Pastor Jeff Orluck
Jeff: Well, welcome back everybody. Here we are. It's time for our message for this Sunday morning. This morning, I would like to talk with you a little bit about the two different worlds that we live in and how the greater world impacts the lessor. Of course, we understand that Jesus, when he came, actually, his very first public statement was "Repent for the kingdom of heaven is near." I have realized a long time ago that when he said the word near, he wasn't talking about it being near in a chronological fashion, like it's soon to come, but what he was saying is it's near in a geographic fashion. It's next to us. In one way, we might actually say that the kingdom of heaven is another universe that coexists alongside of the kingdom of this world. We have two different universes. They are not parallel universes as would be suggested like in the TV show, Fringe. They are different universes, but they still exist side by side and the kingdom of heaven has the ability to reach in and impact the kingdom of the world. In fact, I heard one of my favorite preachers here in this country say that every time a miracle happens, it's because the heavenly realm has superseded our physical realm. That's kind of interesting.
Jesus said, his first public thing was repent for the kingdom of heaven is near. What I really want to focus on this morning is that word repent and what that means to us in our lives every day. Lots of times when we think of the word repent what comes to remind is stop doing all the bad things you are doing, or you are going to be in trouble, right? That’s kind of how we look at it. I think it's really important to understand that any of our bad behaviors actually are much deeper than what we see on the outside in terms of behavior. They go deep into our soul, into wounding that we have, and especially into ways that we think. I think it's really a lot better to look at this word repent, and to see what Jesus was saying. When he said the kingdom of heaven was near was not change your behavior, but change the way you think. That makes perfect sense because the ways and the thoughts of God are so much different than our ways and our thoughts in this world.
In fact, it says that in the book of Isaiah, the Lord is speaking and he says, "For my thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are my ways, your ways declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts." Think about it. How much higher are the heavens than the earth? How long does it take to get from the earth to the heavens? It didn't take long to get to the moon, but it takes a lot longer to get to Mars and it would take a lot longer to get to planets that are light years away. How long does it take to get to the heavens? I think what I'm leaning into here, the point I want to make is that it takes our whole lives to learn the ways of God. We have been [inaudible 39:44]. We've grown up in a world where so much of what we've learned to think, so much of what we've come to believe, so many of our experiences and how they've shaped and formed us are different than the ways that God is and different than the ways that he thinks.
Another way that we tend to think of repent is that is kind of a one-time thing; kind of like going forward to accept Jesus as your savior at a Billy Graham crusade. That's a very real and meaningful experience. We'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment, but I would like to suggest that what Jesus is calling to is not a one-time experience. It's a lifelong transformation. The way it happens is by our communion with Holy Spirit and the scriptures and all the different ways that we seek his kingdom, that we push in for spiritual truth, that we hunger for spiritual things. There are a lot of different things that speak to us, including messages from our pastor and in conversations with friends and all kinds of things we might read, and so many different ways. And then of course, there is our time we spend in our devotions and our time in the scriptures. In all of those times, Holy Spirit is there to guide us, Jesus said into all truth.
That's why he said he sent the Holy Spirit, was to guide us into all truth. You see truth, it's important to understand that truth... In fact, if you remember when Jesus had his conversation with Pilot, at the very end, Pilot says, "So you are a King?" and Jesus said, "I'm not of this world. I'm the King of a different world." Actually, Jesus says, "I came to testify to the truth." Pilot said, "What is truth?" Which of course, this is a million dollar question. What is truth? Of course today, we really struggle with that because we have competing information about, just about everything. We have different sciences about COVID. We have different opinions about how the country should be run. We have different opinions about just about everything. You can go online and you can find supportive documentation for any way that you choose to believe. So what is truth?
Well, here is the answer truth, in the Greek is the word Aletheia. The better translation for that word is reality. Truth is not a compilation of facts. Truth is not having all the right facts. Truth is what's real in the other kingdom, in Jesus' kingdom. What Jesus came to do was to bring the reality of his kingdom into our lives. That's what he wants to do. That's what Holy Spirit does. What that ends up doing is confronting every single part of who we have become before the time that we met him. As I said, it's a lifelong journey. We were with our kids last night. My daughter showed me a really cool post that she found where there is a young family and they happen to have, I think it was a woman's father who lived with them. He is a 97 year old grandfather to their two children.
They were watching a worship service that Sean Feucht was conducting one of his city-wide campaigns of worship. It was someplace in Europe. During this worship service they were watching, he was presenting the opportunity for people to ask Jesus to be their savior. For the first time in his life, this woman's 97 year old father, as he was watching this message, prayed, put his hands in the air and with tears streaming down his face, asked Jesus to be a savior. Many of us understand that experience when we first opened our hearts up to Jesus, when we first asked him to be our savior, when we first surrender our lives to him there is an immediate and miraculous transformation that takes place that is unexplainable, unless you've experienced it.
I had one friend who put it this way. He said, "I wondered if there was ever anybody else in the whole world that was a Christian like I had just become, because if anybody in the world had experienced the kind of love that I just felt, I would have heard about it." That's how profound it is to meet Jesus for the very first time. It completely revolutionizes everything inside of you. For some time, all was well with the world. It's real change. But what's interesting is that in spite of that spiritual transformation, all the ways we think all the things that we've learned, all the practices that have been normal in our lives, none of those things have changed yet.
What can happen over a very short period of time is the old ways of thinking start to come back in, the old ways of behavior come back in. For some of us, even after an encounter, Jesus that's really life transforming, we in a very short time can just be back to living the old life that we were before and nothing is different, or we can let Holy Spirit begin to guide us and teach us through the scriptures and confront the ways we think and challenge the things that we've always believed and teach us new ways of thinking and new ways of being, the higher ways of thinking and the higher ways of being. When he does that, we all know as we've experienced, it's up close and it's personal. He delves right down into the very basics of our relational experiences in life. He starts to confront how you talk to your husband or wife. He confronts the tone of voice that you use in your conversations with your spouse. He begins to challenge your viewpoint, your attitude, how you see your spouse, how you disrespect them, how you judge them, how you complain about them. He calls you on those things, and he asked you to repent, which simply means to change.
He begins to change the way that you relate in your marriage. He heals what many times, is a broken marriage. He begins to teach us how to treat our children, how to love our children, how to be attentive to our children, how to speak to our children so that they are encouraged and love and they grow up healthy. He begins to teach us how to have healthy homes. He begins to teach us about our vocational lives. He starts to change our attitude about our jobs, about our bosses. He starts to deal with our work ethic. It's so many things and the Holy Spirit will begin to get down into the very nitty-gritty of everything, every little part of our lives. Over time, as he changes the way we think, as he heals the woundedness in our hearts, as he begins to adjust the way we approach everything in life, our lives truly do change for the better. Life gets really good when we live in the ways of God. In fact, there is nothing better than to enjoy the blessing of his goodness and to live in his ways, everything changes. That's what he does.
I want to encourage you to really let Holy Spirit begin to speak or to continue to speak in every way. Every time you read the scriptures, he'll speak to you out of those scriptures. He'll call you about something. He'll call you to something that you haven't ever contemplated before. He'll use all kinds of instructors to speak to you. But in every case, when the Holy Spirit speaks to us, we really do want to respond to what he says. You have to remember that Jesus comes... Here's a thought I wrote; Jesus comes to us from, speaks to us from, and calls us to a different world and a different kingdom that uses different ways and has different ways of thinking. We've entered into something that's new and fresh and higher than anything that we've learned before. There is nothing better than to embrace that, and let God have the way he wants to have with us.
Something I want to suggest is when... I just want to talk for a little bit about those of you who are like me, and you have known the Lord for a long, long time. I realized I have been following Jesus now for almost 50 years. There is a danger that happens when we've known Jesus for a long time. We begin to think we really understand it all, and we become closed to change. Let me read you a passage of scripture here. It's in John chapter 9, verses 39 to 41. This is a frightening scripture. There are several passages of scripture that really get my attention and really cause me to want to be different than I maybe would have been. This is one of them. This is what Jesus said- For judgment, I've come into this world so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind. While he was talking to the Pharisees, this conversation all took place after he healed a man and the Pharisees took issue with it.
The Pharisees respond to and say, "What? Are we blind too?" Jesus said, "If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin, but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains." Don't you think, like, whoa, if I think I know it all, that's when I get in trouble. If I understand that I don't know it all, that's when there is still hope for change. When we think about the Pharisees, the ones who Jesus was talking to in this, we have to understand that these are the most learned theologians in all of Israel. The Pharisees spent their whole lives studying the scriptures more so than I've spent studying the scriptures. I've lived 50 years with Jesus, but I haven't spent near the time in the scriptures that the Pharisees did, but even though they really knew the scriptures inside and out, they studied the law, they followed it, absolutely the best they understood it, they still ended up rejecting the Messiah that the scriptures talked about.
One of the things that I've come to understand is that it's totally possible that having really sought to follow the Lord to the best of my ability that I could actually end up on the wrong side of God. That's where the Pharisees were. I never want to be there. I never want you to be there. I'm not talking about that we should somehow call into question our basic tenants of the faith that we maybe find in the Apostle's creed. That's a good foundation that we all accept and hold to and adhere to as the foundation of our faith, but everything else that we build on top of that in terms of our theological understanding in terms of our political understanding and in terms of our life experiences, all the rest of it is subject to the scrutiny of the Holy Spirit.
If we assume that we are in correctable, that we actually know everything that needs to be known, we miss out on the opportunity of the Holy Spirit to bring us into his truth. At that point, it's easy to find ourselves moving in a direction that ends up being contrary to the heart and ways of God. How can I say this? I've been there. Probably many of us have, and we can talk about it. But thankfully, the Lord is merciful. Even in those times when I thought I was right and I was totally wrong, he showed me mercy and he began to speak to me and he began to teach me that he had a different way. Every single one of us, after 30, 40, 50 years of serving the Lord, have more to learn about who he is, what he has for us and what he has for our role in the world around us.
Let's maybe wrap this up. I think one of the greatest gifts that God has ever given us, which you can probably tell from what we've talked about today, is the opportunity and the ability to change. There is actually nothing sweeter than to discover that something wasn't quite right in your life and to be able to have it become right. I just want to read Romans 12 verse 2. It says, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” What I want to do is I want to read it out of the Message Bible. I'm going to read it with Eugene Peterson's take on it because I think it really draws out some real nuances that are really helpful as we are reading this. It just gives us an understanding of what it really means to repent, which is not just to change your behavior. It's to let the ways and the thoughts of God infiltrate our lives in such a way that how we think, how we feel and how we respond to the world around us is the way he would.
I know I've still got a long ways to go, but that's okay because I know that I can trust my friend, Holy Spirit to constantly teach me new things, confront the things that are wrong and bring me to a new place. Here's what Eugene says, "Don't become so well adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You'll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you and develops well-formed maturity in you." Let's just take a moment to pray and open our hearts up to everything that God wants to do for us.
Thank you, Lord Jesus. I'm assuming that we have people watching who have just met you, who are just starting out a new faith journey with you and every day they are in wonder because you are showing them new ways to think and new ways to speak new things, to believe that you bring in healing and transformation. And then there are others of us like me, who have walked with you for many, many, many years, and we still find ourselves in the same position of humility, knowing how much we need you to teach us how to think your ways, how to respond to the world around us the way that you would. I thank you, father, that for every single one of us that's listening today, whether we've known you for 1 year or 50, that you are faithful to continue to take us on this journey of transformation to think the way you think and be the way you are.
Lord, right now we just want to say to you, we open our hearts, we trust you and we yield to you as you speak to us, as you guide us, as you help us. We do choose to repent. We do choose to change. We do choose to follow. We thank you for what you are doing every day in our lives. We thank you for forming each and every one of us individually, and Lord that as we respond then we know you are actually forming your church. As we said a few weeks earlier, your church is the key to change in this world. Thank you, Father. Amen. God bless you. Have a wonderful week. The Lord be with you in all that you do. We'll see you again next week. Bye-bye.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 11-1-20. If you would like to watch the full service, click one of the links below.