Big Idea: Because Jesus rose again, I can have hope for my future that gives me joy for today.

One of the greatest surprises about humanity is how much we can survive — if we have one thing: hope.

For instance, think of some of the worst conditions possible. One of those would be the people who were imprisoned in Germany through World War II. We see this in the survival of victims of the Holocaust. These people suffered brutal conditions: concentration camps, GULAGs, the most inhumane maximum-security prisons. But many of them also went through something worse. Many of them lost hope.

Viktor Frankl was one of these prisoners. He survived the war and later became a psychologist. Listen to what he wrote:

The prisoner who had lost his faith in the future—his future—was doomed. With his loss of belief in the future, he also lost his spiritual health and hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay. Usually this happened quite suddenly, in the form of a crisis, the symptoms of which were familiar to the experienced camp inmate.

Usually it began with a prisoner refusing one morning to get dressed and wash or to go out on the parade grounds. No entreaties, no blows, no threats had any effect. He just lay there, hardly moving. If this crisis was brought about by an illness, he refused to be taken to the sick-bay or to do anything to help himself. He simply gave up. There he remained, lying in his own excreta, and nothing bothered him anymore. (Man’s Search for Meaning)

We simply can’t live without hope. In fact, sometimes when someone dies we say that they’d given up hope. You can’t live long or very well without hope. Andy Crouch said: “Human beings can live for forty days without food, four days without water, and four minutes without air. But we cannot live for four seconds without hope.”

So today I want to talk about hope. We just watched a video that says three things:

I’m an idiot.

My future is incredibly bright.

Anyone can get in on this.

Today I want to talk about the second point in the video: my future is incredibly bright. How could we say this? I don’t know all of you. I don’t know the pressures you face. I know that for some of you right now, life doesn’t seem incredibly bright.

But I can tell you that your future is incredibly bright. The reason is because of the day we’re celebrating. Let’s look at the passage we just read and discover why our future is incredibly bright.

Hope for People Like Us

First, let’s see that what we’re going to talk about is for people like us. It’s easy sometimes to think that the people in the Bible were different from us. It doesn’t help that we see images of Bible characters in stain glass windows with halos. It’s easy to begin to think that the people in the Bible were different than we are.

So let’s remember who wrote this passage. His name was Simon or Peter, one of the best friends of Jesus. I don’t know exactly what personality type Peter was, but my guess is that if he took a Myers-Briggs he’d be an ESFP — someone who’s caught up in the excitement of the moment, and who wants everyone else to feel that way too. He was bold, original, but also a little unfocused. If Peter was in this room right now you’d probably know it. You would have liked him.

What’s important to know about Peter is that he failed. He choked when it really mattered. If you talked to Peter about his biggest regret, he’d have to admit that at the moment when it really mattered, he denied Jesus, not just once but three times. He became a broken man. He lost hope in Jesus and in himself.

Fast-forward thirty years to when he wrote the words that we just read. He’d become a key leader in the church. Not only that, but he was filled with hope even when facing adversity. As Peter wrote these …

Big Idea: You’re a mess — but Jesus responds to messes by praying, seeing, forgiving, and restoring.

One of the biggest ideas that we struggle with is that God could ever love us. The great theologian Karl Barth, a great and controversial theologian, was once asked how he would summarize the essence of the millions of words he had published, he replied, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” At one level we understand that. But then we wonder: could it ever be possible that God could love us?

We read passages like this:

Sing aloud, O daughter of Zion;

shout, O Israel!

Rejoice and exult with all your heart,

O daughter of Jerusalem!…

The LORD your God is in your midst,

a mighty one who will save;

he will rejoice over you with gladness;

he will quiet you by his love;

he will exult over you with loud singing.

(Zephaniah 3:14, 17)

We wonder: could it be true? With all that we’ve done, and with the mess we’ve made in our lives, could God really love someone like me?

I’ve talked to people who know, at an intellectual level, that God loves them. But they’ve struggled deep down to know and rest in God’s love. I’ve even heard one or two of them say that they would love, for just one minute, to feel the extent of God’s love for them. It’s one of the deepest hungers and longings that we have. But we think that our messes get in the way.

If you’re questioning if God could ever rejoice over you, quiet you by his love, and exult over you with loud singing because you’re such a mess, then today’s for you. You need this passage, and I do too.

You’re a Mess

We have good reason to doubt God’s love for us. We’re a mess.

I don’t know if you ever watched Scooby-Doo as a kid. I did. Every show was basically the same.

Shaggy, Fred, Daphne, Velma, and their dog, Scooby-Doo were called, were always getting themselves into trouble. In every episode, they faced a villain: a ghost, a witch, or some other ghoul. In every episode, they’d catch the villain. And here’s what would happen:

…In every single episode, the villain turned out to be a person you’d never expect. We’d always assume the villain would be that really mean tour guide, or the obsessive park ranger, or the mean gasoline attendant from the beginning of the episode. But as the Gang ripped off the mask of the villain, it was always quite the surprise. The villain was always the really nice janitor, the sweet teacher, or the seemingly “good guy.”

One author observes:

Grover and Scooby-Doo teach us precisely what Christianity has been trying to teach us about Good Friday: the villain and the monster aren’t who we thought they were. In the Gospel stories, everyone fails; everyone sins against Christ—even the best disciples, even the “good guys.” In the end, the villain is us. (A.J. Swoboda, A Glorious Dark)

That’s exactly right. We expect that the villain is going to be the bad guy out there: the drug addict, the gang member, the hardened criminal. But it’s never that simple. We’re the villain. We have the problem.

In the passage before us, Jesus turns to Peter and says, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:31-32). I didn’t notice this until this week, but the you in this passage is plural. Jesus is saying, “Satan has demanded to have each of you.” Jesus is talking to the good guys. They’ve been close friends with Jesus for three years now. Jesus has poured his life into them. He’s taught them, commissioned them, lived with them, and loved them. They’ve seen him do miracles. And now Jesus looks at them and says that Satan’s coming after them. The only reason that he centers Peter out is because he knows that Peter will have a special role in restoring them.

Not only that,…

Big Idea: Why do we need the church? Because without it, we’re in danger of losing the privileges of our salvation.

According to most experts, most of us who attend church are attending less than before. Thom Rainer, president and CEO of Lifeway Christian Resources, says that the number one reason for the decline in church attendance, isn’t that fewer people are attending church, but that members attend with less frequency before. Whereas they used to attend every week, now people attend maybe 3 out of 4 weeks. As a result, a church that used to have 200 people attend now only sees 175 people out every week, even if they haven’t lost any regular attenders. It’s a huge shift, and it’s one that I think is accelerating.

Closer to home, Carey Nieuwhof, a pastor in Orillia, observes that many church attenders who love God, appreciate the local church, and are even involved in the local church, but simply attend less often. It’s a trend that isn’t going away. He gives ten reasons, including the increase in travel, more online options, self-directed spirituality, and a failure to see a direct benefit. It’s something that every church leader must confront. He’s not pessimistic about the church, but we can’t bury our head in the sand and pretend it’s not happening.

While this trend has accelerated, I’m not so sure it’s completely new. The reason I say this is because of the passage we just read that says:

Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. (Hebrews 10:24-25)

I’ve heard someone say that every new generation thinks it invented music and sex. In our hubris, we think that we’re the first ones to ever experience something. It’s the same with church attendance. The writer to the Hebrews says that some people, two thousand years ago in the early days of the church, were in the habit of not attending church even though they followed Jesus. You can see why. The early church met on Sundays, which was a working day. Churches were filled with all kinds of people, including slaves. There were no trade unions. Many workers would have been exhausted and would have been tempted to go home and get some rest before the next day’s work rather than showing up at church. Then you have all the other good reasons not to show up: stuff that needed doing at home, as well as competing entertainment options.

So here’s the reality: we’re probably all tempted to not make gathering for church a priority. And here’s another reality: it’s going to seem like anything I say about this is because I’m a pastor and I benefit from you coming to church. Let’s be completely honest. If I say that participating in the worship and community life of a church is important, you’re going to think two things:

One, there are a lot of reasons not to be here.

Two, it’s awfully self-serving of me to argue otherwise.

In other words, both you and I have a bias. You have a bias to think that coming here isn’t important, and I have a bias to tell you that it is.

Let’s demolish my bias first. I want to confess to you that I ride a bit of a roller coaster as pastor of this church. When a lot of you are out, I feel really encouraged. When a lot of you are away, I’m tempted to get really discouraged. I’m tempted to get way too much of my identity by how well or how poorly church attendance is going. I need to be corrected. I need to remember that my value before God isn’t based on how many people are sitting in chairs on a given Sunday. My value comes from the fact that God has adopted me as his son, and that I am fully and complete…

Big Idea: Build a praying habit because of what’s at stake.

So here’s the honest truth when it comes to prayer: we’re all beginners. I’ve never met a single person who has this prayer thing figured out. I love the story of Sinclair Ferguson, a Scottish theologian and pastor. The editor of a publishing company asked him to write a book on prayer. He felt flattered. But in a moment of honesty, he told the editor that the author of such a book would need to be older, more seasoned, and more prayerful. He even suggested some names. The editor smiled. He had already had asked the well-seasoned Christian leaders that Ferguson had mentioned. They, too, had declined for the same reasons. “Wise men,” Ferguson says. “Who can write or speak at any length easily on the mystery of prayer?”

Prayer is difficult. It requires focus, which is a scarce resource. We’re easily distracted. It’s hard enough for us to ask a friend for what we need, never mind God. And what good does it do anyway? Does God really hear, or are we just talking to ourselves? It seems sometimes like we’re talking to the air. These are some of the thoughts we have — or at least that I sometimes have — when I pray.

Here’s the other truth about prayer: we need it. It’s a gift. When Obama was president, he received tens of thousands of letters, emails, and parcels each day. They passed through The Office of Presidential Correspondence. Many of their letters start with phrases like, “I know no one will read this.” But someone does. Dozens of staffers, interns, and volunteers read through the correspondence. Out of the tens of thousands of pieces of correspondence, 300 would be selected for the Director of Presidential Correspondence. Out of those 300, 10 would be selected for the President’s daily briefing.

If you wrote to the President, you would have a very small chance of getting your message through. But you have immediate, unfiltered access to the God who holds the entire world together.

Warren Buffett is one of the greatest investors in our day, and he is also the second richest man in the world, with an estimated worth of $44 billion. In June 2005, Buffett decided to help raise money for his charitable foundation by offering an online auction for someone to have lunch with him. The winning bid was $351,100—the price of one-time access. I wonder if we recognize the value of our access, round the clock, to God himself?

We’re all beginners when it comes to prayer. At the same time, prayer is a privilege. It’s a gift.

So for all of you who struggle and stumble to pray, today is for you. I want to look at a simple passage with you. We just read it:

Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison — that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak. (Colossians 4:2-4)

Here’s what we learn:

Build a Prayer Habit

Paul writes, “Continue steadfastly in prayer.” What is Paul saying here?

There are some things that we tend to do in fits and starts. We decide to run, and so we go for a 10K run the first time out and say, “Well, running is overrated.” We decide to start eating healthy and last two days before we give up and revert to our old habits. We’re tempted to do the same thing with prayer too. Every once in a while we decide we really should pray more, so we go to a prayer meeting or two, or set aside half an hour to pray. And then we give up and revert to our old ways.

That’s not what Paul is saying here. He tells us to continue steadfastly. Paul’s telling us, in other words, to pray regularly; to make prayer a regular practice in our lives. He means that we shouldn’t be haphazard or hit and miss in our…

Big Idea: Because of the Bible’s source, and because of what the Bible does, make reading or listening to the Bible a priority in your life.

For just a few minutes today, I want to explore a discrepancy, or a gap. Here it is:

On one hand, there are few things more important than regular intake of the Bible into our lives. As one writer (Donald Whitney) says, “No spiritual discipline is more important than the intake of God’s Word. Nothing can substitute for it. There simply is no healthy Christian life apart from a diet of the milk and meat of Scripture.”

On the other hand, most of us simply aren’t reading or listening to God’s Word as a regular part of our lives.

Let’s explore this for a minute. I could go on for a long time to talk about the importance of God’s Word, but let me give you just a few quotes.

Jesus said, “It is written, ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” (Matthew 4:4)

Martin Luther, the great Reformer, said, “The Bible is alive, it speaks to me; it has feet, it runs after me; it has hands, it lays hold of me.”

Elias Boudinot, an early American lawyer and statesman (1740-1821), said, “Were you to ask me to recommend the most valuable book in the world, I should fix on the Bible as the most instructive, both to the wise and ignorant. Were you to ask me for one affording the most rational and pleasing entertainment to the inquiring mind, I should repeat, it is the Bible; and the most interesting history, I should still urge you to look into your Bible. I would make it, in short, the Alpha and Omega of knowledge.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian of the last century, said, “Because I am a Christian, therefore, every day in which I do not penetrate more deeply into the knowledge of God’s Word in Holy Scripture is a lost day for me. I can only move forward with certainty upon the firm ground of the Word of God.”

A former participant in Gospel for Life said this about the Bible: “I LOVE it! Reading God’s Word everyday is something I’ve done long enough that I can’t stand to miss it! It is truly my anchor, rock, stability, everything that is good!”

I could go on. That’s the one side of the equation: there are few things that are more important than the regular intake of God’s Word into our lives.

But here’s the other side of the equation: most of us aren’t doing it. In 2013, Angus Reid conducted a study of over 4,500 Canadians about their use, beliefs about, and attitudes toward the Bible. Here’s what they found:

Only 1 in 7 Canadian Christians reads the Bible every week.

Most Christians (3 out of 4) read the Bible seldom or never.

Only 1 in 4 Christians believes that the Bible is relevant to modern life.

In other words, few Canadian Christians are reading the Bible, and most Christians don’t think that the Bible is relevant to modern life.

More personally, I’ve talked to many people — including church leaders — who struggle with reading and applying the Bible in their lives. I remember talking to one church leader who told me that he found the Old Testament Scriptures as dry as dust, and very difficult to read.

Chances are that within this room we are living right in the middle of this gap. On one hand, we know that the Bible is important. We get it when people say that it’s alive and valuable and that it runs after us. We understand someone saying that they couldn’t miss it. But we also find it difficult to get into the habit of reading the Bible, and many of us just aren’t reading it on a regular basis.

So today I want to do something really simple. I want to look at why the the Bible is important, and what we can do about it.

Why the Bible Is Important

The passage we just read tells us, in just a few words, why the Bible is so important. 2 T…

Big Idea: Escape the frantic pace of life and make room for our souls to grow by understanding two truths, and living out one practice.

Today is a big day. We’ve just finished week one of Gospel for Life Discipleship. If you’ve been tracking along with the daily lessons, well done! And if you haven’t, not to worry. We have designed this so that there’s no guilt. You can just wipe the slate clean and start again. And if you haven’t signed up, that’s okay too. We want you to benefit even if the only thing you do is to listen to these sermons and apply them to your life.

We’re about to go into week two, and the theme is going to surprise you. The theme is rest. We’re talking about forming key habits that will lead to a life of transformation. Why in the world would we talk about rest? In this crazy world, in which we all have way too much to do and not enough time to do it, who’s got time to rest?

In his book The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, Tony Schwartz nails the problem:

The way we’re working isn’t working … More information than ever is available to us, and the speed of every transaction has increased exponentially, prompting a sense of permanent urgency and endless distraction. We have more customers and clients to please, more e-mails to answer, more phone calls to return, more tasks to juggle, more meetings to attend, more places to go, and more hours we feel we must work to avoid falling further behind. The technologies that make instant communication possible anywhere, at any time, speed up decision making, create efficiencies, and fuel a truly global marketplace. But too much of a good thing eventually becomes a bad thing. Left unmanaged and unregulated, these same technologies have the potential to overwhelm us…

No matter how much value we produce today—whether it’s measured in dollars or sales or goods or widgets—it’s never enough. We run faster, stretch out our arms further, and stay at work longer and later. We’re so busy trying to keep up that we stop noticing we’re in a Sisyphean race we can never win.

All this furious activity exacts a series of silent costs: less capacity for focused attention, less time for any given task, and less opportunity to think reflectively and long term. When we finally do get home at night, we have less energy for our families, less time to wind down and relax, and fewer hours to sleep. We return to work each morning feeling less rested, less than fully engaged, and less able to focus. It’s a vicious cycle that feeds on itself. Even for those who still manage to perform at high levels, there is a cost in overall satisfaction and fulfillment. The ethic of more, bigger, faster generates value that is narrow, shallow, and short term. More and more, paradoxically, leads to less and less.

Can you relate? I get tired just reading that. It feels increasingly like we’re caught on a treadmill and we can’t get off. We read books like Essentialism and In Praise of Slow, but our lives keep getting more complicated and tiring.

What should we do? One word: rest.

Today I want to do help us do that by unpacking two truths, and then giving us one practical takeaway. The truths are revolutionary, and the practice I will give you is countercultural. And yet applying the lessons I’m about to give you is desperately needed in today’s world. What I’m about to tell you is not optional. It’s necessary if we’re going to live according to God’s design.

How can we escape the frantic pace of life and make room for our souls to grow? By understanding two truths, and living out one practice.

Understand Two Truths

Here are the two truths that we need to understand, not just at a surface level but deep down in our souls. Here’s the first:

God created us to rest.

I once knew a young lady who came in one day with re…

Big Idea: How do we grow? We grow when God works in us. And we grow when we work out what God is working in us.

I’m really excited. Today we’re beginning a seven-week series that will take us right to Easter. It’s a series that’s unlike any other series I’ve ever done, because we’ve created content that will be delivered to you six days a week by email, and we’re going to pair it with coaching. We’re going to back up what we preach with as much help as possible to make this stick in your life. Our desire is that this will be a series that changes our lives and changes our church. I pray that we will look back and say, “That’s when we took a big step forward together as a church.”

I want to tell you how this all began. In 2011 Charlene and I attended a workshop in Green Lake, Wisconsin. It was a conference for ministry couples in transition. I had begun to sense God calling me to something different — which turned out to be church planting — and we were trying to figure out what God was doing and what our next steps should be.

At that conference I met an older pastor. He had planted a church that had grown quite large, and he’d just retired. I asked him what he was planning to do in his retirement. His answer shocked me. “I’m going to take about six months and try to figure out discipleship,” he said. He had ordered the books. He’d blocked off the time. Now that he retired, he was planning on figuring out how the church goes about making disciples, growing followers of Jesus Christ.

I want you to think about this.

Imagine an accountant telling you at retirement that he wanted to learn addition.

Imagine a retiring auto mechanic telling you that at retirement that he planned to learn about internal combustion.

Imagine a retiring hockey player tell you that he wanted to learn how to skate.

For a pastor and a church to not make disciples is unbelievable, when you think about it. Someone’s said, “For a church to be deficient in its discipleship is to be deficient in its fundamental reason for existence.” (Transformational Discipleship). It’s like a doctor not knowing how to use a stethoscope, or a referee not knowing how to blow a whistle. It’s inconceivable.

And yet it’s also very understandable. It’s possible to run a church that looks successful, and fail at the very reason for which the church exists. It’s possible to hold church services and to run programs, but to fail to make disciples.

And so we’re going to take the next seven weeks — a relatively short time — to make sure we’re not failing at the very reason we exist as a church. We want to give you practical tools to build habits that will set you up for a lifetime of growth, and to work on this together as a church.

So today, as we begin, I want to ask a basic question that needs to be answered if we’re going to make any progress. How do we grow? If we’re going to grow as believers, how do we actually go about it? This is the very question that the retiring pastor was wrestling with. It’s the question that we need to wrestle with today as well.

Let me give you the answer in two points, and then let me give you a practical takeaway.

How do we grow? We grow in two ways:

God Works in Us

Look at Philippians 2:13 with me: “For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” This is one of the most profound verses that we could look at today. There’s so much packed in this verse. I’ve known this verse off by heart for most of my life, but every time I look at it — and it’s only 16 words in the original — but there’s enough packed in here to chew on for weeks.

Let’s just highlight three things.

It’s God Who Works in Us

This is the great news. If you are a believer in Jesus Christ, God himself is at work in you.

How do we change? God changes us.…

Big Idea: Life is uncertain. How are we going to survive it? By remembering that he’s sovereign, by trusting his justice, and by praying and supporting each other.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Jimmy’s Coffee on Gerrard. If you haven’t, I highly recommend it. I was there the other day, and somehow managed to snag the third floor boardroom for myself. Eventually, though, a woman joined me. She asked, “Will it bother you if me and my friend talk?” I told her no. It’s a public coffee shop, after all. I can’t expect other people not to talk. Then she asked, “Will it bother you if we cry?” I told her it wouldn’t bother me. It didn’t make sense for me to tell them that they could talk but they weren’t allowed to cry.

So they sat at the table, these two close friends, and me. And in the safety of speaking in front of a stranger who didn’t know who they are, and who would never see them again, they began to open up about their lives in complete honesty. I won’t repeat the details of the conversation that I overheard before I decided it was time to leave and give them a bit of privacy, but I’ll summarize it like this: life is hard. Actually, life is brutal. It reminds me of the advice I once heard for preachers: be careful what you say when you preach, because the world just rolled over and flattened half the people in your congregation every Sunday.

We’re in the very last sermon of our series in the book of James. Today we’re looking at a large passage that goes from James 4:13 right to the end of the book. It’s a passage that switches between a lot of topics. One preacher (David Platt) kidded, “This sermon is going to be all over the place, but it is totally James’ fault. This whole series is James’ fault, for that matter.” It’s going to seem like this passage is all over the place, and it is in some ways, but there is one overarching theme: life is uncertain, and we need wisdom so we know how to live within it.

So as we finish this series in James, let’s look at what James says with two simple points. One: life is uncertain. Two: given that life is uncertain, how do we live within it?

Life is Uncertain

The first thing that James tells us is that life is uncertain. This is so important because of a lie that we’re tempted to believe: that if we’re smart enough and disciplined enough, good things will happen in our lives. We live under the illusion that we are in control of our lives, and that the right strategy, the right techniques, and enough discipline, then we’ll be able to live the good life. In other words, we think we’re in control of our lives.

The reality? James says we are not in control of our lives. Look at what James says in James 4:13-14:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” – yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.

James is not saying that it’s wrong to make plans. The Bible is clear that planning is a good thing. Proverbs 21:5 says, “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty.” Planning is a good thing.

The problem? In our planning we often forget that life is uncertain. We don’t know what tomorrow will bring. We act like we can plan our lives when we don’t even have control over the next five minutes.

Our lives are unpredictable, and they’re also short. The Stoic philosopher Seneca said, “We are always complaining that our days are few and acting as though there would be no end of them.” I thought of this recently when I came across a grid that shows how long the average person lives in months and weeks. It’s not a long time. James compares us to a mist that appears for a t…