The 180 Church Podcast with Dr. Sammy and Friends

Faith is a series of ongoing conversations, like a long and winding road where there may be detours, delays, and most importantly, doubt. Our relationship with faith is also a nonlinear process; there are moments when we talk ourselves out of believing in God. Like Nicodemus and his admiration of Jesus, we may never know if our neighbors and friends are close to believing in God, but He may be drawing them to Him. Though so many have shelved their faith, in today’s Day in the Sun service, we are reminded that God can use us to bring others back to belief.

There are multiple factors that are hugely important for the health of our spiritual life. One is the discipline of the heart, which is paramount for keeping our human propensity to wander in check. When we are experiencing the highest highs or the deepest sufferings, the danger of our expectations and internal wiring can lead us wayward in our expressions of ministry and what we assume is permissible in the Christian life. After all, while the human heart errs towards stupidity, pride, and greed, we are also often unaware of our faulty expectations of the Father in this journey of faith. In order to mitigate the deceit of the heart and avoid undue damage to our communities, Dr. Sammy encourages us to establish mechanisms for curbing the deceit in our hearts, build a habit of introspection, and consider whether our lives reflect the ministry set by Jesus.

The Book of Ecclesiastes grapples with the notion that life under the sun is hevel - or put another way - meaningless. Like hevel, which means vapor or smoke in Hebrew, our lives on Earth are fleeting and ultimately outside our grasp. However, while our choices and actions may seem like fruitless toil in our limited understanding, they reveal where our heart truly is in relation to God. The discipline of the heart is looking to God, instead of everything else, for meaning and hope. It's a discipline because it requires sacrifice; we let go of the other ways we try to instill meaning in our lives, and in exchange, make room for God, who gives our lives eternal significance.

We as humans tend to be self-interested, but that is not necessarily a sin, since we depend on a degree of self-care to survive. This means, however, that when God calls us to do something, we will naturally find tension between our goals and God's goals. At these times, we should recognize that God is calling us to something more purposeful and powerful and to, with God's help, make sacrifices against our self-interest to answer His call. In reward, we receive God's shalom: permanent completeness and wholeness. Indeed, He will make whole everything that is broken.

The vision of the church is to cultivate a safe and authentic community that brings believers into discipleship. What makes an authentic community hard to achieve is our tendency to hide from our own faults and failures, which is behavior that stems from the brokenness of original sin. If the cost of an authentic community is our discomfort in the acts of sharing our pain and striving towards greater accountability, then why build the discipline of Christian community? As shown by the exchange between Peter and Jesus after the Resurrection, the discomfort of living in an authentic community allows us to grow and flourish as God meant for us to - because we can be intimate enough to confess our sins and journeys towards repentance.

In metropolitan hubs like NYC, many of us identify with being ambitious in our goals and orienting our lives towards achieving them. However, a prevalent pitfall lies in how we may end up establishing our identities in our achievements and goals. After all, it is not unnatural to want our desires to come to fruition. But when our goals appear to be out of reach, blocked, or uncertain, eliciting negative thoughts and beliefs, how can we trust in the promise that the Father has plans to prosper us? When we recognize our true identities formed through salvation in Christ, trust him to do the heavy lifting for things outside of our control, and align ourselves to his plan, we may just find that there is peace of mind and heart in who we are and in the character of the one who is in control.

The story of Job gives us wisdom for wrestling with our doubt in the face of great obstacles. In painful or uncertain times we tend to search for answers to our questions, and when we don't get any explanations, it becomes easy to lose hope in a God who is fair and compassionate. But Job's story teaches us that instead of answers, it is God himself we must cling to. We can cry out to God with our heartbreak and frustrations, we can study Scripture to remind ourselves of God's true character, and we can engage wholeheartedly with community to practice forgiveness and celebration with each other. These disciplines are the foundation of putting our trust in God - of having faith not in ourselves and what we can see, but in the One who works for and loves us beyond our understanding.

Defaults are habits of behaviors that help us cope with life’s struggles. When we try to stop resorting to harmful defaults, such as in Lent, we learn that old habits die hard because we create routines in which we are rewarded for coping with certain triggers by repeating certain behavior. It’s not that our need to cope is bad, it’s that our coping mechanisms hint at our need for something only God can satisfy. Though scripture states the “days are evil”, meaning life will give us enough struggles, the good news is that we can create habits of accessing the Spirit to help fill our need to cope with the transcendent love of God.

When we come across difficult times, most of us probably have one or two coping strategies that we rely on to provide some semblance of reprieve when dealing with the stress. Whether we’ve learned constructive methods of coping or have to unlearn destructive ones, we fall back on these strategies to get the tiniest bit of relief. To our dismay, the source of our stress doesn’t simply solve itself, and we can find ourselves stuck in the cycle of stress-coping and temporary relief. But in Christ, there is a new way of living; it’s a call to freedom, to leave behind our old ways of coping, through a relationship with Christ. We can take solace in the knowledge that we are new creations in Christ, that we are already freed from bondage, and encouraged to pursue the new self made in Christ’s image.