Intro/Outro: Welcome to Garden Church podcast. We are a community in Southern California dedicated to raising resilient disciples of Jesus Christ.
Bill Dogterom: Well, good morning. It's good to be with you this morning and to say happy New Year. This is the first day of the church calendar. Yesterday, the thirtieth, we looked back and we gave thanks over the three or four days, right, of all of the ways in which God has met us and the ways in which we have come through. Things that in the moment we didn't think we're gonna make it through.
But today is the first Sunday in Advent and Advent is the start of the church calendar year that invites us to kind of pump the brakes a little bit. Just slow down to to recognize that if we're not careful and sometimes even when we are, we will just sail right past the most meaningful events in human history. We will we will be so anticipating, so expectant of of of a of a Christmas morning, of of the incarnation and all of the meaning of that that we'll miss. What is what is needing time to settle in, including including for us at this church. Right?
Over the last several months, we've experienced some pretty amazing things as a community. And we give thanks for that. We really do. To be blunt, we don't know what's going on. You only ever really kinda have a sense of what God's up to in the rearview mirror.
We see where God was. And and that's not a bad thing but that does require us to walk at a pace. Sometimes you gotta slow down to keep up with God. And Advent is a season that says, let's turn the temperature down. Let's bank the fire rather than keep on finding because when we name things, when we put a label on things, when we think we know what's going on enough to kind of attach a label to it, we then start to self fulfill the prophecy.
We try to make things happen. And because we really don't know what's going on, and we're grateful grateful, that's the response to the now. That's the response to what is happening in in in the now. And Advent is that season that says, let's you know, we've been we've been working this this stew for a long time. The steaks have been on high.
I mean, it is it is wonderful, but you gotta let it rest. You gotta let it rest for the flavors to to blend together. You gotta let it rest for the community to not get caught up in the froth of renewal, the froth of revival if you wanna use that language. That's wonderful but it's unsustainable. What we want is to let it settle deeply and profoundly, into a foundation that is adequate for the next stage of whatever it is.
Because God's always playing the long game. Would that be fair to say? Now is always not the final word. It's in preparation for what is to come come come come next. And and But but we've gotta pay attention to what is happening in the now and not be constantly missing what's right in front of us because we're scanning the horizon for the pretty lights that are shining.
Yeah? My my favorite saying on this is a is an obscure one but bear with me. It says, if while washing the cup for tea I am thinking about drinking the tea, I'm not washing the cup and I probably won't drink the tea either. It just simply says, do what's in front of you to do with full heart, mind and attention Then when the next thing comes for which this is preparation, you'll have capacity to be in that moment too. It's really hard.
And why is this important? Simply, we've talked about this before but the only life in which you will ever meet God is your life. Right now. There is no future in God. There is no past in God.
There's just now. So Advent says, let's attend to what is right in front of us. Let's attend to this current moment and thanksgiving then is one of those, foundational practices, one of those disciplines that sets us in place, that gives us a stable place. It says, we we want to attend to what God has done as the foundation for the hope that we still have for what God is going to to to to do, but more importantly for the God who comes. Because Advent is about preparation for the coming of Christ.
Not not initially Advent was about the second coming of Christ, not the first coming. We've kinda hijacked it a little bit and and and made it about the promissory note called Christmas. But the story doesn't end with Christmas and the incarnation. God is still on the move and will be returning and so Advent sets us in place in our current moment and says, pay attention. There is no place you can be including the place you are right now that God is not fully present with you.
And that I I need to just land on that for just a sec because some of you are feeling disqualified from presence because of your stupid. Something dumb you've done, some reaction you had that was uncharacteristic or worse characteristic and you think, I just gotta get my act together then I can come into the presence of God. No. You can't get your act together. That's why you need the presence of God.
He's the only one that can can address the disqualifiers that we we we put in place. He is as present of clearly, present with us in worship, but he's just as present when you blew yourself up in catastrophic failure. Just as present and just as kind and generous and merciful in those moments as he is in this moment. He can't do other. He is love.
So when we are in the places of disqualification, we need to be aware of his presence and his presence for us in love. Right? So advent slows us down to attend to that and thanksgiving kind of is is is aware of the of the foundation that needs to be laid. So much so that Paul, in the very first letter he writes to his friends in Thessalonica, it's probably, I don't know, less than ten years after all of the scenes of resurrection and crucifixion, all of that. Within ten years or so, there's a church in Thessalonica and Paul is writing to them and he says, here's God's will for your life.
Anybody wanna know what that is? Nobody? Cool. Alright. Well, here here here's God's will for your life.
Rejoice always. Pray always. Give thanks always. And and and we wanna say, yeah, but should I marry this person or should I buy that house or should I take that job or should I wear this outfit? I look really cute in this.
Should I Do I What do you want me to do? What's your will for my life? Here's the deal. If all of your thinking about the will of God is on those external things, you won't have a heart to carry it. The heart that is carried doesn't God is clearly capable of trusting you with your life.
If your heart is set by rejoicing, by being a regular conversational relationship with him, we call it prayer, and by offering everything up to him with thanksgiving. Everything up to him with thanksgiving. So this sets a frame of heart that enables God if it does matter that you marry this person or take that job or buy this house or whatever it is. If it does and sometimes it really does matter what you wear today. Sometimes it really does Most of the time, not so much but sometimes it really does matter for whatever I don't understand the nature of the kingdom.
But I can tell you stories along precisely those lines. But if that's the case and your heart is set on knowing, honoring, pleasing, loving him by rejoicing, by praying, by giving thanks, then you will clearly have the capacity to hear him say, do this and not that. Right? He knows how to write on the wall in flames. Even you couldn't miss it if your heart is set.
And this is how Paul says, you set your heart. You give, you orient, your life to him with thanksgiving. You recognize. Sometimes anybody get pushed out of alignment over the last several months. Okay.
Well, just me. Are you gonna join me here at all this morning? I'm gonna go to the overflow crowd. But that happens. Right?
Somebody ticks you off at work. You don't get the promotion you thought you were gonna get. The thing that you were counting on fell through. The relationship ended in a way that was was painful and difficult. Or on the other thing, sometimes we get pushed out of alignment by the good things that happen.
Right? And and and we can Thanksgiving just says, no, no, no, no, no, this is nothing but he's everything. And I wanna orient my heart towards him. I wanna I wanna bring my whole life, everything to him, and and and and orient myself to him because I'm gonna need the joy that I get from rejoying. I'm gonna need the conversational relationship that only It's not about telling God what you want him to do.
Prayer is mostly about talking with him about what he's doing. Right? And then I want to step into that reality that's created by energy with joy and and a conversational relationship so that I can offer up my whole life. I don't wanna cling to the to the good things that happen as if they're the final word and I certainly don't wanna cling to the negative things that happen as if they're the final word. So I wanna take whatever's in my hands and lift them up with expectancy.
Notice what happens to the posture of the hands now. They're empty. I'm ready to receive whatever comes next. I can live with expectancy but without expectation. Expectations are a prescription for disappointment.
So I don't live with expectations on God. I live with expectancy for God. And this invitation from Paul says that that pushes back against the Genesis three descent into despair. We have been trained as a human race. You can talk about evolution or social evolution or whatever it is you want, but we have been trained to despair.
We have been trained to the negative. Protection. We have been trained with an awareness that we have an enemy that is out to get us and only the naive go about as if that were not the case. Here's the problem. We tend, knowing that we have an enemy, to label things that are oppositional to us as the enemy rather than recognizing if I can put a name to it, flesh and blood, that's not my enemy.
There is one, principalities, powers, spiritual forces of darkness in high places, opposed to us, resistant to us. Right? Paul's gonna talk about that in just a second. But but what thanksgiving does is said, I recognize that that the the whole universe is not tuned to despair, it's tuned to hope because love is the most powerful force in the universe and has promised to redeem all things. So I don't have to play the game of the loser who's lost.
I can play the game, if you will, of one who stands in the victory that has already been won. Right? And thanksgiving says, therefore, no matter what happens, including those things that I perceive in the moment to be oppositional or challenging or difficult or painful or hard, everything gets offered up. Right? And so it becomes the foundation, foundation for hope.
He leans into this a little bit later on in Romans, where he says in his ministry verse one of chapter five. So you've been justified by faith. You have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. So we boast in the hope of the glory of God. And not only this, but we also glory in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance and perseverance character and character hope.
And that hope doesn't put us to shame because God's love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. So he's he's taking the realities of our lives. Some days it it it's it's sunshine and roses, everything's wonderful, the sun is shining, the temperature is perfect, it is and and I'm not just talking obviously environmentally, I'm talking about the nature of our our our our our And then then there's a whole bunch of stuff in the middle. It's not bad, but it's not It's just kinda meh. Anybody live in the meh every once in a while kind of a gray or overcast.
It's just like, oh, gee. Here we go again. Yeah. Yeah. God is his present in the In fact, he trains us in that where nothing much is going on far more so than he does in the heights or the depths.
Right? Because what's what's the goal here? What Notice what what rejoicing produces is endurance. When you're rejoicing or when you're battling, endurance is the last thing on your mind. Where you need endurance, where you need faithfulness is when nothing much seems to go on.
Where you're not being reinforced and there's no clear enemy that you're pushing against, where you just have to show up and do the thing day after day after day, that's when endurance is needed. So Paul says, first of all, we rejoice in the good things that God has done. We don't earn it with our thanksgiving, we step into it with our thanksgiving. It's like generosity in in some ways. We've just seen some phenomenal outpourings of generosity here until we start to realize, wait a minute, I'm being generous with God's money.
I wish I could take some credit for this but it's not my money. I wish I were generous but the only reason I can be generous is because God has already been generous. Right? So we step in in the imitation and this is what Paul is saying here. Look, we boast in the hope of the glory of God.
This this working of glory, is a is a interesting image for Paul. Remember he says earlier in Romans, everybody has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Everybody's taken an off ramp to stupid. Everybody's ended up in the ditch of your own lives and and some of you some of us by trying to avoid it. Right?
Us righteous people, we try to avoid sin. So where do we end up? In the ditch. The the more focus we put on our efforts to avoid, the greater the likelihood we will drive in the ditch. And Paul says, yeah, this is what you expect because you you are built to be the image of God.
Genesis chapter one. To be the glory of God. To be the manifest presence of God in the world. That's what glory means. So when we sing glory to God, what we're singing, what we're praying is we want your presence to be more and more manifest in the world.
Well, how do you think he's going to do that? Bright shiny things? No. He's sending you. God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten sons and daughters so that those who believe in him through them, through you might have eternal life.
So the glory that we have fallen short of is ourselves. We have because of sinned, we've missed the mark. We've we've ended up where we ought not be with attitudes and dispositions. And it's particularly for those of us who are particularly gifted with self pity, with resentment. It's one of my spiritual gifts right there.
Right? And and and, you know, you just cling to the tree of of resentment and and dare God to pry you off it. I've fallen short of glory. I'm fallen short of who God built me to be. And so we rejoice when the work of the cross, when the work of Christ, when the work of the hope that is established in Christ begins to restore that glory.
Begins to make us human again. But then Paul says, it's not just in the good things that happen that we rejoice. It is also when we are going through suffering. When we get the pink slip. When we get the diagnosis, when we get the break up letter, when we get the text that says, I don't wanna ever see you again.
And Paul says, what do you do with that? Offer it up with thanksgiving. You don't know how to fix it. You don't know how to redeem it. You don't know how to make sense of it.
You don't you don't know how to get out of the ditch. I mean, anybody been impacted by by by Yeah. Of course you have. Of course you have. It's either you're stupid or somebody else's stupid or a generation is stupid.
I mean, come on. And especially in this last year, the the weight, the cumulative weight that people are carrying societally since the last ten years with social media has now made everybody's pain everybody's pain. Right? And Paul says, what do we do with that? Well, here's what we do.
We glory in it. Do you see what he's doing? We don't aren't just made like Christ by the good things that happen. We are made like Christ by entering into his sufferings and we glory in those sufferings. We didn't welcome them in terms of of of seeking them out.
You don't have to look for them. They're coming for you. But what happens when they do? Well, Paul says glory in them. Why?
Because that suffering produces perseverance. Endurance produces character. A foundation of character that can carry the weight of hope. Not for your own sake alone but for the sake of the world. Can I'm guessing that in many of your places at work, maybe even at home, you're the only hopeful person in residence.
A lot of hopelessness around right now. There's a lot of hopelessness. So he's sending you as an ambassador of hope. And you're in the same mess that everybody else is in. That's how you you We're we're we're we're not we're not standing on a a place of superiority.
I've got it all figured out. It's like, dude, I I don't have anything figured out. But I know who does and I'm not gonna tap out until the game's over. I'm gonna stay in it. That's what endurance is about.
And along the way, there is the muscle memory of character that is built so that that hope is grounded in a deep and profound reality about who God is, with us in in the moment. So suffering is that inevitability that that comes along and and and and and Thanksgiving then gets us unstuck as a as a prelude to hope. Thanksgiving kinda shocks the system into saying, oh, this was a bad thing that happens. And Thanksgiving says, oh, really? Are you sure?
Do you know that for sure? Why don't you just offer it up and see what he can do with that bad thing that happened? We've done this before but I'm guessing if I took a short survey around here, some of you have been around the block a few times, and you would be able to say the disappointment of three to five years ago has become a praise report today. The suffering, the diagnosis, the difficulty, the challenge, the hard season that you went through in your marriage or or your job or whatever, that has now become a praise point for you. How did it get that way?
You fixed it? Sorry, you're just not that good. No, you're not yet that good but he's working on it. He wants you to have when he's all done the mind of Christ. To be able to view everything that happens and offer it up with thanksgiving and to build into that releasing the the the the seasons that happen and then seeing what he might do with them.
Right? Jesus is an exceptional sailor who can harness any wind including contrary winds to get you where you're going, to get you where he wants you to be, to bring you back into alignment with what God is doing in the moment. And the advent season then gives us an opportunity to slow down and to notice, to become present, to the an opportunity to pause and to to to to begin to look around and notice the wonder that is breaking out all around us. To notice even in the dark spaces where where we have this mind numbing tendency to just kind of traipse along without noticing that every bush is burning. And if we will pause for a moment, we will notice a few of them at least are burning without being consumed.
And the ground that we're standing on is in fact holy ground. And we're invited to kick off our shoes because this is our home. This holy ground is where we belong and where we encounter the God who knows our first name. So Paul, plays around with this, and and and suggests as as as we're learning into this, how do we develop capacity then for this moment? And he says, well first of all, Romans chapter 15 verse four, everything that was written in the past was written to teach us so that through the endurance taught in the scriptures and the encouragement they provide, we might have hope.
You see why we need to slow down? You see now why we need to kind of let the wisdom of the ages begin to flood the broken places of our hearts? We need to recognize that God has been doing this redemption thing for a very long time. And as we study scripture we learn how and are encouraged then to endure, to not lose hope, to not and again hope is not for changed outcomes. Change hope hope is in the Lord.
I don't I'm not I'm even smart enough to hope properly. My my my hope horizon is too narrow. I just wanna get out of the stupid I got myself in. I just wanna get out of the mess. I just wanna get out of the out of the hard I just wanna get out of it.
What if God wants to use it for a glory greater than I can even pray for? What if what if he wants to take that little narrow horizon and just blow the socks off it in wonder. Well, if I pay attention to the to the to the stories that have been told, if I learn the lesson from the folks who have done the thing before me, if I if I'm in the middle of the forest of my confusion and don't know which way to turn and and and and the temptation is to just run madly in all kinds of directions getting myself more and more lost and and and Paul says, no, no, no, no. Just stop for a minute. A path will begin to emerge.
You'll notice there's a a break in a branch that signals a path. There's a there's a a slight wearing of the path right in front and he knows how to get you home from wherever it is you are. Yeah? So so we wanna learn the lessons of the past. We wanna be able to look back in order to look forward.
We wanna reorient ourselves. We don't wanna quit just because it's hard. We don't wanna waste our pain. We don't wanna waste our suffering. We wanna offer it up as quickly as we can.
We wanna oh, and we don't wanna waste our pleasure either. Sometimes we're more distracted, as I mentioned before, by the good things that happen than we are by the bad things that happen. At least in the bad things, if we're instinct is correct, we turn to the Lord for help. But when good things are happening, it's like, look what I did. Aren't I wonderful?
And that's more distracting. Right? It pulls us off the off off the path. So we wanna offer it all up, an attitude of grateful dependence, seeing everything that happens as as as the the the grist for the mill of what God is doing in redemption for us. And and then here we finish up with this, turn to to this Advent theme in Isaiah verse 12 of chapter 15, same chapter, a little bit further down.
He says, now the root of Jesse will spring up. One who will arise to rule over the nations and in him all of the nations, all of the Gentiles will hope. Notice what he's doing here. The root of Jesse is, one of the many messianic terms that gathers up the character of Jesus, anchored in David's family, that that that idea. And so when he he uses that language from Isaiah, he's saying that that we know the root of Jesse.
He we know his first name. He has come to us. This is this Advent theme that gives us confidence in the current moment we're in to offer everything up with thanksgiving because all of the longed for future is present in this current moment. You have to start from where you are. And so we start with this release of of of our lives and and and again, not praying for specific, not hoping in changed circumstances or or more resources or better friends or No.
I No. I'm hoping in him. My hope isn't in a in a different GPS coordinate. My hope is in the Lord. My hope isn't in a bigger number in my bank account, my hope is in the Lord.
My hope isn't in in better, situation, a different at, no, my hope is in the Lord. And so that reorientation focusing on the God who comes to us and who is with us, please notice how this works. He's present with us in each moment all the time. So why do we talk about the God who comes to us? Who's actually showing up?
You are. He's with you. Right now, he's with you. Are you? Anybody find yourself pulled out of the present moment?
He's still talking. I hope we beat the Baptist to the buffet. Did I lock the door this morning? We're thinking about drinking the tea. In the meantime, God wants to come to us and redeem the situations and circumstances of our lives.
And if we look around, we'll notice there are little tendrils of green sticking up through the burned over landscape of our failures and faults and our successes, inviting us not to give up, not to quit, not to tap out, to stay in the game, to know that God is with us, and in that moment, to stop long enough to sink beneath the surface of what's happening and discover. He is he is there. He is there. Our hope is anchored in the Lord and so we pray, oh, come. Oh, come Emmanuel.
Come and ransom your people. Oh, Lord, give us strength, confidence, and hope in this season, at this moment. We wanna be your people for the sake of the world. In Jesus, we pray. Amen.
Amen. Gonna invite you to do something with me this morning and that is pray a prayer of blessing, a benediction over one another. Alright? This text in Romans 15 ends with this benediction that I'm gonna ask you to pray a phrase at a time over one another. So would you stand and maybe find yourselves in groups of three or four if you're in overflow.
Again, if you can do that. If you're at home, and and you're with somebody, maybe you can just turn and look in their eyes and pray this over them. Or maybe if you're by yourself, pray it over yourself. Alright? Are you ready?
I'm gonna pray this phrase a at a time and then I'm just gonna ask you to repeat this. Are you ready? Alright. Here we go. May the God of hope look at one another and pray it over them.
May the God of hope fill you with joy and peace as you trust in him so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Intro/Outro: Thank you for listening. For more information, please visit us online at garden.church.