Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Hey, guys, this is naive. And you've reached the Mosaic Church podcast. So excited that you're part of our listening community, and I'd love for you to be even more connected.
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[00:00:11] Speaker A: There's more content there, and there's more opportunities for you to get connected in our ministries and events as well. Also, love for you to share this content if this has blessed you. I know that God wants to use you to bless other people with it, so share this podcast.
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Join us to reclaim the message and the movement of Jesus together. So would you consider giving to this ministry? I know that God is able to do immeasurably more through us when we come together. Thank you so much. God bless you and enjoy.
[00:00:59] Speaker B: Good morning. Good morning. So excited to have you guys with us this morning.
We are in week three of the Other side of Certainty, a series based on a book, a real, actual book that I wrote you guys.
So exciting. Next Sunday, Pastor Naim will be back. We're starting a new series on the book of Ephesians, really the letter to a church in Ephesus. And we're gonna be giving you some more information about how we can really dig into this next series together and go through the scripture together. So be on the lookout for small groups, information on that. But yes, today it has been such an honor to be here with you guys for the last three weeks to be able to go through all of this content and the message that I really just feel is so timely for right now. We got to celebrate this week with some friends and some family, just kind of the launch of the book. And even my childhood best friend that I've known since I was six years old flew in from Michigan to be there. And it was so incredibly special just to hear conversations from so many of you guys, also of how this is helping you to unlearn God and to relearn God and to really kind of rejuvenate your faith. And so we're gonna wrap up the series today. And so I thought, you know, last week I almost split the church with my theological take on Dorito flavors.
So I was like, well, this week, maybe I'll just introduce you to someone who's been very, very impactful in my own faith evolution.
And it's not my best friend. He wouldn't fit in the prop basket.
But it is Barbie.
Any Barbie fans in the house?
Wow. That is not enough of y'. All, Listen to me. Barbie is an icon, okay? She is an icon, not just in fashion, but for those of you that are like, wow, okay, we're not actually gonna talk about Barbie today. We're gonna talk about the box that she's in. Because I think just as much as her hair and her shoes and her accessories kind of have become definitive of Barbie, also her box and those like, plastic shackles that are on her ankles and her wrists and, you know, the string that ties her hair to the back of the box, including the box itself. I think these things have also defined her for generations.
I know, at least it did for me. I realized one day that I was actually myself living in a metaphorical Barbie box like this. I realized that I had created a world for myself that was small and that it was safe, and it kind of kept me all in one place. And it gave me a sense of control and it made me feel like I was protected because nothing from the real world could actually get to me in here.
But the problem with that was that then my value, my self worth, came in. Staying pretty and shiny and put together and clean and being good and never being affected by anything that was outside of my little box.
And so what I did was I started adapting to living in the box. I started adapting to living inside of. Of those parameters. And I found myself with a limited world.
And after a while, instead of seeing it as limitations, I actually started to believe that this was just my reality, that I just lived and operated in this kind of boxed in life.
And so maybe for you, you can relate. You're like, okay, I understand that experience. Maybe not. Maybe for some of you, you don't actually live in this box, but it is where you keep God, because you like to have him in here, where you can look at God and you can talk to him and you can take him out and you can, like, play with him and interact with him sometimes if you want to, but then you. When you need him, you know, but then you put him back in there and he can go sit up on the shelf so you know exactly where he is when you need him Next time.
It gives us again, a little bit of a false sense of control and security.
But your desire for a God that can be explained can lead you to worshiping a God that can be contained.
And a God that is contained is limited. And that is not actually the God that we worship. A God that is limited is limited by who we want him to be.
And so the problem with that is we can't get to know God at a deeper level when we already decide that we know everything about Him.
We can't be open to God teaching us anything new when we've already decided that we know what he's going to say.
We can't be surprised by God and anything in our lives because we prefer him to be predictable and small.
See, friends, when we are certain of who God is, we lose our curiosity.
And when we lose our curiosity, we stop pursuing relationship with God to get to know what. What else more there is about Him.
And when we stop pursuing relationship with God, we limit him in what he wants to do in and through us and in the world.
And unfortunately, I do think that this is maybe a common thing that we do to box God in. I also think that it happens kind of simply, maybe where we don't even realize that it's happening. So I'm gonna throw out some examples and maybe one of these you can relate to. I think sometimes this actually happens in our churches where questioning our spiritual leaders is seen as disrespectful.
And so what happens then is we just end up limiting our understanding of God or of the meaning of Scripture to that one leader or that one person's interpretation or their experience with it, their perspective.
Sometimes God is withheld from people that don't fit a certain ideal or a certain norm.
And so we misunderstand who God is and believe that his love and his grace and his acceptance and his mercy and his forgiveness is really limited to people who look a certain way or vote a certain way or speak or dress or live in a certain place.
And so we limit God to only people who fit the criteria of that one homogenous group.
Sometimes it's actually our own fear of being wrong or of being bad or of having some kind of consequence or punishment, something taken away from us that boxes God in.
We use our righteous performance, right? This is where the to do lists and the things that we've been talking about come in. Because we use those things to say, okay, but if I do all of this, then I know I'm gonna keep God happy or. Or I'm at least gonna keep God happy with me, and I'll stay on his good side.
But again, all we're doing is limiting God by the parameters that we think will make him happy or the ones, honestly, that maybe we're comfortable living under.
And it's not always just our beliefs in God. It's also our beliefs in ourselves. It's our beliefs in ourselves. And the way that I think we mis. See ourselves through God's eyes that cause us to set up unrealistic expectations.
I think we have a belief for ourselves, many of us as followers of Jesus, that, like, we have to do it perfectly and we have to have a standard of perfection that we are supposed to reach. And that every time we mess up, every time we don't reach that standard of perfection, that God is disappointed and that we have failed.
And I know, at least for me, that was one of the reasons I kept God in the box. Cause I was like, but if I fail, I wanna make sure he doesn't get away from me.
I need to make sure I don't lose my salvation.
I need to make sure that he still knows and would consider me a good Christian. So I need to be really, really good so I can make sure that God does not remove himself from me.
If that is something that you believe, that is not who God is. And my prayer is that by the end of this message today, you'll be able to kind of open your eyes to some of the beliefs that you have, as we've been doing in this whole series, maybe start to ask, like, where did this come from? Why do I believe this about God?
And if you'll be brave enough to let some of them go, my hope is that you'll be able to understand God in a new way today and then actually, like, let him out of the box.
And so we're gonna start back at the Sermon on the Mount, where we started in week one, where we talked about how Jesus used the phrase. You've heard it said, but I say multiple times. And so what he was doing is he was taking their religious expectations and he was expanding them. Because his life was like the starting point for the new covenant. He was saying, because of my life here, all of the old ways, the way that you used to worship God, all of that old covenant are over. It's complete.
And so now what you're gonna do is follow my ways and my words. And so this was what he was doing to try to teach them. Here's now how you worship God. Get to know God and live out who God is to the people around you. And so he ends this whole sermon with this line in Matthew 5:48, which is tough, but you are. Help me out to be perfect. Perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect. Say even as.
We're coming back to that. Even as. Now, I promise I'm not setting you up for failure. Okay, we're gonna talk about My favorite word when it comes to Scripture, which is context, we have to dig into the context. So if you look up, which I did, the root of this word, perfect, the Greek word for it is actually teleos. Say teleios, which means to be made perfect.
It's not about starting that way. It's not about showing up that way. It's not even really about attaining perfection. It's about the process of being made perfect. This is an adjective that describes growth and transformation.
Now, Jesus is not telling us to be God, but to be like God again, to be as our Father, to be like Him.
If you have kids or you've ever been around kids and their parents, you probably notice that after a while, kids will, like, start to pick up the mannerisms of their parents, maybe the habits, the patterns, right? Because kids learn to be like their parents. And sometimes we don't even teach it that way necessarily.
It just kind of happens.
So we get to think of Jesus the Son, as God's mini me, okay? And that's how we're gonna figure out who God is. We're gonna know and believe that Jesus has picked up on and is the display of God and all of the characteristics of God. And so by watching Jesus and doing what he does, that's how we can learn to be as our Father.
And this whole Sermon on the Mount that Jesus was giving was about people trying to teach them to live differently outside of their cultural expectations and the things they were used to. He's like, hey, no, love your enemies. Actually pray for the people who are treating you unjustly. These are very, very difficult things to do for us. And they also would have been very radical at the time.
But Jesus is not setting up an expectation of perfection.
He's actually taking the expectations of religious law and he's changing them.
He's telling them, this is not how you become perfect or show your holiness anymore. That holiness is not something that we can attain with knowledge or with good behavior.
But we become holy when we become like Him.
We become holy and we are made perfect as long as we're willing to participate in, in the process.
So perfection, not the goal, okay? You are no longer needing to live in the parameters of trying to attain a perfect following of Jesus.
And another thing that I think that we need to reframe, which is very much connected, is this idea of sin.
Okay, you are going to mess up.
You probably already did it today.
I know I for sure did.
When we mess up, when it comes to faith, we call that sin spoiler. Alert. Jesus is not surprised, okay? He expects this of humanity. Because here is the deal. We live in something people like to say, the now and the not yet.
I don't know if you've heard that phrase before. We live in the now and the not yet. Because what that means is we live in the now where Jesus has already come to reconcile all of creation back to God and also the not yet. We are also waiting for Jesus to come and kind of reconcile that to full completion and put the world back right again.
Because sin has entered the world. And so because of that, things are not as God intended. We do not live in a world that is as God originally intended. And so when we take the combination of evil in the world and our free will to do whatever we want, we're going to sin, we're going to mess up, we're going to hurt each other. We are going to do things that don't look like our Father. And we're gonna have days and weeks and seasons where we're like, you know what?
I don't even really wanna strive for this. I don't even wanna try.
And instead of trying to become like our Father, we choose to do things that very much don't look like Him.
Again, I want to look at the root word of the word sin, okay?
Say hamartano.
I don't know if I'm saying that one right, but that's how we're saying it today. Hamartano, okay? This is the Greek word for the word sin, and it is an archery term. Okay? Maybe if Barbie is too girly for you, you're like a Katniss Everdeen girly. And you like the bow and arrow, okay? That's where we're going with this idea of sin. A sin is what happens when you aim for the bullseye and you miss. If you hit anything else other than your intended goal, that is a sin. Because you missed the mark, what happens is you don't shoot it one time, miss, and then be like, well, I guess I'm done for the rest of my life.
You walk over, you pick it up, you take aim again, and you retry.
You try again.
And so I want you to understand that sin is actually not an adjective this time. It is a verb. It is a verb to describe something that we do. And we take sin seriously because it interrupts us becoming like God. But also, sin does not create the parameter in which you live.
I'm gonna say this even more clearly. Cause I know somebody in this room needs to get this sin Is something that you do.
It is not who you are.
It is a verb. It is something that you do. It is not who you are. Now, we can get convicted, right? We can have guilt where the Holy Spirit is within us, going like, hey, hey, little red flag.
That's what I tell my girls. I'm like, if you feel something in you and the Holy Spirit's like, maybe don't do that. Maybe don't do that.
That's conviction. That is God's way of saying, like, you're about to do something that doesn't look like me. That doesn't help you to become more like me.
Sometimes we do it anyway.
And then God gives us grace to pick that arrow back up, take new aim, and try again.
If you have been told that because of your sin you are bad, that because of your sin you are broken, you are wrong, or that God is going to separate himself from that is the voice of shame and it is a lie.
That is the voice of the enemy coming in and trying to do whatever it can to convince you not to get back in the process of becoming more like God.
These are very different things.
Conviction, holy conviction in the Holy Spirit can lead you back to God, back to that process of becoming more like him.
But the idea that you are no longer have value, you don't have any worth to try again.
That God has removed himself from you, that he can't even be in your presence because of your sin, that is from the enemy. That is the voice of shame.
God created you and called you good from the very beginning.
Sometimes we make choices that are not so good, but it does not mean that you have failed to the point that, like, everything is over. It doesn't mean you've messed up to the point that you've gone too far.
We're gonna see Jesus talking to Peter, one of his disciples, just hours before he went to the cross.
Peter was going to mess up and deny Jesus. And Jesus knew that it was going to happen. And so he's like, you know what? I'm gonna go ahead and just let Peter know, like, this is what he's about to do, just to kind of prepare him. Jesus basically is like, hey, just so you know, sin is a feature, not a bug of humanity.
It's a feature, not a bug. We are all going to turn our backs on Jesus at some point. But what I really want us to pay attention here is Jesus response to us sinning against him before it even happens. Luke 22 says, I have pleaded in prayer for you, Simon, who would later be named Peter, that your faith should not fail.
So when you have repented and turned to me again, strengthen your brothers.
Jesus is like, you're gonna mess up. But I'm praying that your faith doesn't fail, that it doesn't destroy your faith. And I had to sit with this one for a minute.
Cause like, Peter was on the inner circle, he was there. Like, he actually walked with Jesus in his actual lived life. He saw the miracles. He was part of some of the miracles. Why would Jesus think that Peter sinning would cause his faith to fail?
And I think that it's because Jesus knew that if we tied our faith to our behavior, then we would start believing in our own power to be able to perform the good enough or well enough, instead of relying on the process of being transformed by Jesus.
Jesus knew if we took our faith and we tied it to our own behavior, we would rely on our own strength and what we could do in our own power instead of relying on his transformation of us from the inside out.
And we actually see in this verse, I mean, there's so much in here where Jesus is basically giving Peter the model for what we do when we sin. And the first thing he says is that we hold onto our faith, our belief in a God who offers us grace and unlimited opportunities to try again.
And we repent.
We say, we admit God. I'm sorry that I chose to be led by something other than your spirit. We also apologize if there's repair that needs to be made for hurt or for damage that was caused.
But then we put our eyes on him, we turn back to him, we pick up that arrow, we take new aim on Jesus and we try again.
And also we do it in community.
We do this together. Because sometimes you need someone else to remind you of what's true.
Sometimes that voice of shame is so loud in your mind that you start to believe it and you start to listen. And you need someone else to remind you the truth of who God is and who you are in God and what God thinks about you, regardless of what your last few days or minutes or seconds even looked like.
We also do this in community because when we can show up honestly and authentically and vulnerably with our mistakes and no like, mask of perfection, and we can walk into a room and we can say, hey, I am going to humble myself and be willing to try again, be willing to hear your feedback, be willing to say, okay, this makes me uncomfortable, but I'm going to listen and I'm going to try to Figure this out. We can actually bring freedom and permission for other people to then do the same thing and to know that they are not also counted out because of their mistakes.
Sin does not box us in.
In fact, when we allow God to shape us through our mistakes, even those mistakes can become part of our transformation and becoming more like Jesus.
How many of you live in a house with someone who is in the slime craze?
I am so ready for it to be over.
I am actively trying to get all of this slime out of our house.
Okay, anybody remember Silly Putty?
It's just like an egg. You, like, take it out, stamp it on a newspaper, be like, oh, cool. Picked up the ink, put it away. Done. Easy. Amen.
Slime is not like that.
Slime is everywhere.
And slime does not just neatly go back in the egg slime. As my youngest daughter, Margo, who's gonna be 11 on Tuesday, whoops. Told me that it's active. Slime is a process. So here's what I learned.
If it's not sticky enough, then you can add glue.
And if it's too sticky, then you add activator. And if it's too hard, then you add lotion. And if it's too runny, then you can add cornstarch.
But guess what happens when you keep adding stuff to the slime?
It grows.
And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and it just continues to grow. And then when you're done and you're ready to put it away, It doesn't fit in the container.
Slime cannot be contained.
As much as you try to push it down inside, it overflows the container. And, my friends, this is your new picture of God, not this.
This is the picture that I want you to walk away with today about what the spirit of God is like in you and in the world.
God meets us in our mess with all of our mistakes and all of our striving and all of our uncertainty and all of our sin, and he wraps himself around us, and he's like, come on, come out of that container, you.
And he, he just adds everything that we need. He adds mercy, and he adds grace, and he adds forgiveness, and he adds patience, and he adds love. And God just continues to grow and grow and grow within us until we cannot contain Him. And his spirit is literally oozing out of us.
God should be oozing out of you.
I held that for too long. It got real sticky.
God should be oozing out of us, friends. And when the spirit of God is actually oozing out of us. We should see it.
We should look like this.
Because the other thing about slime is that it doesn't just grow, it spreads.
If you have slime in your house, you have slime in your house.
Ask my kitchen ceiling why it's purple slime, okay?
Just like slime cannot be contained and it spreads. The spirit of God within us cannot be contained. It should ooze out of us and it should spread when we let it change us from the inside out. That's what happens. And when the spirit oozes out of us, we should be able to see it.
Maybe it looks like that we ooze forgiveness instead of allowing bitterness to keep us boxed in.
Maybe it means that we offer patience for people who keep making the same exact mistakes and we don't cut them off or push them out or withhold grace from them.
Maybe it means that we are overflowing with self control when it's a lot easier to rage.
Maybe what's spilling out of us is acceptance and safety for people to show up exactly as they are in our presence. Because we remember that we too are still in process. Because the process is the whole point.
The process is the whole entire point. And as soon as we think we've arrived and we no longer need it, that's exactly when we better get back in.
Just as slime cannot be contained, God's spirit within us will take us to places that we never intended to go because they are not neat and tidy.
The spirit of God is going to spread you out to places that your politics, your theology, maybe your church culture or experience did not prepare you for.
And it's likely going to be outside of your comfort zones.
God's spirit might want to take you to the margins to stand with people who have been pushed out, and then to create safe pathways for them to find belonging.
The spirit of God might ask you to cover up your defensiveness with humility to be able to say, okay, we'll just go for the big ones. Hey, I noticed like some racism, some misogyny, some prejudice.
Maybe the spirit of God wants our humility to cover our defensiveness when those things are exposed so that we can show up with a willingness to listen and to learn and to change in the process of becoming more like God.
Maybe it might ask you to sit with the grief of yet another horrific tragedy in our schools when our kids safety is not guaranteed in a place where it should be guaranteed.
And maybe the spirit of God is asking you to feel it instead of becoming desensitized or numb to it because it doesn't affect us yet. Yet it's God's spirit that fills us with the courage to advocate for justice instead of simply offering thoughts and prayers every single time people are exploited, abused or excluded by the powerful and the wealthy.
Hear me. I'm not saying don't pray.
I am saying you pray and you lament what is not as it should be. And we take and we use the spirit of God in us for our God given agency to act and to bring his spirit into places where it is desperately needed.
We allow the spirit of God to spread us out into the places so we can show up in the world as our Father would in all of the places that make us uncomfortable.
There is nothing that you can do. There is no place that you can go that God's spirit won't go.
Our question is, are we going to be people who try to hold his spirit back and contain it, or are we going to be people that help it spread farther than we ever thought it could go?
In the Barbie movie, you had to know I was coming back to her. In the Barbie movie, Barbie does leave Barbieland and she goes into the real world.
And unfortunately for Barbie, unfortunately for Barbie, that really. She got taped in there good, okay.
Unfortunately for Barbie, things don't go as expected and people don't like her like she thinks that they would.
And there are not easy answers to her problems.
And everything is just kind of a mess. Everything is harder than she thought it was going to be. And so what she does is she goes to Mattel.
Obviously, if you're Barbie in the real world, that's what you do. She goes to Mattel and she talks to the CEO of Mattel who assures her that he can make everything better, that he can fix all of the hardships and the things that she's dealing with. And what he says to her is, if you're agreeable to it, we just want you to get back in that big giant box and go back to Barbieland.
And then he delivers the lie that I believe the enemy wants you to believe as well.
He says, just get back in that box and go back to where you came from and everything will be as it was.
Everything will be as it was.
Friends, going back to what you came from, a faith you used to have, a life you used to live, does not guarantee anything.
Even if it was better, even if it was good, it doesn't guarantee that that's where you're meant to be. And if going backwards means you're not growing forward in growth, that that's not what God wants for you.
God does not live in this box. He does not want you to live in this box.
And it is going to be uncomfortable to follow Jesus.
It is going to be hard. God is going to show you something that's gonna be really hard to see. God's spirit is going to take you to a place that is really hard to go to, that you didn't plan to go to.
And when you do these things, people are not going to like you or agree with you in the way that you expect that maybe they would.
So the temptation to get back in the box will always be there. The option to get back in the box will always be there.
And it will tempt you with the promises of security and control and safety and answers.
But the problem is that there's a trade off.
And taking those things or the promise of those things means that you will always be limited.
You will always be limited. And it might seem easier for someone else to tell you what to believe, or for someone else to go ahead and make the decisions and let you know when you're being good enough or if you're doing the right things.
But you'll be putting your faith and your life in someone else's hands.
You'll be putting your faith in Jesus in the hands of someone else.
And the only person that we can be certain of, the only person that we know for sure is going to lead us and be with us is God.
I love this prayer that Paul has for the community in Ephesus and Ephesians 3.
He says, I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power together with all the Lord's holy people to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.
And to know this love, that's like, kind of like knowledge.
To know this love that fights with knowledge, to know this love that competes with knowledge. No, to know this love that surpasses knowledge, a love that surpasses anything that we could know, then that you may be filled to the measure of the fullness of God.
It is not knowledge, it is not right answers. It is not certainty or following Jesus perfectly that fills us with the fullness of God. It is rooting ourselves in the love of Christ and allowing that love to transform us until the Spirit of God fills us to the full measure. And then once we do that, once the love of God and the Spirit of God is oozing out of us like this slime, it's only then that we can rely on God to do what only God can do, that we cannot do.
And to finish this verse that y' all know so incredibly well here at Mosaic, that is when we allow God to do immeasurably more than we can ask or imagine in our limited capacity through the limitless power that is at work within us.
God does not need you to be certain of anything.
Certainty is not his goal. His main concern is not how many scriptures you can explain or how many holy to do lists you check off every day, or how close you are to living a perfect life as a follower of Jesus.
But God is inviting you beyond certainty, beyond the things that are even knowable for you to know, where you have the freedom to risk and to wrestle and to ask questions and to let go of the things that defined you as a person or that defined your faith for so long.
He's inviting you to let go of the things that have boxed God in.
Because you can understand that the love of God is actually wrapped around you no matter where you are, in your belief, in your walk with Jesus, no matter what you've done or who you are. Cause you know that God's love is wrapped around you as you work it out.
That's what we believe in.
So friends, faith on the other side of certainty. What I hope that you will walk away with after this series is that it's not about going back in the box.
It's about knowing that even when you can't see it or you can't feel it or you can't explain it, that the goodness of God's presence is still working in you and in the world around you.
And that is what we put our certainty in.
That's where our faith lies.
Let me pray for us.
God, I thank you that first and foremost, Father, you are love God, that you loved us, you created us and called us good. And there has never been anything that we have done or could do, God, that would remove your love, your presence from us.
God, I pray that you would help us to see where you are, God, moving in the world around us, God, especially when it's hard to see your goodness, when it's hard to find the light or the hope. God, Would you help us to see where it is, Lord? And would you ooze out of us, Jesus, all of the goodness that this world needs?
God. Would you help us to get uncomfortable, God, and learn to be comfortable in the discomfort, God, if that's where you're calling us to, to take your spirit to people who so desperately need it God would you open our eyes to unlearn maybe old versions of ourselves God God maybe toxic legalistic ways of performing or striving God when you help us to see that all we have to do is connect with you say yes to being in relationship with Jesus so that we can experience the reconciliation and the forgiveness and all of the things God that you are offering to us if we just say yes.
God I pray that your presence would be with us so strong this week God that even as we wrestle with grief and despair and all of the things that threaten to take our joy, God the things that feel like they're shaking our faith, God that we would be able to remember that because you are still good and you are still moving it is okay in Jesus name.
Thanks for listening to this message from Mosaic church in Charlotte, North Carolina.
For more audio and video content, visit us at MosaicChurch TV.
