Transcription
God knows who he made when he made you. And when he speaks to you and gives you vision for the future, or gives you, uh, invites you into things in your life, it will make sense to you. It'll scare you. It'll be beyond what you think you're capable of, but it will make sense to you.
Paul, Saul of Tarsus, has his vision on the Damascus Road. The vision to him makes sense. Like, it's, and what it does is, the way that God appears to Saul is in honor of who Saul is, when he was knit together in his mother's womb. So, so when he has that vision, it fits right in line with all of his training as a Pharisee. It's like the greatest thing he's ever longed for in his sect. The Phariseeism is to have this vision, and as far as he knew, no one's ever had it. And so it's the greatest kind of honor of his life.
The challenge is, it was Jesus, right? And he didn't say what he thought. He didn't think it was going to be Jesus, first of all. And he thought Jesus, or whoever was going to tell him that he was right, and not show up and say, "Ah, you're a little bit off on all of your eschatology." Like, we're so positive about all this stuff, man. We're so positive. We know the times. We don't. You don't.
And so for Paul, it was honoring to him that God appeared to him in a way that his identity immediately responded to. If he was walking down the road and Jesus walked up to him like a carpenter, that wouldn't have had the impact that this did on him. It's, it's the, it's the beauty and the intimacy of God to come to you and I in a way that you and I know who it is, and it honors who he made you in your mother's womb.
So when you are doing listening prayer and you are hearing from God, I always ask people, "Does that make sense to you?" Because if it doesn't, we need to back up. God knows who he made when he made you. And when he speaks to you and gives you vision for the future, or gives you, uh, invites you into things in your life, it will make sense to you. It'll scare you. It'll be beyond what you think you're capable of, but it will make sense to you.
So gorgeous. And this is another thing the scriptures are trying to point out to us. This is not a weird thing. What's astounding is the magnitude of what God is doing. That's what's astounding to people. We're just praying these little itty-bitty prayer requests, and God's responding on this massive, like he does to Rebecca. She's just like, resolved this conflict that's growing within me, the Jacob-Esau conflict. It's a generational, genealogical prayer request that she's praying, and she has no idea. She has no idea what she just asked God. And his answer to her was, "I will." But she didn't know because she wants it right now. And if you don't do it right now, it must mean that it's up to me. I was out. We were out in Seattle writing a script for this thing on the prophets. And I asked one of the guys with me, I said, one of the writers, I said, "Do you believe? Do you think God, when you pray, ever says no?" You know, growing up, you hear God has three answers in prayer: yes, now, and later, or something like that, right? Yes, no, and wait. Like, where is that in the Bible? It's funny how we're just trying to get so certain on these things, which is that's the most vague answer possible. He says, "Yes, now, or wait." So, wow, that clears that up for me.
So I asked this guy, "Do you think God ever says no?" And he said, "Oh, Don has my phone." The guy looks at me and he goes, "I don't think he says no. I think he says new." And I thought, that's a dumb answer. But then the more I thought about it, I was like, wow, I dismissed him because he's younger than me. And you know, but because I was in a scarcity mindset when I asked him. He doesn't say no, he says new. I thought, oh my gosh. And then the guy continues, as if that wasn't impressive enough, and to embarrass me further, he says, "People don't have ideas. Ideas have them. People don't possess ideas. Ideas possess them." And I thought, okay, I'm done talking to you for right now because I have to think about that too.
And then I was listening to this lecture on culture, and the speaker said, he's not a, he's not a Christian guy. But he says, "You can't create culture. There's no such thing as creating culture." I was like, "We want to create a healthy culture here." He's like, "You can't create a culture. You know why? You are born into culture. You are these are the two cultures of the whole world, and you are in one or the other. And if you're in this culture and you're going to try and create a culture of joy and peace, not going to work. It can't work. In this worldview, and in this worldview, you can have joy, but not because you're creating it, because you're receiving it from the one who gives joy."
So we have humans have this funny idea that we can just, despite what's, despite what's truth, we can just create these little bubbles that we live in that just don't have to go by any of this stuff. And it doesn't work. I mean, look at our culture. Look at our culture.
So when we're, when we're, when we're going to do something, when we're in our life, and we're praying, and we discover who we are in the Kingdom, we discover, "Oh, there's a kingdom? Oh, I didn't know that." And we discover, "Oh, I have an identity in that kingdom? Wow, I didn't know that." And then you, "Oh, we can hear from God? Oh, wow, I didn't know that." And then you move into a community that does it, and you're not just by yourself in the woods trying to work it all out, but you're in a community of like, really smart people that do this all the time. And then you realize, wow, people have been doing this since the first century. And we kind of got away from it, and we're kind of coming back to it, like over generations. And then you're reading their Bible. And like, that's the scope that God works on. That's what he does. It's these large. And it's, but it's in the lives of these individuals. Individuals in this large scope of things. And what's he doing? He's doing more than you can ask or imagine. That's not like a dream verse. That's about, that's the truth of what's happening. It's more than you could ask or imagine.
So we have free agency. So we can decide which one of these cultures we're going to live in. This is false, but we can live in it. We can pretend like it's true. But this one leads to death. We can live in this one, which has always been true, and this one leads to life. So if I'm in a room with peace negotiators, my first question is, "Which worldview do you want to try and negotiate peace in?" Because if we're going to do it in this one, let's just not waste our time. But if we're going to do it in this one, let's get to it. Let's get to it. Other-focused peace negotiation. But we're not here. We're in self-interest peace negotiation, which leads to separation and conflict. And it's all it ever will be. Like, I don't have to believe anything about the Bible to know this is 100% true. I just have to tell the truth about the world that I live in.
But then, like, what do we do about it? Then we have the scriptures. And Moses and the whole Bible going, "We'll tell you how to live in this. We'll tell you what happens when you lose it. We'll tell you how to get back into it. We'll tell you how to maintain it." And here's the other thing: you never have to be afraid of death because Jesus took death away. So there's nothing to be afraid of. Go get them.
But we're like over here going, "But what if we die?" "Okay, I took death away. You cannot die." "Okay, all right. But what if we die?" That, like, we can't get out of it. We can't get out of it. Death means you lost. Death means you lost. Death means you lost. Did your people die? You lost. Really? Is that true? Losers die. Winners live. Winners live. Losers die. That's what we're taught every day in church, out of church, everywhere. Not true. Winners die. Winners don't don't die because someone took their life. Winners die because they give their lives for other people. And that's how we all win. That's it.
And we're over here trying to make dreams happen in this culture. No, you can get to the top, and your whole people end up enslaved. It didn't work. You think it worked? It just took the empire a certain amount of time to put you all in bondage. And every civilization makes the same mistake.
So we have the scriptures. We can read these. We can read these passages. And here's Jesus on the scene saying, "It's like this. If you want to think about the whole thing, it's like this. It's like a sower went out to sow." Who is the sower? Sometimes God is the sower. Sometimes you are the sower. Sometimes other people are the sower. It's not just God is the sower. It's sometimes it's all of those. The point is not who's the sower. The point is what do you do if you are the sower with what you have? And what does it say we should do with it? We should throw it out to who? Everyone. Everyone. Not our group. Not our team. Everyone.
What if they don't receive it? It doesn't matter. What if it just bounces off their resistant hearts? It doesn't matter. You. And if you, if you don't want to sow, well, I don't think God's going to give you much to give away. Then why would he? You're not going to pass it out. You're going to use it to manipulate other people. You're going to use it to corral people into your own team. That's going to be taken away from you. And what you had is going to be taken away from you. That's if you're the sower.
What if you're the person receiving the seed? That could be in any scenario. And so we read it here. We go, "Here the verse 18, here the parable of the sower. Then the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the word of the kingdom." What is the word of the kingdom? What is that? What do you think that? I, I, I'm, don't you're not in the scarcity test where you have can't fail. I'm just asking you. See, you're all raised in this. You're like, "I don't know if I want to guess because everyone will look at me and say, 'Wow.'" What I'm asking you, what do you think the word of the kingdom is? What do you think it is?
"Scriptures?" "Could be the scriptures." "Love?" "Sorry, love." "What's the word of the kingdom?" "Truth." "What's true?" "That's it. The truth. You shall know what, and it'll set you free." "The truth?" "What truth?" "The Baptist truth?" "The Methodist truth?" No, the truth. The truth. What's the word of the kingdom? Whatever is the word of the kingdom. All of it. When, when, okay. It's, I'll just say like, it's any good, true, beautiful idea. It's all of it. Like, we're always putting the trying to get in these little certainty things. Get out of it. It's a mystery. The word of the kingdom.
I think, I think, I maybe I wrote this or I said it the other day. When we lived in Jerusalem, I, one of the guys I worked with, his name is Father Cel. He's an Arab. He's an Arab, um, believer. He's the, uh, of the, he's the father of the Anglican. Who is he? Anglican? Yeah. Anglican Church in Jerusalem. But he's an Arab. So he's been through the same kind of difficulty as any Arab that lives in Israel. Very difficult life. But because he's Eastern, he's an Eastern Christian. He's not a Western Christian. So as an Eastern Christian, Eastern Christians didn't participate in the Crusades historically. They didn't. They've never fought the Muslims. They've never had a war with Muslims. And if I ask him, "Why didn't you guys fight the Muslims?" He says, "Because we've been living together for generations. Why would we fight? Just because I'm an Arab Christian, why would I fight an Arab who's a Muslim? Why would I do that?"
But the Western Christians in the Dark Ages rallied around what the Pope called holy war. The Catholic Pope invented the term holy war, not the Muslims. That Catholic Church did it. And he said, "We are in holy war against the infidel." All of the language that Muslims use about holy war is from Christian language. That's where they learned it. Anyway, so he said, "Our people come was telling me, our people woke up one day and all of Europe was marching towards us with swords, and they were killing anyone." Because most of the soldiers were illiterate and didn't know what the war was about. So they were told, "Kill anyone that doesn't believe in Jesus." So the first group they killed as they crossed Europe were Jews on the way. And then when they got there, then they found Muslims and they killed. And that whole thing. So the, the Eastern Church weren't in the Crusades. They were actually victimized by Western Crusades.
So in current day, my friend Cel calls me a crusader. That's what he calls me. He goes, "Jamie, you're such a crusader." Because he says, "All my language is the language of a Christian crusader. Do you know what that means? All of my language is about warfare and fighting and winning and beating and conquering. All my Christian language is centered around a war." And I don't know why. Do that. But because of the culture I'm from. And so he doesn't have that language. When he talks about his faith, it's all about sacrifice.
So real quick, I said to him one day, we're walking through a parking lot, and he says to me, "Hey, you know what?" He said, "The other day, the Druze head of the Druze Church." The Druze is like a secret religion. It's a mix between all kinds of bizarre stuff. They're they're very tight. They they side with Israel in most conflicts. But they're they're a mix between like Christianity and Judaism and Islam. It's weird. And they're very closed off. And so my friend Cel says to me one day, "Hey, the Druze leader," and he names him, "called me the other day and said he wants to meet with me and talk again about faith in Jesus." And I'm like, "You're kidding. Nobody can get to that guy. And and you're going to get to him and you're going to win him?" And he goes, "You're such a Christian." He said, "How do you describe him calling you?" He goes, "Kingdom. It's so kingdom. I'm not winning anything. He's not losing. It's kingdom."
And then he looked, there's a little flower growing up through the asphalt in this parking lot. And he goes, "See that? That is also kingdom." My friend coming to faith in Jesus, kingdom. That flower, kingdom. Made me sick because he sounded like Jesus. Like in that situation. And I'm like, "Crusader, crusader." And I asked him, "Why are you a priest?" He said, "Oh, that's a kingdom story." I'm like, "I, I figured you'd say it was a kingdom story. I get that part. But how, why are you a priest?" And he said, "Because when I was a little boy, my grandfather and his brother fought against the, the, uh, Sultan of that, the Ottoman Sultan." Sultan. They resisted the Sultan and they wouldn't fight on his behalf. And my, my grandfather, my grandfather and his brother. My grandfather was a pacifist. My the brother was, um, was like a real zealot. A real zealot. Yeah. And so he got arrested and taken in front of the Sultan. And the Sultan said, "You're gonna die. You're gonna die." So my, my grandfather said, "I'll die in his place." And the Sultan said, "Why would you die in his place?" He said, "Because he doesn't understand the love of Christ, and I do. And I don't want him. I want him to be able to live his life knowing Christ, and he hasn't yet, but I have. And I know where I'm going. I'd rather die in his place." And he was executed in place of his brother. And this kid said, "I want to be like that. That's why I'm a priest." He goes, "Why are you a believer in the kingdom?" I was like, "I don't want to tell you to beat the bad guys to win the loss to defeat Satan, all that language like that, right?"
So because I grew up, I grew up in this too. We all grew up in this kind of stuff. But we could live over here like this. So the word, what is the word of the kingdom? It's all of it. It's all the beauty. It's all the truth. It's everything that's love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. And every endeavor that makes that spread. It's, it's what brings transformation. It's Christ's death and resurrection. It's all of that in every way that it can be expressed in this world. That's what it is. And it, and it's being thrown out by the sower all the time to us. All kinds of ideas about how to do this. How do we do this in the world? Well, what's your identity? How can I do this in my identity? Well, you could write a book about it. You could do this in your business. You could do this in the school. You could. And then constant ideas as we co-create with God.
But that seed doesn't always make it. All those beautiful ideas. And if we, if we had time, we could start this right now. We could just, we could just start writing down ideas. They're, they're in you. They're because when did God stop throwing out the seed? He doesn't. But he can't keep throwing seed when you won't receive it. Like, it can't go anywhere. You got to let those things start to grow. And then other seed come in.
So there's some people like, you have an idea and it's like, "That's just so stupid. I can't even entertain it." That's how we respond. "That's just so ridiculous." And that's like, it just bounces off. And God will keep throwing that seed to you until you die and are with him. And he's like, "You know what? We could have done together." But it's okay. It would have been amazing. But it's okay. A lot of people think this is why there's weeping in heaven. Not because anyone's in trouble, but because they, you weep at what what might have happened if you would have let that seed grow. But it's okay. But he'll keep throwing that seed like that. Why won't you let it hit? Why won't, why? It's like a person that can't receive anything from anyone. "Nope. I know what I'm. I know what I believe. I know what I believe. I know what I believe." Bang. It just bounces off. And it's like, you're in a peace negotiation. It's like, "Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. We have to win. We want them out." Like, then you can't grow. Nothing can grow. Does that make sense? That's what this is about.
And the people that can receive it, then recognize it, they can hear it. More is given. And to the ones that can't, it's not like God's taking it away. It's just there's nothing there. There's nothing to work with. Just like no fear, guilt, shame, all those things. It's just like, "I can't. I know. I can't. I can't."
I talked to a guy the other day. He's, he's, I can't really tell you who he is, but he's a high-level guy in another country. He's an American. He worked his way into this position. It's unbelievable how he did it. He got there. He was there 10 years. These people, if you could hear these people talk, you wouldn't be afraid of anything in the world. See, what scares us in the world is we think the whole thing's out of control. No, it's not true. We think God's nowhere. He's not there. It's all falling apart. It's not true. He throws the seed everywhere, all the time. And it does take root.
And this guy, he worked his way into a very high position, um, in a foreign government that's an adversary of the US, deep into it. And he has a lot of influence. And he's 25 years old. And he was there for 10 years in that position. He has an undergrad degree. I think he just had an undergrad degree. And he worked, worked his way into that position. Just do this weird thing, and this weird thing, and that weird thing. And he had a seed of an idea, and he just let it grow. And he just tried it. And he's from a Podunk school. It's funny. He told me where he went to college. And oh, anyway. So and then he ends up in this high-level position. And he's telling me the people that he's working with on a regular basis. I'm like, "Wow, that's super impressive, dude." He's 36 years old. And he says, "But I couldn't endure it. I got choked out by the fame and the money." That's how the empire works. This guy loves Jesus. And he was in such a beautiful position to do such amazing, influential things. But he got enamored with it.
And when he was talking to me, I said to him, "Listen, when you're talking to me over the phone like this, stop saying the names of the people you're saying. Stop saying those names on the telephone. Uh, you don't have to impress me. I believe that you're who you say you are. Stop saying their names." And I knew right there, this guy doesn't understand his identity because he's trying to impress me with who he knows. Like, you don't need to do that.
And so now, though, thank God, just the way God works, he's going to be in a location that I'm going to be at at the end of the month. And I can meet him there. And people that are going to be there work in the country where he has been working. So God's going to do this whole, like, this again with him. And I told him, I said, "You, you accomplished what you accomplished at 40% of your true identity." I said, "I want you to think about." He's like, "I can't go back anymore. It's destroying me." Like, "Yes, you can. This time we go back a different way. This time you go back with a community. And you go back whole. That's what we do. And you're going to do it again. And I'm going to help you get there. And I know the community that helped you get there. Do it again."
But that's what the empire does to good seed. It chokes it. Everyone in this room has ideas. Everyone in this room is capable of more than you could ask or imagine. The challenge is two things: timing, a little bit of endurance. But it's mostly timing and expectation.