Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] We're in the middle of a sermon series looking at the work of the Holy Spirit, what the Holy Spirit has done throughout creation, even from the beginning of time.
[00:00:10] Genesis 1, the Earth was formless and void, chaos reigned.
[00:00:16] And the Holy Spirit, that is the breath of God, the energizing of God, formed and filled all of creation.
[00:00:26] And these two words, these two concepts of God's work through the Holy Spirit, forming and filling, kind of play out all through the Bible.
[00:00:35] They are interrelated, they're involved with each other. But it's helpful to look at them separately. The same way in Genesis 1, they're looked at separately. The first three days you have forming. The second three days you have filling.
[00:00:49] They go together. You can't have day and night without sun, moon and stars. But day one, you've got day and night. Day four, you have sun, moon and stars. They interact. They're a part of each other. But the work of the Holy Spirit is described separately in terms of forming and filling. And that's the way I wanted to talk about the process of the work of God continuing to bring order out of the chaos in the world now through the Holy Spirit. In terms of forming and filling, we've been looking specifically at this idea of the Holy Spirit filling us. And as the Holy Spirit fills us, it is the Holy Spirit is necessarily separating us the same way that the Holy Spirit separated the day from the night.
[00:01:33] Being formed is synonymous with being separated.
[00:01:38] I want to ask you to think of one word that describes you.
[00:01:45] Any word that describes you.
[00:01:49] You can write that down. You got a pen already? You can just go ahead and write that down while you're at it. One word that describes you.
[00:01:58] Now, whatever that word is, think about what if you are that word.
[00:02:04] What? You can't be something that you are not. If that word is true of you, you are not at least one thing, if not many things. Being something means that you are not at least one other thing. If you are tall, you are not short. You can't be tall and short. You are either tall or you see or you identify.
[00:02:30] I might not identify you as tall, but you might identify you as tall. And if you identify you as tall, you don't identify you as short. If you identify yourself as tall and short, you absolutely have a problem going on. You can't identify you as both. If you are one, you are not the other. Your identity, your formation. As you are formed, you're becoming one or the other. And this is what makes adulthood so important.
[00:02:56] When we talk about children, one of the most beautiful things about children is that there is so much potential. You look at a child, you think, oh, there's so much potential in them. That is because they are unformed, they are immature. And maturity is the process of being formed, of becoming something and becoming not something, of taking on identity, responsibilities, becoming, like stepping into who you are. And it also means stepping into who you're not. You are leaving behind certain things, and you're picking up certain things. This process of being formed is a process of maturity.
[00:03:32] It's sad when you see a kid that has to grow up too quick, you know, when they have to take on responsibilities too early in life.
[00:03:41] Maybe even worse is seeing an adult who has not taken on responsibilities in life when they are still. When they are of.
[00:03:49] When they have the capacity to become someone and they've just not done it yet.
[00:03:56] It's like all that unrealized potential is just so sad.
[00:04:02] Being formed, like, having the courage to say, this is what I will commit my life to. This is who I'll become, is necessary in becoming an adult.
[00:04:14] The issue, though, is, as you are growing, as you're becoming formed, what are you becoming formed towards? What are you becoming? What is this thing that you are?
[00:04:26] And when we talk about being formed in the Holy Spirit, we mean specifically being formed to be fit to God's character. God's kingdom, God's household, God's kingdom, heaven. Heaven is literally the place for people formed in Christ. Well, just look at these few words real quick.
[00:04:48] God's kingdom. This is the place where God's will is done. You could also think of it as, like, God's household, like, where, like, you have a kingdom.
[00:04:59] I can't.
[00:05:00] If I went out to your car right now and, like, tried to break in, you'd be like, what are you doing, Clay? Like, that's. You have. Do you have Alzheimer's? It's not your car.
[00:05:13] You don't belong there. If I went out there and started kicking your car and denning it, you might get a little mad at me, right? You might even call the cops. Now, if you went out there and kicked that car, I'd be like, well, you're kind of dumb, but that's your car. Like, that's your kingdom. You can kick your car, you know, like, that's something you could do.
[00:05:32] You are able. You have a control over certain things. The things that you have control over are your kingdom. So God's kingdom is whatever he has rule and reign over where God's rule and reign is done.
[00:05:47] God's people are those who submit to or a part of his rule and reign. You might think of it like children of God.
[00:05:57] If I go over to your house and I'm like. And I'm like, hey, Christian, go clean your room.
[00:06:03] Christian would look to his dad and be like, who invited him into our house? You know, if Brandon says, go clean your room, I don't know exactly how it plays out, but I bet Christian ends up cleaning his room.
[00:06:18] Like, he has rule and reign over Christian. That's his son.
[00:06:23] He has a responsibility. He has a relationship with him that he is able to say things to his son that I can't say to his son. And his son recognizes it, too. He might. You get to a certain age, you start thinking, like, I'm big. I don't have to. You still do. But you kind of get to that spot where you don't think you do. But until somebody else starts acting like your dad, you're not my dad. You know, like, there's a big gap. Even if you don't want to do what your dad says, there's a big gap between doing what your dad says and doing what some rando does. Like, if some other dude's like, who do you think you are? You're not my dad, right?
[00:06:54] That's because you are a part of your household kingdom. You're a part of that household. You're a part of that kingdom. You are formed. You have been raised. You've been made to be something that you are a part of that household, and you're not a part of my household. I don't get to be your dad. You got a dad, right?
[00:07:12] So being formed means that you are something and you're not something. Being a part of God's kingdom means you are part of where his rule and reign is, not where other people's rule and reign is not. Your own rule and reign, not Satan's.
[00:07:27] I belong to God.
[00:07:31] And at that point, you are fit to. You have been formed to be a part of God's kingdom. That formation is everything. The formation of the spirit of God. That you are made to be a part of God's household is so insanely important. It's like everything else that we think about. Being a Christian is secondary to that.
[00:07:55] Having the, you know, the gifts of the spirit and the mission and all that kind of stuff, except that you belong to God.
[00:08:02] Nothing else of God is yours. That's not your inheritance unless you've given yourself over to be his son and daughter.
[00:08:10] So spiritual formation, the spirit Forming us is the spirit driven process of forming the inner self in such a way that our spirit becomes submissive to God.
[00:08:24] This is the work of the Spirit. When we talk about formation, he is making us like children to God. That's all it is.
[00:08:34] You are becoming like his child.
[00:08:38] Romans 12. Paul says this.
[00:08:40] I urge you, like, I can't even tell you how important this is. Like everything else that I've been talking about, like Romans chapter 12 is like this. He's been building up this idea and everything else is going to be practical about living in the faith. But this, I urge you, is this linchpin moment in the book of Romans where he's like, everything that I've talked about so far rests on this. I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, by everything that God, by all of the graces of God, that shows up in the spirit of God, that plays out in your life, by all the opportunity that he's given you, you must offer up your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God.
[00:09:26] This is your true and proper worship.
[00:09:31] Like literally everything that we were just doing, we just spent all this time singing these praises to God.
[00:09:37] Nothing that came out of our mouth, except that they came from a person formed in Christ, was authentic and true.
[00:09:43] If those words are emerging from a person who has submitted their life and allow. If you are a child of God, all the words that Ben just led us to sing are authentic. They are, they are a testimony to who we are.
[00:09:58] If they're not, we just, we just sing like a song on the radio. We, at best, at worst, we kind of lied. Like, those words are designed to emerge from a person who has been spiritually formed to be God's, God's people, a part of God's kingdom.
[00:10:15] This offering up your body, as this living sacrifice is being formed in him, is your spiritual set. Your, your spiritual, your proper, your true and proper worship.
[00:10:25] So do not conform to the pattern of the world, but be transformed. That's formation. Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.
[00:10:36] Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing and perfect will. When your mind, when you no longer have a mind that's opposed to God, you're able to interact with the world. You're able to do things that are fit to the way God would do them.
[00:11:00] Jesus said, I only ever do what I see the Father doing. It's that the spiritual formation that we are a part of is orienting our mind to like Jesus, the one we Say we follow only ever do what we see the Father doing, that our mind is fit to the things we want what God wants, we enjoy what God enjoys. And like Jesus said, we do what God does. That's, that's what that formation is doing inside of us.
[00:11:31] Now I wanted to get to this point about the spiritual formation because all that sounds, I, I hope, I hope that we've been talking about this for a few weeks now. So I hope at this point that was almost like, yeah, it kind of makes sense based on the last few weeks.
[00:11:45] How, like, how do you do that? Like, how do I.
[00:11:53] How is my mind transformed? Like, I have a way of seeing the world that's different than your. We have these, like, things seem right to us, you know, and how can I, how can I go about trusting how to make my mind think something different than what it thinks now? Should I, like, maybe my mind is already, maybe I am already formed correctly in the spirit of God and I don't need to be reformed. Like, how, why would I, what is the process? Give me, give me like a, give me like a pattern here or like a process that I could go through for this?
[00:12:39] Well, I don't think that there is any one process. The Bible doesn't say here's the process that you go through, but everyone who has been transformed has either been taught or stumbled on some sort of process. There have been some. There's something that you have done that you figured out how to do repeatedly that has helped you become transformed in the image of God. Because that's not a one time thing. The sin of the world is constantly deforming us. It's constantly working against our formation in the kingdom of God. And so if we are living as children of God, it's a process that we have.
[00:13:23] There is a process of dying to ourselves, offering our bodies up as living sacrifices that we didn't just do one time, that we have made a habit in our life and has become normal for us. So there isn't just one process, but there is always a process because it's something that requires like a lifetime of doing. And anything that you do for a lifetime is something that you do repeatedly. It becomes like a process for you. It becomes like a normal thing. I get up, I brush my teeth.
[00:13:53] You have a certain process that you go through in the morning, probably different than mine, but generally we're probably getting all the same things done somehow. You know, maybe you shave in the shower, maybe you shave at the sink, maybe you don't shave very often. But sometimes, like, you know what I mean, we have general processes that we all kind of do.
[00:14:13] Similarly, in my link group, we talked about this, and we were talking about the.
[00:14:23] The process of being transformed. And we've got a guy in our link group who is a big part of aa, Tyler.
[00:14:33] He had gotten to a bad spot in his life decades ago now, and he got to the point that he was willing to.
[00:14:43] Did I say something wrong? Okay, all right.
[00:14:47] I often say words wrong, so I didn't know if I did all right.
[00:14:50] He got to the point that he just kind of died to who he was, and Alcoholics Anonymous was a big step for him. He said this.
[00:14:57] He said, I figured out that tweaking, constantly trying to tweak my life to make it better was so hard. Like, it was really hard. It's really hard to try to, like, adjust yourself.
[00:15:10] The only thing that really worked for me was to totally quit and give up and assume that everything that I thought before was wrong.
[00:15:18] Like, once I stopped trusting myself, then I was able to start building a new life. I had to totally. I didn't. I had to stop trying to tweak my life and making it better. I had to.
[00:15:31] If you wanted to use Paul's words, he had to offer up his whole life, his whole body as a living sacrifice. He had to just quit, stop thinking he knew what he was doing, which was cool. I was like, okay, well, there is a process, right? There is a process that this guy is. He's starting to describe some sort of process. Well, then I also. I remembered that I haven't mentioned Dallas Willard in so long. So don't hold this against me, But I remember that in Renovation of the Heart, Dallas Willard said this. He says, any successful plan for spiritual formation, whether for the individual or the group, will in fact, be significantly similar to Alcoholics Anonymous program. That whatever thing that you're doing, whatever process you have been a part of to in your spiritual formation, you'll look at the Alcoholics Anonymous thing. You'll say, there's some stuff there that.
[00:16:20] There's some stuff there that makes sense to me.
[00:16:23] So I want to look at this process not as like, this is how you do it, but this is the way a lot of people do it. And something like, this is the way we've all done it. If we have been a part of being transformed, being formed into the spirit of God.
[00:16:40] I want to start off looking at the guy who, like, going back kind of is the reason for the Alcoholics Anonymous start. He wasn't Actually a part of aa. But Frank Buchman was, he was a Lutheran pastor, like in the 1920s.
[00:16:56] He was in the Philadelphia area and he had started this ministry. He really wanted to make a big difference.
[00:17:01] He wanted to be a big deal.
[00:17:04] And he started this ministry and the board that was overseeing this ministry said, hey, it needs to be self sufficient. We can't keep, we can't keep funding it. It's costing too much. And he got really upset. He felt like they didn't see his vision and they were like working against him.
[00:17:23] These six men. He was being saw as his enemies. He eventually quit. He went into depression and he was just like, I'm done with this. I'm so like, why in the world would these people want to be in charge of ministry and not see the vision for actually helping people? Like, they were so worried about the bottom line. They weren't actually worried about the people that they were serving. He just, he became really embittered by it.
[00:17:46] Once he left ministry, he went to. He went kind of looking for this mentor that he had.
[00:17:51] He missed that mentor. It was a Baptist minister in England and he missed him. But he ended up hearing this other guy preach. And while, while that person was preaching, he had this, like this revelation. And this is what he said.
[00:18:05] I thought of those six men back in Philadelphia who I felt had wronged me.
[00:18:13] They probably had, but I'd gotten so mixed up in the wrong that I was the seventh wrong man.
[00:18:20] As he began to think about it, he realized all of that bitterness and anger towards those wrong men.
[00:18:27] He had been missing one person to be concerned about, and that was himself.
[00:18:34] The more time he spent or later on, as in this testimony that he gave, he said, I began to see myself as God saw me, which was very different picture than the one I had of myself.
[00:18:46] I don't know how you explain it. I can only tell you that I sat there and realized how my sin, my pride, my selfishness, my ill will had eclipsed me from God in Christ.
[00:18:58] Now remember, this whole bitterness and anger that he had was over his passion to live, his passion to be living in the kingdom of God. He was desperate to see God's will done. And he was embittered that other people were keeping him from doing it right. When he's talking about what he saw in himself, very different, he said, I'll tell you this, his own sin, his pride, his selfishness, his ill will, this was a result of him feeling thwarted or doing something good. This wasn't like he got up and decided to be a villain and twirl his mustache.
[00:19:39] I was the center of my own life that big I had to be crossed out.
[00:19:46] I asked God to change me and he told me to put things right with them.
[00:19:51] It produced in me a vibrant feeling as though a strong current of life had suddenly been poured into me. Remember we described, like the Holy Spirit, like that breath, that vitality that comes from the breath of God. That's what he's describing here. It was like this vitality had been poured into him and a dazed sense of great spiritual shaking up when he stopped seeing himself as the victim, as one that he was oppressed. And he began to see himself as the one that was sinning and that I needed to go to those men and I needed to apologize to them for the sin in my life.
[00:20:28] He felt energized and empowered because the Holy Spirit could work on him to transform him so that he could be a part of God's kingdom. He wrote a letter of apology to these six men.
[00:20:40] He didn't write a letter like, hey, look, I know we've disagreed, and whatever it was like, here's the way I have wronged you. He didn't write them asking anything. He didn't request them to, you know, for any forgiveness from them.
[00:20:59] He wrote to them to let them know how he had wronged them and to ask for forgiveness.
[00:21:06] Later on he got a chance to talk to that mentor that he tried to go to England to meet.
[00:21:12] And his ministry had been taking off and it was doing really well, but he was a little bit like he didn't know exactly how it was going to go.
[00:21:18] He was looking for confirmation about the direction of this ministry. It was called at this point, it was called the First Century Christian Fellowship. It eventually became known as the Oxford Group.
[00:21:30] He was really focused on trying to create communities of church similar to the first century.
[00:21:38] But he didn't know. He didn't have a model for it. And his mentor said, let me get this right. His mentor asked him, there it is. He said, do you let the Holy Spirit guide you in all that you're doing? And Buchanan said, yeah, I pray and I read the Bible every morning.
[00:22:00] But then his mentor said, yeah, but do you give God enough uninterrupted time really to tell you what to do?
[00:22:09] This became kind of core to his spiritual formation practice. Both feeling the liberation that came from doing a self inventory of his sin and asking forgiveness for the sin and spending time with God, asking him to reveal what he wanted, wanted in terms of himself, wanted in the world that he could begin to see the world through God's eyes. And giving God enough uninterrupted time was necessary for his spiritual development.
[00:22:44] I haven't yet found anyone that has talked about spiritual development that has had any success that hasn't included those two things that they.
[00:22:56] One guy, he used the words ruthless self inventory. I always loved that. That as he's praying, he's constantly doing a ruthless self inventory to reveal exactly not who I feel like I am, not what I think, but a ruthless self inventory. And that it comes about through a time with God in which he's not in control of the time or what happens.
[00:23:21] You might think of it like Sabbath. It's a time when I'm not productive. I'm simply allowing God to be productive in that moment anyway. Those were two things that were fundamental to his formation.
[00:23:34] Now in that time that he was alone, it was important, he said, to discern when God was speaking to you and when I was speaking to myself.
[00:23:43] So he wanted to seek out that time with God in obedience, without any self interested. Editing is the way he put it. So, like, whatever I'm hearing, I'm not hearing it through the lens of how this works for me. Like, I'm not discussing this with God in order to make this better for me.
[00:24:02] I'm simply allowing it to be true whether or not it's good for me.
[00:24:09] I'm looking for circumstances around me that make these thoughts practical. Like, as I'm hearing these things practically, can these things play out in my life?
[00:24:22] I'm assessing these thoughts that are coming to me in my quiet time in terms of their honesty, purity, unselfishness, love.
[00:24:31] If that's not where this is coming from, then it's not coming from God. I have a lot of thoughts and they might invade even into my quiet time. If those thoughts that are coming in my quiet time aren't honest and pure and unselfish in love, I can assume that those thoughts weren't from God.
[00:24:47] Are those thoughts consistent with scripture? God does not disagree with God. And so anything that I've heard in my quiet time, if it disagrees with scripture, didn't come from God.
[00:24:58] I get advice from friends. I have people around me who are faithful to being formed in the Spirit as well.
[00:25:08] And I talk about when I'm learning from God with them. And they honestly tell me what they're seeing too. That's helpful.
[00:25:17] And I am drawing on the experiences and teachings of the church that there have been 2000 years of people who have Been following after God.
[00:25:25] A lot of people that I have that I can look back to and see what spiritual formation has looked like for them. And I can look at that and I can compare it to myself. Those were things that he kind of figured out for himself to check him in his process, his spiritual formation process from veering into.
[00:25:45] I'll call it taking the Lord's name in vain.
[00:25:49] If I say God is calling me to something that God hasn't called me to, that's a, that's a crime. You know, that's like, that's like. If you said like I told you to go commit some, to do something bad, right? And I didn't tell you to go do that, I would not be happy with you. You know, I think, I think a lot of well intentioned Christians have not taken the time to separate out their will from the will of God. And there have been times that they have that they have said this is from God when it's not.
[00:26:30] I am, I don't want to be in that position to put my words in God's mouth. That's scary.
[00:26:39] Okay. Those were the things that he.
[00:26:42] Those are the background that went on at this point. I want to look at the model that AA that emerged from all of that. All those. I just want to kind of give you the background for where he came from.
[00:26:53] And then these 12 steps you've heard a lot about that are a spiritual formation model that Dallas Willard said any model that you have for spiritual formation will be similar to this. If you haven't yet thought of your own model for spiritual formation, this is a good place to start. Now I've taken it and I've. So AA has become something since began and it's become something that's like not necessarily Christian. So any higher power forget that I pulled it back into Christianity specifically, which is where it started. And so I've edited it a little bit to make it Christian specific first step. We admit we are powerless over sin.
[00:27:31] That our lives have become unmanageable. This is very similar to Romans 7. I do these things that I don't want to do. I don't do the things I want to do. Why I don't understand myself. There is this powerlessness that I have in my own over sin.
[00:27:49] You might say I need to be saved.
[00:27:52] Be a Christian way of saying that I am powerless, I need salvation.
[00:27:59] I came to believe, or we came to believe that God could restore us to sanity. I really love that way of thinking about it.
[00:28:08] Not just that he restored me to health or that he restored me. But if I need to be transformed by the renewing of my mind, it's not just like, oh, I need to think something different. I need to go from being insane in my thoughts to being sane in my thoughts.
[00:28:24] God's thoughts are what's sane.
[00:28:26] And that when I have disagreed with God, it's very similar to insanity. The world around us is insane as it engages in stuff that has nothing to do with God.
[00:28:37] When you experience some sort of chaos or whatever that's happening in your workplace or whatever, there is an insanity that's taking place because people have failed to have the mind of Christ. This idea that we came to believe that God could restore sanity is, I think, the most perfect way of thinking about what it means to have a Savior. I'm being saved from insanity.
[00:29:01] We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God through the submission to Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior.
[00:29:11] Romans 12. Our whole bodies are living sacrifices. We just looked at that.
[00:29:18] This is a fundamentally important aspect, that our salvation is not something that we achieve on our own.
[00:29:27] Our salvation is not something that God forces on us.
[00:29:32] He's not going to make you be his child.
[00:29:37] You have to agree that you trust him and he will adopt you as his child, but he's not going to force himself on you.
[00:29:47] When you make the decision to turn your will and lives over to God, that is your decision.
[00:29:52] And if you don't do it, that's your decision too.
[00:29:58] We made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. At this point, I want to go back and look at a passage I looked at Last week, Galatians 5. Paul, just looking generically, talking to a crowd of people, lists things that might fit within a moral inventory.
[00:30:16] He says, when you follow desires of your sinful nature, if you think of forming like you've got, you could be formed sinfully, or you could be formed in Christ, right? Formed towards the kingdom of God or the kingdom of hell. When you followed your sinful nature, the results were clear.
[00:30:33] Here is that inventory.
[00:30:36] Sexual immorality, impurity, lustful pleasures, idolatry, sorcery, hostility, quarreling, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambition, dissension, division, envy, drunkenness, wild parties, and other sins like these. Now he's talking to a whole crowd of people in a particular location. And I'm sure this inventory was very fit to them in total, but it probably wasn't fit to them individually all that well.
[00:31:05] As you go through the process, through a time of allowing the Holy Spirit to transform you as you trust in God.
[00:31:20] Your spiritual inventory would look different than this.
[00:31:25] You're looking at yourself and you're saying, what are the things in me that I know aren't a part of the kingdom of God? What.
[00:31:33] What rises up in me that doesn't fit there? What doesn't belong?
[00:31:37] Where do I see those things already, honestly, when I am home by myself, when I'm at work, when I'm talking to my wife, in those moments, what tends to pop up over and over again?
[00:31:54] That I'm like, there is no way that that came from God. That's just not a part of God's nature.
[00:32:00] That would be your inventory that you would. You might even write that down.
[00:32:06] Write that down and say, this is normal for me and it's not normal for God.
[00:32:11] At the same time, you might give a spiritual inventory of things that are normal for you, that are normal for God. Things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.
[00:32:23] Things that are fit to the kingdom of God. You might write that down.
[00:32:26] In order to move, in order to be formed or be transformed, in order to become more like the spirit of God, you have to know what the spirit of God is like, and you have to know what you're like.
[00:32:40] To get from one location to another, I have to know two locations. I have to know where I am, and I have to know where I'm going.
[00:32:47] So it's good to know what the character of God's like. It's also important to know what the character of clay is like.
[00:32:54] And I need to know what are the things that I need to lay down? What are all the things that I've noticed that just don't fit?
[00:33:07] Where is God already leading me? And where am I being led by something that's not God? I want to know all those things. And so for me to be a part of the kingdom of God, I got to know where I'm at. This whole making a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves is really important.
[00:33:25] Next, we admit to God ourselves and to other human beings the exact nature of our wrongs.
[00:33:35] Now, this part's really funny because we don't do confession a whole lot. You know, there's some traditions where it's like you go and you, like, confess periodically, but it's supposed to be a little bit like, anonymous, all kinds of stuff like that.
[00:33:51] Here we're admitting wrong to ourselves, to God and to other people.
[00:33:58] Now, of those three, my guess is that admitting your sins to other people is the one that's most daunting. But I think that's crazy. I think, like, you don't. Of the three, you have the least power over me, right?
[00:34:15] Like, for me to be honest with myself is, like, fundamentally important.
[00:34:20] I've got to be honest with myself to get anywhere in life. Like, how can I know how to become anything unless I'm honest with who I am? Like, admitting my sins to myself is fundamentally important, but even more important to that, not just where I am, but where I'm going, that I am going to God. I need to confess to God where I am in that desire to come to him. I need to be honest with him about where I am. This is very similar to, like, you know, again, with your kids.
[00:34:51] Like, it might be daunting to tell your friends something honestly about yourself.
[00:35:00] Like, the last thing you want to do is to give your friends some impression about you. That's like, that's gonna make them think less of you.
[00:35:09] But really, compared to your parents, like, I hate to tell you this, but a lot of them friends are gonna come and go, like, your mom's your mom. Good luck.
[00:35:19] That's a relationship you gotta figure out. You know, getting that relationship right is super important. It's gonna be important a long time.
[00:35:30] So, you know, that's the one that's more daunting, really.
[00:35:38] Anyway, I think when we look at this, all three is important that we are.
[00:35:43] That we are honest with other people, with ourselves, and especially to God.
[00:35:53] And James 5 talks about this, that we confess our sins to one another.
[00:35:59] All of this has biblical framing, and it's based in wisdom that comes out of the Bible.
[00:36:11] He said we were entirely ready to have God remove all of the defects of character.
[00:36:17] It's one thing to recognize those defects. It's another to say, I don't want them to be who I am.
[00:36:23] I like that these things were broken down. If I was right in these steps, I wouldn't have. I would have thought just by saying it and confessing it. Well, obviously I want them removed. But, like, do you. Do you really want to be different than who you are? We had to want to be different than we are.
[00:36:41] And we humbly ask God to remove our shortcomings.
[00:36:49] This is where I think it's like, following Christ is very vulnerable.
[00:36:56] It's not a process that's like, well, this at the end.
[00:37:01] I've done all this ruthless self inventory. I've done all. I figured all this stuff out. I've confessed all this stuff.
[00:37:08] So then I'll be changed. You do all of that, and at the end, all you've got is to ask him humbly to change you. Like all that you did doesn't change you.
[00:37:21] All that you did puts you in a position. Now you're in the spot to ask him to forgive you.
[00:37:27] I think a lot of times we don't, dear God, forgive me of my sins without having done all that stuff beforehand, without actually wanting or not knowing what my sins are, not knowing how they affect other people, not agreeing with God about the awfulness of them, not seeing how they hurt others about wanting to change. We just get to the point that we say, change me, God, and then God, why doesn't he change me?
[00:37:54] Going through all that puts us in a position to be changed. But at the end of the day, it's God that's changing us.
[00:38:01] After that, he says, we made a list of all the persons we had harmed and we were willing to make amends for all of them.
[00:38:10] And we made direct amends to such people as was possible, except when doing so would injure other people. I thought that was so. It's. There's a lot of wisdom in that. I want to go to those people and ask for forgiveness.
[00:38:23] There are some times that you're going to do more harm. There's something that you've done in the past. By bringing it up to that other person, you will generate more harm for that other person. So be wise.
[00:38:34] You're not doing this to make yourself better. You're doing this to restore that relationship. You've got to be wise about when doing that would hurt the other person.
[00:38:45] We continue to take personal inventory. And when we were doing wrong, promptly admit it.
[00:38:51] This whole meditating, being silent, assessing myself and silence, coming to God, seeing from him who I could become, who he saw me as letting him reveal his character and my character, where there were differences. All of that process was something that I continued to do on a regular basis.
[00:39:12] I didn't do this once and it was over. We continued to do it.
[00:39:17] We sought through Bible study, prayer and meditation to improve our contact with God.
[00:39:22] That this process was helping us hear God better.
[00:39:29] And having had a spiritual awakening, we tried to carry this message to others. The Great Commission.
[00:39:35] As I was transformed, we went and told what we had seen and heard with other people. As I was transformed, I began to help other people be transformed as well.
[00:39:45] This is a step, I would say, the most involved process of spiritual formation that I've seen. This might be. You're looking at all this and like, maybe Your eyes have glazed over, like, gosh, it's too many steps for me. I can't do all that. I don't know. I didn't think about all of this. But some of it came through what I was taught. Some of it came accidentally. But this process is very similar to what I've learned that I need to do in order to be transformed, in order to become mature in Christ, to become formed as something in Christ, to be filled with the Spirit, I needed something like this. And as I read through this, I. I didn't think of these steps. But all these things have at least sometimes been important for me.
[00:40:38] You might be the kind of person that needs to break things out. Very like, step one, step two, step three. If so, good.
[00:40:46] Here's something you could start with and you can adjust on your own so that you can begin to put yourself in a position for the Holy Spirit to take root in your life. For you to be formed, you may not need something like this. For you, it might be something much more wild and free. That's fine, though. Once you look at what happened, you'll probably find a lot of this stuff taking place in your life. Either way, if we are going to be people fit to the kingdom of God, a part of his household that are his children, we will be formed by the Holy Spirit.
[00:41:21] And there will be a process like this that's become normal for us.
[00:41:27] These disciplines are a part of every Christian's life who is formed in the Spirit.
[00:41:33] Let's pray.
[00:41:37] Father God, As we humbly submit to you our lives as they've existed, whatever parts of our life have been apart from you, Lord God, we don't ask for you to tweak our life. We ask you to take it over, Lord, to make it what you see in it. Lord, not what we see in ourselves, but what you see in it. And I, as daunting as that can be, God.
[00:42:08] The other options are just awful.
[00:42:13] Lord, the chaos and, and the craziness that exists apart from you isn't what we want for our lives.
[00:42:21] We want to be your children. We want to be a part of your household.
[00:42:25] And Lord, we want to answer to you.
[00:42:28] And so, God, we give our lives to you. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
