Christ Not Causes

The world has never been through, in our lifetimes, what it’s in right now. And as I have talked with multiple friends and leaders and I mean, not here but all around the world, they keep asking me and I’m asking them, so, what now? What next?”

What are we going to do? What now? What next?” And that’s a big question also for the Church. And I’d like to take a crack together with you and address that issue.

And one of the little tools that I have used personally and we use at our organization, it’s called the “Four Helpful Lists,” it’s in your notes.

And if you’re asking yourself some of those confusions like, “Hey, what now? What should I do? What is coming up? What’s next?” Make a list. And in the column, write down in a column, “This is what is wrong.” Just in your personal life and what is going on. Family, finances, the world.

Make another column and say, “This is what is right,” and list all the things that are right. You’ll be surprised how many things are right that you forget about, because the wrong feels so loud.

And then you make a column that says, “What is confusing?” It’s hard to make a decision or know what to do until you get clear.

And the last little column is, “What is missing?” Often, the key to your future, the key is there’s a person missing or some information missing or something that is missing.

And what I’d like to do is flip that and walk through that process, not micro – my life or yours – but macro.

But I think if I got a group of you together and I said, “When you think of the world right now, what’s wrong?” I would hear things like, “Wow, morality. The decline of the Church. Sixty-eight to seventy percent of our own young people leaving the faith. Trillions and trillions of dollars of debt. Division, politically. Division, racially.”

We could have a pretty good list that we are all experiencing about what is wrong. And I want to suggest that in every era, we could make a pretty good list. But I’d like you, in your notes, if you would jot down Isaiah chapter 5, verse 20. Because in every era, there is fruit. Think of a tree. And there’s lots of negative or evil fruit. There’s the issue of the unborn. There are so many. There’s the issue of the sex trade. There’s the issue of education. There’s all kind of evil fruit.

But if you go down the trunk to the root, Isaiah 5, verse 20, in a similar situation, the prophet would speak for God and say, “Woe to you when you call good evil, and when you call evil good. When you call that which is sweet bitter and when you call that which is bitter sweet.”

And then he goes on and basically says when there’s a complete shift and you lose sight of God, lose sight of truth – which all morality, all relationships, everything is based on – I want to tell you, that’s the root. And if we are going to change personally and big picture, we’ve got to get to the deeper issues.

Then I’d say, “What’s right?” I mean, what’s right right now in our world? And we could make another list. But I’m going to ask you to open your Bible. Here’s what’s right – Romans chapter 8.

The apostle Paul, just listen to what is right, currently, for you and our world. Verse 26. “In the same way, the Spirit also helps us in our weakness. For we do not know how to pray as we should, but the Spirit Himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words. And He who searches the hearts knows the mind of the Spirit is, because He intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”

Here is something right for you right now: the Third Person of the Triune God is praying for you, He’s praying for me, He’s praying for America, He’s praying for our world.

Notice he goes on, verse 28, “And we know that God causes all things to work together for the good, to those that love Him, who are called according to His purpose.” And then he talks about those who He foreknew He called. And then he says His ultimate purpose is to conform us to the image of Jesus.

So, we know, number one, right now, regardless of all the junk that is happening all around the world and maybe in your world, or in your marriage, or with one of your kids, or with your boyfriend, the Spirit of the living God is praying for you and the sovereign Father is orchestrating everything happening in your life or America or the world or India or Africa for a good.

And that good isn’t that it just works out our way or we will be happy and everything will be like the way we want it. But the good is that He will conform me, He will conform you if we lean in.

And He will make us more and more like Christ. And when more and more of us are like Christ, then we become that light and that love and that salt and that power that we transform things. That’s what is right.

But that’s not enough. He goes on. “What, then, shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all – how will He not also, with Him, freely give us all things? Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen? God is the one who justifies. Who is the one who condemns? Christ Jesus is He who died – yes, rather, who was raised who is at the right hand of God who also intercedes for us.”

Now, have you thought about this recently? I mean, you can just think everything is so terrible and it’s so wrong and there’s no hope and what about this and what about that? The Spirit of the living God is praying for you. The Father is working all things for your good. And Jesus is at the right hand of the Father praying and interceding for you.

Now, it’s His agenda He’s praying about. The condemnation, the fears, the struggle, “Who will separate us from the love of Christ?” And then he starts to mention some things that are happening globally. “Will distress, will tribulation, will persecution, will famine, will nakedness or peril or sword?”

And then the apostle reaches back into the Old Testament and he says, “No, for your sake we are being put to death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” That’s their experience.

“But in all these things we are overwhelmingly conquerors through Him who loved us.” And then he says why; here’s your hope.

I don’t care what your circumstances, my circumstances. I have seven friends – it all happened within about ten days, and I finally just, Theresa and I were talking, I got a yellow sheet of paper and I just had to list the seven names. And five of the seven have the most serious kind of cancers you can get. And the other two are in horrendous situations. And there’s – aren’t there just moments right now where you feel like there’s just waves of junk and negativity?

But Paul said, “I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels or principalities, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

And these four little lists is – here’s what I want you to know. What is wrong? Truth has evaporated in our culture. And now we are getting the consequences.

Proverbs 14:12 says, “There’s a way that seems right to a man, or to even mankind, and it’s the way of death.” And we’ve got our own way and now we are reaping a lot of consequences.

What is confusing? I think what is confusing in our day is we really don’t know what to do and there are so many different voices telling us what to do and where to go and how to get of this situation. Proverbs 16 says, “The mind of a man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps.”

Jesus, the first century, was so much like what we are living in. It was so bankrupt, it was so brutal, it was so violent, it was so unfair, there was such injustice. Whether for slaves or women, all kinds of people of color – if you weren’t…

And Jesus would say to those disciples, “In the midst of all of that, if you’re confused, ask and it will be given unto you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened. For everyone in the midst of a confusing world who keeps on asking and keeps on seeking and keeps on knocking – what? You’re going to find.

The final little thing here is the fourth question is, “What’s missing?” And if you are taking some notes and wanted to put a passage down, I would write down James 1:5. The biggest thing missing is men and women filled with the Spirit of God who have the wisdom of God. The wisdom of God is knowing how God has arranged life to work and following in that path in your specific situation knowing what to do, when to do it, how to do it in alignment with the Spirit’s working through His Word.

And we are in a very, very unique time in all of world history. And in my research, I came across a very interesting article. It was actually written in 2020, pretty early on, called The End of an Epoch: A New Beginning for Capital Markets in the Twenty-First Century, by Bruce Fenton.

I put the quote in your notes, because I think just seeing it in print. He says, “The measure of where we are today will not be marked as the beginning of a recession, or even a depression, but as the end of an era.

Listen carefully to this, especially if he’s right; I think he is. “Make no mistake: our old world is gone, and the way it works has changed forever. As with all such times, the change happened fast, and it is permanent. This will forever transform our lives, our markets, and our world.” But here’s the application, “It’s time for new ways of thinking and solving problems.”

What are the implications? I have three observations that I think are very clear implications for your personal life, for the churches in America, for the churches around the world, and also for countries and nations.

Number one observation is we must accept normal is never returning. How people communicate will never be the same, finances will never be the same, geopolitical structures will never be the same. The same and normal is never coming back. The sooner we accept that, the better. Some people will mourn about the past and they will be stuck in it.

Second observation is that we must rebuild because we can’t return. We’ve got to rebuild, we’ve got to – it’s a new paradigm, it’s new thinking. Because of the tragedies and difficulties that have happened, we will have opportunities to fix things that were systemic for years. And we’ll have a chance to rebuild things in new ways.

This is the third part that excites me, we must lead boldly. Underline boldly. In this kairos moment of history, in Greek there are a couple different words for “time”. Chronos is, like, from two o’clock to three o’clock to four o’clock. I’ll be there at seven tonight. That’s “chronos”, sequential time.

Kairos means it’s a window of time. It’s an opportunity. It’s a little slice, like Galatians 4:4. It says, “In the fullness of time God sent forth His Son.” Literally, it’s when the world was pregnant, there Roman roads and there was a bankrupt philosophy. And in this window of time, Christ strategically came.

And we are now living in one of those kairos moments. We have unbelievable challenges but unbelievable opportunity. And I put a little passage there from 1 Chronicles 12, because I think this is what we need to be.

It was a time of huge transition. And there was a group of men from Issachar who understood the times and knew what Israel should do. My personal challenge to me first, to me and my wife, and then to you, understand the times. Discern what you should do, discern what God wants to do, and then get on board with what God is doing in this really strategic window of time.

There’s a lot of different opinions and a lot of different things, but I started from, “This is what I know the Bible teaches,” what I have studied and looked at is how great movements of God have happened historically in the Bible and through Church history, and there are some very definitive patterns about how it works and how it doesn’t work.

And I’d just like you, let’s go on a journey together to, out loud, process. Here’s my first point as we start our journey. Our world is desperate for hope, stability, direction, and deliverance. The world has never been more ripe for: We need a Messiah. We need someone to fix this.

And what I want to say is: Who is going to fill this void? And if we get just sort of unconscious and start focusing just on ourselves and our own little worlds, some people will fill the voids of what is happening in the world instead of who needs to.

I gave some options. Will philosophies and truth claims? We are seeing the rise of some old thinking and Marxism. We are seeing the rise of a lot of isms and new truth claims and religions. Will they fill that void?
Or maybe, will it be all science and technology? Oh, we’ve got all these problems, don’t worry! Science is the answer. Everything is empirical. We’ll just, there’s new technology that is going to solve everything.

Or will it be powerful people and institutions? It has happened all around the world; it has happened historically. When there is a vacuum like this, there are people with power, desire, and they’ve got a game plan.

Or number four, will it be the body of Christ? Will it be what happened in the first century? What seemed so even unthinkable, but it was like this little tiny group of twelve and this little tiny group of a hundred and twenty. And they were like a grain of wheat that fell into the earth and died and they brought forth much fruit. Because it wasn’t them trying to do God’s will in their power, in their energy. It was them dying to themselves and the same power that raised Christ from the dead dwelt in them and they lived in ways that by 313 A.D., of the sixty million people in the Roman Empire, thirty-three million confessed that they were believers of Jesus. Huge – they turned the world right-side up.

As during the plagues, they served and loved and died as they sang going into coliseums, thanking God for the honor and the privilege of dying for Christ. That’s a little bit different kind of faith, isn’t it?

I was in Jordan with a young doctor, probably thirty-two, thirty-three. There’s a contract out on her from Yemen. And we were meeting with her to help her and she just said, “I don’t expect to live very long.” “Before we go back, will you teach us to die well?”

And every time I get around people like that, all of a sudden, there’s a faith, there’s a lens, there’s a God, there’s a Spirit, there’s a truth, there’s a word that is so radically different than, “How is my life going? I’m not very happy. I’m not as fulfilled as I would really like to be in my marriage.

And by the way, all those things are true. I don’t want to dismiss them. But the American dream and the gospel, somewhere entered into a marriage about thirty, forty, fifty years ago and we have been asking all the wrong questions for quite a while.

It’s all about us. My fulfillment, my happiness. Jesus has become the self-help guru to give me a wonderful marriage and healthy, wealthy, and wonderful all the time. And if I sort of read the Bible, pray, go on a mission trip, and even give above ten percent, well, sort of the unconscious agreement is He has got to make my life work out. My kids won’t get in trouble and I won’t get cancer. And when those things happen, we say, “God, where are You?” We have claimed a God and a set of promises that are nowhere here.

When I’m in the Third World, they claim different promises. “For we have been called to suffer for His sake. Therefore, follow in the steps of Jesus who although He suffered, did not revile, but entrusted Himself to His faithful Creator.”
All I’m saying is I think the world is going to be a very different – it’s going to require a very different kind of Christian. And here’s the part that I am very, very excited about.

I want you to know that we have the greatest opportunity to experience God and make the greatest difference in the last hundred years at a minimum and possibly, no group of followers of Jesus, with the technology we have, with the world situation, probably not since the Reformation. And I will tell you, the Spirit of the living God will tap some people on the shoulder, and He will breathe life into some churches. And it probably won’t be a lot of them. And there will be a group of people that get it. And we will see God do things like we have seen in Acts chapter 2. We will see God do things and it will be swimming upstream.
I would say that it’ very important to think we are living in a day that is much more like the first century than the last century. And the last century, a good portion of it, there was a, in America at least, a collective worldview and culture that actually supported your faith. Being an honest person, telling the truth, having a marriage and staying married, basic morality.

I remember my dad selling a car and he shook a guy’s hand. There wasn’t paperwork; there weren’t lawyers. And so, to be a Christian was to be esteemed. Now we are in a day where if you are interviewed for a job on a court and you’re a female who says, “I,” because of her faith says, “I believe the life of the unborn is very, very important,” then two senators say, “We could never have a judge like that, because she is dangerous.” How do you get to be dangerous because you just care about an unborn child?

Well, then what is our model? I am going to suggest our model and our mandate is Jesus Himself. Here’s the good news. If you’re taking notes, I left this one blank I think. There’s hope! Luke chapter 4, do you remember it? Do you remember? Jesus is starting His ministry, He has been tempted, He goes back to Nazareth where He had been brought up, and was as His custom, He stood up in the synagogue on the Sabbath day and they gave Him a scroll. And He unrolled the scroll, the book of Isaiah.

“‘And the Spirit of the Lord,’ He says, ‘is upon Me, because He anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, to recover the sight of the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the favor, the favorable year of the good news of Yahweh, the Lord.’ And He closed the book, He gave it back to the attendant, and He sat down and the eyes of all the synagogue were fixed on Him and He began to say to them, ‘Today, this has been fulfilled in your hearing.’”

What I want you to know is the world is looking for a Messiah. Memo: He came. We have one. He is our hope. We need to just follow Him and proclaim Him. But it gets better than that. There’s help. It’s not just His model. Remember His mandate?

We often talk about, “Go into all the world,” literally it’s, “As you go.” This wasn’t for some little group of people and you have to go on a trip. This is – participle – as you go to work, as you go around the block, as you go to get your coffee, as you go to pick up your dry cleaning, as you go to wherever you go, “make followers of Jesus,” authentic, fully devoted, Romans 12 as we read, followers of Jesus.

Now, of who? Not just of nations out there. The word is ethnos. To every people group. And what are you supposed to do? “Well, I want you to baptize them in the name of the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit.” And in that day, that primarily was: help them move their identity from their darkness into light.

And this moment of baptism is when they say, “I’m a brand-new person and my alignment and my family is the Church, this supernatural community.” Well, then teach them. Well, what do you want us to teach them? Teach them, it’s not about coming to a service and listening to someone and singing three or four songs and trying to be a nice person.

“Teach them to obey everything I taught you.” Well, where is that? It’s this! [the Bible] And what I love is, here’s the help. Before He gave that in verse 19, He says, “All authority in heaven and earth has been given to Me.” We’ve got all the power we need.

And then when He finished He said, “And I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” His presence. But His presence isn’t manifested to everyone. His presence is manifested to people that are about making disciples.

It’s making disciples in a disrupted world.

So, then the question then raises, well, how do you introduce Christ to our disrupted world? And there’s a little acronym that the Lord gave me as I was processing this that we will walk through.

But if you look at Jesus’ life, He proclaimed Christ, not causes. There were lots of causes. The cause of women, infanticide, slavery. And it was those people who followed Jesus with all their heart that addressed those biggest causes. But they focused on Him first and foremost. They were a healing community. They weren’t hostile and angry over what Rome was doing.

They focused on relationships, not real estate. There weren’t even cathedrals built or places to go to for three hundred years. They met in homes and catacombs. They just loved each other. They ate meals. They did innovation, new wine in new wineskins. They weren’t indignant. They were people that focused on substance, not success. I don’t think they were counting all the numbers; I think it was Yahweh. He’s the Lord our God. We are going to teach people the great truth. We are going to be men and women who know God’s Word, who share God’s Word, who teach our children.

Fathers, that when we rise up and when we go to bed and when we walk by the way, who impart and model what it means to be a follower. The substance of authentic followers.

And finally, they were people who weren’t waiting for the next technology. They had their technology – the Roman roads, the aqueducts – they had lots of technology.

It’s interesting, when someone said, “Lord, will You tell us, what’s the work of God? I mean, how are we really going to do this?” John 6. “This is the work of God: that you believe on Him who He has sent.” There’s a lot of things we can do, but without faith, without trusting Him, it’s impossible to please God.

The blessing of being in countries and places where the gospel is not well-received and it’s very hostile, is people have to trust God. The challenge of being Americans who are wealthy and affluent like all of us who live in nice places like this, we have to choose to trust God. And it’s hard.

Even among fellow Christians, to really trust God, I mean, really trust Him with everything, you’re swimming upstream. So, what’s next? Let’s get started, very, very practically as I wrap our time up.

I believe what is next is there is a question to ask, there is a decision to make, and there’s a path to follow. And I’m going to tell you on the front end, it’s going to be a process.

But here’s the question to ask. It’s the question that Jesus asked to one of His favorite, favorite churches. If you know the history of the Church and how it came to be in Ephesus, it grew and it had such impact and now Jesus, about thirty, thirty-five years later through the apostle John is going to go back to that church.

He says, “I know the things that you do. I have seen your hard work and your patient endurance.” So, they were active. They were doing good stuff. They didn’t give up. “But I have this complaint against you. You do not love Me or each other as you did at first.”

But Lord, we’ve got services going, got a lot of impact, we’re giving money. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you have lost your first love. I have become a compartment, I have become a part of your life, I have become an appendage, I have become maybe even an important part of your life, but not your life.

He says, Look, pause, just back away and kind of look at your life and all the stuff and get perspective. “See how far you have fallen! Turn back,” the word literally is repent, “turn back to Me and do the works that you did at first.”

Lean back and just try and remember. Remember what it was like when you first tasted grace? Remember when you were obnoxious, because you were telling everybody about Jesus and it wasn’t like I got to, ought to, should read the Bible, but it was like, “Oh man, this is so exciting!” And you were memorizing passages and it was bubbling up and you were just like this crazy person that needed a little maturity. I think we’ve got a lot of dry maturity.

And Jesus said, “I want to ask you a question.” Not, is your doctrine right? Not, are you faithful to church? Not, are you a bit more moral than most people? Have you lost your first love? Your passion for Me?

“If you do not repent, I will come and remove your lampstand from its place among the churches.” A lampstand is a picture, it’s His presence. You do understand, there are lots of churches that Jesus doesn’t show up at. They are all across the world and they are all across America and I’ve been in a lot of them. You just, you start to teach and you just realize, it’s like BBs off of a tank. There’s no openness, there’s no sense of God’s Spirit, there’s no presence, there’s no power. Oh, they are religious, do some good things.

So, let me ask you, how about you? Have you lost your first love? That’s the question to ask.

Then there’s a decision to make. We read about it. The apostle Paul, after the clearest presentation of eleven chapters of what the gospel is and what it means says, “And so dear brothers and sisters, I plead with you to give your bodies to God,” literally the word is offer, it’s a tense in the verb that means at a certain day on a certain time. It’s punctiliar. It’s not just some general thought. On a certain, on a certain time, have you ever said – this isn’t salvation – that’s chapters 3 and 4 of Romans. This is lordship.

This is the question: Am I all in? Give your bodies to God as a living sacrifice. Well, why? Is it to earn His favor? It’s because there’s a transaction? Is it to get His blessing? What does it say? Look at your notes. Look at the passage. “Because of all that He has done for you.” It’s His mercy; it’s His love. “Let it be a living and holy sacrifice,” so it’s not something you do one day, although it happens. It’s a lot like marriage. You do it on a specific day and then you live it out every day. This is truly the way to worship Him.

If you ever wanted to pause and ask a really big question, it’s how I came to Christ, actually. “If there is a God and if He actually exists, what do You want from me?” I didn’t grow up as a believer. And I was just around enough hypocritical Christians and watched just enough of the really bad Christian TV, the best I could tell is all they wanted is your money and to use you.

And then I met a group of real believers, and I had never opened the Bible. And the first passage I opened to was Romans 12. And the question I would ask, “If there’s a God, what do You really want from me?” I realized it was not my money, it’s not what I can do for Him, He wants me. He wants you. All of you. Every ounce of you. He wants your heart, He wants your dreams, He wants your family, He wants your future, He wants your money.

And it’s not to take something away. He wants you to take it and entrust it to Him in light of all that He has done for you, because surrender is the channel through which God’s biggest and best blessings flow. For you to experience the life that God wants to do in you and then through you, means that you need to get the controls over here and you become the co-pilot.

And finally, there’s a path to follow. And after that moment of surrender, he says, “Don’t copy the behavior and the customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.”

Literally, grammatically, it’s: stop allowing the current world system – lust of the flesh, lust of the eyes, and the pride of life – to mold you. In the vernacular it’s stop letting sex and salary and status be the goals in your life that shape what you do and why you do it.

Stop letting pleasure and position and power to be the things that, forget what your mouth says or what you say in your mind. It’s what your behavior is saying. And instead, it’s not about trying harder, it’s about renewing your mind. It’s putting a pause on the news, a pause on Netflix, a pause on the phone, maybe doing a three-day media fast from everything and going back to some of those key passages and renewing your mind and just saying, God, I need a fresh wind from You, because the Spirit of God takes the Word of God and makes it alive in your heart.

And notice the promise and the desire. “Then you’ll learn God’s will for you, that which is good, pleasing, and perfect.”

Three questions I think we have: Have I lost my first love? Am I all in? And is the world conforming me or am I transforming the world around me?

And I realize it’s a strong challenge and I would just say, when Jesus gave this challenge, hear His heart. They were living in the same world, the same problems, the same issues as us. And that’s the agenda because we get it in the New Testament. But Jesus is saying to you, what He’s saying to you, on this day, “Come, come, come unto Me,” right now, “all of you that are labored and heavy laden,” that are stressed out, that are overwhelmed, that are confused, that don’t know what to make of it, don’t know about the future, and have deep and overwhelming concern, “come to Me and I will give you rest, rest for your soul.” Let Me take over.

And then He goes on to say, “Take My yoke upon you,” let’s do this together. “My yoke is light.” Just let’s hook up and let’s do life together. And here’s what I want you to know, this isn’t me pounding you, it’s not going to, I’m going to take the best things away from you, because, “I am gentle.” This is Jesus describing Himself. “I am humble,” I have your, I put your needs ahead of My own. Remember? I went to the cross. “And I am gentle and I’ll give you rest.”

And so, my encouragement is for you to take this very, very seriously and even if it’s just a baby step, Lord, I am going to look at my life. Don’t make some knee-jerk, emotional response to anything.

Look at your life. Where is my first love?

And if you’re not sure, get out your financial statement and get out your calendar and it will tell you exactly where your first love is. And maybe, maybe the great step would just be, Oh Lord, I’m sorry. He loves you! He’s not down on you. Lord, I’m, gosh. I spend so much time playing these silly games and impressing people and saying things and worrying about that and anxious about that and consumed with how much I have lost and, blah, blah, blah.

And then for some of you, it may be today. But where He would say to you, if He played Texas Hold ‘Em, sorry, I had a gambling addiction before I came to Christ. I think in gambling terms. He would say to you and me, I want to give you the best and greatest life ever. I want you to take the stack of chips of family, the stack of chips of business, the stack of marriage, the stack of your future, all your money, all your dreams, and I want you to push them to the middle of the table and then I want you to say to the Holy God of the universe, “You deal. I trust You.”

“He that spared not His own Son, how will He not with Him freely give me all things?” Oh God, “You’re a sun and a shield. No good thing will You withhold from those who walk uprightly.” Is it fearful? Of course it is. But God, the world is crumbling. All that I am and all that I have, I want to be Yours.

Because the very last line, and this will be a journey for some, it will be a moment in time for others, God must work deeply in us before He will work significantly through us.

Lord, we love You. We do it very poorly, but God, we are so grateful that You love us and You do it so infinitely good. We have nothing to fear. Help us now on this journey to be Christians that live like Christians. Amen.