Good morning. Yeah, I think I'm good.
Pastor Greg wasn't planning to be here today,
but there was some rain which cancelled some of his plans,
so he's able to be here, and he booed me when I just came up.
So he's here to heckle.
Apparently if he doesn't have to be, you know, holding the microphone,
he can harass others.
But he knows I can take it, and he knows I would love to do the same.
So that's okay. Well, good morning. It's good to see you.
My name is Scott. I usually start with a little bit of an intro.
I had a spinal cord injury several years ago,
so I use a power wheelchair that you'll probably see moving back and forth during this service.
I do get thirsty a lot from dry mouth, so I'll stop and take lots of drink breaks.
I do have a hard time staying warm. My temperature is really low,
so that's why I stay with all the layers on. It's not a fashion statement.
And my blood pressure also does tend to run pretty low,
so I say tilted back in my chair so that I stay conscious.
So just a little bit about me. As I was getting ready to come up here,
I was looking through, and sometimes I just kind of notice who's here and what's going on with that.
And by my rough count, we have 17 people, and this isn't including, like, one-time visitors.
We have some of the Armstrong's family visiting us today and some of my family visiting us.
So it's not including those guests.
I think we have about 17 people here that have been here for less than a year.
That is awesome. And I think we have another 18 that aren't all here today
but are regularly attending that have been here for less than three years.
And I've been a part of churches. Of course you're excited whenever you have a guest,
but I've been at churches where having 18 people there that have been there for less than a year
is just so exciting because it doesn't happen.
Have you ever gone into a church, and you might not have experienced this,
but you've gone into a church and they're so happy to see somebody new, all their eyes turned to you,
and they're so excited to see you.
And if you're visiting and know you won't be back, you just automatically feel bad.
It's like if they're that one car that slows down and looks at the yard sale that no one's at,
and they perk up and they want you to stop so bad, but their stuff is not that good,
and that's why no one's there.
And so you just keep going and kind of do the little wave.
But it's so good to be a part of a church that has so many fresh faces.
And so I want those of you that are fresh faces to know that you're not alone.
There are lots of other folks here that are in a similar boat.
And part of the reason that we're so happy to have you is because we love to share what God is doing here with others.
And that also speaks to those of you who've been around a little bit longer, that we're a welcoming church,
and we're excited to see new faces.
So yeah, those are just really good things, so I wanted to share that.
So to the pet peeves, does anyone have a pet peeve that they would like to share?
Something casual, of course.
Chewing with your mouth open.
Chewing with your mouth open, yes.
That's one for me, too.
Wet towels on the floor.
Oh, wet towels on the floor, especially if you step on it, right?
Especially cabinet doors are open.
Yes, especially because sometimes I run into them, and if I run into an open cabinet door,
there's a good chance I'm going to take it off the hinges.
So speaking of wet towels on the floor, the other day, Pastor Greg was at our house,
and we had just fed Zayla, and he stepped on a banana.
And that is not a good feeling to step on a smushed banana.
You weren't wearing shoes.
Because there's a sign on the door that says, please take off your shoes.
So what's better than what banana is on your socks?
Because there's not really a good way to clean it off.
So yes, little things.
But those little things are examples of things that get us maybe overly involved in our story.
They get us sucked into whatever's bothering us at that moment.
I remember shortly after we were married, my wife and I, you know,
you have this narrative in your mind of what it's going to be like when you get married.
And we waited until we were married to move in together.
So it was a new thing for us.
And I was just convinced before we had been together that nothing she was going to do would ever bother me,
because we were so in love and I loved her so much that I just appreciated everything about her.
Until one day I opened the silverware drawer and the forks were where the spoons go
and the knives were where the forks go.
And some of them were upside down.
And it actually looked like someone had just dumped them in there from the dishwasher silverware tray.
And immediately I thought, there's no way the person that I love so much could have done this on purpose.
No sane person would do this.
It must have been a one-time thing.
But then I saw it happen again.
And I thought, oh man, we have a problem.
So I brought this up to her and her response was, do you empty the dishwasher?
Well, no, I guess not.
Do you help wash dishes or prepare the food?
Well, now this is just getting unfair.
We were talking about putting away silverware.
Now we're bringing all this other stuff into it.
Hold on a minute.
And so she brought up some good points quickly and I shut up about the silverware drawer.
I wanted to tell her how I thought it should be done.
Then she started including me into it.
So we laugh about it.
I don't know if you've heard of it, but it's a good example.
It's a good example of how we can use it to help us get out of the dark.
So we have a lot of examples, but they bring us into a conversation about pride.
And how sometimes when we're focused on our story, it can be from a place of pride or it can lead us into a place of pride.
It can be from us or what we're proud of.
Humility focuses on the stories of others.
It's really hard to be prideful when you're invested in and listening to someone else's story.
Because you have to set your story, your pride aside to be able to do that.
So pride and humility, those are the focuses of this morning.
We're going through in the next seven weeks seven examples of a sin that can bring us down
and the virtue that is the opposite of that, that can bring us up.
That can help us to be more Christ-like.
And we're also following this theme of the radical.
It sprouts from the seed something new in our life that comes out of something old or something dead.
So as you can imagine, pride is the thing that we want to die in our lives.
And humility is the thing that we want to grow up from that.
We together so far?
Okay, very good.
I'd like to read a verse now.
It's from Philippians chapter two verses three through five.
And I'll follow our custom if you would stand as you are able or raise your chair or whatever it is
to read from Philippians chapter two verses three and five.
Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit.
Rather in humility, value others above yourselves.
Not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of others.
In your relationship with one another, have the same mindset as Christ.
Thank you. Go ahead and be seated.
Now looking again a little bit to the silverware example.
It's a funny example in a lot of ways, but it also highlighted how much I was focused on my story
and how much I was overlooking the larger story or in this case my wife's story.
I wasn't shopping for groceries.
I wasn't preparing the food.
I wasn't washing the dishes.
I wasn't putting the dishes away.
In fact, I even remember one day very clearly it was one of those moments where you realize
I'm not as good of a spouse as I thought I was going to be.
I'm not the partner I thought I was.
I told her I'd be home at a certain time for dinner and I was playing basketball
and then some more people showed up and then some more people showed up.
So I stayed at the park and kept playing basketball.
And I was late for dinner when we'd set a specific time.
And I came in and a hot dinner was sitting cold on the table with the silverware set.
And my wife was, I don't remember if she was in her room or if she'd gone for a walk or something,
but she was not there.
And that was one of those moments where I realized I'm that guy right now.
I'm that person who came home late for dinner and it's sitting cold on the table
and I didn't keep my word.
Not a proud moment.
But it highlighted something that I wasn't fully participating.
I was not fully engaged in that part of our relationship.
And the greater part of our relationship, not really out of a place of,
hey, she should have to do these things.
I just hadn't done those things before.
I didn't cook for myself.
Going to the stores for like pizza rolls.
Cleaning up was wiping down a plastic plate or throwing away a paper plate.
So the idea of having to do these other things didn't occur to me.
I was paying attention to my story and not paying attention to the bigger story.
And it wasn't until I shared my own pet peeve, my own prideful thing,
that I started to get a bigger picture.
And so I started making enchiladas and that was like my thing that I made.
But at least it was something.
There is a television program that takes place in an office
that reminded me of a humorous example of this as well,
but that shows something bigger.
There's a boss on this show who comes into work and it's his birthday.
And he is excited because it gives him a chance to highlight himself and his ego.
And he has a whole party planned for himself.
He has a special outing planned.
But he realizes that people aren't paying attention to him.
They're paying attention to someone else.
This person is waiting for a call from the doctor about a medical test.
And so rather than celebrating the birthday,
everyone is focused in on this other person comforting them and paying attention to them.
The boss's response is one of being upset, not for his friend, not for his coworker,
because this is a distraction from him, from him getting to celebrate his birthday,
from him being able to be the center of attention.
Again, a more lighthearted example from a TV show,
but an example that draws us into he was invested in his story.
He was worried about what was happening with him,
and he was ignoring what was happening with those around him,
which was much more important.
Sometimes we can even hear echoes of pride from the pulpit or from when we hear others.
Have you ever left a sermon and thought to yourself or said to someone else,
I feel like that was more about him than it was everybody else.
Sometimes we can get caught up in our own stories.
Hopefully this isn't one of those Sundays.
We compare our stories to others at times.
We can get caught up in that sometimes when we hear someone else's story
and what they're going through, our focus moves to how it relates to our story.
And that can seem like a nice thing, and it can be a nice thing,
but sometimes we're more worried about comparing our stories to them
and sharing our story that we overlook their story and what they are sharing.
Now, Paul points out to an example of humility being that of Christ,
and there's no better example, and I'd like to just list off a couple things
that help remind us of his story and the humility that he exhibited.
First of all, Christ submitted to the Father and how he came and how his story was told.
We know that he was born in a humble place.
He then became a refugee, his family did, when he was persecuted and had to go to Egypt.
Then he came back and they lived in a city called Nazareth.
Not a happy place as far as popularity goes.
Considered a place where outcasts come from.
When someone heard that Jesus was from Nazareth,
the response was, can anything good come from there?
He also allowed himself to be announced by John the Baptist, his cousin.
That was who some of his disciples came from,
but John the Baptist was someone who ate bugs and wore animal hide
and lived in the desert and had as many people, or probably more than hated him, than liked him.
That's who announced Jesus' ministry. It came from a humble place.
Even when he began his ministry, around the age of 30, took a great deal of patience.
He took his time before he burst on the scene.
He learned to trade. He did these things.
Then when the devil came and tempted him to do some things that were great demonstrations of power
would make it clear to everyone who he was, he resisted that.
When he went to gather his followers, his followers were not the most educated,
they did not have high pedigrees, they were people of very humble means.
The examples go on and on, even all the way to his death.
It was a humble death to put it lightly.
So that his story could intersect with ours in a way that it couldn't in any other way.
He brought our story with his through the cross.
We go through these examples of humility and see how Christ demonstrates his care for us, his humility,
and it brings you back again.
How do we follow the example that Paul points us to, the words that Paul points us to, and then to Christ,
of investing in other stories and wanting to value theirs over our own?
I was working and there was someone here in the Quad Cities and there was someone from Chicago coming.
It was the head of our company, someone important.
He always had impeccable suits, I mean impeccable.
He had great style, which kind of added to the allure.
His voice was a deep voice that caught the attention of everyone in the room.
We wanted to impress him with our Quad Cities operation, our smaller branch of that bigger branch.
So we had several meetings set up through the day.
He was going to visit each of our locations.
He dropped in on the program that I was a part of, and it was a program that helped students who dropped out
get their GED and do some life skills planning.
So we had some interesting characters, to say the least.
One youth that we had, Jeffrey, was particularly interesting.
He was really bright, but he kind of lived in his own version of reality.
We decided through our attempts to help him identify a career that he was going to be a modern-day treasure hunter.
That there was a lot of treasure out there that was yet undiscovered in the jungles and in shipwrecks
that he was going to go and discover.
And so when our big company CEO asked him, what do you, you know, what career interests do you have?
His response was, I want to be a treasure hunter.
And I think some of us in the room were a little embarrassed.
We were looking for something a little more down-to-earth, more practical, that we were guiding this young man toward
that could show what a good job we were doing in preparing youth for future careers.
But then he went a step further.
He figured that when he asked that question, when our CEO asked that question, he wanted the full story.
So he went and got a book about treasure hunting.
It began to go with him through it page by page.
And I was waiting for him to cut him off.
I was waiting for him to say, hey, I have another meeting to get to, or to politely dismiss the whole treasure hunter idea.
But instead, he stopped what he was doing and he listened to him patiently until he was finished.
He demonstrated that day, even though that kid didn't have any idea who he was or how important he was,
that he was going to take a position of humility and hear someone else's story
rather than focusing on his own of who he was and what he had to do.
I saw a doctor recently for a physical health issue that I've had for a while now,
and that I just accepted, hey, this is part of my life is dealing with this issue.
And I went and saw a doctor.
And when I saw a doctor, I tend to talk to doctors really fast because I have the impression that they don't have a lot of time.
They want to hear the basic facts, give their basic response, and then go on,
especially when you're dealing with specialists, which this was.
And so I went on and I listed my symptoms.
I listed the situation and I said, I really don't know what else can be done about this.
And I said, I think this is as good as it's going to get.
And he stopped me and he said, that's not good enough.
I think that there's more that we can do for you.
There's more options.
We need to explore those.
The way that you're living right now, I think we can do better.
And there was something in my spirit that was so humbled because instead of just dismissing me,
instead of moving forward with something else, he took a moment to step into my story and understand where I was coming from.
And instead of just another patient with another symptom, he saw it as something more.
He saw a quality of life that his heart reached out for and thought there's got to be a way that we can do something better.
And so he made some references for me.
And actually, I talked to another doctor the other day that had another idea for those symptoms.
And I was so pleasantly surprised and so excited with.
And actually, Pastor Greg took me.
And the way while I was riding home, I kept saying, I just feel so good.
I just feel so good.
I'm so happy.
Even though nothing's changed yet, the fact that someone listened to me and heard me and was suggesting something different meant so much to me.
I want to encourage us to enter into other people's stories, to be aware that sometimes pride leads us automatically
without trying to or being egotistical to focus on what's happening with us in our story.
But Paul points, Paul uses these words.
He says, Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit and humility value others above yourselves.
Not looking to your own interests, but each of you to the interests of others and your relationship with one another.
Have the same mindset as Christ.
So as I'm wrapping up here, I want to mention something simple, asking someone three questions.
And it doesn't really matter that much.
I don't think what those questions are, but it shows that person that you're interested in their story, what's happening with them.
The reason I say three questions is this.
We usually start with one question.
How are you?
And that's fine.
But if we plan to follow that up with another question, how was your week?
And then one of my favorite questions is, what was a highlight of your week?
And then usually you get a few more words and a few more words, and it lets you hear a little bit of that person's story.
Or even if they're not open to sharing that, they know that you are more interested in hearing
than just a couple words that they have to say.
So just asking three questions as simple as they might be.
Let's go ahead and pray.
And as we pray, I want to ask each of you three questions.
Please bow your heads with me.
Father, we pray right now that you would guide us as we look to hear the stories of others.
To step into a place of humility.
To follow the example of Christ.
To focus outside of ourselves.
And I pray that you would guide our hearts right now as we ask three questions.
Is there a place in my life I've allowed my story to be more important than others?
And now Father, we ask, where in my life can I demonstrate humility toward others and hear their story?
It might be with a friend, it might be with their family, it might be at work or somewhere else.
Just help us to identify that place.
And finally, please prompt us to be obedient and give us the strength to carry it out.
It's in Jesus' name we pray, amen.