Today we're starting a new series called /fully.
And the reason I want to make sure
that we have this graphic up was
because it's literally in my notes
that I was going to say that this is one
of the favorite graphics that we've ever had, for me,
that we've ever had for a series.
There's a guy sitting there, he's looking up at a starry sky
and the details on the screen may not capture all this,
but there's just stars everywhere
and they are just enamored by the beauty of the sky.
And then what we've done is we've superimposed a water
balloon that's being punctured in slow motion
and it's just suspended above this person.
What happens is your imagination starts
to think about what that's going to do.
It's going to fall on that person.
How will they handle that?
How will they be able to take all of that in?
And when I look at it, I look at it
and I go, that's definitely too much water
to fall on any one human being.
And yet at the same time when I look at it,
I think I could take it.
I think I'd be okay.
I don't know about you, but I think I'd be okay.
I think that they are going to be okay.
It might even be exhilarating.
It's going to be something that they talk about
for the rest of their life.
There was one time I was standing looking at the stars
and then suddenly there was a giant water balloon above me
and an invisible hand popped it and it all fell on me
and I was okay.
Something really captivating about that
because that is how I feel about the fullness of God.
The fullness of God is more than we could possibly take in
any one of us, it's too much.
But that too muchness will not leave us injured.
Amen?
Nearly everything on this earth, if you do it too much,
eat it too much, take in too much, it will hurt you.
Even the central elements for life,
if you drink too much water, and this is true,
if you drink too much water, you can get sick
from an electrolyte imbalance.
Oh, we're finding this out.
If you get, if you take in too much pure oxygen,
you'll actually get dizzy, you can get nauseous,
your heart rate can lower to a dangerous rate.
When was the last time you were at church
and your pastor's phone rang?
Now to be fair, it wasn't my phone, it was my iPad, but.
You can have too much,
you can have too much of a good thing, oxygen, water.
But what about Jesus?
Last week and the week before,
we introduced a new song called Make Room.
It says, I will make room for you
to do whatever you want to.
And in the bridge, it says, shake up the ground
of all my tradition, break down the walls
of all my religion, because too much religion
can be a bad thing.
Notice I said religion, not Jesus.
Religions are just systems for understanding God.
And if we fill up on religion,
the system more than the fullness of God,
or if we confuse the system for what is able to fill us,
we will probably get injured.
We could get dizzy, nauseous, our heart rate could slow,
we could fall into our heads,
and maybe we would then attribute that injury to God
instead of to the system.
We don't want people to fall in love with a system.
We don't want you to fall in love with just the house.
We don't want you to fall in love with the concept
of Christianity.
You're meant to meet Jesus,
to encounter God the Father,
to experience and be moved by the Holy Spirit.
We don't want you to get it confused.
The songs and the sermons and the systems,
the structure are not the point.
They are not what fills you.
God truly fills us.
There is more in God than we could ever fully experience
in our entire lives.
With that, let's open up our Bibles, okay?
If you don't have a Bible,
there are blue ones on the tables,
or they are out on the bookshelf out in the lobby.
You can take one of those home.
If you need it or you can download a Bible
from any of the digital app stores,
we are going to be in John chapter 10.
It goes Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts, Romans.
If you see any of those,
you know that you're in the right neighborhood.
And then we have a tradition
of giving the scriptures our full attention
when being read in the context of the sermon.
You can do that any number of ways,
whichever way helps you give it the most attention.
If you would like to stand with me as I read it,
you are invited to do that as you are able.
It is John chapter 10, starting in verse one, it says this.
Very truly I tell you Pharisees,
anyone who does not enter the sheep pen by the gate,
but climbs in by some other way is a thief and a robber.
The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep.
The gatekeepers opens the gate for him,
and the sheep listen to his voice.
He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.
When he has brought out all his own,
he goes on ahead of them,
and his sheep follow him because they know his voice.
But they will never follow a stranger.
In fact, they will run away from him
because they do not recognize a stranger's voice.
Verse nine, I am the gate.
Whoever enters through me will be saved.
They will come in and go out and find pasture.
The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.
I have come, they may have life, have it to the full.
Let us pray.
God of every tribe, every tongue, every color,
every nation, we thank you for your word.
We thank you that it has persisted
throughout the millennia, that we still have it to read,
to consider, to learn from,
and I pray that whatever you have for us to learn today,
that it would stick,
that it would become a part of the framework of our faith
as we become stronger,
as we become more like your son, Jesus.
Amen.
Amen, thanks y'all, you can have a seat.
All right, so let me just walk through this a bit, okay?
Jesus is talking to the Pharisees here.
Generally speaking, the Pharisees believed
that the system would save them.
They care deeply about following the rules,
because if they followed the rules perfectly,
God would bless them.
God would save them from their enemies.
God was good, yes,
but in their practical theology,
God's expression of goodness was tied to their behavior.
Does that make sense?
And so the perception of the Pharisees from the outside
was that the only fullness they had inside
was from rules and laws and legalism.
And so Jesus is confronting that by saying,
the way that you're doing this is stealing life.
The way that you are doing this is stealing life.
He's saying, the sheep that are looking for rules,
they're gonna follow you for sure.
And there are always gonna be people
that are looking just to follow rules,
believing that the rules are what will save them.
But the sheep that are looking for life,
not just law, Jesus says they're gonna follow me
because they will hear my voice, know my voice,
and they will follow me.
Now, I've never been hunting.
I don't know about you.
At least I don't think I've ever been hunting,
that I can recall, but my neighbor Ben is an avid hunter.
I love him, he's a great guy.
I've watched him train a hunting dog named Paul
for the past few years.
I'll be driving down the alley between our houses.
He lives on this side of the alley,
I live on this side of the alley.
And from the end of the alley,
I can see him working with Paul
doing exercises on being a good hunting dog.
And I know, I have no concern whatsoever
that this dog is gonna run out in front of me in the alley
because Paul is well trained.
Now, we have a dog named Ralph.
He is a pug, and we love him.
But Ralph only listens if you have a treat in his hand,
or in your hand, and only if you're directly in front of him,
and only if there isn't a bush
that he really wants to go over and smell,
or if there isn't anything other that he would rather do.
Ralph does not listen very well.
He is in many ways the opposite of Paul.
He is a pug, Ralph is a pug.
Paul is a giant black Labrador.
Ralph is chubby, Paul is lean.
Because Paul has learned to listen to Ben's voice,
Ben can actually throw a fake duck halfway down the alley,
and he will just sit there waiting for his master's voice,
waiting to be told that he can go,
because you do not want your dog chasing a bird
when you're out hunting,
and someone else might still be firing their weapon.
Paul is safe because Paul has learned to listen to Ben's voice.
Ralph belongs in the backyard or with a leash on.
The sheep that Jesus is talking about,
they're closer to Paul than they are to Ralph.
Because sheep really do learn to listen to the voice of their shepherd.
I've seen videos of this,
where people go up to the edge of a sheep pen,
and they call and they try and convince the sheep to come over
five different ways,
and the sheep ignore all of them
until they hear the voice of the shepherd,
and the shepherd comes along and gives out their call,
and the sheep come over because they know,
okay, that is my shepherd.
Now goats, on the other hand.
Have you ever been around goats?
Anyone?
Everyone been to a petting zoo?
Every year during fall break,
we take all the kids out to Shady Knolls,
and every single year, we get one of those bags,
we get one little bag for every kid
of the stuff that you can feed to the animals,
mostly goats.
These goats, they are what I would call
aggressive.
They will eat from any hand
that is remotely moving in their direction.
They climb over each other,
on top of each other,
they maneuver with everything that they have,
they jockey for position,
they stick their heads through the fencing,
even sometimes getting stuck,
just to stretch their tongue out,
to grab one more grain
from one tiny child's hand.
It's as if they think they will never eat a meal again.
Sheep will follow their shepherd's voice.
But from what I have read,
goats don't learn to do that.
Goats have to be coaxed with something out in front of them,
convinced that there is a prize.
They have to be convinced to move
with some kind of reward.
A blessing, if you will.
Goats will only move from blessing to blessing to blessing
to get where the shepherd wants them to go.
But the sheep will listen and trust
that the shepherd is leading them to good places.
Jesus is trying to tell them
that he's not just holding out handfuls of grain,
that he's actually leading them to fields of pasture,
to streams of water,
life to the full,
not life for the moment.
And that phrase, life to the full,
it's in our prayers that we pray here,
it's across songs that we sing,
because it's from the Scriptures.
That phrase is a pivotal one.
It means greater,
it means excessive, abundant, exceedingly,
properly all around,
beyond what is anticipated,
exceeding expectation, going past the expected limit.
The Amplified Version says,
I came that they may have life and have it in abundance
to the full till it overflows.
Father overflow my cup.
So listen, there are a thousand things
competing for our attention.
A thousand voices, a thousand shepherds,
with a thousand carrots and a thousand rules,
looking to steal and kill and destroy.
Competing to be what we think will fill us,
whether it is politics or money or romance or religion.
We can frantically careen our necks
to get the seeds from any passing hand,
or we can listen to the voice of Jesus
and follow where he leads,
trusting that he will fill us to the full,
satiated and satisfied beyond expectations.
That he will help us experience life to the full.
So how do we practice this,
or how do we even participate with this?
Well I think first we need to ask ourselves a question
and meditate on this.
You can write this down,
put it in your phone if you want,
you will not have enough time
to give this question enough attention right now.
We need to start by asking ourselves,
are we being injured by what we think will fill us?
I know something about myself,
and I've said this before,
it's not a secret,
it's not something I'm necessarily embarrassed about,
it's just something I know to be true about myself.
Sometimes I eat far more than I need to,
and that's not a joke.
I eat more food than I need to,
and I know that it's because I have an issue
with managing my emotions.
I know that it is a mechanism for me.
I don't always have a healthy relationship with food,
and sometimes what I'm literally trying to do
is cover up one feeling with another.
I'm trying to cover up sadness or grief or trauma or anger
with this feeling of being too full.
In those moments, I'm being like a goat.
I'm looking for an immediate fix for my feelings.
And that is why I've started talking to a therapist about it,
because I think so many of my issues with food
are connected back to trauma and grief.
Now notice, I didn't say I'll just pray about it,
because I pray all the time.
I wake up in the morning literally praying almost every day,
talking to Jesus, the first words in my mouth,
as I'm coming to be awake.
I'm talking to Jesus, and I hear Him say,
go talk to a therapist.
Prayer is a conversation.
For some of us, if we have a real conversation with God,
we will hear Him say,
why don't you go talk to someone about that?
When we listen to the shepherd, he will lead us to life.
And what I want all of us to hear is that if you are being injured
by something that you have been trying to fill your life with,
please talk to someone about it.
Please talk to someone about it.
Then I'm reminded that where the Spirit of the Lord is,
there is freedom.
I'm reminded that God is love, and that His love casts out all fear.
I'm reminded this love frees us from the bondage of the law and legalism.
I'm reminded that Jesus has made His home literally in my heart.
I'm reminded that if I feel injured by what is filling me,
I might be trying to jam something in where Jesus already is.
When we moved to Colorado from Georgia, many in 2010,
we lived in Colorado for a year, three years earlier,
for the school of worship that we went to,
and then in 2010, we were moving back there.
I had this 94-ish Mazda Protege, five-speed, a little black,
a little speeder, and we were pulling it behind the U-Haul,
because we had a van as well, so one of us drove the van,
one of us drove the U-Haul with this car.
What we did, like many of us have done, we used the car we were pulling,
like what? Like extra storage, right?
Let's jam more stuff into this thing, because it didn't all fit into that thing.
And what happened was I had this old guitar that I really didn't play much anymore,
because it was broken in two or three different ways,
but it was that nostalgia guitar.
I had had it forever. I had played the ever-living snot out of this thing.
What happened is I didn't have anywhere to put this guitar.
Literally, everything was full, and so I opened the driver's door,
and I tried to, actually I was on the passenger door,
and I tried putting it up into the dash, the guitar in a big travel case,
onto the dash, over the wheel, and then I'm trying to close the door.
I'm like trying to close the door on this guitar case inside of this little car,
and then I heard the crack.
The crack, not of the guitar, of the windshield.
I was trying to cram something in a space where it didn't belong.
I took the guitar back out, this piece of junk guitar,
and leaned it against the house that we were moving away from.
I sent a text message to my buddy Kent Cray, and I said,
yeah, I left a present for you on my old porch.
I closed the door, we moved to Colorado with a giant crack through the windshield,
my primary vehicle.
If you believe in Jesus, I'd say to any extent,
if you believe in Jesus, you are full of Jesus.
That means that everything that goes in here,
Jesus is going, yeah, this belongs right here with me.
This belongs right here. This belongs right here.
Sometimes there's going to be stuff that we try to fill our own self with,
but we just don't trust that Jesus really has already filled that space.
We can trust that if you know Jesus, then you are full.
And over the next, I think, seven more Sundays,
where we talk about different kinds of fully, how to live fully,
we are not telling you that those are things that you need to get into you.
We are saying that those are things that God helps live out from us.
Last thing I want to say, that I'm reminded of a quote from the line,
the witch in the wardrobe, and this has been used many times,
so maybe you've heard this before, you've probably read the books,
obviously C.S. Lewis is writing these books as allegory,
as a kind of theology of how he views God.
Mr. Beaver says, Aslan is a lion, the lion, the great lion.
Ooh, says Susan. I thought he was a man. Is he quite safe?
I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion.
Safe, said Mr. Beaver. Who said anything about safe?
Of course he isn't safe, but he's good.
He's the king, I tell you.
Along the way, if you're standing in the presence of God,
you're going to have some growing pains.
Living with the Lord in a way that does not injure us does not mean that nothing will ever hurt.
In the moments of pain, in the moments of stretching, in the moments of growth,
we're meant to remember that even though this feels dangerous,
even though this might feel confusing at times,
that the one that we are following, the one that we are filled by, is good.
Jesus is the good shepherd. He's not just a shepherd.
He's the good shepherd. He is tov. He is from the beginning.
He is for us, and he will not injure us.
He will lead us into life.
Life to the full. That is what you have for us.
Amen? Amen. Let us pray.
Jesus, thank you for being a good shepherd.
I pray that each of us would have a conviction from your spirit that we are full,
and that if there are things that we have been trying to jam into all of the spaces,
that you help us set some of those down,
that we will trust that you will show us how to live fully,
that you will not injure us, even as you lead us through danger.
Amen.