Radical Integration

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:13

Hello, my name is Eric, and I am one of the pastors at the Village Church. The following podcast is a ministry of the Village Church. We hope that it inspires you, that it drives you closer to Jesus, and it opens your eyes to the possibilities of living in the kingdom and joy. And God bless.

Speaker 2: 0:35

Please join me in my prayer, Lord God, above you are Lord of all things. And you have raised up Jesus to sit at your right hand at your throne and put all things beneath his feet, including us and every aspect of us. And we pray that we would be able to, in your power, in the power of your spirit, be able to submit all things to you. In Jesus' name we pray, amen. So we're in a series called Radical Discipleship, and it's, we're in month three of this, and we've been in it since the very beginning of January, I think literally the first day of January, because, uh, January 1st was a Sunday. So we have been at this series for a very long time. And one of the things that I'm gonna try to do this morning is summarize everything that we've done thus far. So buckle in, okay? I'm calling what I'm presenting to you today, radical integration, partially because I want to integrate all the various sermons that have been preached so far this year. So we're in this series called Radical Discipleship, and I want to ask you a question that you can think about for a moment here, and we've been trying to inform you of the answer to this question all the way through, which is, what is a disciple? Okay? So think for a moment, what is a disciple? All right? Now, if you have answers, shout'em out. Someone who follows Jesus. Okay? That's a great answer. Other, other answers, someone who follows Jesus with intention. That's good. I like that. A learner. Excellent practicing Discipline, someone practicing discipl. Excellent. Yeah, very e etiological there, Mike. Good. Okay. Awesome. These are all great answers. Okay. To whom are we? Disciples treats this answer kind of Artie includes that. All right, you can all shout it out, Jesus. Okay, good. Right, right. Do you feel like the little kid's out in front, right? A little catechism time, right? Well, you should. This is part of the basics, right? Of our faith, of our practice, why we gather here in the morning, and there's just why we wanted to do this sermon series, but what makes it radical? Okay? Because we affixed this word. I kind of forced Eric in this, uh, he likes to tell this story that we had. There was a couple things that he wanted to talk about that had the word radical in front of it, like radical hospitality. And then I said everything, the whole thing should be radical. I stand by it. Okay? All right. So what makes it radical, this radical discipleship? Well, so we have this key theme, and it appears in three of the four gospels. So the, all three of the synoptic gospels have this quotation from Jesus. So Matthew chapter 16, verse 24 says, then Jesus said to his disciples, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. And also in the book of Mark, the, one of the other gospels in chapter eight, verse 34, we have this quotation. Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said, whoever wants to be my be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. So the verse that's been anchoring us this whole time, all three months of this so far, has been out of Luke chapter nine, verse 23. And it should look really familiar to you based on what I've just read. So it says in Luke, then he said to them all, whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me. I think we lose a lot of the power of this because we, um, we've made, crosses into a symbol, I mean, rightly so, we've, we've kind of transformed the idea of what a cross is as Christians over the last 2000 years. But if we go back to the time that Jesus is saying this, I wanna kind of rephrase it for you in a couple different ways. Whoever wants to follow me, Jesus said, must take up his grave, digger's, shovel and follow me. Whoever wants to follow me must take up his electric chair and follow me. Whoever wants to follow me must carry on them a loaded gun prepared to give it to anybody for their own execution. This is, this is all the sense of what Jesus was saying. He's saying, you need to pre be prepared on a daily basis to die to yourself in order to follow him. It's really radical, which is why I stand by the title Radical Discipleship. So we've been looking at all these various aspects of following Jesus in a radical way. The first one that we talked about was courage. And Eric gave this sermon and he started out by asking, what or who are you avoiding? Which I thought was a really great question. Um, if we jump way ahead to the sermon I gave on submission, I wanna say what you're avoiding is typically your strongholds, but I'm kind of giving away a lot of my integration that's supposed to happen later. Okay? So radical courage should say, is anchored by confidence in God and what God has done. That's the radical part of radical courage. It's confidence in God and what God has previously done for us. So he used the example of a character named Caleb in the Old Testament. Caleb was a scout ahead of the Israelites as they were wandering through the desert and going to enter the promised land. Caleb checked out the promised land, it was full of giants, really scary people, well fortified cities, and all of the scouts except for Caleb. And this one other guy said, they're gonna beat us up. There's no way we could do this. And Caleb says, we can do it. I have confidence in God. So that's our example of radical courage. And what Eric drew our attention to is that Caleb was aware of what God had already done for the Israelites and who God was, what Ga God was capable of doing. He had brought them through the Red Sea. He had g visited the plagues upon Egypt and got them out of slavery. And so what we need to do in order to be anchored in confidence and have courage radically, is to tell our stories. And he challenged us all to tell the stories of us entering into God's kingdom one at a time. Bring aside people in the church and tell your story because then you will rehearse to yourself the confidence that you can have in God and and take courage. And then other people are prepared to tell you back your own story to remind you when you're struggling in your faith, take courage, right? You can have confidence in God and what God has done for you personally as a whole church historically in the Bible. And that's the radical part of radical courage. Then we went on to talk about waiting. The radical part of waiting, Eric was explaining to his is that waiting in the Bible, in the Hebrew word is active, not passive. We tend to think of waiting as like waiting in a doctor's office or a dentist's office. I am constantly waiting for doctors. I hate it that they tell me to arrive early, like 15 minutes early. And I'm like, no, I'm not arriving early because you're gonna be 15 minutes late and then I'm gonna be waiting a half an hour. Okay? But my wife hates being late for anything. So we're we're early and then we wait even longer. And I think of it like probably a lot of us think of it as empty time in which to do nothing and just veg out or play on my phone or scan Twitter or whatever it is, whatever it is that fulfills your time while you're waiting because it's just empty time. So you might as well entertain yourself, right? Distract yourself from the boredom of it. But that is not the sense of waiting that we see in especially the Old Testament. Waiting is an active thing. That's the radical part of waiting that Eric was trying to draw our attention to. So we wait in a weird way. Okay? So although if you're maybe a mother, a mother who's done breastfeeding, this may mean make more sense to you if you haven't, it's maybe a a a strange way to think about it. But what he said is, the way that we wait actively is like a weaned child. So unweaned children who are still getting fed by bottle or breasts are very anxious and they constantly need things, right? They have no ability to stay content on their own. They need to be, uh, fed, they need to be changed, they need to be rocked and so on. But a weaned child is one that has a capacity to be attentive to what the parent is doing. So it's the focus shifts from the baby being all about his or her immediate physical needs to being weaned and being able to pay attention to what the parent is doing to receive instruction. And I actually really like what Emily said as a picture of this, besides a ween child was a well-trained dog. I had to put the well-trained part because my dogs are not, my dogs don't do this. They're not well-trained, okay? So not just my dog is just, when they wait, they wait lazily just flopped out on the floor or the couch, okay? Like I typically wait at the doctor's office. But a well-trained dog, if you tell it to sit or lie down, it will stay extremely attentive because it is waiting for the next command that it will receive from its master. Have you seen a well-trained dog do this? Like they'll be there, but their ears are up, their eyes are looking around, right? And as soon as you say, let's go, they're just immediately ready and they just bolt alongside their master, right? Like right in line. And that is the way that we're called to wait radically looking for what Jesus, our master is ready to tell us and instructing us to do and following him. So that brings us to following. So Jesus calls us to be his followers, his disciples. So this is, uh, this is probably the most important sermon, I would say of the whole series, um, because that is the most important part of being a disciple as you follow. And before we talked about following, Eric talked about being zombies. Um, and he even did some like pantomime and some moaning things that I don't feel. I feel too dig dignified to do that up here. But, uh, but it was great. I really enjoyed that moment. You should go back and listen, by the way, I listened to all of these sermons. So if you have the, the time and capacity, I would heavily encourage you to re-listen to all the sermons. They're all on the Village podcast, the Village Sermon podcast. So, uh, we can help you get set up with that, or I can help you get set up with that if you want to. It was a great way to kind of relive all of this and um, do a better job of filling my time when I was waiting<laugh>. Um, but he talked about us being as zombies before we come to Christ, before we enter into the kingdom, that we, we have no purpose, no direction, no minds, no capacity to actually do anything intentionally or for good. And then we're animated, we're brought alive in Jesus, and we're actually able to be human beings the way we were meant to be. So as we follow Jesus, there's an temptation to go back to our zombie-like ways. But if we follow Jesus, we live out the authentic experience of being truly human as he is. And there are types of followers, they're kind of like dominant ways that the New Testament especially describes following Jesus in these really powerful metaphors. And we kind of joked about it maybe being like a personality test that you could take and we might actually make this personality test. I'm kind of excited<laugh>. Eric was saying he was working on his book the other day and he is like, yeah, and there's gonna be a quiz and I'm gonna, anyway, so maybe we'll actually do this. But there were some follower types. So there was a way that you might follow as a soldier was one of the ways the New Testament describes following. Jesus says that Jesus is your commander. You're a soldier under his command or as an athlete, he's the coach, the trainer. You are the athlete trying to follow his instructions and live out of that. Or as a student, he is the teacher. You listen to his instruction, you take it on board or as a servant. He's the master. You follow his decrees, his instructions to take care of things, to do things around a household or as a citizen. He's the Lord, he's the king and you are the subject. And those are all great. And I loved the way that he brought those out. And if you think about the New Testament and you kind of go and you take a long survey of it, you'll see a lot of these different expressions being put forward by Paul and Peter and the gospels of Jesus himself. And then I got to talk about radical evangelism. And the part that I tried to make clear to you was radical about evangelism in the New Testament is that evangelism is actually discipleship. And I looked at the example of Paul who says, follow me as I follow Christ, which is a really, really bold statement. And so I gleaned out of that the idea that we need to lead like we follow. So if you follow Jesus as an athlete, you need to be a coach to somebody else. If you follow Jesus as a student, you need to teach others who are coming up behind you on the path and so on, that you have really good things to offer as a citizen. You have a community, you have an ethic. And so if you are a citizen type follower of Jesus, then you need to instruct us about the rule of Jesus as a lesser Lord. And then I ask this question, looking at the example of Paul who was chained to his Roman guards while he was in prison. To whom are we ourselves chained to? Because that is who sh you should be leading in discipleship, which is evangelism, radically speaking. And Eric went on to talk about hospitality. He warned us that he had talked lots and lots about hospitality previously. And so this was gonna be a new take, a different take. And indeed it was. I don't think I had heard him say these things quite the same way before he brought out the radical part of hospitality in that rasp radical ho. Hospitality cares for the unwanted guests, not just the guests that you would really like to have at your house, but the guests that you kind of would prefer aren't there in some part of your soul. Also, it cares for people at inconvenient times for you, you're on your way to do something and something someone calls out for hospitality. That's radical hospitality is when you're on your way, you're in the middle of something and you are inconvenienced. So he told us to expect inconvenient opportunities out of interruptions in our lives. And he gave us the example of Jesus who was on his way to heal a child. And he pointed out just how much Jesus cares for little children. And so clearly it was very important and clearly a good thing for Jesus to be doing, to be on his way to heal a child who was about to die and in fact did die while he was interrupted by this woman who also needed healing and did it in a kind of sneaky way. But he stops everything and r offers her radical hospitality in healing her addressing her conversing with her in a culture in which she would've been an unwanted guest. And we're to follow Jesus' example as disciples of him and we're supposed to do ministry. He talked about radical ministry that recognizes that you yes, you right. Just imagine little Uncle Sam poster kind of, yeah, you too are a very important pastor. So in one Peter, chapter two, verse nine, it says that we're a, a royal and holy priesthood that each one of us is a priest. And Eric said a lot of us don't really have a whole lot of interaction with priests in our daily lives. It's not really a lot of our background. So if you're have a background like me and like Eric, it's maybe easier to think of a pastor and what a pastor does. So you all are very important pastors and need to be acting like pastors. You need to do the kind of things that pastors do. And that by that I don't really mean, he didn't really mean up here preaching, like standing in front of a large crowd of people and saying stuff, but no meeting with people, assessing their health and their needs and then praying for them and seeking their healing and health. That is the most important role of a pastor, is to be aware of the people around you, what they need, and start attending to those needs. And he gave us some criteria and different areas about how you might diagnose people's health. And a lot of people really, really, uh, caught on to the whole environmental health aspect of things. But you can go back and listen to all that. And then he talked about parenting. There's a few things that were pretty radical in that to me, I'm gonna pick out one of'em. He said that radical parenting disciplines, for some of you that might not seem too radical, but I think in the current way that we understand parenting in our culture this day and age, we're very afraid of disciplining our kids. Part of the reason is that we just don't enjoy it, right? We don't like giving our children pain and consequences. And he looked at Proverbs and Hebrews and he told us about the rod of discipline and how it drives out foolishness. And that it, your children will not die when you discipline them. And going from Hebrews that if you don't discipline your kid, you're basically saying to them that they don't belong to you. Disciplining your children, claims them as yours. And so it drives out foolishness and it produces righteousness and peace. So you need to do it, you need to discipline. It's a radical step to take, but it's very, very necessary. And then I talked about submission and I pointed out that radical submission is deep, not just broad. So there's not a lot of people that it's, it's not just that there's a lot of different people that you need to be in obedience and submission to as a follower of Jesus. That's true. But also that you need deep in your soul, in your heart to be submitted to Jesus in things that are you would rather protect, um, because they're vulnerable to you. So it surrenders strongholds, and I talked about strongholds as this, I masistic, right? This pictorial representation of these, these promises that we've made against God, these demands that we have that God never interfere in certain aspects of our life, that we are going to continue to take control and have control and build up walls around hurts and pains and traumas and things that we insist upon being our own and not touched by others and by God. So we need to following James chapter four, resist the devil, wash ourselves and mourn as a way to repent and submit. And then Eric talked about gender And he said that God created humans with bodies. That's all of us. That's all of you. You're human with a body, male and female. So either you're male or female and you have a body outta Genesis. And maybe that seems like kind of a yaa thing to you. But as I go around the world and I talk with people and I read news and I scroll through social media, this is quite a radical thing to say. And then he said this even more radical statement that even I wins at the Creator. That's God defines his creation. I don't get to choose my identity and my purpose. God does that for me. He gives it to me. And my role is to consider whether I can accept that in submission or whether I'm gonna pretend that I fabricate it myself, which is quite radical. And we talked about marriage, marriage actually, and singleness as both gifts, radical gifts from God. So if you're married and the way that we do marrying marriage ceremonies and the way that we talk about marriage, we tend to talk about marriage as a gift, right? Your spouse as a gift to you, right? And this is a very familiar way of talking, but we hesitate the way that we typically think to think of singleness as a gift. So I found this quite radical, and maybe you did too, Because there's some things that single people are available to do as followers of Jesus that marry people are not as easily able to, uh, I think I have a repeat of my slide, so that's my fault. But here's what I wanted to say as out of a sermon that Eric gave a long time ago, but uh, I remembered as he was talking about singleness. Um, I apologize to those of you who are not as familiar with military, but I'm gonna do it anyway. Okay? So he said that single people are the special forces of the church. So the rest of us, the normal everyday grunts, okay, who are married, we're, we're slow to move. We bring a lot to bear when we show up, but we're not very quick on our feet, right? We don't have a whole lot of mobility. We don't have all this freedom in our lives to just get there and do things. But the special forces are lean, mean, fighting machines, right? And they have all these resources that are available to them to get to where they're needed immediately as quick as possible, and to spend enormous amounts of time, especially in crises. And single people are like that. You get to do the work of the kingdom in ways that married people just can't. That's a gift. That's great. That's amazing. So I am speaking to you today about integrating all of this integration. So what's so radical about this? Well, I want you to think about how many things does all include, right? So I, I read to you out of Ephesians earlier, and I tried to bring out these aspects of Paul's writing to the church in Ephesus that emphasize all of the aspects that Jesus is over and in charge of and above and has authority over. Okay? So think about this. How many things is all? So I've been told that there are microscopic particles called corks and gluons, I don't really know what they are, but there's a lot of'em. They make up everything. There's these really b big things called galaxies. I kind of understand that a little bit better cuz I think I can sometimes see representations of them, right? In sci-fi movies and stuff. And there's everything in between, right? There's ants, there's elephants, there's little kids, there's grown adults, there's me, and then there's every aspect of me. There's my body, there's my soul, there's my mind, there's my thoughts and my feelings. There's my plans and projects, there's my hobbies, there's my family, there's my friends. Oh, and Jesus Christ is the Lord, the ruler, the king of all, all that. And more, somehow I didn't include angels and demons and whatever spiritual things exist in the world that I can't even comprehend. So a definition of integration. Integration is bringing different things together as a whole, which is what I've been trying to do this morning so far. I'm taking all these different things and we're trying to unify them right into one thing under one Lord Jesus Christ. So all things under Christ radical discipleship is following Jesus in all things. Emphasis all, all things following involves discipline and submission. So I loved the parenting sermon because it brought my attention to discipline and the purpose of it, the benefit of it, even though it's difficult. And you may have heard when he talked about, when Eric talked about following, um, the athlete, type of follower who, and, and I've recognized even in my own life, and I look around to other people who are runners and power lifters and dancers, just how much, much discipline is involved in following a trainer, a coach, a sport, right? A particular school of dance. It involves discipline to follow Jesus and submission. There's not really any way to follow anybody without a certain kind of submission. I was thinking about this, like there's absolutely no point in me following Jake, for example, on a trail if I'm not submitted to the idea that Jake kind of knows where he's going, at least a little bit, right? I mean, just think about this for for a minute. Like, if I go to ask someone to teach me how to play pickleball, right? I'm submitted to them in their greater knowledge and understanding of the game pickleball, and I have to be listening to what they tell me and in obedience to their instruction. It just doesn't make sense any other way. And so following Jesus is like that, except I can trust him. No offense Jake more than Jake, okay? So I was thinking, I'm, I've been working on this idea. I, I'm, I'm really big into history and I love the Middle ages, medieval things. If you guys love Lord of the Rings, I know many of you do, you probably got thinking about all kinds of like fantastical worlds that are medieval times inspired. And so there are these things called vassals. Okay? So I have to explain a little bit what a vassal is. A vassal is somebody who's underneath a greater authority. So underneath a king, there might be various dukes and duchess, right? Um, various kinds of knights. So it, there's a Lord and then there's a vassal underneath. And that vassel might in turn have vassals underneath him. And from this perspective of those lower vassals, the person above is a Lord, okay? But we, and I think myself like to think of ourselves as allies, which puts us on an even playing field with the person that I'm in relationship to. Like if I'm your ally in something, it means we together as equals are working towards something or on the same team. If I say vassal though, that means I'm clearly underneath you. But Christ is over all. We're not equals, we're not allies with God. I mean, not just we're subjects, we're VAs to the Lord. We have to keep things in the proper perspective. So like I like think of my own little personal fiefdom, my personal kingdom, my land, right? My power and authority, and then God's over there and I say, yeah, I guess I'll help out in this aspect, in this limited circumstance. But it's not like that. He's over all of it, right? If he wants to come and crush my little sandcastle stronghold at any time he can, I it belongs to him. I belong to him. He created me, he defines me. My purpose is his. And he may lead me alone, allow me to do my own thing. But that's not to my benefit actually, which is what I talked about with my sermon on radical submission. Because we have these things that I called strongholds that we love to keep to ourselves within our soul. And we permit, we do not permit God or others to come in. So radical integration, ens involves bringing all and every aspect of ourselves together under Christ. So we integrate ourselves, we take our strongholds, and we decide that too is part of me, and that also is under the Lordship of Christ, and that I also bring before him. And this takes courage and waiting. So I'm trying to integrate these different ideas of this sermon series, right? Because as others, some of you pointed out when I talked about submission, if you surrender or dismantle or allow your stronghold to be demolished, you're vulnerable. Where's your moat to protect you now, right? Where those walls to protect you from all the hurt, the pain that could come your way. And that's scary. Courage is the ability to overcome, to deal with fear. And we need that from Jesus. We need to rehearse our stories. We need to rehearse the stories of what God has done for us in order to confront our fear, to know that God will keep us safe the way we need to be protected, the way that we need to be in him. And also, this takes time. It takes time. So then we're gonna require waiting, actively looking to him, not just entertaining ourselves, not distracting ourselves, but actually anticipating what God is going to do. So it includes our marriage and our singleness, our bodies, our gender, our sexuality. It includes our children and our parenting. It includes our possessions, our time, our plans, our agendas, our money, both the money that we have and the way that we make it. It requires ministry, hospitality, evangelism, and discipleship making. And once again, it's our money, our possessions, our time, and our agendas that are at stake here. And we don't like that. I don't like that at least sometimes. But I wanna remind you of what Paul says As he talks to the church in Corinth. He and Timothy writing to them say, the weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretense that sets itself up against the knowledge of God. And we take every thought captive and make it obedient to Christ. So I just wanna point out how radical this is. He talks about taking every thought captive just as there are many, many little subatomic particles. There are many, many thoughts in my mind all the time. So it includes our philosophy, our thoughts, our feelings, our attention and our attitude, our politics, our histories, our pain, our traumas, and our secrets. All of these need to be integrated and brought to Jesus. Uh, and then I messed up my slides, but okay, so take heart. Here's a little courage. Here's the promise that Jesus gifts to all of us, his followers. Take my yolk upon you, learn from me, for I am gentle and humble and heart, and you will find rest for your souls. So some personal questions that you can think about that I don't want you shouting out answers to, but What part of yourself or your life remains separate from the lordship of Christ. Unintegrated. How will you personally radically submit this thing that you consider to Christ? And then some more public things that we could talk about. Um, what has stood out to you most in this series? What's something important that I didn't manage to review today? And how do we radically submit all things to Christ? So we may have some time for questions, but maybe not a lot of time. Yeah. Backwards to the personal questions. Sorry, I went a little fast there at the end. What part of yourself or your life remains separate from the Lordship of Christ? And these are things that, I mean, I guess if you wanna be really bold, you could talk about in front of all of us, but, and how will you personally radically submit this particular thing that you bring up in your mind to Christ? Did that give you enough time? Yeah. Okay. All

Speaker 3: 38:54

Right. Hey, I, uh, I I just really, I really like this. Thank you. Yeah. And then it struck me when you were talking just in integration, like during therapy, when people are getting therapy, like in order to help you like, um, heal from your trauma or really negative experiences, they use that word a lot integration. And so it just made me curious a little bit, I don't know, like what, is there a parallel there or Yeah, I don't know. I just wanted to bring up that idea and think about like what is, there's like a healing component to integration. Because like when something's separate and you're living your life over here and ignoring this thing over here, it actually is making you sick. It actually, it, it, it, it's an oppressive thing. So anyway, I don't know if that brings up any other thoughts for you, but

Speaker 2: 39:48

To that idea, I don't know that I need to say much more because that's exactly right in my opinion. I mean, that is part of what I'm drawing on to use this word integration, is that when we have hurt and trauma happen to us, we often create this kind of disassociation and we cease to recognize certain parts of ourself as ourself. But Christ too is Lord of that.

Speaker 4: 40:18

Uh, um, I wanted to answer the last one. Radically submitting, I rely a great deal on my imagination connected with Romans 8 38. Is it God will work all things out for the good of those who love him. So maybe the trauma in my life, he's gonna work out for good in somebody else. So I like to imagine every day that moment when I'm standing with him and seeing the phenomenal thing he did with all the stuff and how gorgeous it is. And I don't know what it's gonna look like, how he's gonna do it, but just sitting in that helps me be willing to submit.

Speaker 2: 40:57

That's beautiful.

Speaker 4: 40:58

Thank you. I wanted to say that I don't know about podcasts, but all the sermons are also on the website.

Speaker 2: 41:04

Yes,

Speaker 4: 41:05

True. And you can just say to Google village villages online.com sermons, bang,

Speaker 2: 41:12

They got it. Two summits right there.

Speaker 5: 41:23

<laugh>, uh, while we're plugging that, there's also transcripts available.

Speaker 6: 41:29

<laugh>,

Speaker 5: 41:30

The transcripts are quicker than the whole sermon and wonderful sermon again, Michael,

Speaker 2: 41:37

Unless you listen on triple speed, but keep going.

Speaker 5: 41:41

Ah, right, right.<laugh>, um, wow. I mean, just, but, but what's something I didn't re review today? The whole thing you said about like that train dog, his only agenda is what the master wants. That is so convicting to me because it just reveals how almost a hundred percent of my time is on my own agenda. So thanks for that challenge.

Speaker 2: 42:08

So, so one quick response to that is that I, I have this fear, and maybe you share it, that if I make only my agenda what Jesus' agenda is, then I get no good things. Like I imagine those things that I'm holding onto, that I keep apart from Jesus are the good things, and the other things are like bad or scary. Um, but when you look at trained dogs, you realize how joyous and how many good things they get. Yeah. Anyway,

Speaker 7: 42:43

Um, uh, typical of my father to steal my thunder<laugh>, but I, I wanted to talk about the same thing, but what stood out to me about the, the dog, I love that. I love that. Um, picture is with regards to hospitality. Um, and I think of the times where I've been intent on the glamorous Martha Stewart hospitality, and I've missed out on what God was offering and inviting me into. Um, so I, I just thought, yeah, that that's what I long for, is to have that alertness and that readiness as I'm going about my day looking for the interruptions and seeing them as some, as good things that Jesus is offering me.

Speaker 2: 43:29

Yeah, I, I wanted to share like, just very briefly, and you can maybe ask me about it later, but some of the most positive things that have happened to me over the last two years, um, as a follower of Jesus have become, been because I was willing to be interrupted and inconvenienced.

Speaker 6: 43:55

So,

Speaker 8: 44:02

Uh, I don't know what question this is answering, but I think, but uh, if I think about the question, what's radical about following Jesus? Um, I guess another way that I look at it is that it's Jesus that makes it radical cuz uh, you know, we can talk about the radical part being, you know, the completeness of submitting and, and following and everything, and the breadth and the depth and everything. Uh, and we could try to do that with other leaders, you know, Confucius or Mohamed or Thomas Jefferson or whatever. But, uh, Jesus is the only one who can actually handle being followed. Totally. So

Speaker 2: 44:58

Yeah. Thanks. That helps. That's really, no, that's very helpful. That's a, that's a good counterbalance to the emphasis I gave. That's really great.