Stay Humble and Get to Work

[00:00:01] Ephesians, chapter 2, verses 8 through 10. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not from yourselves. It is the gift of God, not by works, so that no one can boast. [00:00:20] For we are God's handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. [00:00:33] In 2019, I moved my family down here to Bozeman, Montana from Big Sky. I was pastoring a small church up there in Big sky for five years, and then I was sniped by Bob. By Bob Snipe sniped me and he brought me down here. And in 2019, I began as the teaching pastor here at Journey Church. And as I look around the room, there are some really fond memories, some faces and smiles and people that I know. We've got great memories. [00:01:04] And it was an incredible time. It was an absolutely incredible season in ministry. We were bursting at the seams in 2019, much like you guys are already. And we started this thing called the Everyone Initiative, which you're starting to build now. So I asked some of you for money, a lot of money. Okay. And we started building the Everyone Initiative and working on that. We had some incredible moments together. We slow jammed our annual report every year. That was a highlight for me. [00:01:35] We did something called the Generosity Rockstar. Which I'm just gonna go ahead and say for those of you who know, I'm sorry, I apologize. I'm here to tell you, I apologize for that. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, don't go look that up on YouTube. Just don't do it. It won't. It's not worth your time. [00:01:56] It was an incredible season, but it was also a challenging season because six months into me being here in this new church without a lot of built in personal equity with you, there was something that happened in 2020, around March. I don't know, I think feel like it was a dream still. Do you remember? Like something happened around then. It was like. And I. And once again, I made some bad decisions. I, like came up here one time with a Darth Vader mask on and I was like, I found my new mask. And then one time I put the dog thing on so I couldn't touch myself on the face. Cause that's how it spread, you know? And so mistakes were made. We'll just say it that way. Okay. [00:02:41] And so it was an incredibly life giving time, but it was also a really challenging time of life for us. Juggling two kids and a big ministry, thousands of people that are a part of this church. Big budget, big staff. [00:02:56] And it started to weigh on me, and I started feeling off, like, man, this wasn't working. And wasn't working. Like, I thought it was working. [00:03:06] And so in 2021, I remember sitting backstage, much like I just did a few moments ago, and I remember this thought, and the thought was this. [00:03:17] Where are the exits on this place? [00:03:20] Cause I was just thinking about, how do I get out of here? [00:03:25] It was just too much, and I just couldn't handle it anymore. And I was in a really bad place. [00:03:32] I joke, if I was Bob, I'd have fired me at least three times, okay? [00:03:36] And so I was looking for an exit, and I was thinking about, what do I do in this moment, and what do I do now that I'm in this kind of burnout phase? And I've heard other pastors talk about this. I've heard. I've heard other people talk about this, but now I'm in the middle of it. So what am I gonna do now in the midst of this? And it was kind of a fleeting thought. I came out here and I just. I just preached, which is, like, by the way, that's what pastors do. It doesn't matter what happens on Saturday night. We gotta come up here and put on a face for you and, like, do it, all right? It's part of the challenge. And so I thought, man, that's weird. And so two weeks later, I'm preaching again, and I'm sitting backstage getting ready to preach again. And. And the same thought occurs, okay? And I'm like, where are the exits? Where am I going to go? What should I do? And I walk out to a door, I open the door, I look out at my tundra, and I think, okay, I've got a camper shell, kind of like a redneck setup in there. [00:04:30] I've got meals that are dehydrated that I can heat up for about a week. My wife's going to be real angry about this whole situation. [00:04:38] But, like, I maybe need to get out of dodge right now. And I was seriously contemplating, like, I'm out of here, okay? [00:04:46] Fortunately, I didn't leave, which is why Bob welcomed me to come preach again. Cause I probably wouldn't be here if I had left that day. [00:04:53] But I remember thinking, what do I do now? [00:05:00] What do I do now in the midst of this situation, in the midst of what I'm dealing with both internally and externally? And. And that's what I want to talk to you about. This morning. Because I think that question's gonna find you, too. [00:05:17] This is a question that will find you. Maybe it has found you right now, or maybe it will find you someday. Or maybe it found you last year. But the question is this. [00:05:30] What am I gonna do now? [00:05:33] What should I do now? Maybe you're in an exciting season where you're asking, what should I do now? You just graduated, you got the whole world in front of you, and you're like, what should I do now? [00:05:49] You're looking at maybe going to college, or maybe you graduated college and now you're looking at jobs. [00:05:54] You're looking at maybe trying to meet her or meet him and start your life together. [00:06:01] What are we gonna do now? Now, maybe it's a very celebratory moment. Maybe it's sort of in between. Maybe your kids were the ones that just graduated, and you're like, oh, this is gonna be awesome. Empty nest. And then you wake up and you're like, I don't know if this is as great as I thought it was gonna be. Right. What are we gonna do now? Right. [00:06:21] Maybe it's a stage of life thing, but also maybe it's something more difficult, like what I was dealing with. [00:06:26] Maybe it's this low burning sort of burnout in your life, and you're like, I don't like midlife crisis, but that's kind of what it feels like. [00:06:36] And you're asking, what should I do now? Maybe. Maybe you've experienced great relational pain lately, gone through a divorce or a loss of some sort, and you're wondering, how do I. How do I manage this? How do I get through this? What am. What am I going to do now? What should I do now? [00:06:56] I think this is a question that will find you at some point. And so I want to give you a bit of encouragement and a bit of challenge today. Based out of this little passage in Ephesians, I want to give you a simple but not easy answer to that question. What should I do now? So here's a simple but not easy answer. It is this. Stay humble. [00:07:21] Stay humble and get to work. Okay? Stay humble and get to work. I'm making it easy for you to remember this morning. Okay? So you're like, you're a little dead on me. I gotta wake you up. Okay? Okay. All right, here we go. Here we go. I feel it in the room. All right, look this way. [00:07:35] Okay? And tell them, stay humble. [00:07:38] Come on, like you mean it. Some of you, like, need to tell them that, like, they were not humble. This morning. So turn to the person over here and go. Stay humble. Stay humble. Okay. And then turn to the other person. Now I feel the energy coming up in the room. Okay, here we go. Turn to the other person and say, get to work. [00:07:54] Okay. Okay, do it again. Stay humble and then get to work. [00:08:00] Okay, I believe you now. I believe you now. Okay, that's what we're gonna do. [00:08:03] That's what you should do now. [00:08:06] You should stay humble and get to work. We wanna look at this simple passage from a guy named Paul. Paul was an apostle of Jesus. It means he was one of the first followers of Jesus. But he wasn't always the first follower of, of Jesus. Paul was raging against the church and raging against Jesus and the followers of the Way of Jesus. Until Paul had this transformational moment with Jesus where he encountered Jesus, he met Jesus and everything changed for him. And because of that, Paul became a church lover instead of a church hater. He became someone who was helping plant churches and, and minister to pastors and help small communities of the followers of the Way of Jesus in the very earliest days of the church. And this little letter that we read out of is a letter. It's not a book of the Bible. Even though it says it's a book of the Bible, it's actually a letter. So if you're new to reading the Bible, read this like a letter. Sit down for 20 minutes and read the whole thing like a letter to a church. Now where was that church? That church was in a town called Ephesus, hence the name Ephesians. So Paul is writing to this church in Ephesus, which was on. It was a port city on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea. It was a center for culture, it was a center for arts and religion. One of the seven great wonders of the ancient world was the temple to the goddess Artemis, who was a fertility goddess. It was as long as three football fields. It was an incredible place, a hodgepodge of people, people coming and going from all different types of cultures. Think of like a New York City kind of vibe, right? And in the midst of that, there's this small group of people who are following the way of Jesus. [00:10:08] Most theologians estimate that it was between 150 and 200 people in a town, a city of 300,000 people. [00:10:17] So Paul is writing to challenge and to encourage this small group of followers of the Way of Jesus who are probably asking the question, what should we do now? Right. They have just witnessed Jesus death and they have witnessed his resurrection as. And they have witnessed him ascending to heaven and giving his disciples and them the work of the church. And it would be very natural for them to be asking, what should we do now? Especially because they're under great persecution. Things are incredibly difficult for them. Not everybody's buying into this message of Jesus, and they're having to live in the middle of that each and every day. And so Paul, in his letters, he spells this out in really simple ways. But I'm gonna be honest with you guys. It's not easy ways. And so what I wanna do is just follow this tiny little passage out of this letter from Paul to encourage us to stay humble. [00:11:20] To stay humble and to get to work. Stay humble and get to work. [00:11:27] We're gonna start with stay humble. And I want to share with you two gifts, two gifts of stay humble. Because I think there's two sides to this phrase, stay humble. And the reason I wanna start with stay humble is this. [00:11:44] We have a temptation in these moments where we are asking, what should I do now? [00:11:50] To handle things on our own, don't we? [00:11:54] To not be humble. How many of you, when things aren't going well, and you're asking, what should I do? How. How many of you are a control freak and you just try to control the situation? Raise your hand. How many of you are like, I'm so much of a control freak, I'm not gonna raise my hand for you right now. [00:12:09] Okay. Yeah. There you go. All right. All right. Okay. [00:12:13] So some of us, when we get into this situation, we power up, we control the situation. We figure it out, we fix it on our own, right? Some of us go in a different direction, right? We play the victim card. It's everybody else's fault, and it's not my fault. And we don't take responsibility for anything that we find ourselves in the middle of. Some of us, Some of us cope in very poor ways, right? And we hide ourselves from what is real and what is true. [00:12:47] And we turn to substances and addictions and things that don't have the answers that we need. And we end up in really arrogant spots, really prideful spots. [00:13:01] And so I want to encourage us and challenge us in the two gifts that I think we find within. [00:13:08] Stay humble. So gift number one, Gift number one, is this the gift of grace? How do we stay humble? We receive the gift of. Of grace. Paul says this. For it is by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not of yourselves. [00:13:30] It is the gift from God, not by works, so that no one can boast. Paul knows this to Be true in a very personal way. [00:13:43] Paul was hell bent on. On taking out the church. He wanted to get rid of the church. [00:13:50] And he had this transformational moment on the road to Damascus with Jesus. He was going to persecute the church. And Jesus shows up and says, paul, Paul, why are you persecuting me? He blinds Paul for several days so that he might open his eyes. To what? To the gift of grace. [00:14:12] To the gift of grace. Because what Paul knew was following the rules, was being good enough and smart enough and financially savvy enough. [00:14:23] What he knew was high arrogance. And what God taught him was humility and grace. The gift of grace. In another one of Paul's letters, he refers to him as. As the worst of all sinners. The worst of all sinners. So let's just play this game. [00:14:45] Paul refers to himself as the worst of all sinners. He wrote scripture that we're reading 2,000 years ago. Are you better or worse than Paul? [00:14:57] Anybody wrote scripture this week? [00:15:00] Okay, so if Paul calls himself the worst of all sinners, how is that? What is. What is that? [00:15:08] What is that? [00:15:10] Well, Paul has this engagement with Jesus where he understands the word grace. [00:15:19] See, I know you're smart people and you come to church and I'm so happy you're here. And you're like, I know the word grace. I just sang about it in, like, three of those other songs. It was great. Grace, right? This is a place of grace. We even make these kind of things, these phrases up. [00:15:33] Can I just lean on you a little bit? [00:15:35] Can I challenge you like Paul might? Is that where you go when things get hard? Do you go to grace? [00:15:42] Or once again, do you go back to control and manipulation and victimization? Where do you go when things get hard? What is revealed when things get hard to you? [00:15:55] That's where we get to see grace. We get to see in our own lives whether we actually believe in grace or not. [00:16:03] Whether we actually believe in what Jesus did on our behalf in spite of us. Can I just lean in? Look at me. Look at me. Don't look at the screens. Come on. Look at me a second. Okay, here's the message. You are so much worse than you think you are. Ha ha. Welcome to church. Okay, okay, Stay with me. Stay with me. You are far worse than you think you are. [00:16:26] But let me flip that. You are far greater love than you can ever imagine. [00:16:30] Let me say that again. You are far worse than you think you are far worse. [00:16:36] But you are far more loved than you can ever imagine. And I would be Remiss to gloss over the gift of grace. Paul knows that it's in spite of him that. That God has done his best work. [00:16:54] It's because of his sin that Jesus went to the cross to pay for his sins. To pay for your sins. To pay for my sins. That we might be set free. And then rose from the grave. [00:17:08] That we might have eternal life in him. And then gave us the Holy Spirit to live within us, to empower us, to challenge us, to shape us into what he desires for us to be. It's grace upon grace upon grace upon grace. Paul knows that. And he knows the church there is going to need that as well. Cause they're gonna wanna puff themselves up and try to figure it out. And they've got 150, 200 people trying to survive in this big cool city. And they've got temptations and they've got distractions. And he knows they're going to have to go back to grace over and over and over and over and over again. [00:17:53] So what should you do? [00:17:55] What should you do now? You should stay humble and receive the gift of grace. [00:18:03] Grace is unmerited favor. [00:18:06] Unmerited favor. You didn't earn it. [00:18:10] You don't get to boast about. [00:18:12] Is a free gift of God to His beloved children. It's grace. [00:18:20] So first we stay humble with the gift of grace. [00:18:25] And then once we've got that firmly planted within us, once we understand the real state of affairs that we need grace upon grace upon grace, then we get to move to the second gift of stay humble. And the second gift of stay humble is this. It's the gift of being yourself. [00:18:47] It's the gift of being yourself. I'm gonna sound like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth for a moment. Cause I just said you're far worse than you think you are. Right. Okay. But I also wanna say this. [00:18:59] You are gifted and uniquely wired for what God has for you. [00:19:10] You are uniquely gifted. [00:19:14] You are formed together by God. [00:19:20] Psalm 139 says to us that we were created in our mother's womb. We were fearfully and wonderfully made. [00:19:30] And so we need to embrace this gift of grace. And then we need to embrace the gift of being ourselves. [00:19:39] The NIV says it this way. We are God's handiwork. And I don't really like that. We are God's handiwork. The ESV translation, I think it's a little better. It says this. For we are God's workmanship, His craftsmanship, his masterpiece. [00:19:58] That's who you are in Christ Jesus. [00:20:04] I've been a pastor for a very, very long time, and I'll tell you this at the end of the story, at the end of the sermon, But I've got these other cool things going on in my life where I get to work with men and be a part of something called legacy guides. And one of the things we do in there is we do a lot of self discovery. And we talk about where a guy is gifted and where he isn't gifted and what is he good at and where is he limited. And I think this is the gift of being yourself. Once again found in this banner of stay humble is thinking rightly of oneself. The way I define humility is this. We don't think too highly of oneself. We don't think too lowly of oneself. We think rightly of oneself. Some of you think too lowly of yourself and you think you're not being arrogant. No, you're being arrogant. Welcome once again, welcome to church. I'm a challenge right now. You're like, yeah, but I don't think much of myself. [00:20:56] What? That's undermining the gifts and grace of Jesus Christ. [00:21:00] That's not. That's not humble. That's not humble. That's called insecure. Okay, Right. So. So we don't think too lowly of ourselves, and we don't think too highly of ourselves. We don't rock around being like, look how great I am, man. I can do it all. No, you can't. I've run into so many guys who are like, I can do it all. I'm like, no, dude, just. I'll ask your wife and she will tell me that you cannot do it all. All right? [00:21:29] So the gift is being honest and humble with who you are. [00:21:38] Often in my work, I use some things called, like, working genius, enneagram 7 primal questions. These assessments that you can take that can help you get a good picture of what you're good at and what you're not good at and what you're mediocre at. And what I want to encourage you is to get real mirrors in your life. [00:21:57] I'll just. I didn't say this in the first service, but I'm going to say here. So the higher you rise in success, the less real mirrors you will have. I'm talking to successful people in the room right now, just for a moment. The higher you rise in success, whether that is financial or the corporate ladder or whatever position that is in, the higher you rise in success, the more you don't have real mirrors. That's a warning. [00:22:20] You do not have real mirrors. You have people who will tell you what you want to hear. Cause they want something from you. [00:22:27] And you need to do the hard work of asking for real mirrors. People who will say to you, this is what you do really well. And this is where you're terrible. You. You have a blind spot. And by the way, it's called a blind spot by definition. Cause you can't see it. Right? [00:22:46] And so you need to have real mirrors in your life. I didn't say that in the first service. That was for somebody. All right, you're welcome. [00:22:59] So you are God's workmanship. You are his craftsmanship. You are his masterpiece. And so what do you do in the midst of unknown? What do you. What do you do in the midst of hardship? What do you do in these moments where you say, what should I do now? [00:23:16] We stay humble. We receive the gift of grace, and then we receive the gift of just being yourself. [00:23:24] Of just being yourself. [00:23:27] Bring what you have before God and allow him to use that. We stay humble. We stay humble. We stay humble. And once we've stayed humble, once we've embraced this gift of grace, and once we've embraced the gift of being ourselves, then we get to respond with the other side of this passage, and that is this. We. [00:23:54] We get to work. [00:23:56] We get to work. [00:23:58] Once we've embraced the being humble, staying humble, then we get to work. Paul knows that the church he's talking to has a lot of work to do. [00:24:14] If Paul didn't do his job, if Paul met Jesus and wasn't transformed by Jesus and wasn't sent to the Gentiles and didn't listen to the assignment that God had given to him. Do you know what we would be doing today? [00:24:28] Something else. [00:24:30] We wouldn't be here if Paul didn't do his job. If the church in Ephesus didn't do its job, we would most likely not be sitting in this room together studying scripture together. God had called them to specific purposes to get to work. To get to work. [00:24:50] Here's what Paul continues to say. [00:24:54] He says this. You were created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God has prepared in advance for you to do. [00:25:07] This is a great word of encouragement to the church and a great word of challenge. It's a great word of encouragement because God prepared all the work ahead of you for you. [00:25:20] That's why we know the gift of being yourself is going to work. That's why we know the gift of grace is Going to work. The gift of grace leads to the gift of being yourself, which leads to doing the work that God already prepared for you to do. So what should you do? [00:25:36] You should do what God asks you to do. [00:25:41] You should take the gifts and the abilities that he has given to to you, and you should step forward into the work that he has for you. Paul was serious about this and encouraging to them in this, and I want to encourage you, step into the work that God has uniquely gifted you toward. [00:26:04] You have what you need to figure out this moment. [00:26:10] What should you do? You should get to work. What does that look like? [00:26:15] It looks like a lot of things. Some of you should. Some of you should get into the scripture more and be like, ah, I don't know the Bible well. And I, you know, I'd like to know what to do in this situation. You should probably read the Bible a little bit. Okay. [00:26:29] Or some of you need to grow in prayer. Some of you need to go to a therapist, go talk to somebody. Right? [00:26:36] Some of you need to go apologize, say you're sorry, stay humble, and get to work. [00:26:46] See, it's encouraging because you can do this, but it's also challenging in this. [00:26:50] We have so much to do. Church, we have so much to do. Your neighbor needs the gift of grace. [00:27:00] Your children need the gift of grace. [00:27:05] Your spouses need the gift of grace. [00:27:09] Our schools need the gift of grace. [00:27:16] And if Jesus asks, who will I send? And he hears nothing, what's going to happen? [00:27:25] See, God doesn't need you to be special. He needs you to be available. [00:27:28] Hear me well. Some of you are chasing special. [00:27:33] You want likes and you want hearts and you want Instagram credibility. [00:27:40] God doesn't need your special. He needs you to be available because he has good work for you to do. [00:27:52] He has a world that needs his love and his grace and his forgiveness. And he needs you to be the mouthpiece for him, that you might share with your life and your words and your actions and your intentions the goodness and the grace of God, who has changed you, just like he changed Paul, just like he changed the church in Ephesus, that His kingdom may come and that his will might be done on earth as it is in heaven. Listen to me. Listen to me. Get to work, okay? I'm fired up. Get to work. You got work to do this week. [00:28:31] You have work to do this week, and you've been given everything that you need for that work. I was sitting backstage in 2021, and I was thinking about exits. [00:28:46] Where am I gonna go? [00:28:48] And that led into a big, long conversation about, okay, what should I do now? [00:28:55] Bob was super gracious. Our elder board was super gracious. You don't always get to hear these stories because they're behind the scenes. And we didn't share much of this with you guys. [00:29:04] But they sent me to a guy who helped me do some life planning, a guy named Lance Witt, who was a former pastor of Saddleback. [00:29:12] He's the executive pastor of a big church in Southern California. And he helped me work through a life plan. [00:29:17] And through that, I got to write a mission statement and value statements and do a five year vision for what I wanted for life. And. And I got to do all of this exploration on God's grace in my life and my giftedness in my life, and got to kind of chart this all out on papers. And so Lance started coaching me and I was like, man, I'd love to do something like this. And so the way we kind of transitioned out of here was that I launched a business called Legacy Guides. I see some of my guys that I've been on trips with in the room. [00:29:47] We've done 75 trips with this company that I started called Legacy Guides, where we help. [00:29:52] We help guys go and fish and hike and hunt and have so much fun. But we do this deep dive into self discovery and looking into who God made them to be. And do you know? Do you know? [00:30:04] This is gonna sound boasty, but it's not boasty. Do you know why I'm good at it? Cause God made me for it. There's nothing about me, guys. Nothing about me. The guys I work with are heroes. I'm not much those guys are heroes. [00:30:17] But God used the gifts and the talents and the abilities in my life, and he really used the brokenness of the moments that I went through to craft me and mold me into the man that he wants me to be. That I might have impact on other men who need to be the men that God desires for them to be. I just did my 75th trip. It's crazy. [00:30:44] And God called me back to Big Sky. So I came from Big sky and I went back to Big Sky. We just moved into our house and I'm pastoring my church back up there. And it is such a redemptive season. Why do I share that? Because God. [00:31:00] God has a story. [00:31:02] God has a story for you in the midst of wherever you are right now, in the midst of that question that has either found you right now or will find you someday. [00:31:15] And you know how to answer that question. You're going to stay humble and you're going to get to work. [00:31:28] For it is by grace you have been saved through faith. [00:31:33] This is not from yourselves. It is a gift of God, not by works, so no one can boast. [00:31:40] For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, I thank you for everyone in this room and listening online. [00:32:02] And I thank you for what you're allowing them to go through. [00:32:06] I thank you for the great triumphs in their life, the great victories in their life. And I thank you for the valleys. [00:32:17] And I pray that you would use all of these things for your kingdom and for your glory. [00:32:27] And I pray God now over the hard things in this church, God, the relationships that are broken, the finances that are broken. [00:32:39] I pray over the internal voices that are not healthy and helpful. [00:32:46] Pray over the lies. [00:32:48] And I pray for truth. [00:32:51] I pray Jesus for grace upon grace upon grace. [00:33:02] And I thank you, Jesus, that you're with us. [00:33:05] You never leave us, you never forsake us. [00:33:09] Pray that you would turn graves into gardens. We pray in Jesus name, Amen.