Fire - Luke 24

Do you know the only difference between myself and Michael Phelps? If you don’t know who that is - Michael Phelps is one of the most decorated olympic champions in world history. A top notch athlete - He has 28 olympic medals, 23 of those being gold. But besides that (and the fact that he’s 6 foot four) - do you know the only difference? Intention. Connected to that - here’s another question: did you know that you can do something a lot, and still be really bad at it? I mean, I know how to swim. I even took classes when I was a kid. I know all the different strokes - I love to spend time in the pool. But even if the two of us spent equal amounts of time in the pool - he’d still be a better swimmer, and the difference is intention. I’m in the pool to have fun. To splash some water and give my kids piggy back rides into the deep end. Whereas Phelps, he’s in the pool to train. He’s practicing his starting jump over and over and over. He’s practicing that cool little turn flip kick off - over and over and over. You know what I do when I get to the end of a pool? I just scoot over and tap it. Maybe grab the edge, put my feet on the wall crawl sideways, pretend like I’m a crab. I used to think practice makes perfect - but practice is not just repeating something over and over. You can do something over and over and not get any better at it. How about you? Do you have anything in your life - you’ve done it a thousand times, and you’re always bad at it? Repetition is only half the story, all by itself - it’s not enough. Practice, where you actually get better, is repeating with intention. You can do something a lot, and still be really bad at it. Phelps and Me? We can be in the pool the same amount of time, we’re both getting wet - but his swimming has intention, his swimming has purpose.

Today we are finishing up our series on the Holy Spirit - and each week we have spent time looking at all the different aspects of who and what the Holy Spirit is. We talked about the moments in God’s word when we describe the Holy Spirit as a Dove, or as wind, or as water. And today we are going to get into my favorite depiction of the Holy Spirit - Fire. And I’m just going to give you the big teaching up top. If you want to grow as a person, in any way at any level - intention is everything. If you can hang with me for the 25 minutes or so, we are going to jump into the world of Jesus, and in those words we will find incredible good news about how you can grow, especially when you’re dealing with suffering in your life. Think about it this way - if there is fire in your life, say you’re in the kitchen and there’s a fire - maybe you’ve got a gas burner and one of the circles is lit… what you do with that flame determines whether you get burned or get bacon. If you misuse that fire - stick your hand directly into it or something - you’re going to get burned. But if you put a frying pan on it, couple strips of bacon - you’re going to get breakfast. There’s going to be a lot of moments in your life - where you can’t change whether the fire is there or not - but what you do with it, that’s going to make all the difference in the world. The key is intention.

If you want to grab your bible - we’re going to be in Luke chapter 24. I’ll give you a moment to look that up, feel free to grab a bible off the back wall or look it up on your phone. I love to encourage people in the church - please feel free to bring your bible, and every time I say that I try to follow it up with this promise: if you bring it, I promise we will open it. Luke is one of the four books in the bible that tells the story of Jesus - and chapter 24 is right at the end of the book. It’s the actual last chapter of the book. Jesus has come - lived an incredible life, walked with his disciples for years. Performed miracles, given teachings, walked the land - he ate with people, he wept with them, he laughed with them, mourned with them. In the end he was crucified on a cross - died and was buried. And we come into the story just three days later. Three days after he was killed, some ladies came to properly embalm him with spices - but the tomb was empty.  Just some angels in there - giving them good news that Jesus is alive. In the greatest moment of triumph history has ever seen, Jesus rose from the dead, the tomb was empty and sin and death were defeated forever. Absolutely epic - the easter moment. And the ladies are absolutely blown away. They run from the empty tomb to tell everyone what the angels told them - they tell all the disciples, and some of them even had a race to go check and see that the tomb really was empty. All that happened in the morning - they get this incredible news, but they’re not sure what to think about all of that. And so then we get to verse 13, [read v.13-16]. Imagine the sadness and the suffering they are going through. They lost Jesus on Friday, and now it’s Sunday night. It’s been a devastating weekend, and they’re still kind of mentally dealing with this crazy story they heard from these ladies, and they’re walking to a nearby city of Emmaus, just sort of verbally processing everything out loud, and Jesus walks with them. They don’t recognize him, but he has been there all along. Now this is the first major thing I want you to grab onto from the text - even if you don’t recognize him, the Holy Spirit is with you through every trial. 

It keeps going, [read v.17-21]. So they’re walking in their sadness - it says it was written on their faces. And Jesus is walking with them through their sadness, but they don’t recognize him. And then they say, “We had hoped he was the messiah.” We had hoped. Do you hear the defeat in the past tense? It’s not - we still hope. They’ve lost their hope. We HAD hoped - before. Before the bad thing happened. We HAD hoped. Let’s make this real life for you, here today - do you have a “We had hoped” in your life?  had hoped our kid would have gotten a good job by now. I had hoped to to be married by this point. We had hoped our kids would have finished school. I had hoped I would have found the job opportunity by now. I had hoped the cancer would go away. I had hoped my niece or nephew would walk away from the substances that I know are killing them. I had hoped the doctors would have found a solution by now. I had hoped my grocery bill wasn’t eating so much of my paycheck. I had hoped things would get better in my marriage. These men look at Jesus with defeat and hopelessness in their eyes. We had hoped he was the answer to our problems. We had hoped he was the messiah, the one who would save us. 

And I love what happens next. First Jesus scolds them a little bit, but then - in verse 25 it says, [read v.25-27]. See, here’s what I want you to realize - we don’t read this book every Sunday because we want the people of the greater Grand Rapids area to know cute stories of amazing things that happened a really long time ago on the other side of the world. I think sometimes we reduce religion to that. Some people think we read this book because it’s magic, or because it has all the answers, or because we have to in order to call ourselves good Christians. Gotta do my bible reading homework. But the reason we have this book is that every page points us to Jesus. Second Timothy tells us that scripture has everything we need to find salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. Let me show you what I mean. I’ve used this graph before, but it’s one of my favorites - so let’s put that on the screen. The word of God, what we commonly call the bible, is not a single book. It’s a library. 66 different books written in three original languages over the course of hundreds of years - literally over a thousand years. Some of it is poetry, some of it is parable, history, wisdom, love songs, prophetic work, and even letters written from pastors to churches. It is the single most impressive piece of literature that has ever existed. What you are looking at is a diagram of every time the bible cross-references itself. Conceptual links between verses, connecting people, locations, phrases and more. There are 63,779 cross references in total. At the bottom you’ll see white bars - those are the chapters in the bible, starting with Genesis 1 on the left and the end of the bible on the right. The length of the bar is the number of verses - that super long one in the middle is Psalm 119. Look it up if you’re curious. The arcs you see are the moments when one part of the bible references another. All 63,779 times it does it. The color corresponds to the distance between the two chapters. Now hidden in those lines are roughly 300 prophecies about the messiah. Depending on your definition of prophecy, some scholars put the number closer to 200, some closer to 400 - but let’s ballpark it at 300 prophecies that came from the left side of the chart, that Jesus fulfilled on the right side of the chart. Now I don’t know which ones Jesus was pointing out to those two men on their little walk - he probably didn’t go through all of them. But basically what he was doing is walking them through the text - the writings of Moses and the prophets to see how it all connects and it all points to Jesus. 

I say all of this to give you this fundamental truth: If you are going through something, if you are struggling right now here this morning, one of the greatest things you can do is spend time with this book. But here’s the problem: Sometimes when we are struggling, a well meaning friend (or pastor) might encourage us: well, just make sure you’re spending time in the word of God. Make sure you’re reading your bible. And we dismiss it, because that doesn’t feel like growth. It doesn’t feel productive. It doesn’t feel like a solution. It feels like a cop out.  But this is the truth I want you to grab onto this morning - Getting into the word of God is a practice designed to remind you that your story is a single thread in a massive tapestry that God is weaving throughout history, and the picture on that tapestry is one of redemption. We look back to remind ourselves of what God HAS done throughout the history of his people - which gives us hope about what he WILL do with our lives tomorrow. That’s what Jesus did with these guys. Let me show you what God did yesterday, so you can feel better about what he is doing today - so we can get to tomorrow together.

The story finishes up, [read v.28-32]. I love this so much. He sits down to eat with them, and it’s the moment that he takes the bread and breaks it - suddenly they recognize him. Now some of you might know this. Why? Why did that action trigger their memories? When’s the last time he did that? Communion, right? Four days ago, Thursday night - Jesus sat down to have a meal with his disciples and that’s when he broke the bread - and told them, “this is my body, broken for you.” Jesus just spent, who knows how long, walking on the road to Emmaus - explaining all that cool, intellectually clever stuff about how the old testament connects to the life of Jesus - and that didn’t trigger their memories. It was the small, simple, repetitive act of breaking bread that opened their eyes and helped them recognize Jesus. This brings me to the last major thing I want you to see from this story. It is not always the epic mic drop moments that help us recognize Jesus. It is simple, repetitive acts of faithfulness. Think about it this way - when it comes to fire, lighter fluid is a lot of fun. It makes things hot and it makes them hot fast. Big fire. And easy. It is easy to make a big fire fast with a little lighter fluid. But it’s not lighter fluid that’s going to get you through a cold, dark night.  To last a long time you need coals - we need to be charcoal people in a lighter fluid world. 

Writer Ann Voscamp tells this story about a man named Cliff Young. Now, I read the book a few years ago, and I had to go look it up. Cliff ran what was called the Sydney to Melbourne Ultramarathon. It was a 544 mile race that lasted days. It’s an incredible feat of athleticism. It takes astonishing endurance to pull these off. And all these runners are sponsored by nike and adidas and all these professional athletes are getting ready, and on the day that the race starts, this guy shows up. And he is a 61 year old sheep farmer, and he shows up in overalls and boots. Like his FARM boots. And he says, “Hey, I want to run.” And they’re like, “are you insane? Do you have any backers? Any sponsors?” And he’s like, “No, it’s just that I herd sheep. And sometimes when there is a storm, I have 2,000 sheep on 2,000 acres and sometimes I’ll go out and run to get the sheep in. I don’t have a dog, and I don’t use a four wheeler or anything - I just run the sheep in. And sometimes that can take me like 3 days of running, and I figure this race is 5 days - and so I might be able to complete it.” And they’re like, “That’s crazy. You can’t run with these great athletes in your boots and your overalls. You run with sheep, you’re not prepared for this.” And I mean, just thinking about this 61 year old sheep farmer - I love this picture. But they let him sign up. And on the first day, the runners leave him in the dust. They didn’t even call what he was doing “running” they said, “it was more like shuffling - barely moving.” Now he showed up in work boots, but apparently one of the runners had an extra pair of shoes for him to borrow. And here’s my favorite detail. He had to take his dentures out - because he didn’t like the way they rattled when he ran. 

And apparently the normal way to do these long distance races that stretch over multiple days is that the runners would run for 18 hours straight, and then sleep for 6 hours, and then repeat for five days in a row. Run for 18, sleep for 6 hours and repeat. So they left him in the dust, ran for 18 hours, stopped to sleep. Cameras went away. And then apparently, this sheep farmer, Cliff Young - he just kept running. He didn’t know you were supposed to stop and sleep, and when he used to run the sheep, what he meant was that he would run for three straight days. So he just kept running. And he ended up shattering the world record, two days faster than any previous runs of that distance - the second place runner was 10 hours behind him. And at the end of the whole thing - they asked him, “hey, what are you going to do with the $10,000 prize?” And he said, “Oh, I didn’t know there was money.” So he waited at the finish line with the money, and handed it out to the next five runners. 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 6th place all got a gift of cash from him - because he felt bad taking it from them. He just wanted to run. And his big secret was not flashy athleticism or sponsorship or the best equipment. His big secret was that he was willing to run through the night. Even when it was the darkest, even when he was dead tired - he was willing to run through the night. In those moments in our lives when we are feeling beat up, and broken down and exhausted - it is our willingness to run through the night - simple, steady plodding, that will lead us to victory. It’s not lighter fluid that gets you through the struggles in your life - it’s the simple, repetitive acts of spiritual growth - prayer, reading your bible, going to church, these are the things that open our eyes to Jesus in our life. To be honest, there’s some really great stories of fire in the bible that I could have chosen to show you the work of the Holy Spirit. We’ve got pillars of fire, burning bushes, Elijah calling down fire from heaven - there’s some really cool moments with fire in the bible. But you’re probably not going to see that stuff in your life. These two guys who arrived in Emmaus - they looked at one another and said, “when he was explaining the scriptures to us - didn’t our hearts burn within us?” THAT is the Holy Spirit movement you are most likely to encounter - found in the simply, repetitive, consistent spiritual disciplines and it can absolutely change your life.  

Verse 32 said, [read it]. And then verse 33 keeps it going, [read v.34]. WITHIN THE HOUR they were on their way BACK to Jerusalem, where they JUST came from. This started as the bummer walk of depression to the nearby town of Emmaus - “we had hoped” was their theme song. But then they walked with Jesus, even when they didn’t realize it was him. They didn’t feel like Jesus was close to them, but they walked with Jesus through the scriptures, they broke bread with him - simple, unremarkable regular habits - and their eyes were opened. If you, in your life, walk with Jesus in simple, unremarkable, regular spiritual habits - your eyes will be opened. Jesus is going to appear to them a bunch more times, eat with them, spend time with them - but this moment is the start of it all. God took their suffering, their stress and fear and worry - and he redeemed it. This is the good news I want you to carry with you from here this morning into the rest of your life. Our God is a God who redeems suffering. I cannot get up here and claim that you will not experience suffering - that would make me a liar and a hack. I know you all too well to lie to you. I don’t know if the thing with your kid is going to have a happy ending. I don’t know if healing will come to the cancer.  I don’t know if the car is going to fall apart, or if the new job offer is going to come. I don’t know that - I’m sorry. But what I can tell you, with absolute confidence, is that there is a God who redeems suffering. I know that Heaven works backwards. Like CS Lewis said in one of his books, “Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.” The fires will come - what you need to ask yourself is are you going to be burned? Or are you going to be forged? Everybody gets burned. If anybody says otherwise they are either lying or trying to sell you something. Not everybody gets forged. Suffering does not stay suffering when it is in Jesus’ hands. God takes our suffering and turns it into a stepping stone to something better. Are you going to be burned? Or are you going to be forged?

Do you look at your life and think - the enemy is holding me to the fire? Do you see the struggles in your life as ways the enemy is trying to burn you? OR do you see your life as the forge? You ever see those videos of the blacksmiths shaping metal or glass blowing or something like that? They pull out these long poles with some molten metal on the end, and it’s red hot coming out of the fire, and then they beat it up with a hammer and stick it back into the furnace again. And they do it over and over until you start to see the shape of something beautiful. The only difference between me and Michael Phelps is intention. Don’t waste the fires in your life. Don’t waste your suffering by letting it stay suffering. Give it to God and let it become a stepping stone.

There’s this apologist named Taylor O’Lynn who was talking to some of atheist commentators in a recent video and they said to her, “look if following Jesus makes you happy, go for it. As long as you’re happy, I’m happy.” And she has this reaction where she says and I’m sort of paraphrasing here, she says “Woah - Jesus didn’t die to make me happy.” Hear that - Jesus didn’t die to make you happy. He was not tortured and brutally mocked, spit on and hung on a cross like a criminal so that you could feel better about myself. If your belief system is entirely contingent on how happy it makes you - I encourage you to look beyond the one feel good emotion that you like so much. We have the capacity to be fortified in the fire. We have the capacity to have so much endurance and to be stronger and stronger after every bad thing that we go through - that comes from a suffering God. That comes from a God that put on flesh, and took on more suffering that we could ever imagine. And it wasn’t to make you smile more. I can get happy from the world, serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin, cheap, cheap. I can pet a cat, scroll for a couple hours, take a walk and I’m happy. Do some exercise, get some endorphins going - happy. Or you can get happy all by yourself, and the world will show you it’s not hard. But it’s not about being happy, it’s about the fact that we are dying. Suffering without purpose is death. We are dying and we need life. It’s about  defeated death to give us life. Jesus did that. It’s not so that I can be happy, it’s so that I can be alive.”

A few years ago I was serving a church called Flushing United Methodist Church. We were there 5 years, and we loved that church and we still love those people. As some of you know, there was some church drama - they went through a big denominational split, and I realized I couldn’t stay. I lost my church. I know I’ve talked about it a bunch before - but the truth is it is the most significant source of suffering in my recent life. We left that church pretty broken up. And at that time, over 2 years ago - that’s when I first connected with the Zero Collective. I was talking to lots of different churches, exploring denominations and I actually met Brian we did a zoom meeting, I even met David Doerner at that time. This is 2 and a half, maybe three years ago. But there weren’t any job openings. Brian told me, “I’ll keep your number” - but I wasn’t holding my breath. We talked to other churches - I wound up taking a job at an amazing church called Aldersgate Church in Saginaw Michigan. And I have to tell you - when we arrived at Aldersgate, we were hurting. Licking our wounds and emotionally processing everything that had just happened - we were in rough shape. We put on a brave face, but I don’t think the good people of that church will ever know just how much healing they brought to my family. I was a campus pastor, and I served under a lead pastor by the name of Michael. Pastor Michael was an incredible leader, and I soaked up so much wisdom and leadership guidance from my time with him. He brought me back to a place where I could do ministry again. We were living day to day, week to week - and after some time at Aldersgate, we started to look towards the future with hope. Our suffering had turned into a stepping stone on the path God had for our family. And I looked back at Flushing and I thought about the things Pastor Michael taught me and I wondered, “If only I knew then what I know now - I could have done things different, maybe we wouldn’t have had to leave Flushing.” And then I had a different pastor friend of mine point out, “well - if you hadn’t gone through the suffering, do you think you ever would have come to Grand Rapids? You would have stayed in Flushing for years - You never would have been closer to family, you never would have joined the Zero Collective.” And I don’t know how much you guys realize - I’m ten times the pastor I was a year ago. Serving all of you - I have learned so much, I have grown so much, and I’ve seen I still have so much more to learn. You all have been such an amazing blessing to my life - and I realized that, as awful as losing my church family was - God redeemed that suffering, and used it to bring me here. I wasn’t being burned, I was being forged. So this is my challenge to you all - take the suffering in your life, and use it. Give it to God and let him use it to forge you into something beautiful. Let’s pray.