-alrighty, let’s get into this!
-for the weekend we are going with the theme Elemental, in case you hadn’t guessed. The whole idea of this is we are going to explore faith from the ideas of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water.
-because faith and growing in God is not one way, one thing, one set of steps and then you’re there. We want you guys to get a bigger picture and be experiencing and learning about God in all the ways you can.
-so for today, we start with earth. [SHOW DIRT]. Here it is, earth. This is dirt.
-exciting, isn’t it? But do you realize how much of this there is? There is about 12 million square miles of dirt that is suitable for growing things on earth right now. To give you an idea of how much that is, only about 4.71% of the earth’s surface has usable “earth”. There’s water, mountains, deserts, etc.
-so even though we think of earth as everywhere, it really isn’t. There’s very little. And to replace it, it takes 100 years to get 1 inch of soil naturally (we do things to speed up the process).
-earth is a lot more precious than we think. But a lot of people don’t see it as precious. They see it as messy.
1. EARTH IS MESSY
-when I was growing up, I loved to play outside. I know some of you don’t know what that’s like, but this was a time before xbox. My TV got two stations when it wasn’t cloudy. But my first house, it was in the middle of nowhere on a county road, we had two neighbors within a mile, a little house on 3.4 acres of land surrounded by corn.
-and one thing I learned about playing outside, you get dirty. Now my mother, she didn’t like dirt. She wouldn’t be happy when I came in covered in dirt. I had a dog named Charlie who in the spring would go outside, disappear for a long time (once was three days), and he would be in the corn fields in the mud and come home just black. Mommy made us get rid for that dog…
-but it’s true. Earth is messy.
-why do I bring that up? Because growth is messy.
-look at your physical growth. How many of you have hair grow in straight and perfect? What about pictures of you growing up? Missing teeth, acne, for some of you you had to grow into your ears.
-and it doesn’t happen straight either. You don’t grow exactly four inches per year. There are growth spurts, some of them even hurt.
-this happens to your brain too. One part of the front of your brain hits two major growth spurts, one at 3-4 years old, one when you’re about Jr. High. That’s part of why they act like 4 year olds.
-in all ways of life, growth doesn’t look like this [SHOW ARROW]. Instead, it looks more like this [SHOW CRAZY ARROW].
-this is a quote from a guy name Mike Yaconelli, he was one of the first people ever to help youth pastors. “Spirituality is anything but a straight line; it is mixed-up, topsy-turvy, helter-skelter godliness that turns our lives into an upside-down toboggan ride full of unexpected turns, surprise bumps, and bone-shattering crashes. In other words, messy spirituality is the delirious consequence of a life ruined by Jesus who will loves us right into His arms.” (Messy Spirituality, p. 17)
-growing spiritually, doing what we can to learn about and be like Jesus, it’s messy! Ever wonder why sometimes you feel like God is next to you, the next day He’s a thousand miles away? You’re not bad, it’s how growth works. Growing to be like God is messy.
-here’s an example. James and John, two of the disciples. They were two of the only three to see Jesus raise a girl from the dead, to be at the Transfiguration, to be asked to go a little further and pray with Jesus. How did they measure up spiritually?
**Luke 9:51-56 -> 51When the time was coming near for Jesus to depart, He was determined to go to Jerusalem. 52He sent some messengers ahead of Him, who went into a town in Samaria to make everything ready for Him. 53But the people there would not welcome Him, because He was set on going to Jerusalem. 54When James and John, followers of Jesus, saw this, they said, “Lord, do you want us to call fire down from heaven and destroy those people?” 55But Jesus turned and scolded them. [And Jesus said, “You don’t know what kind of spirit you belong to. 56The Son of Man did not come to destroy the souls of people but to save them.”] Then they went to another town. (NCV)
-now does that sound like spiritual people to you. “Hey Jesus, they aren’t being nice, can we pray for fire from heaven to burn the crap out of them? In Your Holy Name of course.”
-and what about this one?
-Mark 14:32-35a, 37-41 -> 32They went to the olive grove called Gethsemane, and Jesus said, “Sit here while I go and pray.” 33He took Peter, James, and John with Him, and He became deeply troubled and distressed. 34He told them, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with Me.” 35He went on a little farther and fell to the ground. 37Then He returned and found the disciples asleep. He said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Couldn’t you watch with Me even one hour? 38Keep watch and pray, so that you will not give in to temptation. For the spirit is willing, but the body is weak.” 39Then Jesus left them again and prayed the same prayer as before. 40When He returned to them again, He found them sleeping, for they couldn’t keep their eyes open. And they didn’t know what to say. 41When He returned to them the third time, He said, “Go ahead and sleep. Have your rest. But no—the time has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners.” (NLT)
-if Jesus told you He was about to die, please pray, what would you do? These disciples, great men of God, they slept.
-Jesus understood it too, spiritual growth is messy. It doesn’t always go the way we like.
-even after we are growing, it usually doesn’t look the way we think it should, or worse, how others think it should look.
-have you thought about how unorganized, how messy, how just crazy our world looks?
-see, we like things orderly and nice, but nature is rarely like that. Trees don’t grow straight with perfect globe boughs, rivers don’t flow straight, mountains aren’t smooth and animals are not quite or sing in tune with each other.
-in The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe there’s a scene where Aslan visits the queen’s castle. In her courtyard are all the creatures she’s frozen in stone. They are set up symmetrical and nice and everything is quiet and orderly. Then Aslan breaths on the and brings them back to life. Here’s what Lewis wrote:
The courtyard looked no longer like a museum; it looked more like a zoo. Creatures were running after Aslan and dancing around him till he was almost hidden in the crowd. Instead of all that deadly white the courtyard was now a blaze of colors; glossy chestnut sides of centaurs, indigo horns of unicorns, dazzling plumage of birds, reddy-brown of foxes, dogs and satyrs, yellow stocking and crimson hoods of dwarfs; and the birch-girls in silver, and the beech0girls in fresh, transparent green, and the larch-girls in green so bright that it was almost yellow. And instead of the deadly silence the whole place rang with the sound of happy roarings, brayings, yelpings, barkings, squealings, cooings, neighings, stampings, shouts, hurrahs, songs and laughter. (C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, p. 137)
-God is the master of organized chaos. I have never heard the birds sing together in the morning, but I have heard many different birds all singing and I love it. It sounds cool.
-sometimes our spiritual growth can look like organized chaos. I know it sounds odd and doesn’t make sense and we want things to be straight and logical, but spiritual growth is not a straight line, it is not something in many ways you can plan, which make Liz and I so happy. And that’s also why we don’t take it personally a lot when people are upset or they aren’t growing like “we” would like them to. It’s just how God works. Some people see God in a sunset, some have to be knocked off their donkey like Saul. That’s just how it works.
-but as messy as earth is, it’s necessary.
2. NUTRIENTS ARE IN THE EARTH
-I think everyone who has taken fourth grade science knows that you need three things for a plant to grow, sun, water and dirt.
-why dirt? It’s not because of the plant needing the actual soil. Hydroponics allows plants to grow without dirt, on one condition. You have to supplement the water with what is important in the dirt. The nutrients.
-healthy dirt contains nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium primarily with other things like calcium, magnesium, sulfur, zinc, manganese and others. The reason plants grow in dirt is because that is where their food comes from. We need dirt to grow. We need the nutrients.
-spiritually, we need nutrients too. They’re necessary for growth.
**II Pe. 3:17b-18a -> 17Be careful so you will not fall from your strong faith. 18But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. (NCV)
-the way to make sure you hold onto your faith, grow. And it the verse mentions two ways to grow, in grace and in knowledge.
-so we have to bathe ourselves in those nutrients, grace and knowledge.
-the question is where do we get those?
-grace comes by living it. We seem to think that growing in grace is growing in experiencing grace. I don’t think that’s it. We grow by giving grace.
**Col. 1:9b-10 -> 9We pray that you will also have great wisdom and understanding in spiritual things 10so that you will live the kind of life that honors and pleases the Lord in every way. You will produce fruit in every good work and grow in the knowledge of God. (NCV)
-when you live the kind of life that honors God, you produce fruit. After all, that’s what we’re called to do, grow not just so we can be big and strong, but to produce fruit and help others, give them nutrients to grow up big and strong, so they will give nutrients to others and so on.
-so we grow in grace, and knowledge.
**Col. 3:17 -> 17Let your roots grow down into Him, and let your lives be built on Him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness. (NLT)
-rooted in Christ, growing strong in the faith you were taught, which is given through God’s Word.
**John 17:17 -> 17Make them holy by Your truth; teach them Your Word, which is truth. (NLT)
-that would be Jesus praying this prayer for you and me the night before He was crucified.
-we get our nutrients from God’s Holy Word. We should be doing what we can to learn everything that is in it. There are stories to learn from like we talked about at Christmas, songs, prayers, different sections meant to teach you how to live, all sorts of things to learn from.
-the scary thing about our world right now, many people are lacking these sources of nutrients. Let’s go back a few hundred years, it was common for people who got an education that it would include Bible teaching. What about living like God wants us to, showing grace, when you watch people drive, do you see people showing grace? Usually all I see are frowns and fingers, but that might be my driving.
-we have to surround ourselves in that dirt, in living grace to people, in learning God’s Word and living it out every day.
-but there is something difficult to that. Very seldom do you find dirt where food just grows:
3. YOU HAVE TO WORK THE EARTH TO GET FRUIT
-things very seldom just grow. You need to put in a lot of work. That’s even Scriptural. Go back to the Garden of Eden when things did just grow. Sin entered and the earth paid.
**Gen. 3:17-19a -> 17And to the man He said, “Since you listened to your wife and ate from the tree whose fruit I commanded you not to eat, the ground is cursed because of you. All your life you will struggle to scratch a living from it. 18It will grow thorns and thistles for you, though you will eat of its grains. 19By the sweat of your brow will you have food to eat until you return to the ground from which you were made. (NLT)
-it is in the Bible that if you want something from the ground, you will need to work at it. Things do not just grow.
-and it’s not like a little bit. Anyone here ever tried to grow something in a garden? It isn’t easy.
-even if you know what you’re doing and you get good soil and feed it the right nutrients and extra water when it needs and whatever, it’s still hard. Some ground will grow nothing no matter how hard you work at it. I was reading one study that said Canada, bread basket to the world (all the prairies grow wheat for the world), out of all the land Canada owns, only 4.96% is suitable to grow crops. Everything else is too rocky, to wet, too whatever.
-that takes a lot of work to make that little tiny bit of land produce enough to do what you need to grow for all the people to eat.
-but if you are willing to do the work, you can get big rewards.
-go back to this soil idea. Everyone knows my wife loves Disneyworld. I know, shocker. But I like all the behind the scenes stuff, all the “how do they do it” stuff that ruins the magic for Lorie. But we did a behind the scenes tour of EPCOT’s seeds tour, and in those two little greenhouses they grow all the food (other than beef and chicken) for all the parks. Every single piece of food you eat at Disneyworld is grown at EPCOT.
-now, they can do that because unlike farmers, they get 100% of the profits from the restaurants, and park ticket money as well. But they have spent a lot of time, effort and money on trying to work on how to grow the most they can from the soil. They have grown so much they are in the Guinness book of world records for the most tomatoes from one plant, one ten foot tree in a planter, over 32 000 tomatoes, 1 151.84 pounds from one vine.
-how did they do it? They learned all they could then they got to work.
-I think with our faith we need to get to that point. Learn all we can so we can put it to work.
**Col. 2:6-7 -> 6And now, just as you accepted Christ Jesus as your Lord, you must continue to follow Him. 7Let your roots grow down into Him, and let your lives be built on Him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness. (NLT)
-for our faith to grow we are supposed to be growing our roots down into the soil of God, but our lives are to be built on Him. Built, building, work. We are supposed to let God be our foundation, but at the same time how we live our lives day to do, that we build upon the foundation. We have to do the work to build our lives.
-the problem is people want strong buildings, they want the fruit from the garden without the work of planting the garden. They don’t want to wait through the bad weather and the summer heat and see what grows.
-your spiritual journey, hopefully, it’s a long haul marathon type journey. Back to our idea of spiritual growth, the jagged crazy line, you have to let that line play out. If you bail when the line starts going down, it won’t go back up again.
-spiritual growth is messy. You have to get dirty, you have to work, and even after you do everything that seems right, it still doesn’t feel like growth sometimes. I know people who have gone on spiritual retreats like this or Chrysalis and they come home and don’t feel any more spiritual, sometimes less, than when they left.
-that just happens. But the other side of that is just because you mess up or things go wrong that doesn’t mean that God doesn’t want to use you. The Bible is full of stories of great people who did amazing things for God and their spiritual growth was [WAVE HAND CRAZY].
-the only difference between them and those that fell, they didn’t give up. They messed up and still tried to serve God. They felt miles away from God but still read their Bible and prayed and did the things they knew they needed to do to grow.
-so don’t give up. Keep your hands dirty. If you don’t feel spiritual, it’s okay. But don’t wait to feel spiritual to serve, pray, study, grow. Do it anyway. That’s the key. Farmers don’t work the ground only when they think something’s growing or only when they see growth. They work it anyway. We need to work the ground of our spiritual lives no matter what. Our lives will be messy, but we need the nutrients even in the mess.
