Christ the Center

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org It's great to have you here. You can follow along in the Bible app, as you know, about this sermon. There's notes there for it. We're in the second week of a series on rest, which is something I know it's kind of ironic to do it in the summer. Everybody's on vacation right now, but I don't think we're talking about vacation or just taking a break. We're talking about deep inner rest for your souls. As Jesus says here, we're gonna look at Matthew chapter 11 verses 25 to 30 as our main focus today. At that time, Jesus declared, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for such was your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him. Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy and my burden is light. So Walker Percy, I don't know if you know of him. He's a southern author with an attitude, and I guess he was alive while I was back in Baton Rouge, Louisiana working as a campus pastor at LSU. He lived in Covington, and I didn't know it. I would have loved to have met him. I guess he was at his bookstore all the time. He's written about six novels, and from a Christian perspective, often, and he wrote another book, which I think is kind of snarky, kind of fun. It's called Lost in the Cosmos, the last self-help book, and he basically, yeah, he basically says, you know, he's making a parody of the 65,000 or so self-help titles you can get off of Amazon, and our obsession with trying to figure out ourselves, and he says, it's so funny that we are lost in the cosmos because we don't know where we're from, we don't know where we're going, we don't know what we're doing. We're human. This is the Western civilization, a feeling of alienation, but I'm gonna let him say it in his own words. He says this in this book, you live in a deranged age, more deranged than usual because despite great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing. Here's another one. Why is it possible to learn more in 10 minutes about the Crab Nebula in Taurus, which is 6,000 light years away, than you presently know about yourself, even though you've been stuck with yourself all your life? So it kind of just explores this, right? Now, I've been amazed, like, I love teaching at FGCU, just adjunct faculty, a couple leadership courses, and I've kind of been a little amazed that I think they're endemic or emblematic of everyone in our society right now. They're kind of lost in the cosmos, many of them, not all of them, but many of them. So I get to do something different in this class, this leadership class. We get to explore their philosophy of leadership, and I make it a little deeper. I say, hey, this is your chance. Most other classes you have to learn just, you know, the plot of this novel in a literature class and compare this author to this author or whatever and do critical analysis of that, or you have to learn statistics, or you have to learn scientific equations, or applying this critical skill or whatever. In this course, you get to spend time asking the question, what is the purpose and meaning of your life? Why are you here? What are you here for? Right? And a number of the students look at me and say, what do you want me to write? In fact, that's what they've asked. They said, I say, I want you to write what you believe you are here for. So what are we supposed to write? Again and again, because they are, and the best many of them can do is write down a career path. Do you understand what I mean? And to me, that's kind of penultimate. That's not the ultimate. It's like, okay, I'm gonna do this for a living for 20, 30, 50 years. But why are you here? What are you here for? I had one student who was a second career student, nice guy. When we were exploring this, and I was asking him to write this down, and this was part of the midterm. What is the philosophy of your life? Why are you here? What are you here for? What's the purpose and meaning? And how are you going to use that in terms of your leadership? He looked at me and said, I don't think anybody can figure that out. And I said, well, you're not gonna figure it out, especially if you're not gonna ask the question. And a lot of people aren't even asking the question. They're okay with kind of being lost, having a good time. The more I think people ask that question, the more they ask the question of why am I here? What am I about? I believe, and that's ...