The Religion of Busy

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 good to have you here today. And I think this is going to be a fun series to begin just for the next four weeks and to start today. So I kind of have to define what do I mean by secular in the first place and then what's this whole thing going and where it's going. We'll get to that. We're going to start with a couple of passages, words from Jesus himself, from the Gospel of Matthew. You can follow along, by the way, through the You version of the Bible. There's a wonderful little extra in the more section called the events and you hit that and you hit your location here. Thrive Community Church comes up and all the notes for this message come up, including the texts, the scripture texts. So that's kind of fun to follow along and when you take notes, it saves it and you keep them, right? Is that the way it works, Kathy? Yeah, cool. You have them all. You're better than me. You asked me on Tuesday what I preached last, you know, I was like, I'm working on the next one. That's, I mean, I'm just always, anyways, okay. So we're in Matthew chapter 6 and then in chapter 11 we're going to read today. Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life. What you will eat or what you drink, nor about your body, what you will put on, is not life more than food and the body more than clothing. Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? At the same time, Jesus declared, I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that you have hidden these things from the wise and the 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. Before we get into this message, I just do want to say, hey, welcome back, Andy. Andy Blankenship had surgery just 10 days ago. And we, I think a lot of people here and across, a lot of Christian friends from all over have been praying for you and we're just so thrilled that I know it's going to be a long recovery yet, but we praise God to where you are already. You know, I think the doctors and surgeons at University of Miami are probably amazed that you've made this progress so far. It might not feel like it, okay, but anyways, it's great to have you here and to see how well you're doing. Okay. I don't know if you probably will agree with me on this. America has become more secular than it ever has been. Does that make sense? Because right now, if you did, Pew Research actually did a survey of religious trends in America and they asked all the adults across the United States, your religious preference, and now the category of nones has grown to 23% of America. They put none. They don't want to say they're anything in particular. And in the younger generations, millennials and younger, that is at 35%. So that does not mean we are less religious. It just means we don't identify with a specific religion. Okay. David Zahl wrote a book called Seculosity, and that's where I kind of gotten the word secularist from. And in it, it's a worthy read. And in it, he says this, the marketplace and replacement religion is booming. We may be sleeping in on Sunday mornings in greater numbers, but we've never been more pious. Religious observance hasn't faded apace secularization so much as migrated. And we've got the anxiety to prove it. We're seldom not in church. Fascinating insight, isn't it? I think he's right. Now if you look at religion in terms of creeds and rituals and church attendance and buildings and organizational charts and things like how much people pray and do this and that, you'd probably say America's becoming less religious. But if you look at the way religion traditionally has functioned in people's lives, and now look at how people are functioning without religion, you find what's really happened is just a switcheroo. They're now using secular things to fill the gap that religion used to have in their lives. It's gone from simply from going to church to going to soul cycle. From placing trust in a higher power to finding purpose and meaning in work becomes the end all and be all. From the big guy upstairs to that romantic relationship becoming the purpose I am here and what will complete me. So over the course of the next few weeks, we're going to look at this where religion and the secular have joined together to create a new thing called secular. And how that actually is a problem...