Fully Embodied Gospel

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. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here today. And hopefully, moms, you had a great week, and it wasn't just a day. It was just a day, huh? An hour? Was it even an hour? Some of you didn't have a happy Mother's Day, it was more like Vomit Day, I heard. Yeah. Yeah. Being a mom, you just can't be off the clock and say, well, today I'm kind of checking out and everything's going to be good, right? Yeah. Well, it's great to have you here. And we're in our fourth week of this series called Embodied, where we are emphasizing how God created this world and our bodies. Yes. And you are an embodied representative. An embodied representative or ambassador of God himself in this world. You bear the image of God and the goodness of God and the beauty of God and the character of God. That's what it means to be created in the image of God. Now, the problem is the word God. I know that sounds like it shouldn't be a problem. Everybody knows, right? If you, 90% or more even, of Americans believe in God or some divine power. See right there, you start already getting into the abstraction. N.T. Wright, I think he said it this way, people usually think they know what the word God means. He goes on actually and says, but they don't. He's a long-winded way of saying it at that point, but they don't because the word God is not a name. It's a title. It's a category in a sense. It's an abstraction often. Philosophers, religion, speculate on what it means to be God and then they come up, you know, and we've come up with them all and I use them and I think they're true. Omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, have you ever heard of the omnis before? And it's like, we can't grasp the depth of all of that. But what happens often for the majority of people, for me as well as you, I think we struggle with this because we make God into what I would say is our projection of what we want him to be. Ludwig Feuerbach, who actually critiqued Christianity on this, and I'm not recommending reading his book, but he put it this way, it is not as in the Bible that God created man in his own image, but on the contrary, man created God in his own image. We make God what we want God to be. Have you noticed how people talk about spirituality today? And whether they go to this or that or try this or that direction, it's whatever fits in with what I want, I need, I expect. Do you get it? Guess what? I think Craig Groeschel said it best. He was saying that, you know, that turns God into the celestial Coke machine, you know? You put in your prayer and get what you want out, you push the button. I would say it's like God becomes kind of the Marvel superhero, whichever one you want for the time, which is exactly just the right superpowers that you want for that time and place for what you need. But what do we mean by the word God? And we know what we've got, though, is a God who has come close, a God who has become bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. So close, he's closer to us and knows us better than we know ourselves. And we know all of this because God became a human being in Jesus Christ. And so I like what Richard Rohr writes. He says, we must begin by trusting what God has done in Jesus. We cannot return to a healthy view of our own bodies until we accept that God has forever made human flesh the privileged place of the divine encounter. We must reclaim the incarnation as the beginning point of the Christian experience of God. We're not followers of Plato, but must return to the Hebrew respect for this world and for all the wisdom and goodness of the body. The embodied self is the only self we've ever known. Our bodies are God's dwelling place and even God's temple. So today we are starting with Jesus. Because that's the only way we really know who God is. And that's the only way we're going to have a healthy understanding of our own embodied nature and who we are. Now the disciples, excuse me, the disciples didn't encounter God generically. They bump into Jesus or Jesus actually bumps into them. He's the one who calls them. He directs them. He gathers them in. He searches and seeks for the lost. Have you ever thought that the disciples, what he calls them, were kind of like the sheep that was lost? Well, they're pretty lost all the way, even as they are following him. That's the story of all of our lives. It's as how God called Abraham. Abraham didn't call on God. God called Abraham, right? And we see the call of God, the initial call of God is how it all starts. So the disciples bump into a very human Jesus. They think they're following at first a rabbi alone, but through his miraculous words as well as miraculous deeds. And then their own failures time and again of not getting it to the point where they actually think the worst thing is going to be happening through the ...