Favor

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. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here, and it's good to be back. Yeah, I know. Yeah, and yeah, it's good to be on vacation, too, let me tell you. But it is good to be back. It's good to see you here. This fellowship is just wonderful. You all are so great. And we're back into this series called The Big Relief, the urgency of grace in a worn-out world. We use vacations to try to feel less worn out, right? And some of you have gone on vacations where you need a vacation from your vacation. Somehow we don't know how to relieve ourselves of some of our burdens, right? But we're not talking just about getting rest. We're not talking about taking a break or isolating ourselves today. And through this whole series, we're talking about the fact that the world is really a pressure point of performance, and demand, and laws, and rules, and coercion, and all of those things that get in the way of you being actually the human being God created you to be, let alone grades, but yeah, and exams, and all that stuff, right? Yeah, all of that stuff gets in the way, and we're talking today again about how the Christian faith, the gospel of Jesus Christ, who Jesus is, and the church as a result of who Jesus is, is to be, and can be, and is a relief. A relief from all of that. A real community. Today we're exploring this theme called the fact that God's favor, his just disposition towards you, okay? How he looks at you is a great relief from, well, rejection. You ever feel rejected just a few times? Just a little bit? It's always scary, you know, like when I asked Lisa to marry me, right? You're always afraid, right? You're always like, oh crap, she might really know me too well, and I don't even know what she said. It was so delirium, wasn't it, in the airport? It was in the airport. I know this is the weirdest thing, but it's a long story. Yeah, so I got off the plane. I was back, I was in Gainesville, or no, I was in Visalia, California as a pastor at that time, and Lisa and I had been dating. She was in Birmingham, Alabama. She grew up in Huntsville. We met there, and all that stuff. So I flew back, had friends of mine by a couple dozen roses, and I got this, I can't take credit, a female principal I had at this Christian school I was a part of, she gave me some ideas. So I'm sorry, honey, I know, you know I'm not a romantic person. But anyway, so I got a couple dozen roses, got on the Southwest flight, told the flight attendant, hey, I'm gonna propose right off this plane. So I need a couple, 20 people to take a rose with them, one at a time, off the plane. This was when you could actually show up at the gate. Now she almost missed it. She was almost late. Now her friend knew it was gonna happen, so she was panicking, but they did get there in time. And so they got off, I got off the plane, and you're just like freaking out. I don't know, guys, were you freaking out when you were gonna ask? You feel like, I don't even know what I'm doing here. This is the stupidest thing I've ever done. You feel totally vulnerable and weak, and if you don't, you probably are not really thinking through things. Because this is huge, right? Getting married, and David, how was it? Was it just so natural? It was just like, James, what was it like for you? Good. Well, that's a good sign, instead of keeping it on and going like this. Mulamu, how was it? I wonder, what was it like to propose to Martha? Oh, Martha, do you remember? We'll talk later. I gotta hear this story. Okay, we're so far off. This is not in the... But rejection is a real, real issue in our world. I think another word for it that we're gonna talk about that I find in this text today is contempt. Do you know what contempt is? It's just, it's the dismissive, you're less than, you don't belong. You not only don't belong, you shouldn't even exist. You're less than human. It's prevalent right now. But regardless of that, just the pressure to belong, to be welcome, to be accepted, man, it runs our lives. David Zoll, in this book called The Big Relief, writes, the pressure to belong, to be loved and liked by others, is less of a pressure and more of a longing. I don't think it's an overstatement to say it shapes our lives from the moment we are born until the day we die. We all long for a place to belong, okay? And it is wonderful to know, when you show up at a place, that you know when you open that door you're gonna be welcomed before you even open the door. It's a wonderful thing to feel like you don't even have to question what's going to happen, right? It's just such a relief to know that this is one place, one group, one organization, that I don't have to wonder if I'm gonna be the brown shoe at a black tie kind of event, where I'm just gonna feel like an outsider, where people are gonna look at me and wonder why I'm here. I am, t...