TRANSCRIPT:

I feel like today is a really important sermon for us to grab hold of, so much so that there was a moment this week where I was like, man, maybe I reshuffle things a little bit so we're not doing this one on a holiday weekend.

We'll kind of do something else for the faithful to show up on a holiday weekend and we'll hold this one to next week. But I was like, man, that's not the way we want to operate as a church. There's a reward when you show up on the holiday weekend.

And the reward is that we get to wrestle with a text that has a tremendous amount of potential to shape the way that you live your life. And that's not just preacher hype. That's the goal for today, because I think we would all agree with this idea that we are all building our lives one day at a time, one decision at a time.

And sometimes the younger you are, the more you need to wake up to that reality because you have this idea that like, well, at some point, I'll start building my life.

I'm like, no, no, you're building it right here, right now, one day at a time, one decision at a time. That's already happening for all of us in the room. The real question is which blueprints we're using to build those lives, right?

Like, what is the plan that shapes your days? Like, what is the framework that guides our decisions, right? It just makes sense when we talk about the world of building a physical house, right?

There's no builder out there who just starts to throw a bunch of materials together in the hopes that it's all going to work out at the end.

You know, whether you've ever been involved in a construction project or not, that any good builder is working off a set of blueprints that shows what it's all going to look like in the end, and gives a framework for making thousands of small

decisions. And most of us have a picture in our mind of what those blueprints would look like, but if you don't, I think we brought just a sample set that we're going to toss up on the screen, or yes, we are. Right? You've got this idea in mind.

This is no particular house. This is just a random house, but it shows you, all right, there's going to be some sort of dining table in the upper right, and there's a living room, and there's a bedroom, and all that kind of stuff.

This is not groundbreaking. You had this picture in your mind. I'm just wanting you to have that front and center to ask the question, do you have a blueprint for your life?

Like, do you have a picture that sort of shows how career and family and your finances and your physical health and your children and all of these, how does it all fit together?

Now, part of what I believe is you are working off some set of plans, whether you know it or not. It might be a blueprint for life that was handed down to you from your parents.

It might be, some of you are in a season of life where in many ways, the blueprint of your life is the degree requirements that you have to go after the academic pursuit that you have.

Right, some of us are of the age where you figured out that your kids' school and sports has a near comprehensive blueprint for your life. It will calendar out every waking minute for you.

Right, some of you joined the military and you're like, well, that came with a pretty comprehensive set of blueprints. Some of you have joined a law firm and it came with an equally comprehensive set of blueprints.

Or maybe there's a social media influencer that you find particularly compelling and you're allowing him or her to give you this set of blueprints, right? But you're working off something.

There's something in your mind that gives you a picture of what life is supposed to look like and how all the different pieces are meant to be put together.

The simple idea for this morning's sermon is that Jesus also has a set of blueprints for your life. Now, the question is, will you agree with me that the best possible life is found when we build off the blueprint that Jesus has for us?

Are we willing to architect our lives off of Christ's blueprint? It's a really important point because it reminds us that Christianity is not just a set of beliefs.

It is a way of life, that being a disciple of Jesus is not just about agreeing with certain theological truths. It's about building your life according to the blueprints that Jesus has drawn for us.

And here's what I love about this idea of Jesus drawing the blueprint for your life. There are some general precepts that he builds into every single house that he's building.

There's going to be some things that are common to all of us if we consider ourselves followers of Jesus. If you grab his blueprint, there's some things I can tell you to look for in your life.

They may be countercultural, but somewhere in there Jesus is trying to teach you how to love your enemies. That's not exactly what most of us were looking for, but I'm just telling you it's in the plan somewhere.

He's going to teach us how to offer our life as a gift to those around us. But he's not a one size fits all God.

He's not just building track home after track home after track home after track home after subdivision after subdivision after subdivision where we all end up looking the same. Jesus also has a specific plan for your life.

Your kitchen doesn't have to go where everyone else's does. Your kitchen doesn't have to have the same layout. It turns out your kitchen doesn't even have to have white cabinets.

You get to design your career. You get to pursue God's vision for your family. You get to steward your gifts, your talents, your abilities, your passions, in a way that will make your house distinct from everybody else's.

So this isn't just like, hey, here's some general ideas of what it looks like to be a good Christian, go ahead and do that. It's like, no, the Son of God knows you.

He loves you, and he has prepared good works in advance for you to do, and your best life comes when you follow the plan that Christ has for you.

That's really what James is getting at with this question that begins with a provocative and somewhat rhetorical question. Who among you is wise and understanding?

There is a way in which James is still thinking about the teachers that he started to bring into the conversation last week when we looked at James 3, verse 1, let not many of you become teachers, lest you be subject to a stricter judgment.

He clearly isn't totally done with them.

Because you would assume if you were to ask a question, who among you is wise and understanding, and there's some teachers in the room, you would assume those teachers would raise their hand and even somewhat sheepishly be like, well, I guess that

would technically be me. But I think it's a mistake to assume that this passage is directed just to teachers. I think it's very clear he has them in mind, but he is also writing to anybody that would consider themselves a leader in the church.

He's writing to anybody who would say, hey, I think I'm growing in spiritual maturity. He's in a sense writing to anybody in the congregation that thinks they're building a life that's worth emulating, and he's saying, okay, okay, here's the deal.

You think you're starting to figure this Christianity thing out. That's great. You think you're getting some traction.

Great. Let's just go test that. Let's see together how spiritually mature we really are.

Let's go see how wise and understanding we are, and his answer is going to go right back to which set of blueprints are you building off of? He's not going to use the word blueprints.

He's going to talk about it as a source of wisdom, but it's the exact same idea. What's your source of wisdom? What he believes is that our source of wisdom shapes the condition of our heart, which then dictates the quality of our life.

He's just going to draw this straight line from source of wisdom to condition of your heart to quality of your life.

He's going to do an extended compare and contrast between two different sources of wisdom, two different conditions of the heart, two different qualities of life, all of which is to say, hey, Restoration City Church, which lane do you want to pick?

Which way do you want to do this? Whose set of blueprints are you working off of? Are you working off Jesus's?

Are you working off an amalgamation of a bunch of other things? Or are you trying to write your own blueprint? Which one are you working with?

That's what he's after here. In order to help make some sense of it, we're going to reverse engineer this. Instead of starting with the blueprints, we're actually going to start with the quality of our lives and then work our way back.

Because James wants to anchor this conversation in the reality of what our day-to-day life looks like. Which blueprint we are using is ultimately shown by the quality of our lives.

If we go back to verse 13, he says, by his good conduct, he should show that his works are done in the gentleness that comes from wisdom. Right back to this question. You want to know if you're growing in Christ?

You want to talk about spiritual maturity? Notice what James does. He says, look at your life.

He doesn't say look to your academic degrees. He doesn't say look to your doctrinal precision. He doesn't even say how well do you know the Bible.

He doesn't even say, hey, here's 50 general knowledge questions about scripture. Let's see how well you do. The Bible is important.

Understanding theology is important. There's nothing wrong with formal theological education, but that's not what's on James' mind. He doesn't seem to care if you're a Calvinist or not.

He doesn't seem to care whether you speak in tongues or you don't. He's like, let me just talk about your life. It's classic James.

This is the guy who says faith without works is dead, right? But it's no different than what the author of Hebrews says when he encourages us to look to the life of our leaders and consider the outcome of their way of life and then emulate them.

Now, what James has in mind is really, really specific because he says, you want to talk about spiritual maturity, let's look at your good conduct.

That word good is really, really important because in Greek, there are two different words that can be translated good in the English language, right? The first is agathos. It is by far the more common one.

It's not the one that James uses here. The second is kalos. It's more, it's seldomly used, and it is the one he used here.

Agathos just means objectively good, right? Like brushing your teeth is agathos. Like it's good, you should do that, right?

Flossing, agathos, it would be that. Something is good. Kalos retains all of the meaning of agathos.

It doesn't compromise on that at all, but it adds into it the idea of something that is beautiful. James is not just saying, hey, do you do the right thing? He's saying, do you do the beautiful thing?

Kalos isn't flossing your teeth. It's going for a long walk with your spouse on the beach and watching the sunrise while you enjoy a good cup of coffee. It's an exquisitely prepared meal.

It's a mom lovingly serving her infant daughter at 3 in the morning.

It's a dad getting up on a holiday weekend and saying, I know we could do a bunch of things, and we will, but before that, we get to all that, we're going to go to church and we're going to worship Jesus. It's good, but it's beautiful.

So do you see what James is saying? What James is saying is, do you have a life that is becoming increasingly beautiful? Because that's what Jesus wants to build.

And then he gives us a picture of what that life looks like.

He's not talking about Instagram beautiful, he's talking about verse 17 and 18 beautiful, but the wisdom from above is first pure, then peace loving, gentle, compliant, full of mercy and good fruits. It's unwavering.

You're not an on again, off again follower of Jesus. You're not a do the right thing today, wrong thing tomorrow. You're just consistently pursuing God's will for your life.

It's without pretense. It isn't trying to impress anybody. It isn't trying to make sure that everybody recognizes that you're one of the most mature people in the church.

It's just like, man, I'm just following Jesus and I'm more messed up than you'd believe. All right, the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who cultivate peace. I really believe that Jesus offers us the blueprint for a beautiful life.

He's like, do you want that? Or are you settling for the alternative, which is verse 16, for where there is envy and selfish ambition, there is disorder and every evil practice.

So does your life look increasingly like James 17 and 18, or does it look increasingly like more disorder and every evil practice, right?

Every evil practice, obviously, a fairly exhaustive list, but what he's really focused on in this verse is different forms of disorder. That's the key idea.

So he's saying like, when you look at the wake of your life, do you see a series of broken relationships? When you look at your life, do you see finances that are totally out of control? Do you see a schedule that's out of chaos, out of control?

Do you just see a life that feels chaotic?

You know, our daughter Emma plays soccer and she had her first practice this past Tuesday evening, and I took her to kind of help her figure out which team was going to be hers and do the do the soccer dad thing.

It's a merciful respite from being the baseball dad. Soccer is so much faster and shorter. So I was like, yes, let's go do soccer dad.

And Emma's eight and she's on a team mainly with a bunch of other second, third graders and her coach, new coach, never played for him before. I like this guy. He's smart.

He's organized. He's a great communicator. He really has a plan for the practice.

I'm like, man, I'm a fan of Coach Lewis. And Coach Lewis gets to the end of practice and he huddles up these girls.

And he's like, all right, now it's time to start working on our team name, which if you've ever coached youth sports, you know this can go bad real fast. Right? Because they just start nominating different names.

And the first girl's like, we should be the bulging biceps. And it's like, okay, so not so much on self-awareness. You just see Coach Awareness, he's like, okay, that's a possibility.

Maybe something else. And some girls like flaming Doritos. And he's like, okay, yeah, it got a lot of support.

So you watch this very smart, very capable man. He's like, I do not want to spend my entire fall coaching the flaming Doritos. So I need to try to like get something else happening over here.

And he's like, I don't know, what about the phantoms? And they're like, what? No, what about that?

And he's just looking around. And finally this girl goes, she's like, we should just be the Chaos Monkeys. And Coach Lewis was like, no, no, we are.

And I'm like, I love this guy. I just want to be friends. Because he's like, we are not the Chaos Monkeys.

We are young ladies playing soccer and we are doing, and he just like does his whole thing.

And I was like, well, man, I mean, if you want reality, it's not bulging biceps, it's eight-year-old girls playing soccer, which looks a lot like the Chaos Monkeys. I'll get back to you next week.

They haven't voted yet on what the team is, although it seems like maybe Coach Lewis is trying to influence and they might become the Wolves. I don't know. I'm just asking, does your life look like it's being scripted by the Prince of Peace?

Or does it feel like at some point you handed over the reins to the Chaos Monkeys? And they're in charge. You don't know exactly who they are when they took over, but it feels a lot more like that than the Prince of Peace.

That's the question we get to wrestle with. And just remember, Jesus has an offer. He's like, it doesn't have to be that way.

I'd be happy to come in and offer you a fresh set of blueprints. Now, religion normally stops here of like, all right, which is it? And go get busy and clean your lives up.

But praise God, we have a Gospel that doesn't tell us to go clean up our own lives, but invites us to do the harder and the more meaningful work of examining the condition of our hearts, right?

Last week, we talked about the reality that out of the heart, the mouth speaks. That's really just a subset of what we read in the book of Proverbs. Proverbs chapter four, verse 23, guard your heart above all else, for it is the source of life.

This is the Bible's understanding of how you operate as a human being, that life flows from our hearts. So, it's no surprise that James is actually really interested in the condition of our heart that's underneath the quality of our life, right?

Go back to verse 13 with me. Who is wise and understanding among you? There's this question.

Let them show it by their good life. Are you living a beautiful life? By deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom.

James is arguing that a beautiful life flows from a humble heart. That same word that we get translated as humble here could also be translated gentle or meekness.

It's the same word Jesus uses, Matthew chapter five, verse five, in the Beatitudes blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. It's an idea best defined by Philippians chapter two, verse three.

Do nothing out of selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves. That's the heart of somebody who's following Christ's blueprint for their life. It's a heart of humility.

I mean, we could do more work to describe what that humble heart looks like, but this is one of those places where we're probably best served by following James's lead and looking at the alternatives to a humble heart, which we find in verse 14.

Bitter envy and selfish ambition. If that's what's in your heart, the chaos monkeys are going to rule your life. Bitter envy and selfish ambition.

Don't boast and deny the truth. So the question that we need to ask is, which one best represents our heart? Envy, selfish ambition, or humility?

And while it may be hard to detect humility in our hearts, how do you know that? It is not hard to detect envy and selfish ambition. And James is offering those to us as clear indicators of a heart that is out of line.

Envy is simply wanting what other people have. We all struggle with different forms of it. Right, some of us envy people's cars, careers, vacations.

Some of us envy people's spouses. Some of us envy people's singleness. It doesn't, whatever it is, it's that thing in us that looks at what somebody else has and says, I must have that too.

Now, what tends to happen is you look at that person and you say, well man, I wanna drive what he drives.

And you start to look at the life choices that he's made, because the thought is, well, if I just do what he does, then I could drive that kind of a car too. Do you see what you're doing though?

You're giving up on Jesus' blueprint and you're looking to your faux version of somebody else's blueprint and being like, well, I'll just do what he did. Well, I'll just do, because that would get me the car.

I'll just make the blueprint of my life, the blueprint of a senior executive at work, because I want to end up as a senior executive. And what you've subtly done is given up on Jesus' blueprint and started to follow somebody else's, right?

Whether that's somebody that you know in real life or somebody that you see online. Selfish ambition is probably even more destructive, right? Ambition itself, godly ambition is not bad at all, but selfish ambition is a problem.

And I can tell you exactly what James means by selfish ambition, but I have to do it by reading you a quote that feels a little spicy, because this word, selfish ambition, is very rare in the Bible. In fact, this is the only place that it's used.

Where you would actually go to understand its meaning is to the writings of Aristotle. And Aristotle used this in a very particular way, and there's a strong assumption that James knew what it was.

Douglas Moo, New Testament professor, says it this way, the only attested pre New Testament occurrence of the word comes in Aristotle, who uses it to describe the narrow partisan zeal of factional greedy politicians in his own day.

Thank God, we don't do that anymore, right? I was like, I'm not saying anything about, if you work on the hill, may the Lord bless you and let your light shine.

But you get the idea, we don't have a hard time picturing factional greedy politicians and partisan zeal. We know that. Apparently nothing new under the sun, but we also know it in our own hearts.

The goal isn't to take a shot at other people who serve in a particular capacity.

The goal is to say, wait a minute, we're all capable of that exact same behavior, where we manipulate a system that's designed for the good of others and we use it to pursue the good of self. That's what he's after.

He's saying, this thing that is designed to be a blessing to others, you make it all about you, your name, your status, your money, your whatever it is, right? That's what we have to be careful of. Sure, you can do it with politics.

You can also do it serving in the church, right? You can do it as an elected official. You can also do it as a stay at home mom.

It's that idea that I'm gonna make this work for me. I'm not motivated by what's best for other people anymore. I'm just looking out for number one.

I'm after myself. And that lives in every single one of us. I want what you have.

I want what I want and I want it now. And James says, hey, you're gonna detect that from time to time.

Let that be a sign that you're wandering from Christ's blueprint and get back on his plan, which is gonna feel more like a humble heart that isn't trying to use people, but is trying to serve people.

That isn't trying to advance self, but is trying to, Philippians, to consider others more important than myself. And then he says, okay, finally, we've done all this work. Your life and your heart, it brings us back to the source of wisdom.

We come right back to that opening question, which blueprint is underlying the entire thing? One more time, verse 13, who among you is wise and understanding?

By his good conduct, he should show that his works are done in the gentleness that comes from wisdom. That's what he's after. The gentleness that comes from wisdom.

And he, two sets of blueprints. Verse 17, the wisdom from above, the wisdom of God revealed in his word, by his spirit and through his son, or verse 15, the wisdom that does not come from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic.

By the way, James is not saying that everything that doesn't come from above is earthly, unspiritual, and demonic. Right? Sometimes we overstate the case of like, if it doesn't come from God, it's just all straight from Satan.

And I'm like, well, that's not really what he's saying. He's using a particular literary device. It's a crescendo where he's saying, hey, if the wisdom comes from God, go with that.

If Jesus wrote the blueprint, go with that. If not, your alternative could just be earthly. I mean, it represents maybe the best of human thinking.

It just doesn't have the advantage of being offered by a sovereign, all-knowing God. Right? But not everything earthly is demonic.

He's like, it just may be, you may be settling for second best. You either accept the wisdom from above, or maybe it's just unspiritual. It's a really good point.

It would make sense. Except for the fact that Jesus rose from the dead, is alive and well at the right hand of the Father, is interceding for us, and has all authority in heaven and on earth. It's your best thinking.

You just are forgetting about the power of Christ and the reality of the Spirit in the world. Or, maybe it really does come from the evil one. Maybe it really does come from a demonic source that is opposed to all the things of God.

He's just saying, which blueprint? You want the wisdom from above? Jesus' blueprint?

Or do you want something less? Jesus, by the way, was passionate about this question. The reason I said, today matters.

This idea, which blueprint are you using, is essentially the one Jesus leaves his hearers with at the end of the Sermon on the Mount.

Therefore, everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock.

Whoever takes my blueprints and starts to build off of them will have a humble heart and a beautiful life, you could translate it. The rain fell, the rivers rose, the winds blew and pounded the house.

There's no way to get out of the trials, pains, and pressures of life in a fallen world. But at the end of the day, the house that's built on Christ didn't collapse because its foundation was on the rock because they had the right set of blueprints.

But everyone who hears these words of mine and doesn't act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. All kinds of different sand out there.

But the rainfall, the rivers rose, the winds blew and pounded the house and it collapsed. It collapsed with a great crash.

It was essentially Jesus had just given what is probably the most concise summation of his blueprint for life, the Sermon on the Mount. And he's like, oh, what are you going to do with it? You going to get busy building off this?

Or you going to do something else? You going to try to borrow a little bit of Jesus and use it when it seems helpful? Or are you just going to go all in with all of this?

Now, here's what you got to do. It's not enough to just go blueprint shopping. You actually have to start building.

I was thinking about that this week, reading a book from an author named Charles Duhigg. He's a journalist and author. He's written a number of different books.

He was the guy that wrote The Power of Habit. If you've read that, he also wrote a book Faster, Smarter, Better. And that's the one I'm working my way through.

Right now, it's his book on productivity. It's great. Highly recommend it.

But in this book, he tells the story of Avondale Elementary School in Cincinnati, Ohio.

And he tells the story of a teacher named Nancy Johnson, who was a significant part of what they called the Elementary Initiative in Cincinnati and in Avondale Elementary School.

And when Nancy went to work at Avondale Elementary, it was by any and every measure a completely failing school. Test scores were abysmal, faculty retention was virtually non-existent, crime was rampant.

I mean, just everywhere you look, this was a school that was past the point of crisis, so much so that the school district in Cincinnati was on the verge of shutting it down.

But they were just like, I mean, yeah, okay, we've solved one problem, but then we're just going to distribute these students to other schools that are already overcrowded. And it's just going to make things worse.

So they kind of said, hey, we've got to give this one last shot, right? This elementary initiative.

And one of the things they were intrigued with in this school district is the district had spent a fortune on a whole data management, data analytics system that tracked these students and their academic performance in unbelievably precise ways.

And it generated all of these reports that were going to teachers, you're getting emails, just a dashboard of all kinds of information.

And they were really disappointed because despite having invested so heavily in this thing that seemed like it had so much promise to improve student outcomes, it was really two problems.

Number one, the teachers weren't paying much attention to the data at all. And that's no shade against teachers. It was just to like, yeah, look at the demands of my life.

Look at what I'm dealing with. Look at the kids selling drugs in the back of my fifth grade classroom. I don't have space to go read your 36 page PDF.

Like, you know, you understand that line of thinking. You've probably used some version of it in the last month or so. Like, I don't have time to read that report.

Right? We get that. But also this disappointment that this investment had produced no meaningful change.

But rather than scrap it, the principal of the school district, of the school decided to double down on it. But she had an idea. She said, look, here's what we're going to do.

This data has benefit. But what I'm going to do is require my faculty to go into a designated data room for two hours a week. And at first the faculty hated it.

They're like, are you kidding me? But to make it even worse, the goal of the data room was not, you know, study hall for grownups of like, sit here and I'm going to watch you read the report.

The principal said, look, what you have to do is you have to find a way to work with the data.

You're going to create index cards for each one of these kids, and you're going to start tracking the things that are interesting to you, or the things that you think could be most helpful.

You actually have to roll up your sleeves and work with this a little bit. And when that happened, some interesting things started to pop up.

There was an early example where one particular teacher decided that as long as I got to do these stupid cards, I'm not just going to track test scores, I'm going to track which questions the kids in my class get right and which ones they get wrong

on a particular test. And there was another teacher who taught a different section of the same grade who was like, okay, I'll do the same thing.

And what those two teachers figured out is like, hey, the kids that were in my class did really well on the science questions. Well, the kids that were in your class did really well on the math questions. Man, but my kids really messed up math.

My kids didn't do great with science. And they were like, hey, what if we just switch curriculum? We both use, your science curriculum seems like it's working better, your math, right?

Somebody decided to look at reading as a result of where people lived. And what they figured out was, oh, wait a minute.

The place where these kids were doing their homework was on the bus route home, that one of the greatest ways that they could improve reading proficiency was to make sure that each kid on the same bus line had the same reading assignments because

they were all helping each other with their homework on the ride home and that made a measurable difference. Anyway, my point is not to pretend like I understand educational philosophy or anything like that.

We're probably a little too deep in the weeds right now. My point is to say, as I'm reading this entire thing, I'm like, oh my gosh, this is Christian spiritual formation and this is the condition of the American Church.

This is it right here for us, right? Because you and I live in a day and age where we are drowning in data, right?

And we believe that if we just listen to one more podcast, read one more book, go to one more conference, listen to one more sermon, if we just get a little bit more data, we're finally going to crack the code.

We believe in transformation by information. But we're not working with the data that we have. It's just rolling over our eyeballs, it's rolling through our minds, it's rolling in our ears, but we're not working with it.

So I'm not opposed to podcasts. They're great. Listen to one.

We have one. You should read Christian books. That's great.

Go to conferences. Just make sure it's a good one. That's fine.

But if you want to grow, if you want to grow, you've got to work with the data. You want to grow. Here's what you need to do.

You take one piece of this morning's sermon and work with it over the course of the week. It may be as simple as, you're still back at K-Loss as an invitation to a beautiful life.

And you know that your problem is, at the end of the day, you consistently settle for the easy thing. That's what you pick. You pick the easy thing.

And you're like, all right, but that's not Jesus' best for my life. I'm not just going to do the easy thing. I'm going to upgrade to the good thing.

And I'm going to ask myself, what's the beautiful thing? And you're going to carry that question with you for the entire week. What's the beautiful thing?

What would the beautiful thing be in this situation? What's the beautiful thing? That's how you grow, right?

It's looking at other people and saying, wait a minute, am I envying you or am I trying to serve you? Am I promoting myself or am I promoting something that I think is going to be beneficial for you?

For some of us, it means we just need to fundamentally rethink the blueprint of our life, but grab something and work with the data. For extra credit, work with the data in community.

All right, that's why we care so much about community groups at Restoration City Church. It is, if I can say it, where we work with the data, where we have conversations about the quality of our lives and the condition of our hearts.

Because when I preach it, it sounds like there's a world of difference between selfish ambition and envy and humility. But you and I both know that often it's just a hair's breadth of difference between the two, right? Exact same outcome.

And it can be motivated by selfish ambition or by a humble desire to serve others. You can take the same job for totally different reasons. And what I know is I can't always discern the motives of my heart by myself.

I need to be able to process it with other brothers and sisters in Christ and say, here's what's on the horizon for me. As you read my life, do you think I'm operating from a place of humility or do you think this is all just selfish ambition, right?

Work with the data in community. Now to wrap up our time, I want to remind us that Jesus doesn't just architect our life and then sit back and see how well we build.

The Spirit empowers us to build and for all the times we get it wrong, Jesus has already offered his life on the wood of the cross to redeem us.

What you and I are responsible for is deciding whether we're willing to build our life on Christ and his teaching. He's trying to take you to a place where a humble heart creates a beautiful life.

That's what he wants for you, a humble heart and a beautiful life. Are we willing to follow? I pray that we are for our good and for his glory.

Father, Lord, I know that my tendency and my weakness is I want to help you draw the blueprint. I want to make sure that you're getting it right according to my understanding of myself.

I want to make sure that you're operating in the parameters that I've decided I'm comfortable with. And God, at the end of the day, all that does is reveal my struggle to embrace your plan.

Because what you do is call us to a life of humble submission, where we trust that your plan is best, your way is better, and then we follow, even when it doesn't make sense, even when it's outside our comfort zone, even when it's different than what

we would have wanted. So Lord Jesus, if there is anyone here today who's never thought about being a follower of Jesus in these terms, who just feels the need to make a fresh start and embrace your blueprint, God, I pray you'd meet them.

I pray you'd help them to sense that you're even more excited about that than they are. That this is real and they can trust it. But Father, I also suspect there are many of us in the room who absolutely want your blueprint for our lives.

We're just deeply aware of how often we go off script. We're just deeply aware of our ability to mess it up. Would you meet us with grace and with mercy?

Would you meet us with what we need for a fresh start? I pray in Christ's name. Amen.