I stopped going to church and then something interesting happened. Before I get to that story. What I want to do is just give a little background. Hello, my name is Sean also Brooks, and this is love breaks, bad podcast. This is episode number two. And last week I realized I just sort of dove in and started sharing, which was fun. Thank you for the feedback. Thank you for the comments. Thank you for the follows. Super appreciate that. And maybe, maybe you weren't happy about last week, but you listen, thank you for just sticking with me and hearing through that today. What I want to do is shed a little context. I'm kind of where I'm at and how I got here. So I want to share my background a little bit, and then I want to tell you about the time I stopped going to church. So I mentioned briefly last week. I grew up in church. I grew up in a really legalistic Baptist church. And at the time it just felt normal. It felt right. My parents did the best I can. I'm not mad at anybody about that. It is what it is. Right. But over the years, thank God. I've started to have this new understanding of who God is and who Jesus is and the things that actually matter. But anyway, back to my background, I grew up in church. I went to youth group in church. I, I even got as my wife and I, Sarah got married. We fought, we we helped in church all the time. Always volunteering. We're really big part of helping in the youth, the youth group on Wednesday or Thursday, nights of like serving the teenagers and working in cafes, setting up chairs. Inflatables, all the things. Right. So very, very normal part of my rhythm was going to church. And like I mentioned, In episode one, like sometimes that was multiple times per week, Sundays and Wednesdays and extra days. And so church was a really big part of who I was and my worldview and how I saw things and understood things. And then. And my late twenties. I felt God leading me. To start a church. And then something interesting happened. I was scared. I was stoked all at the same time, I was super excited. I felt totally ill-prepared totally not ready. But at the same time, totally excited about what God was doing and sort of how he was calling us. I've never attended Bible college. Or seminary seminary is one of those fancy words for, I guess, Bible college. Where you study scripture and theology and all that good stuff I had. No, I have still have no. Formal church or theological training. So that should just actually, maybe be a warning at the front of every episode. I have no formal charge or theological training. Period. So I claimed none other, I claim no expertise except what God has shown me in my faith and my journey and my walk. But I had grown up in church, so I knew scripture. I knew the Bible. I loved God. For the most part, I did my really, really best to follow the rules mostly to kind of stay in the lane of Christianity and church and all that good stuff. And so by this age, in my late twenties, I learned really how to navigate through the sort of cycle of sin management of like you mess up. You beg God to forgive you. Thank God he does. But you feel terrible about it. And you feel like maybe you're pushing the limits. We kind of talked about this last week. Like maybe you're abusing his Grace A. Little bit, but man, you really need forgiveness because you did that thing again. And so you, you know, you asked for forgiveness and thank God you get forgiven, which is amazing. Right. So I've learned how to navigate this cycle. I learned about church. I learned the ins and outs. I knew the gospel, what I thought was a gospel. And most importantly, I knew that my team. Was right. I knew the church people were right. My team. And now I was super stoked because God was calling me to teach others. This way, the church way, the. How to follow him, how to turn, how to become a Christian. Right. And now I get to recruit others to the team. It was my job. Now to convince outsiders, non teammates, if you will, to stop being bad and start being good. And so. My wife and I. We lived in Southern California at the time we packed up our two little girls at the time two baby girls, and we moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, where we felt God was leading us to start a new church. From the ground up. I was scared. I was stoked. And then something interesting happened. Our first Sunday church service was approaching. It was just a couple of months before we were ready to have our very first kickoff service. And I remember we decided to change the venue. We felt. Led to sort of move from this theater. We're always going to meet in a theater in Knoxville. I didn't have a building or anything like that. So the idea was that we could rent a theater on Sunday mornings. They give us a really great deal, which was awesome. But we had the sense in our heart. It's just sort of feeling, this is sort of like understanding this piece. If you will, that we needed to move our service downtown. To the, sort of the center, the heart of the city of Knoxville. We were going to start sort of out west if. If, you know, an actual sort of the suburban out west suburbs out there. And we just felt that wasn't where we were being called. And so we decided to move to the theater that was downtown, but the theater downtown. Was still under construction. It wasn't going to be completed and ready for us to have our first service there for another six or seven months. And so we kind of felt ourself in this weird spot of. I mean, what do we do now? Like we've never not gone to church, but at the same time, it sort of feels weird to go to another church. When we're about to start a church and I don't know, it just was, I don't know. It just didn't feel right at the time. Like, I don't know, maybe that's even church thinking, you know, like God forbid we recruit somebody from one church to another. God forbid, but I don't know at the time we just felt like it wasn't right. And so we just sorta just waited it during this gap, period. We just waited and we just thought, and we just sad. And for the first time in my life. I stopped going to church. I didn't go on Sundays. I didn't go on Wednesdays. There was no church to go to if you will. Right. We were sort of in this, waiting in this holding period. And then something interesting happened. That's sort of the theme of today, something interesting happening. We started reading Sarah and I, the Bible for ourselves. I just want to say that one more time, because it's easy to probably skip right through that sentence, but it's kind of the crux of all of this. We started reading the Bible. For ourselves. We started reading the gospels, which is. The books and the new Testament about Jesus, about his life, about the teachings of Jesus. For the first time in our lives, we read without the filter of a pastor or a minister or a priest. No church filters, no religious filters, no denominational filters, nothing was wrong. Nothing was right. We just. Simply read the words of Jesus without all the attachments of our youth, would they fresh? A clear lens. And I think, honestly, I think this was the first time I actually. Met Jesus for real. It was scary and I was stoked. And something interesting was happening. We started to see things differently. As we read about Jesus, this guy was different, man. He switched things up up is down, down is up and is out. You're at the party. You're not invited you're in all these things that he would flip on its head. You thought you knew this. Now I tell you this, all the things that we were reading were starting to shock us. Our chores are starting to drop. Wait, what? Of course I'd read the Bible for myself, but when I say read it for myself, I mean, read it for myself. No lens of church. No lens of religion. Just take that all off and read the words. Jesus. Taught. What did he care about? Who did he care about? Who did he spend time with? Who were the people that he was angry or upset with or had little patients with surprise? It's church people. Anyway, we started to read some of this stuff and we started to just almost awaken for the first time. Mostly what we read about was love. This love this deep abounding. Huge love that Jesus had for people, for his family, for his children, for all of us. For the first time. We started to see what gospel, the good news really meant. We were reading and learning things about God. That actually sounded like good news for the first time I life. I was super stoked about this. And just look at God, what good timing that this happened right before we're about to plant a church. I feel like this was like, you know, I said earlier, I didn't have Bible training. I didn't go to Bible college. This was my Bible college. This is where God. Shaped sort of the mission of our hearts as we planted this new church. T to be the things that he cares about to focus, not on growing a church or a building or group. But to just really lean into the, the beautiful, wonderful, mysterious scandalous teachings of who Jesus is, what he said and the things he cares about. And like I said, mostly what we read was love. God loves people, man. We're supposed to love people. And things started to shift, man. That's the thing that I love. We, we say this all the time, but followers of Jesus. Follow Jesus. All right. You can't be a follower of Jesus. If you don't follow Jesus. And I know that sounds obvious, but if you think about it for a second, You got to care about the things Jesus cared about. You got to go to the places Jesus went to. You've got to dial in to the things that Jesus saw, the things that mattered to him needs to matter for us. That's how we know if we're following Jesus. It's not a church attendance. It's not serving in ministry. It's not a missions trip. It's not. Time, spin and a Bible study. It's not another small group. It's not more praise and worship. It's not listening to Caleb on the dial. It's not doing communion. It's not a devotional. It's not the app on your phone. That is a Bible verse every day. All of that stuff can be okay. But it's about Jesus. By the way all that stuff can be okay. But that stuff can also get in the way don't let any of that stuff get in the way of Jesus. Right. Followers of Jesus. Oh, Jesus. We don't follow church. We don't follow religion. We don't follow a pastor. We don't follow Paul. If you don't know who Paul is. Paul was a writer that wrote a lot of the letters and content that are in the new Testament part of the Bible. And a lot of times I find that churches, man, we almost are followers of Paul. We love all the stuff Paul says. I think it's all valid. I think there's all lens to it. But mad followers of Jesus follow Jesus. All right. I'm gonna stop. I'd aggress. Anyway, we had this time when we started listening to what Jesus was saying, started reading for ourselves and it was this beautiful, wonderful, scary, amazing journey. And it was exactly what we'd been hoping for. It's what I felt like I was missing my whole life. I grew up like knowing about God, but I didn't know. God. I grew up knowing about Jesus. And I knew like the words. I knew the system. I knew the game, but I didn't until this season, start to understand who Jesus was and who I was and how deep and wonderful and beautiful and scandalous and overwhelming and undeserving. And over the top has grace was. Like abundant, like good news that you can't even put labels on. Right. Ellington who's my youngest daughter is now 14 when she was little, maybe I don't know, three or four. She had been out with my. My mom. Right. You'd gone out for a day with, with her grandma, my mom, and they, she came back from, from hanging out with her. I think they went to the mall or the zoo, or I can't really remember, but Ellington came back and she had this card, this sealed up card in an envelope. And she handed it to me and she said, dad, this is for you. I said, oh wow. This is amazing. What is this? And she said, it's a card from me. I said, this is from you. She said, yeah. I did it. I made it, I wrote it. I sealed it. I bought it. I delivered it. This is the card from me and I opened it up and I read it and it says, and really impressive handwriting for a three-year-old, by the way, it says something along the lines of Sean. This is a coupon for a lunch date with me. So it was obviously written by my mom, right. Given to Ellington to give to me. But Ellington looked me in that face that day. And I remember she said, dad, this is for me. I made this. That story stuck with me because it sort of reminds me a little bit of how church does stuff, right. Church slash religion. When I say church, I say, I it's, what I really mean is like this deeper religion. It promises on what it could never deliver Ellington. Couldn't buy a car. She didn't have an envelope. She definitely couldn't write fancy cursive. Like where mom didn't. She had no way to take me on a lunch date with her. It was impossible for her. To me, that is what church and religion does. It promises the system. Of advancement and inclusion and, and sort of this. Fo grace. Then if you play all your cards right, then you're in and you're out. And. It just can't deliver that only Jesus can rescue only Jesus can save only. Jesus is real love only Jesus. He forgives grace and good news is Jesus. And that's what we started to discover in the season. I love the scripture. This is from second Corinthian. So. Let me just share this with you. And to me, this, this is really powerful. It says this whenever though, they turn to face God as Moses did. God removes the veil and they are, they are there, they are. Face-to-face. They suddenly recognize that God is a living. Personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. And when God is personally present a living spirit. That old constricting legislation is a recognized. As obsolete. We're free of it. All of us, nothing between us and God, our faces shining. With the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah. Our life's gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives. And we become like him. I love this to me. It's like, I love this part of like, we recognize that God is a living personal presence and not a piece of chiseled stone and that he's inside of us and that he set us free. And that sin isn't an issue because he took care of it. All. He said it is finished and we're free to explore and learn about who he is. Relearned. To, to kind of find these rhythms as he works his goodness inside of us, through his I good living spirit. I love that line. It's live. It's dynamic. It's happening. It's sort of about. On the learning. To me this season for Sarah and I, as we started this church. Was about. Learning is peeling back, all these layers, almost like Jesus says when you unlearn. And when you follow him, you become like little children, right? You don't claim to know it all. You don't claim that you heard it once and then it's done. That's how I live my life for, for. A huge part of it. As far as my religious spiritual life, I, I knew what I knew and no one could tell me different. I knew what I knew, because it's what I had known. It's what my people had known. My family had known, my friends had known it's my community. My whole bubble was about this. And we knew we were right. Which obviously then made everybody else. Anybody else wrong? And to me, the hardest part really about growing. Really the hardest part is almost this giant leap. And once I was over it, There's this beautiful, like downhill slope of just enjoying grace, enjoying goodness, taking in the view and savoring every second, but the big leap, the big hurdle, the hardest part for me. Was starting to unlearn it, starting to hold my hand open instead of clenched and letting the holy spirit, letting scripture letting the teachings of Jesus, start to show me, Hey, this stuff matters in this stuff. Not really. This stuff, not super important. This stuff, not the main thing. But some of these other things that grace mercy justice. Kindness. I love. This, these are the things. That matter. There's a quote by Henry David Thoreau. And it says when any real progress is made, we unlearn and we learn a new what we thought we knew before. Learn online. That's sort of the rhythm. Sort of the rhythm learn and then unlearn learn and then unlearn, let God show you what he's teaching that God show you what he cares about. It's almost like looking at the Bible, sort of this big film, this big story, right? Try to get rid of all the things that you've been told it's about and just watch it unfold as God speaks to you. As Jesus tells its own story. Never think you've got it all nailed down. Never think you got it all figured out. You don't put God in a box. You don't stamp it and put it on the shelf. You don't categorize it. Calculate it. Just watch, just read the scriptures, the teachings and the life of Jesus. Watch it, read it and let it tell you its story. Let it work on you. Let it start to change you. Unlearning to me, it's all been about the unlearning. So what am I trying to say? You're to stop going to church. No, I'm not saying that. Not necessarily. I mean, maybe a break might be a good. Time out for you to start thinking. Start approaching things freshly, but really what I'm saying is this, that church and religion. Are not the answer. And I leave you with this. Closing scripture. One of my favorites in all of the Bible is spoken by Jesus. You can find it in the book of Matthew verse 28. Jesus says this. Are you tired? Are you worn out? Are you burned out on religion? Come to me, get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me and watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace. I won't lay anything heavy. Or ill fitting on you keep company with me. And you're, you'll learn to live freely and lightly. Ah, I love that verse. That verse gets me excited. That verse makes me lean in. To Jesus. I want to follow Jesus wants to learn the ways of Jesus that. Verse to me that calling the invitation. It feels so unlike religion and some, someone like so many churches. I love that line. Are you tired? Are you worn out? Even Jesus knows that he says, are you burned out on religion? When you find yourself at the end of the game, when you find yourself not wanting to be on that team anymore, when you find yourself discovering that. It doesn't have the answers. It claims it can't ever deliver Ellington. Can't take me to lunch. When she's three years old, she didn't write that car and she's claiming something she can't, or is not empowered to give that his church in empty religion. So I'm offering you hope here. I'm offering you a little glimpse into my journey, lean into Jesus. Listen to what he's saying. Discover the unforced rhythms of grace.