Sean Alsobrooks 0:00

Hey friends, happy fall. This is, uh, episode three of season two. And, uh, just to set the table, it's late at night and I grab my phone because my mind is racing. I'm getting pretty excited. And so I ask you, forgive the audio quality. Forgive sort of the randomness of this, but I think, um. I hope that maybe this resonates. This is definitely an episode, probably more for church people. You know, if you've grown up in church, you kind of know the understandings of the inside of the system and how it works. This is, this is definitely more pointed, uh, in, in an invitation to you. Anyone, of course, is welcome to listen, and as always, if there's any feedback, I'd love to hear from you. Also, brooks@gmail.com. Thanks so much for listening and, uh, yeah, hope that this resonates.

Sean 0:49

Yeah. God set up laws, if you wanna call them that, or rules or guidelines or best way to live as a human. And yeah, we broke those laws. We chose our own way. We decided that our way was best. We decided we couldn't trust God. We turned our back on God. We made our own decisions. We made decisions that made life way harder for us in a million ways, and all the consequences that come with those decisions. And yet because God's filled with love, because God is love. He absorbs all of that. It it, he steps right over the line in the sand of his law to embrace us. It's over the top. It's gratuitous. It's too much. But isn't that exactly what forgiveness is? When someone offends you and wrongs you and crosses you, someone goes against you, someone betrays you, and you step over that offense. And you say, I love you way more than what you've done to me, or what I didn't want you to do for me, or my laws, or my rules, or my boundaries. I love you way more than any of those things. That's what forgiveness is. In spite of you doing all those things, I don't care. I want relationship with you more than I want adherence to my law. And isn't Jesus all about that? I mean, from the get go, it's what he's doing the whole time. He's saying it's not about the rule and the law, the Sabbath. The Sabbath is for you. It's over the top. It reminds me of. When we have friends come over to hang out, we'll have six or eight friends come hang out for a game night or something. And, uh, you know, my wife Sarah, with all good intentions, we'll order like 14 pizzas. 14 large pizzas. Should do it right? Uh, yeah. And feed the rest of the neighborhood. She wants to make sure it's covered. But it reminds me of the, the over the topness of the good news of the gospel. Like that's what it is. All along. Remember, people need to be fed. They're hungry. So Jesus takes the loaves and fishes from a little kid. He multiplies them and some miraculous way, some cosmic way, because why not? Why can't he do that? He does it. And then there's like. Bins and barrels and baskets of it left over after feeding between five and 10,000 people. Like that's what he does, right? The prodigal son, he doesn't just allow him back after some rehabilitation, he runs to him, he grabs him, he kisses him, he puts on the jewelry and a new robe, and a feast and a party, because it's over the top always too much. Isn't there a story about. Jesus telling Peter, try the other side of the boat with your nets. They hadn't caught anything all night and Jesus said, just throw the nets to the other side. And they do it and they, the nets are ripping, I don't know, 300 fish or something, or 189 fish or whatever the total was. Huge fish, almost ripping the nets. The story is that they can barely pull them into shore. That's over the top. That's the good news. That's the grace of it all. That is the story. That is the nature of who God is and who he's trying to show us. He's trying to say, yeah, you, you, you did some things out of bounds. You went your own way. Basically, you forgot that you were connected to me and that I know the best way to live. You can. You forgot who you were, but I don't, I'm not mad if there's anything we see in scripture over and over with the arrival of Jesus. It's that God isn't mad, God isn't angry. God doesn't even really care about the things that. The moral things that you've done wrong. He wants relationship with you. He wants to connect to you. He says, over and over, stay connected to me. No matter what you do, don't leave me. I will overcome all that. I will absorb it all. Our bond is so much greater than some of these things. The law is meant to point to me. Don't miss the whole point of the story. It's good news. It's gotta be good news. It's gotta be gratuitous. It's gotta be over the top. If it's not, you've whittled and watered it down to a set of legal obligations, a set of contracts and agreements. That is so, that is so to miss the entire point of reality. Literally missing the point of reality. And that's where so many of us have lived for so long, and I'm asking you to see, I'm inviting you to see, I think the scripture. The good news is the story of us being willing to take the brave challenge of being audacious enough to believe that this story could be true and that God could be that good that my friends requires. Faith that requires a leap that requires some boldness and some bravery because it's a little bit crazy. You know what doesn't require faith? Agreeing to a set of beliefs or doctrines or whatever you've grown up with in church that takes zero faith. It doesn't change you. It doesn't transform you. It doesn't give you an experience. It's just a set of agreements that you ascribe to, that you agree to. And if we're being honest, most of us don't even, we don't even care or do that part very well anyway. It's gotta be good news. It's gotta be audacious. Audacious. It's gotta be over the top. It's gotta be too much. It's gotta be overflowing, dripping down, pressed down, running over. Like 70 times seven, like infinity, like an abundance, like over the top, like, ah, do you have an idea of the vast scale that we're discovering of the universe? It just points to who God is, to the shape of God, to what he cares about. Our understanding of him can't be boiled down to these set of laws. It just can't be put into a set of doctrines and agreements and, and. Traditions that we pass on. It has to be experienced. And faith. Faith is not just belief. Faith is like, Hey, I don't know. Faith is a, it's the mix, the strange, odd, crazy mix of belief and unbelief. That's faith. It takes no faith to believe I'm holding my phone right now talking into it. I am. It takes faith for something that I don't know. I believe it. I feel it inside myself, so I know it in that way, like I know it in my essence, but I can't prove it. It's not this provable thing. It takes this. Faith for this connection to foster, for me to stay connected with this beautiful story of my creator and his creation and understanding and believing that we are one. We have always been one. We are never been separate. That God is in me, that I'm a child of God, that I have a divine spirit living inside of me. That I have the divine mind of Christ inside of me. That we are always one with everything he has created. We have always been one, and we always will, but we've never been separate. That's the lie, that we're separate somehow, that our sin has made us separate in the space that God can't overcome. That's the whole freaking story of Jesus. To open our eyes to say, Hey, that's stuff doesn't get in the way It, it's not too much to keep me away. Whatever you think you've done, whatever distance you think you've traveled away from me. It's not enough to keep me from pursuing you and waiting for you to awaken to who you are and who I am and how we fit together, and how big and how fast and how giant overwhelming the story really is. How good it really is. How big love really is. That my friends takes some faith. It takes a little bit of faith to To make that leap. To make that stretch. It's a little bit scary if you don't have a little bit of like, mm, I grew up calling faith just a green. Here's what you were handed down. Here's what you need to believe. Here's what's true about the world, because people ahead of you decided it. Now, agree to this, please. And we call that faith. We call that being a Christian, that that's not being a Christian, that's not faith. Uh, that's not following Jesus. Jesus didn't come to help us agree to a set of beliefs. Here. My friends read these 19 things and believed, believe, and agreed to all of these things. He came to show us a new way to live, a new way to be human. He, he, he came to show us our true essence, our real nature of reality, and who we really are. Let's not get caught up on the stupid little stuff that doesn't matter. Love matters. Who we really are awakening and opening our eyes to see that every single thing that God created, people, plants, animals, oxygen, atoms, everything he created is created in his divine nature. And that the story Jesus came to show us is that there is no separation. I mean, Paul says it as clearly as possible. What can separate me from this big, vast love story? What can get in the way? What's gonna derail this train? Nothing. He says over and over. Not principalities. Not powers, not spirits, not, not the worst sins listed in scripture. He literally says that he writes that in a letter to the early church. So stop. Going under the law, Galatians five, don't put yourself under the law anymore. You're not under the law. You're set free from the law. Don't operate under that limited mindset. That's the kindergarten mindset, and it's where we all start. It's where we all get our pace. So we need to include that. Yes, we need to absorb that. We need to understand, but we don't wanna stay there. We don't wanna stay there. We want to grow in maturity. We wanna grow to see the beautiful, full, rich, amazing, mind-boggling faith requiring giant, beautiful love story that is the gospel of Jesus. That's what we need to wake up to. That's what I'm inviting you into. Because I'm starting to wake up and I want you to join me. I want you to see how beautiful and great and grand and wonderful it is, and how we're called to be followers and doers. Christians means many Christians. Little Christ is what it means. Christ is an outpouring of love. So that's what I wanna be about. I don't wanna be about pet petty, little stupid moral judgements. Who's right? Who's wrong? Who's in? Who's out? It doesn't matter. It doesn't make any bit of difference. God has absorbed it all, and also it's constantly changing. Look at history. It's not like there's this strict guidelines of it. Just whatever we decide, whoever the insiders decide is out at that moment, I'm done with it. I'm not. Interested in it. It's just old, it's tired. I think more and more of us are waking up to something better. We're sensing that there has to be something more. And this is what Jesus says. If you knock, I'll answer. If you seek, you'll find, and some of us are looking for something beyond what we've been handed down as agreements. And prescriptions and outlines, and here's the shape of God. I, I, I want more. I want better. Because if that's all it is, it's not a good story. It's not worth living into that story. It's just empty. I want something bitter. I want the real. I want the real freaking gospel story. I want it to change me. I want it to transform me. I want to be made new on the inside. I don't wanna operate under the same mind, the same thinking that I've done my whole life. I want to change. I want to see people different. I wanna see myself different, and I wanna see God different. I'm inviting you into it. I feel like I have one toe in the water and it feels amazing, and I'm inviting you in to imagine something better than what you've been handed down. Something much, much, much bigger and much, much more ancient and something we know so little about. This is what I'm discovering. The more. I realize, I know. The more I realize, I don't know. I think that's exactly as it should be. The more I understand the shape of God is not what I was handed down, the more I understand the shape of God is way beyond what I could ever grasp or transcribe or start to put a, an outline around. It's just too big. It's too vast, but this is the thing. It's like, that's okay. Right. I, I, it's like it's, the more I lean into it, the more I lean into it being okay as well. I don't have, I don't have to have all those answers. I'm good with the not knowing. I am actually at peace with the not knowing because the not knowing comes from the bigness of God, the vastness, the craziness of his. Her it they, the craziness of the unknown knowable divinity, and yet also the beauty of what we have already been shown that God's nature is love, that he creates, that she creates that. Through Jesus. We know the heart of what God cares about and it's very clear. It's not laws, it's people. Jesus is always putting people before laws. You know what the church has done? We put laws before people. We've got it backwards. So I'm inviting you to unlearn and un un. Leash your grip on some of the things that you've been invited into your whole life and told this is the only way to think about God. Is it, or is that just what people that came before you told you? Is that just what you've been in inherited? You've been passed down and, and you don't have to change one bit. You can stay with it, or you can start to maybe imagine a better story, a much bigger story, and it's a little scary. It takes a little bit of faith, a little bit of courage to believe this good story, but I promised you, once you start to do this, it opens up and it's rich and it's wonderful, and you'll never, ever, ever, ever dream for a second that you'd ever want to go back to a set of agreements and laws and doctrines like, no thank you. No thank you. Anyway, that's my ramblings and, uh, I would love your thoughts. I'd love your feedback. Does this resonate? Does this in any way vibe with what you're sensing or feeling or thinking or praying? If so, I would love to hear it. Thanks for listening. Until next time.