A few months ago, I was on a cruise with my wife, a Virgin Voyages cruise, which is freaking awesome, by the way. It's only adults. No kid, no kid energy, amazing restaurants. Anyway, I'm off track, but we were on this amazing cruise in the Caribbean, and it's interesting on a cruise ship, you know, they're big. They're like freaking huge. I think it had 17 levels, so when you first get there, it's overwhelming. It's just like, oh my gosh, there's so much to take in. There's so many elevators and floors and levels and food and all the things. Right. But something interesting starts to happen after just a couple days is you start to get the lay of the land, so to speak. You start to get the understanding, oh yeah, my room's on this side. I'm at the beginning of the ship dinner's back there. Oh, that restaurant's there. You start to get a sense and after like day three or four you're like, oh man, I could map out this whole place if I wanted to. I got the run of this place. I know even no secret, little hidden shortcuts to get me to other parts. And it's amazing how quickly that happens. And then one night I remember. It was evening, the sun was setting. It was almost like dusk. And I'm standing out on the balcony and I'm just looking at the vastness in every direction of these waves, these giant waves, and I start to think like, oh my gosh, it just hits you right when you see it. It's one thing, you see it on a screen or see a postcard or look at a picture online, but when you see the vastness of an ocean and you're surrounded in every direction, and it's all you can see, I started to have this picture of like. Hmm. That's, that's God, not only the ocean, the waves that I'm seeing, but just think about how much I'm not seeing. Think about what's under the surface that I can't see. Think I, I was in the Caribbean. Think about the Indian Ocean, the Arctic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the vastness of this thing of water on the planet Earth, right? And what's in there? The mysteries, the depths, the trenches, the creatures, the, the stuff that I have no idea about. And I started to just equate it in my mind. I started to have this thought of like. Sometimes we get the lay of the land early. We've grown up in church, we've been around it. We've been to a bunch of sermons. We've been to a bunch of church and, and it starts to become this ship that we know the route, we know where stuff is, we know how it works. We know the model, we know the message We, the good news is, well, it's not really news anymore. We've heard of a bunch. We've heard that sermon five times. We've heard a hundred Christmas sermons. We've been to the Cantatas. We've heard the music. We've been to the Christian concerts. We've done, we got the lay of the land. And what starts to happen, at least for me, I'll speak for myself, is you lose the beautiful mystery of what actually is the mystery of what is. And so you start to think like God is the ship that you can map out when really God's this ocean that's vast and deep and unknowable in a million ways. And again, even just scale it up like infinity, cosmic infinity. I'm talking about an ocean on a planet Earth. Imagine. Just the size and the sheer scale of the infinite knowledge of, of what God is. And so standing there, I was overwhelmed with this sense of, man, we don't know anything. We have this small picture, like we, we put God in this box and we, we as Christians, we just present it as if it's certainty, like we know it's not all and wonder, it's answers and clarity. We know it all. We know how it works. We've like constrained and constricted and restrained or whatever the word is. We've, we've made God into this thing that we know it can be and it can't be other. And it's crazy to me because I think that scripture, Psalms 1 11 10, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. I think the fear we're talking about is the awe. That word in Hebrew. I just did a little bit of research, but that word fear isn't really fear at all. I'm probably not pronouncing this right, but it's yra, yra and the word yra in Hebrew. It points to this idea of reverence and wonder at a cosmic, giant unknowable scale. It's a rich Hebrew word that is often translated as awe or reverence. Nothing like fear, nothing like trembling, nothing like, I don't know, I guess just. Nothing like the way I used to understand it. It's this positive, very beautiful quality. And scripture says it's the beginning of wisdom. And wisdom to me are these life upgrades, these knowing how to be human in the right way, knowing how to discern how to be in a situation, knowing how to love, being sensitive, showing up. Like the beginning of that is scripture says, stay with me here. The beginning of that, how you get there, how you get on the on-ramp to get on that freeway, that interstate, the on-ramp is fear of the Lord is awe. It is wonder. It is the very essence of you understanding that you don't know. And the more you know, the more you realize there is that you do not know. To me that's following Jesus with a sense of awe and wonder. It's not putting God in this tidy, tiny little clean box with all its edges. We circumscribed it to the shape, to the size, to what it looks like, what God can do. Everything's codified in the book, and nothing that can happen in the universe outside of that. That's foolishness. I'm, I'm just saying that's foolishness. God is bigger and better than our limited minds. It's like the cruise ship and you're, you're, you're saying Yeah, you got the run of the ship. The ship is a tiny.in the vastness of this cosmic ocean of what God is, of what a deity is. How dare what, what audacity, what arrogance to presume that we can size it and shape it and map it and know it and file it and categorize it. It just boggles my mind, and what it does is it makes us miss out on so much, right? It makes us miss out on so many of the good things of following Jesus. It makes God into this knowable prescription, this thing about religion. It becomes this thing that we now know and have to protect. It becomes this thing of, well, scripture says this in Proverbs three, five and six. Lean not on your own understanding. Huh? I like the way the message Bible puts it. Trust God from the bottom of your heart. Don't try to figure out everything on your own. Literally, almost like as if God knows our hearts. Just trust. Just have faith about the unknowable. We are so afraid of the unknowable. We're so afraid that. I don't know. It's like a control thing that we, we won't be able to control something if we don't know it, if we don't make it happen, if we're not certain about the future, as if we ever could be. Like, that's the really, the cosmic joke of it all. But when we are okay with the unknowing, when we're okay with. Sort of this vastness, this, this beautiful thing starts to happen where we don't have to try to figure out everything on our own. We can just trust. Again, that's what faith is. Faith is not agreements to doctrines. Faith is not a simple belief. That doesn't mean anything if you just believe. Uh, a statement of beliefs, uh, a statement of church doctrine. It, it doesn't matter, like big deal, faith is the unknown part. What's out there that's a little bit scary? How big actually is God? How amazing and crazy is this thing that God's moving and doing in our world and that we are called and invited to participate on that. Lean not on your own. Understanding the message Bible. Trust God from the bottom of your heart. You don't have to control it. You don't have to defend it. You don't have to stand, and you don't have to categorize it, and you don't have to do all that. You could just be open to the wonder and the mystery of God. God is mystery. How dare we boil it down to us and knowing, and prescribing and ordering and restraining what God can't or cannot do. The audacity, honestly, it's just crazy. It's just such arrogance of a human to think that. But when your God gets bigger and your God gets wondrous and you're in awe, right, you're looking for awe, not answers. God expands, and guess what? Grace expands. Curiosity expands. Our humility becomes this doorway, as scripture says, to wisdom knowing that we don't know it all. Being open to the wonder of infinite intelligence working all around us for our good, as scripture puts it. That's stepping into life with God. You stop pretending, you know, and you're just open. You're just open to whatever God's gonna do, whatever that looks like. And sometimes it's scary. I get that. That's what faith is. Do you think Peter stepping out of the boat wasn't a little bit scared? It's a freaking storm. People don't walk on water. They sink when they try to walk on water. And yet Jesus says, Peter, come on. He calls him out of the boat. What was Peter feeling? It's just, it's this, it's this church story that we've heard a million times. And again, it becomes so. I don't know. It becomes so not what it's meant to be. It becomes so just, uh, like another cliche, if you will, a Christian cliche. Yeah. Peter, walk on water. Do you know how freaking scary that would be in a, in a storm to try to walk on water? But you gotta have this crazy faith to step out and try to do something bigger than what your mental picture can understand, bigger than what your worldview can entail. The thing I've learned over and over again on my journey, especially the last couple years, is the more I know, the more I realize. I don't know. The bigger piece I have with staying in that spot for so long, it was so much about knowing, being certain. Now I, I'm certain about so little, if I could be honest, so little, but I'm at so much peace with all of that. Like it just feels like the right spot. Like you're in the flow, right? You're not bottling the flow. You're not taking a snapshot of what the flow was at one time in your life or one time in history and saying, this is all it is and this is all it ever can be. You're just letting it flow. You're saying God is. God is other I, I like that scripture where God says, I am what I am. I am who I am. Don't nail me down. Don't pin me down. I am fluid. I'm alive. I am reality I. I am what I am. How dare you try to circumscribe the edges of the map and say, you are this. We don't tell God what he is. We don't tell this. This deity, this love source, what it is or what it can be, or how it should look or how it's shaped, right? Just we approach it with humility. And here's a beautiful thing, just trust. Because the more you realize you, you know, the more you realize. I really don't know. Meister Eckhart Christian. Mystic says the unknowing is actually the highest knowing. I love that quote. Ephesians three 20 says this, God can do anything. You know, anything How? How many things? Some things, a few things. Some things that we can imagine God can do. Anything far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams. Ephesians three 20. God can do anything. Don't tell what God can or can't do. Don't pin'em down. Don't live in a small shelter world of Western religion. Drained and soaked of all energy, of all vitality, of all love, energy. Don't, don't live there. There's a story. Jesus is doing miracles and helping and healing like he always did. He drew tons of crowds and then one day he's in this town. And the scripture says this weird line, it's like almost this little footnote at the end. It says, Jesus moved on from that town. He wasn't able to do a lot of miracles there because of their unbelief. Maybe the saddest scripture in all. In all the Bible. He wasn't able to do much. He wasn't able to work. God, the way God works was limited by people's unbelief. That is a crazy statement. You combine that with what we just read, Ephesians three 20, God can do anything far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams. But what I'm putting together here for you is this. You have to be open. You have to be allowing, you have to live in awe and wonder fear, right? I hate that word. Let's just say awe of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. You want God to start to unpack and do some crazy stuff in your life. You wanna see some. You wanna get in the flow of what life near God looks like. You have to be open. You can't know it all. You can't limit it. Don't limit God. Just pray for expanded imagination. Maybe that's what I'm trying to do. God opened my eyes, changed my heart, explode the way I could ever dream or imagine. I don't wanna limit. I don't want to be the town. I don't wanna be the footnote in that scripture that God or Jesus wasn't able to do. Many miracles. Miracles are to us, are just miracles'cause we couldn't imagine them, but to God, they're just normal. The infinite intelligence isn't impressed by miracles. It's just the flow. It's just what life near God looks like, but we are the ones that limit because God can't do that or it can't look like that, or that could never happen, or we have this, this sense that we have to control. We have to prescribe everything that happens. What happens when we make our God small and when we know it all is this, is we start to make these tribal agreements that you have to agree to, right? It's about fear. It's about our team. It's about excluding everybody else who isn't on our team. It's about rivals. It's about us being correct all the time. It, it creates this fear-based religion. It creates angry Christians desperate to defend their version of the truth. Because we know. We know everything. We know how God works. How dare us, how dare us. The first line Jesus says when he shows up. We translate it again, not properly in English. Repent for the kingdom of God is here. Repent means metanoia in Greek, and metanoia means change the way you think. Change your mind. Stop thinking you know how everything works. Stop thinking that you are God. Change the way you think. There's a beautiful story. There's a beautiful story about a student who visited a Zen master. To learn about enlightenment. How can I open my mind? How can I be enlightened? How can I have that greater consciousness? How can I be in the flow of life near God? And so the master starts to set this tea out, and as he starts to pour the tea, he hands the cup to the student, student's holding the cup, and the master starts pouring and pouring and pouring and pouring and start to spill all over. It's overflowing everywhere. It's on his lap, it's on the floor, it's on the table. It's all over. Finally, the student says, stop. It's full. No more. It's gonna go in. And the master rep applies like this cup. You are full of your own opinions and your own conclusions. How can I show you truth unless you first empty your cup? A lot of us live there. A lot of Christians especially live there because we are certain. We know what we know. We are certain as to the shape of God. What does it do? We gotta get rid of our own certainty. We gotta be open to something bigger and something better, and something different and something strange. We gotta be open to God energy. We can't just contain it. We can't just prescribe it. We gotta empty our cup and let God pour in some God tea, if you will. I want the God tea. I want the awe. I want the wonder. I want the craziness. I want the peace where the peace that passes understanding. I was thinking about, that's a scripture, right? We pray for that sometimes, Lord, give them peace that passes understanding. What does that even mean? It means there's a way, there's a way of peace that this world doesn't understand. There's a way of peace that no matter what our circumstances might be, that God just can, can do in a way that is almost like we can't put language on. It surpasses understanding. But to let that happen, we have to empty our cup of our certainty and our understanding. Again, don't lean on your own understanding. Proverbs three, do not lean on your own. Understanding what you know isn't all there is to know what you know is a fraction, a sliver of what there is. You, you, you think, you feel good and proud and secure because you know the layout of a boat floating on this vast ocean of water you don't know. You don't know. Leave room for awe. Allow for transformation. Allow yourself to be soft and allow awe to move in the sense of wonder. I think that's what Jesus is getting at when he says, unless you become like little children, right? He doesn't say become little children. He says, unless you become like little children, you're not even gonna see the kingdom. You're gonna miss it. What does that mean? Oh, kids are innocent. Oh, kids are whatever. You know what? I really honestly think it means. Kids believe. Kids believe they have faith. You can tell little 2-year-old, Hey, this truck can fly and this is came straight from Santa Claus. And this is, they will believe anything. Their mind is not conditioned to say, I know everything that doesn't fit with my framework. So, no, I think that's what Jesus is hinting at here. Unless you become, unless you become like little children with this mindset of I will believe I, my faith is big. I'm open to what God can do. I will not limit him. I will not say God can't do this and God can do this. I will just trust. I'll have this crazy faith into the unknown that God is working and breathing and gonna do some cool stuff that he's invited me to participate in, as if some of these scriptures aren't enough. Here's another one, Isaiah 55. My thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are higher than your ways. Again, like God through a prophet Isaiah saying, Hey guys, there's something else going on here. You've got a little sliver. Your, your human mind you, you can comprehend a little bit. But you don't know. My thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are higher than your ways. There's a song I love by the band called daws, D-A-W-E-S. The song is called A Little Bit of Everything, and maybe I've mentioned this before. I feel like I tell my kids and my wife about this song like once a month because it's so powerful. The songs a little bit of everything. It's a beautiful song, but there's this line towards the end and it says, all these doctors, all these lawyers and these doctors, they're all wrong and they're all right. It is like trying to make out every line when you should simply hum along. That's what I'm talking about right there. It's like trying to be so certain about every single line. When really you have this, you have the rhythm. You feel the, you feel sort of the movement of God that you can join to the dance, but you don't have it figured out. Stop saying you have everything figured out. It's not attractive. It creeps tribal wars between Christians that are so irresponsible and so disgusting. Be open to wonder. Be open to awe. Let your mind be open to faith that your mind can be blown. That sounds like a good ride. My thoughts are not your thoughts. My ways are higher than your ways. There's stuff I'm doing God saying that you don't understand, you can't understand. You will probably, you'll never understand. You'll grow in wisdom. You'll get glimpses. But our best posture, our most true posture, is to approach God with awe and wonder. Not knowing. There's a story about a guy named Nicodemus. He's one of the church leaders, and he asked Jesus to explain what the hell's going on Jesus. You're drawing these crowds. You're saying this crazy stuff. You're saying things different than what the system is saying vastly different. What is going on here? And Jesus refuses to give him this tidy, clean answer, but he does say this. He says, the wind blows where it chooses. You hear it sound, but you can't tell where it comes from. You can't tell where it's going. It's like that. It's like the spirit life with the spirit. Let God blow it go. It does what it does, what it does, what it does. You can sometimes sense the branches movement. You can sometimes hear it outside. You can't tell what it's gonna do or where it's headed. How dare us? Pin it down. The wind on this Tuesday will blow from the south at four miles per hour because that's what I say. It says that's what I command it to do. That's what I expect. That's what I've known it to do. That's what I was taught it does on Tuesdays. The wind blows at four miles an hour. How dare us? We don't know. It does what it does. Nicodemus wanted answers. Jesus invited him into awe. Awe a WE. Awe be in awe. CS Lewis says, all are all of our ideas about God must be shattered again and again. That's interesting, right? When you start to get this concept, the shape of God, you better throw that down. You better shatter. You better drop that thing again and again and again. Until you're reminding yourself you don't know what you don't know, and that's okay. You're beautifully held, you're wonderfully taken care of. You couldn't be more loved. There's not a second or a day in your life. You haven't been deeply and passionately loved. There's a sense of radical okayness if you can lean into the unknowing. But once we start to have this idea or this concept of the shape of God, that has to be this way, man, that's dangerous territory. That's where you move into idolatry, right? I mean, think about the Israelites, right? God rescues him, brings him across a Red Sea, this miracle rescue story. And what do they do? They build this, they, they melt down their jewelry to celebrate it, and they build this thing and this, this calf, it's almost like this thing of like, this is what God is. We're grateful, we're excited. I think it's born out of goodwill at the beginning, but over time it turns into this idol because God did this, this one day. This is how God must work forever. That's not true. That that's, that's nonsense. I'm just saying like, we gotta be careful. We gotta be careful and we gotta keep our hearts open. We gotta believe that God does what he wants, when he wants, she, he, they, whatever you want to call it, that this infinite intelligence is looking out for us and, and including us and inviting us in to move and to have our being with it. And, and we just need to remain open. We just need to remain in a state of awe and wonder. Romans 11 says this, verse 33. Have you ever come on anything quite like this extravagant generosity of God? This deep, deep wisdom, it's way over our heads. We'll never figure it out. That's a beautiful posture. That's what I'm talking about. To be in awe, to be so enraptured by how good God is, but to also know at the same time, you have no idea how good God is. That's what I'm talking about. That's the place where we stay in tune and in line and walking in relationship with God. Not telling him, not constricting him, not ordering him, not restraining him. Let's move into the sense of a bigger God that does what he wants when he wants. If you've ever felt disillusioned with your version of God that it's too small or that it's boring, I have a good friend that says, Hey, I've been going to church my whole life. I stopped going because it's the same thing every time. It's too small of a version of God, I understand what he's saying. I get it. It's too limited. It becomes uninteresting after a while. It's like, I love the show breaking bad, but after the 500th time of watching the season, I, it becomes uninteresting. It becomes predictable, it becomes prescribed. I know what's gonna happen, and that's the way we get sometimes when we pull up our chair and we say, God does this. God's gotta look like this. This is what my pastor says. This is what my denomination believes. This is what I know. To happen. This is what my parents told me. These are the agreements I believe to. This is the doctrine of faith says this. Stop being so knowing. Start being open. You know, who missed Jesus when he showed up in the flesh? The people who knew everything. God doesn't look like that. God doesn't talk to those people. God doesn't show up like that. God would never visit those people. Oh, if, if that was God, he would never be sitting with those sinners. God doesn't say things like that. That's blasphemy. Guess what? God showed up and they freaking missed it because they said, God has to look like this. There wasn't awe. They already had all the answers. They didn't. They didn't have questions, they had answers. So my invitation for me, myself, and for you is maybe we can adjust our posture in a way that is a little bit more about questions and wonder and amazement and awe instead of knowing and certainty. I think the journey's so much richer and so much better, and I also think it's a better flavor for our neighbors and our friends to see. It. It's just this humble, this humility of spirit that comes with that that makes it easy to have conversations, right? It's hard to have a conversation with, with a know-it-all. It's just not even that interesting or that fun. But when someone's open and they're journey and they're dialoguing, that's a conversation I wanna be a part of. So that's my invitation that we step into mystery and we step into awe. Rumi has this quote, sell your cleverness and by bewilderment. Fear. Awe of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.