Northside Church - Sydney
Guest Speaker: Steve Hodgson
You're listening to another great message from Northside Community Church. All right, I'm really excited to be here tonight. I want to thank you very much for giving me the opportunity, and it's a great privilege to come to someone else's church and have an opportunity to speak into the service. And I know I've got a lot of respect for Sam, not just because he's my brother-in-law, just because I know he's doing a fantastic job here, right? And I see it, when you guys came along to merge this year, the Northside crew had such just an enthusiasm and love and joy and community about them, and it was actually really inspiring for a lot of our other churches. And so that's another great reason to come, because you guys have got something special here. There's a lot of churches out there who are doing it tough, actually, and they dream of having what you guys have got. And so to come and just encourage other people is a really good thing. But yeah, as Sam said, I'm his brother-in-law married to Kristen's older sister, Merity. And I had the privilege, actually, in this family, Kristen and Merity actually come from a family of three girls. And I had the privilege of breaking the ground for Sam. So he got in, and it was so easy, right? It was simple. I had to date Merity for like six and a half years, right, before they even were like sort of a male-friendly household. But you know, I broke the ground, and I'm proud to say now Sam got in, and it was simple. He was there for like a year, and already he's got a ring on the finger, and like, unbelievable, but I've been married for five years, and I love it. I love it. And so my wife's here, she's over there, so you can say hi to her over some lasagna a little bit later. But I want to share with you tonight something, I think God lays on my heart, and I suppose a question that I want you to just be pondering and thinking, as I share tonight, is what is the defining value of your life? What's the core value of your life? What makes up the substance of who you are as you see yourself? My love affair with consumerism, I'd put it, would actually began at a very young age. We live in a consumer society, right, where we're kind of told all the time, purchase, purchase, buy, buy, buy, get stuff, and it will actually make you who you're meant to be. And for me, when I was really young, actually about 10, I can remember, I used to have a thing for shoes. Now, I hate shoes, and I don't know where thongs, I thought I'd better like shoe up tonight, because it is North Sydney, all right, I'm from West, it's a little bit, it's more appropriate out there, but anyway, and so I had a thing for shoes, and my dad used to always say why do you, when you're playing sport, why do you, when you're playing sport, always run around looking at your shoes, and I don't know what it was, I kind of ran around like this, and I'm not sure why, but I just, as I was preparing this sermon, it struck me why, because when I was 10 years old, I'd love basketball, like I just love playing basketball, I seriously thought that was going to be my future, my career, and unfortunately I'm about six foot too short. And I was never going to make it into a career of basketball, say, but I loved it, right? And when you're 10 year old in the 90s playing basketball, okay, the only thing that's going to make you any good on that court is having high top basketball boots, right? If you don't have them, if you have like low cut runners, you're a fake. And so I couldn't wait to get my first pair of high tops, I'm bugging my mum, my mum, I've got to get some high tops, because I just can't play very well without them. Can you get me some, oh yeah, right, yeah, yeah, and I'm excited, like man, I'm thinking about, I can get the Reebok ones, or no, no, no, no, no, like the Nike Air Jordan, dream of the Nike Air Jordan, right? You know, my mum takes me shopping to get my first pair of high tops, and we kind of walk and pass like all the good shops like athletes foot, and we kind of walk past, and we walk by, no, no, we mosey straight on into target. And off we go to the shoe section, and I purchased my very first pair of high tops, which was a genuine pair of aero sports. I don't know if you remember aero sports, right? But when you walked in a basketball court with aero sports, you were not going to score any points. Like, yeah, it was, and I seriously couldn't believe it, mum, like, what is this about? Like, can I really wear these? Can I imagine myself on the court with these? Sounds a bit funny, it's like a little year, like a 10-year-old sort of imagination, but my obsession with consumerism and what I buy and what I put on myself, actually defining myself, didn't end there. I was reflecting back, and I can remember around the time I was trying to impress Meridie. Around year 11, I just moved up from Melbourne, and so I was a bit of a stranger at the school, Meridie's in the year below me, and I remember one day it was the years that, in re-kaying glaciers was very big, and all the girls sort of, oh yeah, and he was hot, right? Okay, like, he was, he was an attractive man, and I was remember I was watching a video hits, and one of his songs came on, and he was dating at the time, Anacorna Kova, and all the guys going, oh, yes. And Anacorna Kova was very attractive, and she's in this clip, and she likes him, and he looks good, and I thought, wow, and I remember what he was wearing, right? And this is a really embarrassing, like, sort of confession to you, I wouldn't do this to my own church, because then they'd realize that I'm kind of a fake, but, but the next day I'm at the shops, and I'm walking down the shop, and I see the t-shirt that in re-kaying glaciers is wearing in his video clip, and I purchase it, because I know that when I put that on, that girl is going to think I am dead sexy, right? I can't sing, but I can wear the shirt. So I went and purchased this, I can remember it, it was like this gross, it was just a boring t-shirt, right? It was like a grey t-shirt over top of sort of like a khaki green, and I used to wear it all the time, I was telling my wife this in the car, and she goes, oh my goodness, I remember that, it was a terrible t-shirt, but I felt like I, I was sold into this lie, right? Now I am, this lie that what you buy, what you purchase, when you put it into or onto yourself, it makes you who you are. Well, even a society that is just, it's a consumer, a society. It's the cultural story of our society in the West. It's a value that actually tells us that we find meaning and satisfaction in consumption. What we consume brings that value into our life, and we might not say it so plainly of ourselves, but I can guarantee you, if you sat down and thought critically about yourself, you could see very clearly how this value actually eats into your life, eats into the very way you define yourself. Every day we're bombarded by messages that tell us the story about what life is really about, right? Life is really about having the better thing than someone else. Life is really about aspiring to that next level, life is really about purchasing that better car, bigger TV, better home, nicer clothes. Why? Because when I've got that, I become somebody. Our success is measured by what we purchase. It's funny, you know, even when we're feeling down, the way we think we can lift ourselves out of this depression is hit the shops, right? We're seeing it at home, and nothing much is happening in life, we're kind of bored. What gives some meaning and excitement to our day, oh man, you should see what I brought yesterday. It was awesome. Guess what? It was marked at 50. I got up for 25. Right? It's kind of exciting. You know, when stuff happens in our life that is not so great, we run to the shops. Where is society that is obsessed with consumerism? I remember I was listening to the radio the other day, and obviously in our world at the moment, there's a pretty serious financial crisis, and the retail sector is feeling that a whole lot. And I was listening to the radio, and there was a panel on the radio talking about the retail sector and how online shops are sort of taken over, and the mainstream shops and the shopping centers are going under, and this lady kind of laughed it off, and she said, "Ha, it'll never happen." We are born to shop, and it's stuck in the light. It's so funny, like we're not born to shop. But in a way in our society, we are cultured into this. We are born to shop. We're born to spend money to consume in order to make ourselves somebody. It tells us that we can actually design and control our own life to be what we want it to be. We can be who we think we should be, but what we consume. We can have the great life, the important life, the fulfilled life through what we consume, the valuable life, a lovable life. It's really interesting, as I was preparing for this, you know, the words of Jesus reflected to me when he said, "Isn't the body more than clothes? Isn't life more than food?" And I think probably we'd also, yeah, of course it is, but our practices and the way our culture works actually says we believe the opposite. It actually says that, yeah, yeah, we buy into the story that what I can put on, what I can purchase, what I can have, what I can bring into my life to control and make up the identity and the definition of me, that's who I am. And we control and we create what I'd say is like a designer life. I am the center of my life, it all revolves around me, what I feel like, what I want to be like, what I want people to think of me, everything comes in and out of my life based on these things. I take some things for a while and then let them go when I want to be a bit different. We get our status now identity from us, it's funny that it's actually in some ways like a cycle of addiction, in that when we purchase something we actually get a bit of a hype from it, a bit of excitement, a bit of it, it's something new in our life and over time that kind of dies so we kind of, I need something else, so we go and purchase the next thing, or we get the new iPad but pretty soon the next new one's out, right? And so then we're like, man, I'm going to look lame if I'm sitting at Gloria jeans with like the old iPad, so like we go and get the new iPad, right? And it's this up and down, it's actually a cycle of addiction and we pretty soon realize that those things we're purchasing, those things we're consuming, it's like a veneer of life, right? It's like just a thin layer that says we're something, that says we've got it together, that says life is purposeful but in reality, it's very, very shallow and it's false and it's a lie that tells us that what we consume can be who we are. In a society obsessed with consumerism, everything becomes a possible consumer item. And you see, this consumerism doesn't end at the shops, right, when you leave the shopping centre. For much of our society, the idea of consumerism extends to every other part of our life. The very important things that make life the richest actually become consumer items. Friends become consumer items. If I take and then I send away and I have and then I get rid of just on a whim depending if I need them or not, family becomes a consumer item. Love becomes a consumer item, marriage becomes a consumer item that just matches my life at this point and I get rid of it. And sadly, for us tonight, faith becomes a consumer item. The idea of God becomes a consumer item. One author puts it like this, he says, "We focus on the benefits that we receive by faith in Jesus rather than being conformed to the life of Jesus." I think one of the biggest challenges facing the younger generation, young adults and youth, I work a lot with youth and so I see this. One of the biggest challenges facing them is how to navigate a world where the core value of that world is consumerism, how to navigate a consumeristic world in what it means to follow Jesus. Because when we live in a world that is defined by consumerism, it's very, very easy to actually start to see our faith gets defined by it. Our churches get defined by it. What it means to follow Jesus gets defined by it. We could call this consumer Christianity. You know, we have iPads, we have iPods, we have IMAX, why don't we have I-church and I praise and I worship and they're so cleverly marketed, right? It's all around me. It's what I want and if I don't like it, like any good consumer, I vote with my feet and I walk out and I go to the church down the road that offers something a little bit better. It's a little bit cooler, a little bit heavier, it's a little bit more where I'm at. It's a consumer Christianity takes over and it all depends, our Christianity depends on how I'm feeling, how I want to look, what I want to be like and we pick and we take pieces of God, pieces of Jesus, pieces of what it means to be a disciple, pieces of what it means to follow Him and we construct this kind of personalized Christianity that is my Christianity. And that's the Jesus I follow, we just leave the rest. We take off the shelf, whatever we want and leave the rest of it. You see, I'd like to say that tonight that when consumerism becomes the core value of Christianity, I think Christianity is actually dead, but when our faith in following Jesus is so overcome by the consumerist society around us, and we're not truly following Jesus. In fact, I'd even put to you that a God who merely fits with my life, a God who merely fits with my choices, a God who merely fits with where I'm at at this point in time, a God who I can sort of carve up and box in and put wherever I want, he is not really God at all and he's most definitely not a God worth worshiping. So we've got ourselves really carefully, am I a consumer in my faith or is my faith defined by something else? I think many of us could echo and relate to the experience that faith sometimes doesn't meet expectations. All the promises we read in God's Word, all the things we hear at church preached, all the hopes and expectations we had, sometimes they fall well short. Don't put you, it's not because God's a liar, it's not because God's trying to lead you on. It's actually because we've succumbed our understanding of God and our following of Jesus into our consumer society. A consumer Christianity is a mere veneer of true faith, it's actually shallow and meaningless. If you've got your Bibles there, I'd love you to turn with me to Mark 8. Because I think Jesus actually answers this whole dilemma extremely well. In Mark 8, we actually discover Jesus in a place called Caesarea Philippi, which is up north of Israel, it's actually not even part of sort of Judea or Israel, it's actually Gentile territory and he's marching around there and he's done a few things there, he's like fed the 4,000 and he's healed some people and as he's going around there, Caesarea Philippi is actually a capital for pagan worship. It is the centre of all sort of pagan God worship, there's temples being built all over the places, there's shrines, there's altars, this place up here is just, if you're a Jewish man and you're wandering around up there, a Jewish woman, you're wandering out there, you are hit in the face with pagan idolatry. And the pagan gods are very, very different from the gods of the Jews, you see the pagan gods are actually very petty gods, they're not gods who actually influence your everyday life very much at all, in fact they're gods who actually kind of stick around their shrine and they just do their thing when you need them to do it, you know, there's a god of fertility so if you're trying to have kids, well hey I'll take a sacrifice over there and I'll lay out my sacrifice and sweet the next day, my wife will probably can see more to it but, and then there's like gods of like the harvest, right? So hey, we want a really big harvest this year, I bet it got to the temple and I'll just lay it down and out comes the harvest, these are gods who we just appease with a little bit of sacrifice, they are weak gods, they are petty gods, they're not gods who actually worry about your everyday life, they're not gods who actually come in and actually interrupt your workday, they interrupt your family, they don't really convict you or confront you with anything, these gods could not be further from the god of Israel. In the midst of this environment, surrounded by all these false gods, Jesus calls together his disciples and Mark actually says a crowd and he says this in verse 34 to 37, if you get your Bibles, won't you read it, he called his disciples and he's crowded to him and he said if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and he must take up his cross and follow me, whoever wants to lose his life, whoever wants to save his life will lose it, whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world yet forfeit his soul or what can a man give in exchange for his soul, if anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the son of man will be ashamed of him when he comes and his father's glory, if anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me, you see the motto of our culture is consume, consume, consume, buy, acquire, design your life, Jesus here invites his followers to something so different, rather than consume Jesus invites his followers to be consumed, to be completely taken up in him, it was the antithesis of the religion in Caesarea Philippi and the antithesis of our culture today, it actually says give up your life and you'll actually find your life, die to yourself and you'll truly live, in being consumed by me, he says, you'll truly discover what your life is really meant to be about, it's an invitation to actually overcome the meaningless spirituality and step into something so much more real, so much more authentic, something that actually takes over our whole life and it takes us on an adventure and a journey into the very heart of who God is, you see what Jesus is inviting in his disciples here, he's inviting him to all consuming discipleship, not to shopping, I think sometimes in our own faith and I don't understand what it means to follow Jesus, we've missed it, sometimes in our own churches we've missed it, it's an invitation to overcome and step past the shell over near of consumer faith and dive head first into this God who is far beyond anything you can possibly box in, who is far beyond anything you could possibly imagine, you see in our culture people hold so tight to the illusion of the good life, but it's all smoke and mirrors, unfortunately we get caught on the carousel of playing the game, Jesus says stop playing the game, step off, give in to me, be consumed, be caught up, be taken up and in doing so you'll actually live, so I just want to give you a couple of things that might look like to be consumed by Christ, rather than to be a consumer in your faith, but to be consumed by Christ, you see the call that Christ makes on us is an all consuming call, it's a beautiful call because it's never forced, it's always a call of love, it's always a call out of humility, it's always a call of grace, come if you will, I won't force it upon you, it's not heavy, it's not burdensome, in fact it sounds like it will be but when you give everything up you'll find incredible freedom to live in, you'll find incredible life to live, what might it look like? The first thing I think it might look like is to move from expectations of experience to encounter, I don't know if you guys noticed this, but one of the big things in giving gifts now is experience gifts, right? If you don't know what to get someone, send them on a drive in a V8 car, that'd be cool, climb up the Harbour Bridge, go on a speedboat, go bungee jumping, go do some wine tasting, experience gifts, these are all sort of manufactured to give you a sense of a hide, to give you a sense of excitement in a safe environment, there's not real risk involved, well it's pretty safe, I don't know how many people have died from bungee jumping recently but it's manufactured to give you a hide to give you an experience that you're really stepping out into something new but it's all constructed around the consumer, it's like a cross-cultural experience versus cross-cultural encounter, you know we sometimes go on overseas trips to experience the other culture and we go to like the tourism type spots which are kind of manufactured to make us feel like we're getting involved, we're not really, it's very different when you get out of the main city and you see what people are really living and experiencing and I think in our Christianity we're going to move from experience to encounter, too often we chase after experiences, we want to experience God, we want to experience a high in worship, maybe get a bit excited, maybe have a cry, maybe and these things are good, don't get me wrong, but I think they're not all that God is asking us to come to, so often we chase the experience in a surface-level engagement that does little for our deeper self, we look for the feel-good moments, the motivating, the inspiring, those things that don't really confront us that much, if it confronts us too much we kind of walk away, but I think what Jesus is calling us to is an encounter that's not even controlled by us, an encounter controlled by God, that we walk into almost unknowingly, where God comes right up to our face and actually shows us for who we truly are and what's really going on, and we see Him for who He truly is, where we experience Jesus in all His fullness and glory and we suddenly go, "My Lord, oh my God, if I'd only known," it counters those experiences like Moses before the burning bush, like a larger in the cave on the mountain when God whispers, like Job at the end of his book where he says, "My ears have heard of you, but now my eyes have seen you, therefore I see myself for who I am and I repent in dust." Paul puts it beautifully in Philippians, he had an encounter on Damascus and he said, "Whatever was to my prophet, I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything I lost compared to the surpassing greatness of dying and Christ Jesus, my Lord, for whose sake I have lost everything, I have given everything away, I've traded all in, I consider them all rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in Him. I want to know Christ and I want to know the power of His resurrection, the fellowship of sharing in His sufferings, I want to be made like Him. I haven't already attained this, he says, but I press on to take hold of that, which Jesus Christ took hold of me. I'd say that Jesus took hold of you if He has and if you've experienced Him for a much greater purpose than a feel-good moment or a motivational service at the end of the week. He has taken hold of you to actually be consumed by Him, to experience what it is to walk with Him, to journey with Him, to have a life completely caught up in Him. So you can say, "Everything, Jesus, be My everything, not just for this moment so I can feel a little bit better, but for my whole life, in my work day, in my family life, in my relationships, I want to encounter you afresh, I want to be confronted by you, convicted by you, I want to see you for who you are, Jesus. You are more than something on the shelf to be brought and sold and traded for or to add it to my list." You are everything. Also think that what Jesus would want is in our life to us to be consumed by Him. He needs to move from the background to the foreground. I was speaking with the other pastors at my church recently about what we're going to be teaching people next year. One of the things we said was we said, "You know what? One thing that I think we're a little bit sad about is that there's a distinct lack of talk and chatter about Jesus amongst our people." He's not on their lips. He's not always on their mind. He's a part of the picture of their life that they've drawn in over on the side somewhere, maybe even towards the center, but he's in the background, he's not the main thing. There's something they see when they look at their life, but he's not everything they see. I would say that Jesus invites us to move him to the very foreground so we actually look through him into everything else. Jesus should be the all-consuming vision for our world. The old hymn puts it perfectly when it says, "Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in his wonderful face, and the things of this world will grow strangely dim." In the light of his glory and grace. If something doesn't want you to see this world, this is his world, it's an incredible world. It's a glorious world. It's full of goodness. He created it out of his pleasure for our pleasure to enjoy, but we ought to see it through him. He should be the very foreground of our vision of life. He should be the very foreground when we look at our workplace, so we look at our relationships. He should be the all-consuming vision. My choices, my preferences, my anger, my frustration, my future, my past. I see it all through Jesus who takes up the whole foreground of my picture of this world. He's on my lips, he's on my mind, he is all-consuming as the very foreground, the foremost reality of what it means to be me. And lastly, I think that Jesus would want us to move in our faith from a place of purchasing to pursuing. We walk into a shop and we just take off the shelves the things we want, some tim-tams, some chips, no broccoli thanks, and just move on through and we take what we want and we put it in there and we construct for ourselves the type of life we want. I'd say Jesus would want us to stop pursuing, I'm sorry, stop purchasing, when it comes to faith and instead be caught up in a life that pursues him wholeheartedly. He's the greatest goal, as the greatest achievement. Not that I just know of Jesus, not that I just know Jesus, but that I am chasing him fully with everything I am. There's no greater pursuit in life than Jesus. When you move from simply seeing faith in Jesus as something I can just take and leave to something that consumes all of me, Jesus is the greatest price. The Psalmist writes of God, he says, "Whom have I in heaven beside you?" And what does this earth have beside you? You are my price. You are my portion forever. I think when Jesus looks into disciples and said, "If you want to come after me, if you want to really truly experience the life that I'm inviting you to, if you don't just want a meaningless spirituality, if you don't just want a veneer of faith, if you don't just want a shallow faith that fails continually to meet the expectations, if you don't want to jump around like a consumer from church to church, from resource to resource, from Bible passage to Bible, from past to the past, if you want to truly know life, then you've got to deny yourself and follow me." He says, "Stop consuming and be consumed by me." Jesus is not a God who we just appease coming to church once a week, chucking our tithes in. He's not the gene in the lamp we rock up to when life's tough. He's not the one that we just go to when there's special occasions in life. Jesus is everything. And sadly, he says that when you try and chase after the rest of the world, you don't win, but you actually lose your soul, he says, instead give up on that. Keep away from that. Begin to pursue me and be consumed entirely by me, to be consumed or to be consumed. It's a simple question, but I think it's relevant that all of us apply that to our lives and we say, "How do I see Jesus? How do I walk my faith?" Is he just a consumable that I've placed in my life because it fits with who I want to be at the moment? Or is he truly the very center, the very content, the core value, the defining part, the one that consumes all of me? Jesus invites us to so much more than what we often experience, and his invitation to you tonight, is that also? Will you step out? Will you say, "I want to give up on the old veneer of Christianity, and I want to begin to walk completely in Jesus, denying myself, taking up my cross, giving up on the value that the world places on consumable and making myself I am, and instead being entirely caught up in Jesus?" It's a glorious life. Let me pray. [BLANK_AUDIO]