Metanoia, The Kingdom of God Is Here
(6 minutes)
"No, it's not a church. It's a family of beloved sons and daughters. It's a family, and we are endeavoring to embrace the unfamiliar. That's what the wilderness is. It invites you on a journey of you not knowing where you're going. The wilderness is an invitation into the unknowing. But also with that, it's an invitation into the undoing." (Pastor Tim)
How much of our thinking, believing and seeing needs to be undone? This is Jesus's invitation to every person. He didn't come asking, "Are you saved?" Jesus came with a singular message that was always in His mouth, "Repent, for the Kingdom of God is within, the Kingdom of God is at hand." The Kingdom of God is right here, right now, ready to be accessed and embraced. All that's required is metanoia - what the word "repent" should actually be. Metanoia means "to change the way you think." Meta means "beyond" and noia means "mind." Jesus' invitation is for us to abandon what we currently think and believe, and go beyond our own mind.
Why is how we think so important? How you think determines how you live your life. It determines every how you make every decision in your life. Everything flows from what you believe and how you think.
Here's a simple story that Pastor Tim shared on Sunday to illustrate the importance of how we think:
Years ago, Reader’s Digest featured the true story of Nick Sitzman — a strong, healthy, and ambitious young railroad yardman who was a hard worker and had a loving wife, two children, and many friends.
One summer day, the train crews were able to end their workday an hour early. While performing one last check on some of the railroad cars, Nick was accidentally locked in a refrigerator boxcar. When he realized that the rest of the workmen had left the site, Nick started to panic.
He banged and shouted repeatedly, but no one heard him. With his knowledge, he predicted the temperature inside the car to be zero degrees. Nick’s thought was, “If I can’t get out, I’ll freeze to death in here”. Wanting to let his wife and family know exactly what had happened to him, he found a knife and began to etch words into the wooden floor. He wrote, “It’s so cold, my body is getting numb. If I could just go to sleep. These may be my last words.”
The next morning, his fellow crew slid open the heavy doors of the boxcar and found Nick dead. An autopsy revealed that every physical sign of his body indicated he had frozen to death. And yet the refrigeration unit of the car was inoperative, and the temperature inside indicated 55ºF. Nick had killed himself by the power of his own thoughts.
What a powerful story. So, how important are your thoughts? How important is what you believe?
"Do you understand why Jesus' first statement to us is "metanoia" - change the way you think? Do you understand that when Jesus shows up to people who have been trapped in dysfunctional bodies - broken bodies - hopeless situations for many years - the very first question that He asks is, 'Are you ready to believe that you're healed?' There is a correlation between what we think and the reality of our lives, is what Jesus is saying. He's saying how you think and how you believe is what's produced in your life. How many of us are tolerating things in our lives because it's how we think it's supposed to be?" (Pastor Tim)
How many things in our lives have we convinced ourselves will never change, and they remain the same because that's how we think and believe it's supposed to be?
Maybe the problem doesn't lie in the circumstances we find ourselves in, but in what we think and believe about those circumstances. And Jesus is showing up to invite us to change how we think, how we believe, and how we see. He's inviting us into metanoia.
Beloved One, are you ready to believe that you're healed?
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Worship: "I Love Your Presence" by UPPERROOM
Honor: Give Online to The Wilderness Place
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