Magnified Ministries Podcast Ep 64 Ecclesiastes Lesson

Who would have known? And you know what I love about it is, because for Young adults now, we are working on these things, we'll talk about later in a later podcast.

But one of the insights I had during the time away when I was on sabbatical is that because we are in a pre-Christian culture, young adults a lot of times who come to us, they come to the church as kind of a provider of services.

So they just want to get service, service, service, service.

You do stuff, you provide for me, you do things for me.

And I think what I discover is that they do it because they don't know any other way of being at church.

They never witnessed other way of being at church.

And so what I think it's really important is to step away and look at the early church and say, well, what was the DNA of the early church? Like how radically different was the church right after the resurrection of Jesus? And I think that's what our conversation has been over the last now four weeks is to kind of look at the stories of Jesus and say, how do those stories impact our lives? How do those stories really inform who we are, where we are, and how do we respond to the movement of the Holy Spirit in our midst?

I love that.

And today we're going to have an opportunity to talk about All of these different stories coming together.

And again, there's so many different stories in the Bible.

There's so many different stories of saints and people that have lived a life well lived, if you will.

And what we want to bring together is this thread that I think connects each of these stories.

The story of Moses, the story of Abraham, the story of Peter.

which is that they lived the good life right and one of the things that we in today's society think about is well what does it really mean to be living a good life because today's world will tell you that means more power, more money, more stature, more fame, more, more, more, more, more, more.

But I think you always talk about this, and I think it's St. Augustine, right? The substitutes of God.

And at the end of the day, what I think we saw in the story of each of these three people is that They live the good life by learning how to let go of their human inclinations and instincts, wrestle with their sin, and turn their life over to God.

And I think in many ways, that's what we kind of want to bring home is, what does that look like in today's world to not become, I don't know, overwhelmed or... drawn or what have you, but to find the way to search for the presence of God in the noisiness of today's world.