The Lifeboat- PT 7 - Go Fish - Audio
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Hey, I'm Tom. I'm lead pastor here at Co-Sphere. Super glad you're here with us. And we are getting near to the end of a series that we've been on for a while. It's called The Lifeboat. And today we are talking about what we are doing. We've been thinking of life as kind of a transitional period. So the way life starts out is we don't have a whole lot of questions about things. We're just kind of cruising along. You might imagine yourself in a cruise ship, maybe in first class, maybe in the steerage, whatever. But life is figured out for you. You're just on the cruise ship. And then suddenly the cruise ship hits an iceberg. And maybe that's something that's the result of what you've done. Maybe you've been living in a way that is just not great. And as a result, things start to collapse. It might be the case that maybe someone did something to you or a group of people did something. You've got to band in, betrayed, something like that. But whatever the case, you have this system, you have this way of life. And bam, it doesn't work anymore. And the next thing you find is that you are drowning. You are in the water. You are going down underneath the waves and back up. And you have a hand out crying out for someone to save you. And at that moment in your life, the reason why you're here is because one way or another, Jesus, the Messiah of Israel, reached out his hand. He grabbed you out of the water. He pulled you in to the lifeboat. This is the lifeboat. And in that experience, right? Well, we're not reflecting when all that's happening, right? We're in crisis. We're desperate. And then as we've seen in this series, you get onto the lifeboat, then things have to happen. You've got to dry off. You've got to get rid of your wet clothes, the way that you were doing things. You've got to get fed. You've got to fill up with the way that Jesus operates because it's totally upside down. It is not the way that you've been operating. It's like the cruise ship was completely wrong about everything. And now you've got to learn a new way of doing stuff. Then you've got to learn how to row because everyone in the lifeboat's got some work to do. We have a way to keep the lifeboat going. So anything that you do that can strengthen this lifeboat or help us fill up our mission. That's what you've got to do. And then once you've learned how to row, you've got to teach others how to row. You've been given gifts and abilities and skills and a message, a story of how God worked in your life. And you've got to teach somebody else that stuff so that they can learn how to row too. And in all of that, we're not really thinking. We're not like, what is happening here? Because really in all of that, it's about us. Like we were the ones drowning. We needed help. Then we were the ones freezing in the cold, stormy weather. Then we were the ones starving. Then we were the ones trying to figure out how to keep this thing going. Then we've been busy helping other people learn. And in all of that, we may never have asked ourselves, what is this boat for? When it stops being about me, we might remember that this boat is called a lifeboat. Because it's not just us, man. There's a lot of other people drowning. I don't know if you guys have ever played Uno with children. Some of you, I know that a lot of us are family game players. I tend not to be. I wish that I were, but I don't know. I'm not sure what it is. I don't really care about winning enough, I think. Or maybe it's that I'm scared of losing, and the only time I want to play a game is when I know I'm going to win, so you'd think then that playing with kids would be the best way to go. But with Uno, I can't control anything, because it's almost entirely luck. The only non-luck parts of Uno are you, cheating, obviously, finding out what other people have, or having the ability to know what other people have in their hand. If you don't know Uno, I think you start with seven and you've got to get all of them gone. Or before you do, you say, "Oh no, I have won." And then you get rid of that when you win. I've noticed that when I play this game with my children, they get all excited, "Yes, we're going to play Uno." And then about seven minutes into it, everyone's miserable. There's crying. There's anger, except for one person. If you don't know, I got three kids. I have Alice, she's 14, Olivia, 12, and Sorin's 7. The only person who's happy when we play Uno, is Sorin. Why is that? He actually does understand the game, like he knows what the point is, but he doesn't care. His favorite part about Uno is getting more cards. He loves it.
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Coast Bible Church, PastorTom Bennett, San Juan Capistrano, CA, www.coastbible.org