From Scarcity to Abundance: Embracing God's Gift
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Scarcity mentality makes some of us defensive, anxious, retreat into holding on to what we got. Scarcity mentality makes others of us aggressive, easily triggered, easily envious, easily jealous. There's always not enough. You're always on high alert. It is an exhausting, terrible way to live. So that's weird because scarcity is reality. But scarcity mentality is soul-sucking and terrible for you and everyone around you. So here's the conclusion I want to invite you to consider with me. Maybe you weren't made for scarcity. [00:04:29] (32 seconds)
Easter is God's gift to a world trapped and crammed in scarcity into his abundance. To live a life that is open, not closed, not anxious, not fearful. To live a life that's free, more playful, more joyful, more peaceful. To go and build a beautiful life, go build beautiful families, go build beautiful businesses or non-profits, or serve or work in your community, all drawing on the magnificent abundance of God that you were created for. That's what Easter Sunday is all about. [00:05:23] (39 seconds)
Now, every week we have somebody at Chatham Community Church who has no church background, no Bible background. We're so glad that you're here. And we're picking up on Easter Sunday at the very end of a long story. So I'm gonna give you a quick flyover of how we get to Easter Sunday. For three years, Jesus walks around and he teaches and does miracles. He does things that no one's ever done before. And he lives the most consequential three years in human history. He changes more lives in three years of his life without like social media, without anything to kind of elevate his platform. [00:06:02] (26 seconds)
Sin is this thing that corrupts all of God's good creation. And Paul elsewhere talks about how the wages of sin, the consequences of sin is death. It's just the natural outcome, right? Death means that everything has an expiration date. Everything ends. Everything has some sort of end date. Everything expires except for Pop-Tarts because they're all preservatives. Other than Pop-Tarts, everything has limits. Everything ends. And so we've got this challenge, right? This problem. And Paul maps it out like this. Sin leads to death, which leads to limits, which leads to scarcity. [00:14:37] (35 seconds)
And God's deep time is marked with all this super abundance, all this abundance language, all these resources, all this power. In Ephesians chapter two, Paul gives us all this overflowing abundance language. And what I want you to do is I'm going to invite you here to close your eyes for just a few seconds while I read some of the phrases from Ephesians two. I want you to let them kind of wash over you. So just close your eyes here for just a second. Let me just read to you some of these amazing, amazing verbs, amazing descriptions of all of God's resources. [00:16:19] (31 seconds)
Sin is a broken relationship, right? Sin introduces something between us and God. Again, sin, not that everything's as bad as it could be, just none of us is as God intended us to be or created us to be. All the stuff that you wouldn't want up here on the big screen, right? All that stuff cuts us off from God. And so what happens is this. We get stuck in this small crammed space called scarcity without all of God's resources, with all of God's grace, without all of all that mercy, without all that life, life, life, and more life. [00:18:12] (27 seconds)
In Ephesians chapter 2, Paul maps out this beautiful, big old butt. And here's what he says in Ephesians 2, pick up in verse 4. He says this, but because of God's great love for us, God, who's rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ, even when we were dead in our transgressions. It's by grace you've been saved. And by grace, God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms. [00:19:08] (23 seconds)
He was doing all the right religious stuff. And then he meets Jesus, who completely blows up religion as usual, completely destroys this little equation, and introduces something that has changed more lives than anything else in human history. He introduces grace at the center of this equation. Paul writes this, it is by grace you have been saved. God raises up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms. It's by grace you've been saved through faith. This is not from yourself. That itself is a gift of God. Not by works, anything you do so that no one can boast. [00:22:00] (33 seconds)
So back to our little diagram, right? So we're all here stuck, dead in our sins with a sin barrier, crammed in this little space that produces scarcity and anxiety and ambition and aggression and all the mess, right? So we're stuck in this sort of thing. And then Jesus lands into this broken space and he breaks through the sin barrier. He lays down his life. He washes away sin. He conquers and overcomes the sin barrier through his death on the cross. Throughout the Old Testament, there's a sacrificial system that people could sacrifice bulls and goats and lambs, and that's how they could wash away sin. [00:24:13] (29 seconds)
Freedom from scarcity that we were not made for comes as we follow Jesus into God's abundance. And as we live out of that abundance that we were made for, we then follow Jesus into a life of meaning and purpose. This is where we get shaped. So as we step into God's abundance, all that abundance, it shapes us. It molds us. It frees us to think differently. It frees us from caring about our reputation so much or caring what other people think about us so much or chasing after small, shallow goals like more money and more power, more applause, more people. [00:27:13] (27 seconds)
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