Here we go.
Well, good morning, Menlo Church, and welcome. I'm so glad you're here today. It was suggested to me earlier today that I preach in the same accent as that person did in the bumper, but I don't think it would go well, so I just chose not to do that.
But we're so glad we are beginning a new series today. It's just a short three-week series called The Formation Machine, and I hope that for you, wherever you find yourself, however you got in today to the campus that you're at or watching online, that God uses this to maybe peel back a few layers to the world we all live in.
As a multi-site church with one mission across multiple locations throughout the Bay Area, I want to welcome those joining us in San Mateo, Menlo Park, Mountain View, Saratoga, and those of you joining us online. Last week, we had people at all of our campuses, including people who came from online to an in-person experience for the first time, choose to go public with their faith through baptism. And the stories have been amazing. I hope you were able to be a part of that.
I know that we are all sort of in this moment grappling with the headlines of our days and daily lives in our own way. It can feel super overwhelming. It can feel like there's more happening than we can even process, all while we are either a Taylor Swift fan or we're rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles. Those are pretty much the two categories.
But there's some stuff that's happening underneath the headlines that I want to spend a few minutes talking about with you today. Today, I want to shine a light on the curriculum of culture that we are all swimming in, whether we realize it or not, whether you would call yourself a Christian or not, in hopes that you can at least make a conscious choice about the way that those influences are informing and shaping your life and decisions.
Under the series resources page of our website, you can find an extended section with additional content that you can explore personally, or you can dig in with your life group. I hope it's helpful. Menlo has a rich history of being a place where spiritual formation has been a centerpiece of how we help people think about incorporating their faith into their life. And I hope this series is a part of that.
But before we go any further, I'm going to pray for us. And if you've never been here before, never heard me speak, before I speak, I pray kneeling. And part of the reason that I do that is because God promises us wisdom. If we'll just ask him with humility, God will give us wisdom. And I think this is a conversation we need his wisdom for especially.
So wherever you are, whatever spot you're in personally, as we begin this conversation, would you humble yourself in the quiet of your heart and let's pray.
God, would you give us the wisdom that can only come from you? Would you shape this conversation in a way, not just collectively, but individually by the power of your Holy Spirit that would spotlight those areas and influences of our life that we have drifted towards without realizing it? God, help us to see you today. And to respond because of it. It's in Jesus' name. Amen.
So a couple of years ago, our family moved to the Bay Area. And before that, I had been to children's birthday parties. And the pattern was pretty consistent. You kind of knew what you were getting. It was going to be like, do a fun thing with your kids while you try to avoid your child getting seriously injured and requiring medical care. That was like step one. Step two, eat pizza. Step three, have a cupcake, go home. Like that was the deal.
And you generally saw the same people over and over again, because it's like your kid's class when they're little. So you're like, all right, see you next weekend. You know, like, oh, let's have the same small talk conversation.
But I have been to birthday parties since we've lived in Silicon Valley that should literally be on television. We're talking Build-A-Bear stations, rented out ice cream trucks, catered food, customized treats, bounce houses, and a petting zoo. And I promise you, that was one party. Don't get me wrong. It was fantastic.
But there's something that happens at a party like that. What starts as fun that everyone is enjoying and the kids can't get enough of, it slowly morphs into a place of overstimulation. And the convergence of their maximum sugar overload and the pre-structured slash conditioned nap time, they go from sugar bliss to emotional abyss like that. You just, you kind of see it coming. You're like, they're not, they're like having fun. Oh, they're not having fun.
And really, that is how the culture around us works too. Oftentimes, the promises that it is implicitly making of what success and significance look like are just like a sugar rush. Instant gratification, quick wins, and the momentary thrill that comes before we wonder why our soul and our bank accounts are so empty.
So if you find yourself more exhausted than you realize, or unsure of what to do about it, this week, I want to show you why that's likely the case for all of us without us taking a step and doing something different. And next week, we'll dive into some intentional and proactive ways to counter the influence that we are all breathing in every moment of every day.
You and I are being formed. That's not a statement of good or evil. That's simply a statement of fact. We are all being formed into something by something. And so many of us, we live with so little personal margin that coasting and drifting through the influences around us feels like the only option, but you can only drift into captivity. You will never drift into a better life. You will never drift into a flourishing life. You will never drift into a healthier life. You will only drift into captivity.
You've probably heard someone tell you a story about a whitewater rafting experience that went from tranquil to tumultuous in a moment, because they were floating along and they didn't see something that was coming. That's the reality that we all live in when we simply choose to drift through the world around us. There are problems and pitfalls all around us.
The Apostle Paul, he wrote a letter to the early church a couple of thousand years ago, and it represents the greatest single piece of literature that has ever captured the good news of Jesus. And in it, in one of the most pivotal points in the entire book, he says this. He says, "Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then, and only then, will you be able to test and approve what God's will is. Not yours, but God's will. His good, pleasing, and perfect will."
Now, this is a really important passage because it assumes the very reality we're going to be talking about over the next few weeks. Paul has just spent 11 chapters walking through this history of the world, God's plan through that history, and his love made manifest through his sacrifice of his only son so that we could have a restored relationship with him in his kingdom, now and forever.
Beginning in chapter 12, he focuses on what we do practically with all of that unbelievable work of God, that this act of incredible grace that we're going to talk about in a moment. And he says, next week, this transformation work that we're going to live out, if you're a follower of Jesus, it absolutely pushes you and me to choose not to drift, no matter the culture that we're in the middle of.
But this week, I want to spend a little time reading you the playbook of the world around you. More specifically, the interplay of our deformation that happens in concert with our sinful and fallen flesh, like those desires you and I have for God. And I want to spend a little time like those desires you and I all have, whether you're a Christian or not, the patterns of a broken world that I think we can all acknowledge, whether we're Christians or not, and the schemes of a very real enemy, whether you believe in Satan or not, that is working behind the scenes for your destruction.
But these are not new ideas. And I think in some ways that should give us some hope, right? If we look at the list that Paul breaks down throughout the book of Romans in what those patterns of this world are. Like, what are the things that we're rejecting? See if you can spot any in our culture today.
Idolatry, making the good ultimate, false gods, feels like we've got that one. Moral relativism, yeah, I think we have some extra credit we're earning on that one. Pride, slavery to desire, fire, hostility toward God, greed for sure. I think we're okay on division. You guys think we have any problems there? Division, vengeance, like, we have aced the test of the implications of a broken world that Paul sets out in the book of Romans.
So when we see things in our culture today, it shouldn't be a surprise. We shouldn't be like, oh, wow, I thought that we could drift towards the best life ever. No, they may show up differently in a world with an always-on internet connection or this kind of unique expression of rugged individualism that we exist in in our culture in the United States in the 21st century, but they aren't altogether different from what God warns us about through Paul.
I think a helpful framing of what we are living through today can be discovered by digging into a framework from a mid-20th century sociologist who's not even a Christian named Philip Reif, who works and wrote a theory of culture. And according to him, there's kind of three cultures.
And in these three cultures, you have sort of a natural evolution through, he argues, all civilizations. In the first culture, you have almost, if you're ever wondering, like, I've never seen you write on this board before, Phil, you're about to find out why. So he would argue it's almost like superstitious. They have a spiritual idea, but it's not connected. Not connected to Jesus. Often it's polytheistic.
And then in it, let's see if you can finish this for me, might make, say it louder for me. There we go. Might makes right, right? So that, this power of sort of like, what do we do with it is superstitious. That's kind of what frames the first culture.
And then this evolution takes place. Where you go from superstitious to gaining a structure. Oftentimes that structure is built around a monotheistic religion, one God. There's usually, like, a book or a creed that they're basing it off of. Oftentimes this is, you know, in our Western culture around Jesus. And then this idea of justice and mercy gets built out. And the best practices of this structure, this creed, and this justice here, inform the government.
Now, third culture is sort of like a reaction to second culture. So you could say, like, this one's superstitious, this one provides structure, and this one sort of resists or rejects second culture. In it you see a word that's become very popular deconstruction today sort of deconstructing a lot of it but you also have this thing happening where there are values and artifacts that get carried over from the second culture so in a way third culture is simultaneously rejecting the second culture while it's also building off of the second culture.
And as we look at these three cultures today and we wonder okay how do I think about that like if third culture is working to deconstruct whatever came before it including a rejection of the faith system that it finds within it and those artifacts of faith only exist in as much as they conform to whatever value that's changing in that moment.
Paul's warnings about conformity like when we look at those three you're like why are you showing me those I think one of the reasons is because we often we sort of villainize one of these above another and we're like well I don't know what to do with it and we're like well I don't know and we we remember or we have been told or we dream about another one as the goal but Paul's warnings about conformity to the world and about the dangers of drifting they apply to all three of these eras.
There's a fourth one I'm going to show you in a few minutes I think his warnings apply to that one as well. None of these cultures are the goal on this side of heaven we are all experiencing the consequences of sin and brokenness everywhere but each of these things requires a different approach and we're going to talk about that a little bit next week.
I don't think I have to take a very extensive poll to discover which one of these cultures you think that we are in. Our third culture in America is often referred to as post-Christian. Now we were never a Christian nation but we are rooted as a nation in a Judeo-Christian ethic. We had a common moral framework that the United States was actually developed based on as imperfect and incomplete as that ethic has been applied particularly to marginalized people through atrocities like slavery and the devastating delay of equal rights for women.
There has been a period where we had at least a common moral framework we were aiming at. See the problem is that as imperfect and incomplete as that framework is in a post-Christian third culture we have it quite different. A helpful definition of the post-Christian culture might be this: a culture that was once built on Christian values and beliefs but has now moved past Christianity and is rejecting and reacting against Christianity.
Now the challenge for us is we live in a region that a lot of people have little to no knowledge about Christ at all. It can feel like a first culture but there are artifacts of faith and elements of culture all around us that remind us that we are a church that is not a church. It reminds us of the influence of Christianity on our post-Christian reality.
Just like the warnings from Paul, we have profound distortions that are so close to our roots, so close to the vision of the kingdom all around us. Human rights are so close, so close to the concept that Jesus and his church have pioneered with Jesus at the middle of. Christians have led justice movements, including addressing the injustice that some Christians have led. They've been self-policing for millennia.
The sense of purpose in our secular age is rooted in the Imago Dei, the fact that God made all humans in his image with infinite dignity, value, and worth. Compassion and generosity that were seen as weaknesses in the first culture, they now would be foreign concepts without the vision of Jesus and the church.
Stewardship of the planet that we live in is something that faithful followers of Jesus have cared about for millennia. Even the kind of individual freedom that we think about comes from the tie to responsibility that God has given humanity and regularly communicated.
All of what we see and drift in with our unique third culture is simply a distortion of the vision. The vision that God has given us as a life full of hope that can lead to flourishing. You won't drift into it, but so many of these things are just a quarter turn different.
So maybe you're wondering if it's really that bad. Like Phil, this is, I didn't sign up for a college lecture today. Why are you showing me this? How far off can these things really be? Can't we all just agree to disagree and live our lives? Well, that's actually something called pluralism. And, uh, we live out kind of this respect and care for one another. We understand we have different worldviews, but pluralism says there is a common moral framework. There is a shared pool of meaning that we live from within.
And as long as we do that, people can agree to disagree in lots of different things. Our problem in a post-Christian third culture is that we have moved from a collective pluralistic society, shared pool of meaning to an individualistic relativistic society. No. We have no shared pool of meaning and we have done it very, very quickly. It's what the Bible would describe as everyone did what was right in their own eyes. And it doesn't work.
There is no common moral framework and it's killing us. Remember none of these cultures are the kingdom of God, which is the true citizenship for anyone that chooses to follow Jesus now and forever. But our culture has unique distortions. In other words, this side of heaven, if you are a follower of Jesus, you are in exile.
Okay. You will never feel like you're perfectly at home because you're not. You're living in a place that is not your home. And I get it. It can feel dizzying to try to live with this kind of intentionality all the time, to think everything in my life is sort of twisted a little bit and taking me off track, but I just need to like survive. I'm just trying to make it through the week.
And sometimes living in this third culture of post-Christian in our moment, it can feel like those terms of service windows that pop up before we can install something or before we can set up an account, when you do that software update. Who has time to read that, right? How many of you are like, some of you are really incredible people, very impressive. And you actually do read that. I've heard from some of you. There are others of us. I just want to tell you, we're annoyed by the ones that are like, we're going to make you scroll all the way to the bottom before you can click agree. And like, you know, I'm not reading this, right?
But you can only drift into captivity. Like none of us are going to scroll to the bottom of the terms of service every day and click accept as fast as we can and just run into the flood of deformation that's happening all around us. None of us are going to do that into a place of flourishing, into a place of health, into a place of life. It's only going to be captivity towards an agenda and a plan that's going to destroy us.
Now, none of this is new. And the good news about that is that God has been sharing how this broken world works with people for thousands of years. In the Hebrew scriptures, there's a book called Proverbs in which a man named Solomon, who is described as the wisest man to ever live. He didn't always live the wisdom he knew, but very wise. He wrote these words that are still true today. He says, "The house of the wicked will be destroyed, but the tent of the upright will flourish. There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death."
Now, it's easy to see in a moment like this how we think like, yeah, but is this hyperbole? Is this really, does this actually how this has to work? I'm just telling you, this was written nearly 3,000 years ago, a thousand years before the earthly ministry of Jesus. And these words have stood the test of time.
Notice how Solomon highlights that even if the wicked have a house, even if they've like made it, you think, oh my goodness, how can they have all of that? It will be destroyed. It will not last. It will not hold up. And all the things and places that really matter, it won't last. But the upright, the people that are trying to honor God, those people, even if they just have a tent, that tent can lead to flourishing.
That there is a way, I know this seems obvious, there is a way that for you and me in post-Christian culture, it seems right. It seems harmless. It seems like not a big deal. And that way, Solomon says, leads to death.
Now, I want to be careful not to vilify people who are made in the image of God, who God loves, who are simply trapped in the schemes of the enemy of this world and the propensity to rebel that lives inside of all of us. God loves everyone. And he calls you and me to do the same thing.
There's something that we've discussed before that is so close to the kingdom of heaven in the world around us. And kind of the utopian pursuits of our secular world. But it would be easy to confuse for God's kingdom, but there's a significant difference. Australian pastor Mark Sayers puts it this way. He says, "They want the kingdom without the king."
And oftentimes what gets described as this utopian future in the kingdom of heaven, you could get lots of people to agree with that, but it's who's in charge of it. The implications for this are profound because we end up putting ourselves in the place of God. And we end up putting ourselves in the place of God's authority.
And the ever-changing value system of our present age, it shapes our goals. It shapes our attitudes and the way that we show up. In his book, The Air We Breathe, Glenn Scrivener highlights the disconnect this way. He says, "In order to pursue the kingdom without the king, we have had to dethrone the person of Christ and install abstract values instead."
The problem should be obvious. Persons can forgive you. Values cannot. Values can only judge you. Maybe I might say values can only cancel you. That's the problem with the kingdom without the king.
Isn't this the way that we're living today? Isn't this what drifting in our world today feels like? The sand underneath us is shifting every minute of every day, and any misstep in those changing cultural values warrants personal and reputational destruction. We are people of grace living in a world without it.
And actually, that's good news because if we live it out and we model it the way we're going to talk about over the next couple of weeks, you will show people the kingdom that we are all made to live within.
What's different about the moment that we're living in, like so much of this is just first culture, second culture, third culture. So much of this is that. What makes it so different about the moment that we're living in is that historically people have existed with limited geographic context. People were aware of what was happening in their immediate time and space, but not now.
Today, everyone knows everything all the time. And I think we could make the case that we're not built for that. And it's being manipulated and curated so that we can feel like we have all of that, even when we don't. This started as a promise of digital utopia.
But if we're honest, there is a lot of digital dystopia all around us. Thanks to the internet, news has become biased entertainment where our attention is itself the product. And we increasingly give our attention because we are fueled by fear. Somehow we have been convinced that the same institutions that have made us so afraid are the only ones that can solve our fear.
So if we just drift into this more and more with the next generation, we're going to be reminded that we don't know what the next recognized answer is, the next must-have app, the next bingeable show, the next can't-miss trend, or the next politician that tells you that they can solve all these problems.
We may find ourselves simultaneously connected to our cultural moment, but disconnected from the God who made us and loves us, regardless of what we've done or where we've been. That's a trade-off we don't want to make.
Our secular age, it promises that if you just trust the promise of an increasingly godless society, you will be happy and fulfilled. And all the projects problems of injustice will just melt away. How's that going? I think you know. Whether you're a person of faith or not, it's not going well.
There is a deepening divide. Some people have actually suggested that we are now in a fourth culture. We think about those three before. We've moved past pushing from the second culture into the third culture and deconstructing. In this fourth culture, it's all about politics and the politicalization of everything.
In this one, it's not really rejecting the third. It's built on the third while still rejecting the second culture. And because of that, our politics, they have the ferocity of religion. And you have one group against another group and nothing in the middle, doesn't it feel like that?
And the reason for that is because we're asking politicians to do things that we used to ask God to do. And we're expecting politicians to be able to do what only God can do. It's why we can't compromise. There used to be something that would happen down here where there was conviction, there was compassion, and there was civility. That everybody brought all of that to a conversation, as imperfect as they did.
Now you have one political party that has claimed conviction, one political party that has claimed compassion, and both of them have jettisoned civility because it's a, you know, everything ends justify the means. We have to just no holds barred win. And it's because we have brought religiosity to our fourth culture. We have asked politics to do what they were never meant to do.
It's why our news sources have become so biased and why the mental health challenge that we see is so systemic. And Jonathan, how do you see that? In Heights research, we see the exponential growth in anxiety and mental health challenges, especially among young people. The promises of a culture asking us to behave like we are on a lazy river at an all-inclusive resort. Those promises are not working.
And here's the thing, that's actually really good news. There's something that I think God can do with it. Now I know that a message like this, it can leave us like wondering where the bunker is that we can just go pray and God just come fix it. Let us know when it's taken care of.
But I think that we're in an unprecedented moment of hope where God is already moving to draw people to himself in our culture and even in our own community to show us how broken the promises of this world truly are.
Throughout my childhood, I experienced a headstrong father who had faced deep pain and abuse as a child. And I think that's what he did. And I think that's what he did. And I think that's what he did as a child who never even knew his parents. And in turn, he parented with the same abuse that he knew. It's all he knew. Our relationship was complicated.
But near the end of his life, something happened. His perspective of life couldn't make sense of the suffering that he was experiencing. He had finished a successful career. His kids were out of the house. He lived in a nice town. But his headstrong attitude couldn't hold up to the physical suffering of disease, to the disappointment of his own life that he was living in the middle of.
It was in the midst of this pain that God reached my dad at the end of his life. Author and theologian C.S. Lewis, he famously put it this way. He says, "Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
And I'm telling you, in a secular age that has said there is a way to have a flourishing life, there is a way to have a flourishing life without God, it's not working. And the pain of it not working is God speaking.
What if the pain that we are asking God to remove in our world is the very thing that he is using to remind our world of its need for him? Are you caring for people in their pain and processing your own? Remember that the pain you feel and the pain that you see around you, it's a reminder of how broken our world is. It's a reminder that you will never drift towards God.
Next week, we'll talk about how God has often used people like us to live in times like these so that hope can spread in unique and profound ways. You are right where God wants you, but you aren't on the lazy river. You can't just drift.
So this week, take a look at where you are drifting, where in your life without margin, you've just sort of let that product, let that streaming service, let that politician, let that news source, let that employer, let that professor, let that friend be the thing that just sort of slowly drifts you and you haven't realized it. Just take a look.
And let me tell you, if you find yourself wondering, how can I live following Jesus in a way that looks the most like the culture around me and makes no waves? If you've ever thought, I want to follow Jesus, but I don't want to make waves. You know what doesn't make waves? Drifting.
Living as exiles in a post-Christian world, we're going to make waves. As a matter of fact, the more you faithfully follow Jesus, the more you're going to stand out in a culture that doesn't. Not with judgment, but with love, with civility.
I hope that this week you'll maybe even think about what are those things that I've allowed into my life? Assumed we're good. Those things that are just small little compromises that have taken over, that I've given too much a share of my mind and my heart.
There's so much more to this conversation that I hope you'll dig into, either in conversations around a meal, or maybe that's at a life group this week. I hope you'll continue to have this conversation.
But here's the thing, God has not given up on you. No matter who you are, no matter what you've done, no matter where you've been. So don't give up on him.
We may live in a post-Christian culture, but there is still a king on the throne. It's the only throne that will matter in the end. And he's not going anywhere.
Would you pray with me?
God, thank you so much. Thank you for the tremendous gift you have given us in your son, that even though we can't get to you on our own, you came to us on your own.
And even though, God, we live in a culture that's not going anywhere, we live in a culture without grace. We are people of grace because you have extended it through him.
And even in just a few moments at all of our campuses, as we remember that act through communion, would you help us in our daily lives, remember the act of surrender and sacrifice that you've modeled for us on the cross 2,000 years ago.
That God, we are people of that work because we follow you. God, would you help us to have eyes to see the circumstances of the world with us? Not so that we'll bring a bitter, bitter attitude of cynicism, but God, that you might break our heart for what breaks yours, that we would walk in with compassion, conviction, and civility, that we would care for a world around us, that we would extend your love just as you've done with us.
God, we thank you so much. We give this to you now, in Jesus' name.
on Feb 09, 2025
