CHS Downtown sermon | Tim Henderson+

Thanks, Eric. So I would rather stand down here on the floor, but if I do that, I don't know if you can see me. Is there enough light if I come down? Okay.

Welcome to Church of the Holy Spirit downtown, the Labor Day weekend edition. We knew it was going to be tiny, and y'all didn't disappoint. But thank you so much for coming out. We know it would've been a lot easier on this Sunday night of all Sunday nights just to hang out and do something fun at home and be outside. But thanks for coming to be with us.

We decided that if we held it, we were going to do something a little bit weird, a little bit different. Rather than our normal time in the scriptures and a formal sermon, I wanted to tell you a little bit of my story and invite you guys to tell your stories. But before I do, let me set this up.

A Question About Jesus' Return

I want you guys to think about this: Jesus might come back tomorrow. The odds on that are relatively long. But if we consider he could come back in a week or a month or a year, the longer out we go, the better the odds get.

Tell me this. At what point would you say the odds are more likely that he comes back than he doesn't? Is it in a hundred years? A thousand years? Ten thousand years? What's your opening bid?

A million years before that feels pretty good. We'll blow each other up before that, right?

Is it a hundred years? A thousand years? Ten thousand years? Two hundred or less?

So we'll go with May, alright?

Imagine Eternal Life

Okay, imagine it's May and Jesus has come back to the earth. He's raised you from the dead, and there has been an examination of your life. And miracle of miracles, grace upon grace, you survive the examination. You are granted eternal life. You're going to live forever in a world of endless and increasing joy because that examination of your life is an act of radical grace whereby Jesus' life is substituted for yours. You get credit for all of his splendor, and he takes the blame for all that you have done.

Now, because of him, you get to enter into joy that will last forever and ever and ever. Endless happiness in a body that'll never die, in a world of perfection, and now it's yours, and it's never going to stop being yours.

Sorrow and sighing have fled away. — Isaiah (paraphrased)

You're there with me?

Now, in that moment when you're there in that place where endless joy is yours, if you were to look back to these days here, these moments, if you were to look back to this time, what do you think you would say is the most important thing that ever happened in your fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety years?

Steve: When I was eleven years old, I said yes to Jesus.

You were eleven years old and you became a follower of Jesus. I like that answer.

Now y'all may not have been eleven, but do you think that in that moment, when endless happiness is yours, total grace, total forgiveness has been offered to you, you would look back and have some kind of a day? Maybe it's not a day. Steve got a day when he was eleven. I don't have a day, but some of us might say, well, it was somewhere in my freshman year in college or somewhere when I was in fifth grade.

Do you think anybody would have a different answer, an answer different in substance than what Steve has said? The day, the time, the season that Jesus became real to you?

I don't think there's any question that everybody in that moment when it's all there and it's all real and it's all been given to you as a gift, we would look back and say it was then. It was those people. It was that event. It was that time in my life where the gospel became real. That is, by far, without any competition, the most significant thing that ever happened to us.

So I wanted tonight to begin—we're going to do this over the span of several weeks. I want you guys to begin thinking: when was that for you?

And for some of you here, you may be like, "Well, I don't know, but it's sometime after 09/05/2021." Because maybe you're in a process and that hasn't happened yet. And if so, that's so great. We're so glad that you are here with us to kind of have this conversation. But I would love you guys to have a conversation—one to think, to reflect: What was that day? What was that season? What was going on in my life? How did it come about? To really think, how did it happen that Jesus became real to you?

I'll tell you just to kind of prime the pump. I'll tell you how it happened for me, and then maybe invite you guys. We're gonna celebrate communion and give you guys a chance to talk a little bit about that yourself around your story.

My Story

For me, I grew up going to church. I grew up in a Christian home—well, certainly culturally Christian. But I thought it was all really, really boring. It didn't land, it didn't connect, it was of no meaningful substance for me.

I have a very clear memory of being in my living room—this is probably eighth grade, ninth grade—and asking my mom to explain to me, "What is the connection? I know that Jesus died, and that if we believe in him, we go to heaven. But like, why? What's the connection? How does what's the mechanics of this that makes like, why isn't it—hey, if you believe the grass is green, you can go to heaven. If you believe the planes can fly, you can go to heaven. Why? What does this have to do with that?"

Whatever she said to me as an answer made no sense to me. It didn't land, it didn't connect. I just walked away.

When I got to JMU, I was your basic happy pagan, right? Christian-ish, but I was not interested in living with Jesus, walking with Jesus, living in him. I thought I was a Christian because I wasn't Muslim. I didn't know Jesus. I wasn't gonna spend any time in his word. I was sleeping with my girlfriend in high school. I was just gonna go to college, get a job, get some money, buy a fast car, be happy. That was it. I didn't think anything beyond that.

But this guy named Andy Sparks came by my dorm room. Andy was on staff with an organization called CREW—a Christian student group. And Andy came by and he shared this little booklet called the Four Spiritual Laws, which is a summary of the Christian message. When Andy shared it with me, I just said, "Yeah, I knew all that." It wasn't a transformative moment. It sounded vaguely familiar, and I just kind of granted it. That wasn't a big deal to me.

But what was a big deal is that I had questions about this stuff that my mom hadn't been able to answer. So Andy came by my room every week for weeks and weeks and weeks. He would come by, and I would just ask him questions. And he would do his best to answer those questions. To be honest, I don't remember anything that he said. None of it sticks in my mind. But there was this relationship that began to form.

Then Andy told me that he was gonna start a Bible study and he wanted to know if I'd be interested to be in it. I said, "Yeah, sure. We could do that." And as a strategic play, he had the Bible study in my room. I gotta tell you, my room was not an ideal place to have a Bible study by any means. I had girls mud wrestling on one wall. I had this life-sized poster of some other girl immediately over my bed, so it looked like she was in my bed. The whole thing was just a lurid freshman dorm, right? Whatever spiritual value took place in that room was offset by whatever happened to those poor guys in that room looking at my posters on my walls. It would be a net even at best.

But they came every week, and so I came because I lived there. I heard the gospel over and over and over again. And in the midst of it, something happened for me. I don't know the day. I don't know what moment it was. But something happened where I began to make this realization.

If you'd asked me what happened on Easter, if there was a pop quiz—what happened on Easter—I could have told you that Jesus rose from the dead. I knew that much. Easter, resurrection. Got it. But if you'd asked me if it mattered and if you'd asked me if I thought it was true, I would have said, "Yeah, that's what happened. We're Christians. Easter. Jesus rose from the dead." But I didn't think it mattered in the slightest. Like, who cares?

And I recognized at some point over my freshman year, there is this massive contradiction. Because either Jesus rose from the dead, and it is the most important thing that has ever happened in human history, or he didn't raise from the dead, and it just doesn't matter. But this thing—that it is true and it doesn't matter—became an untenable place for me to hold. And so I had to decide: either stop pretending to be a Christian because it's not true and go on your merry way, or if that happened, then everything—I mean everything, everything—has to change.

So I read this book by Josh McDowell called The Resurrection Factor, in which he makes the case: if he didn't rise from the dead, what did happen? And he walks through. Maybe it was this. Maybe the disciples stole the body. Maybe he wasn't really dead. He just swooned. Maybe, whatever. All these different alternative theories. And as I went through the alternative theories, like, that doesn't make any sense, and that doesn't make any sense, and that doesn't make any sense. And you kind of get this very Sherlock Holmes thing. You know the Sherlock Holmes famous quote: once you've eliminated all the things that are impossible, whatever's left, no matter how improbable, must be the answer. And I'm like, well, for crying out loud, he rose from the dead. Like, actually. Like, actually. This is a real thing.

And at that point, the convenient lie that I had lived my whole life—he did, but so what?—it was taken away from me. And that year, everything in my life began to change slowly. There was no, like, I didn't wake up the next day with the birds singing. But bit by bit, the posters came down. Right? And I said that both literally and metaphorically because everything else that I had papered my life with began to be slowly changed, almost like unintentionally.

The Reordering of Our Loves

The things that Augustine talks about this process—I had never heard of it, but he talks about the reordering of our loves. Have you ever heard him talk about the idea of reordered loves? The idea is that every one of us—if I give you a deck of 52 cards, we could shuffle the deck. Right? And somebody might put one card at the top of the deck, that's the thing you love the most. And then something else at the bottom of the deck, and that's the thing you love the least. And invariably, around the room, we all love worthy things too little. They got shuffled to the bottom of the deck. And we love unworthy things too much. We somehow elevated them.

And this process began there towards the end of my freshman year, and then into my sophomore year, there was slow growth. And by my junior year, the hook was set. But really, when I came back to college, beginning of my junior year, this cocoon time—like, when a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, it's not at a moment in time. There's this thing that's going on. And that was kind of my sophomore year. But slowly, these things are all getting reordered, and the stuff I didn't care a lick about became really important to me. And the stuff that I had built my life on began to feel paper thin. And it all started to shift, which is not by any means to suggest that by my junior year everything was great. It wasn't. Right? I mean, I'm 50. It's been a while, and there's still plenty of work to be done.

But beyond question, by my junior year of college, Jesus had become something he wasn't remotely to me before I went to college. Right? It's one of the reasons that I absolutely love college because college is where my life was transformed. And Jesus began this work. It was a slow work. In some people, it's fast. For me, slow. But real. Genuine transformation. If my loves were reordered, and not just my loves, but the seat of my confidence. I think I would have said when I was younger that I'm gonna go to heaven when I die. What else is gonna happen? You know? But that's because I'm a reasonably good person, despite all the stuff that's not true notwithstanding, reasonably good.

But my junior year, I understood: all this stuff that you think is gonna work—number one, you're probably not as good as you think you are. And even if you were, that's not good enough. There is no hope. But I didn't—that didn't trouble me any longer because I really began to believe that what Jesus had done on my behalf was real. He was actually in a position, genuinely able to offer me a righteous life because he was righteous. And he was genuinely able to take away the blame for all of the junk in my life—past, present, and future—because he didn't just sprain his ankle for my sin. He died. He paid the price, and all could be put to rights.

And that, though it sounds like the end of that particular story, is actually the beginning of the story.

Because from my junior year on forward, his call on my life to begin to really do the deep, deep work of transforming everything—that's when it began. And then I ended up coming on staff with that organization, Crew. My wife and I were on staff with Crew for twenty years. We spent our whole lives, our whole adulthood on college campuses being Andy Sparks to people. Right? Trying to be the men and the women that would interrupt a college student's life and try to give them an entirely new reason to live. We did that for twenty years. Now we work at Church of Holy Spirit and lead the fellows and do a bunch of other stuff. But it's ever since that moment that it happened to me, I have been intoxicated with the drug of seeing it happen for somebody else. That somebody's whole purpose for living can be radically thrown out of balance because Jesus is transformatively great.

Sharing Your Story

Now, what I want to invite you guys to do tonight is this. Maybe some of you might be able to hop up here right now and tell your story. I'm not gonna ask you to do that, so don't freak out. Some of you might be able to it. Others, you might be like, I don't even know what did happen. I've never processed it. I've never made the list. And I would encourage you guys that this is actually a worthwhile exercise.

Some of you probably know that Saul becomes Paul. Right? His name is changed. But in Acts chapter nine, you can read his story as it actually is happening as Jesus changes his life. But did you know that Acts nine is not the only place that Paul's conversion story is told? It's three other times that you can read about it in the New Testament: Acts 24, Acts 26, and Galatians one into two. He kind of drags it out a little bit.

And Paul saw his story as a tool. It was a useful thing. He tells his story in multiple contexts. Every time he tells it, he tells it a little bit different. He emphasizes different things to focus on with his audience. But the knowledge of the story—what happened? How, or what is—maybe it's not in the past. What is happening? How does this work? That is really worthwhile.

And so I want to give you guys just an opportunity this evening. After we kind of break the bread and pour the wine, we're gonna give you a chance to share your stories with one another. There won't be enough time for everybody to go, but some of you might be like, I'd like to take a swing at that and tell my story. And we're gonna be in this space for the next several weeks. Next week, I imagine our regular crowd will show back up, and we're gonna give them an opportunity to do that as well. So if you tell your story tonight, maybe you won't do that next week. But I think there's value, and I'll tell you why in weeks to come.

There's a lot of value in rehearsing your story for your own sake, but then also becoming practiced in telling your story. Because in some cases, your story—the exact particulars of how God opened your eyes to see your need and his sufficiency to meet that need—might be really an instrument that God uses for other people who need to have that happen as well. Dig it?