Feel Like Quitting? | Kingdom

Welcome back to another episode where we are discussing all things about the kingdom of God and how it is that we seek first the kingdom of Christ, our great

King. I'm the host, John Moffitt. I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and this podcast is a part of a network of podcasts by Theocast.

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Let's talk about today's topic. I quit. I don't know about you, but that's a phrase that I often think about in my own mind.

I'm done. I don't do this anymore. Whether it's parenting, being a husband, living in this world, being a

United States citizen, it doesn't matter, because it just feels like progress isn't fast enough and the pain is too complicated.

I think we've all had periods of time where we're excited about life, we are excited about our job or about our health or about our family, and then there are periods of time where you just want the pain, the frustration, the suffering to go away.

You just want it to end. You want it at a point where you want to quit. It's at those moments and at that period, that's who

I want to talk to today, where you're ready to just throw it in. I can't find a reason to be excited, because it feels like the world is against me.

Here's a comforting truth for me that I have held on to for many, many years, being over almost 20 years in ministry, married for 20 years, been a father for 19 years, just wrestling with life, going into the mid years of my life, that I am not the first to want to quit.

I am not the first to feel like life is just brutal and that it feels like every new year you get kicked in the face in a new place, that there isn't a part of you that just hasn't been violated by life.

When Paul says certain things, like in Romans, where he says, who will save me from this body of death?

I feel like I just walk around with a stinky, smelly body and there's no way to get away from the stench, the dead weight, there's no way to get away from it.

Who will save me from this? He doesn't point to anything here on this world, in this earth, nothing.

He points to something that's far beyond it and far more powerful than any of the solutions that we look for.

We try and Botox ourselves back into life and it just doesn't work. There's no amount of money, fame, health, sex, pleasure that you're gonna find to remove the stench of this earth and the stench of your own sin other than Christ and His blood and His righteousness.

Who will save me from this body of death? Thanks be to Christ, right? So part of the idea of wanting to quit is, at times,

I think our eyesight gets very narrow and our head drops down into our circumstances and we look at what we are holding on to and what we have left and how much pain and suffering it has because we can't look past our hands.

And I love what the Father does in the Gospels. He comes and He pushes our hands down that are covering our eyes, looking at all the hard work we've done and all the scars in our hands, and He says, child, look past this to the real promise.

The labor that we have today is but temporary. This is why

Paul says that I do not consider the temporal sufferings and the laboring and the work that we have to be even compared to what's to come.

But that's the problem, right? That's the rub. This is why I started this podcast a long time ago, conversations about how do you seek first the kingdom of God when it just seems like it's a fantasy, it's not even real.

And then when you think about life being hard enough, it's like, I can't make sense of life, I want to get rid of it.

Well, over the last few weeks I've been challenging us to think about the radicalness of the

Gospel and really the supernatural, spiritual side of our life. Because when you only look at the physical side of your life, the side that you can see, that you can touch, that you can control, and I think that we think we can control it, there comes a moment where it's not enough.

You can't find enough satisfaction, enough safety, enough money, enough time, enough adoration, enough anything.

There's just never enough. There's always that speculation that you might lose it. That's living with eyes here for this world, but then you read the hope of the

Gospel and you read the hope of God's Word, and it keeps telling you things like Peter, set your hope fully on the grace that is to come, right?

Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Where are we putting our hope? We're putting our hope in a person, in a place that we can't see in touch at the moment.

That's what's so hard about this Christian life. If you live for the king and his kingdom, you literally live in a fantasy world.

You live every day talking to yourself, believing it's going to get better, but is there real evidence that it is going to get better?

That's the hard part. Like, how do I know this is going to get better? How is it that all the thousands of people that have died before, including all of the authors, there's no author alive today that we could talk to that wrote the

Bible. You know, it's like, so we're going off a bunch of dead people.

How do we know they made it? How do we know they're there? It's so complicated, right?

And the world is so enticing to us. It draws us constantly in to the way in which it lives, the way in which it thinks, and the way in which it processes.

And the world can't seem to think past five minutes. That's as far as they can go. They can't think past into eternity, let alone what's going to happen to them in the next few years.

And so live for today, because we don't know what tomorrow may bring, so just party it up, I guess. And you try that long enough, and you get to a point where it doesn't work, right?

And that's where you get to the I quit moment. And I know there are a lot of people who listen to this podcast who have felt that, like,

I'm just down. I don't know what to do. I feel like I'm just floating, you know, aimlessly floating down the river, having no idea where it's going, but letting it take me there.

And we know that that doesn't always end well, because that ends us going off of a waterfall, and death waits us.

So what do we do? What do we do? I think a lot of Christians are exhausted and tired of what

Christianity has been handed to, this Calvingelical, conservative Christianity that really is just an angry

Christianity, a Christianity that's spiteful, that just judges each other.

And we find our sense of success by them, how large our events are, our conferences are, our churches are, how many people we can get on board to agree or read our books.

And if that's the case, then Jesus was one of the most failures of a leader. But we know that's not the case, and we do know that God is bringing thousands if not millions of people to himself.

It's just hard for us to see that at times, especially here in the United States, where we really are just fighting just modern paganism that's been repainted and it's got new lipstick on it, right?

Well, what if we woke up every day and decided to live as...just

take the Bible literally as it was stated. Well, what if we did that? We just tried it.

How would that change? At this point, what do you have to...are you afraid people are going to laugh at you? Well, what's your reputation gotten to you at this...got

for you at this point? I mean, you feel like quitting, so who cares about your reputation? What about money?

I mean, if you feel like quitting, money clearly isn't helping or the lack thereof. Family, health...it's

like at some point you have to go, what do you have to lose? That's part of what James is getting at, that God uses trials in our lives, brings us to the end of ourselves so that we'll look past ourselves and into something that is more significant than ourself, that's more valuable than our 75 years of life or whatever that's available to us.

So, how do we get to a point where we wake up in the morning in the midst of pain, in the midst of suffering and frustration and loss and we're actually excited about our day?

We anticipate what we're going to face, whether it's at work or parenting or going to school, being single again, being lonely.

What do we do? This is the journey that I have been on and I am intrigued by, and I am excited to share with you how my world is continuing to be turned upside down, where every day

I'm realizing that the clothes I wear and the car I drive mean nothing.

The house I live in means nothing. It means nothing in light of eternity.

But the people I love, the lost

I befriend, those who I allow to make fun of me and scorn me because I'm trying to care for them and actually stand for the truth, not because I'm self -righteous but because I know truth liberates.

I could just think about even slavery in our own country. There was a point where if you set up and said, no, it's wrong to own another human in the way in which we are doing this, that you would have been slandered.

But now everybody is appalled by it, and rightfully so. But in our country, you can be critical for standing up and saying abortion is wrong.

The truth does not get its approval by consensus.

We don't need to all agree on what the truth is. God states what the truth is.

We believe that. That's invaluable to us, right? But for the

Christian life, the life you live is not a life in the flesh. That's what

Paul says, right? But by what? Faith in the Son of God. That is the hardest part of the

Christian life and what prevents us from quitting because we're not looking to the success or the pleasure or the approval of the world.

We're looking to Christ, realizing our life is more than significant.

It's eternal. It's eternally significant because we have been left here to proclaim and let the world know the supernatural power of the gospel by what we say and by what we do.

Yes, our words and our deeds. What does Jesus say? Let your light so shine.

By what? The way in which we act, so that the world might see our good works and glorify the Father.

So for those of you that say, I feel like quitting, just keep going down this journey with me. Keep thinking about what

Christ has done for you. And what do you have to lose?

You have nothing to lose. If the whole world abandons you but you gain Christ and the joy of Christ, isn't that worth it?

I mean, at this point, is it not worth it? We've tried everything else. We've tried to use food and drugs and sex and money and entertainment to just find some significance in life, and it's not there.

It's not there. So I hate that it's our last option, but that's often how life works, right?

God brings us to the end of ourselves, to the point where we don't want to try anything else, and that's when we die.

See, to gain life, you die. You die to self – self -ambition and self -gratification and self -security – and you give it all up.

And you say, whatever you have for me, Christ, that's what I want. And you enter into a world that everyone thinks you're crazy, but you do.

You enter into a world that no one else can see, but as you look through the eyes of the

Bible, you see a whole new world. It's called a spiritual realm.

You see a whole new interaction. You realize there are enemies and dragons and evil and good and powerful words like gospel, and there are outposts, and in those outposts are other people who believe this.

And there's advancement, and there's hope, and there's giving up of your life and resources and time for something that is more significant, like watching someone go from being a slave of Satan to a slave of God, where all they experience is

God's love and forgiveness and kindness and restoration and freedom from sin, where your life becomes about helping more people than it is about helping yourself to another heap of pleasure.

If you're intrigued by that, come back next week, because I have some more thoughts for you, from going to I quit to He wins, and that's all that matters.

Next week we'll talk about how we focus on the victory of our King and how that gets us out of bed every day we want to quit.

We find the hope and the joy and the excitement from what Christ is doing, not only has done, but what

He is doing. Hopefully, we'll see you next week, either in the presence of our King or here on the podcast.