FAMILY TALK: Higher Calling
Pastor Steven Osborne
Transcribed by DaVinci Resolve 18
An Uncomfortable Start
I like to plan. I mean, most of you know that. And usually I plan my sermons between three—I like to kind of think about six months ahead, and then usually I break it down in, kind of in the first three months, and some of the topics. And then there’s definitely moments that the Lord sometimes change things. There’s maybe something that happens in the community or in our world, and we have to address that. And so me, around November, I gave my list. I give it to the staff because we try and figure out some of the worship and just how is God leading us and different things. And so I give out my sermon calendar. And for today, we were supposed to talk about vision, and kind of vision for our church for the new year. And this whole week, it just didn’t come together. I just didn’t get a release to preach on this. So I’m gonna focus next week, we’re supposed to talk about the three E’s. We will talk about the three E’s, the Lord willing, and a little bit more about our vision.
And so kind of just how I feel this morning is I’ve got my favorite coffee cups here. I don’t know—any of you have a favorite coffee cup? All right, so these are at least my favorite coffee cups in the office. So these are always in the office. This is from a retreat center—we were actually just there this weekend with some guys—and I bought this on my sabbatical. That’s the last time I was there before this weekend. So one of my favorites. And then my wife bought me this one. And so this is kind of a cutie, you know? And then I bought this in Hayward during the pandemic when we were doing online streaming, and so we recorded the sermon. And there was this first weekend that things opened up in Wisconsin, and we said, “Okay, we’re going to go camping in Hayward.” And so there was a little coffee shop. Sunday, I went to this coffee shop to get Wi-Fi to watch our online streaming service, and so I bought this cup. So that’s kind of special to me, kind of just to think about all the things that we have experienced. But this morning, I feel like I’m drinking from this. It’s just uncomfortable. Right? You get coffee cups that just doesn’t drink well, in a sense—the handle feels off, the opening feels off, and it’s just awkward. It’s like, “Man, get rid of this thing.” And so this morning, in a sense, I just feel like I’m drinking from this, because I don’t have clear, exactly clear direction on how the Holy Spirit might lead us this morning. So I just wanted to be transparent and open with you. So we’ll see how this morning goes and how the Holy Spirit is leading.
Like I said, I wanted to talk about vision, and some of the things I’m talking about this morning really does fit into the vision piece as well. But throughout this week, there’s several scriptures that has been meaningful to me and that impacted me deeply. And some of them over the years. But all of these three passages kind of spoke to me in some new ways this week. And so I’m just gonna share these passages with you, and then I’m gonna get out of the way, amen? And then I’ll let you preach, or however the Spirit is leading us.
Motivated by Love
All right, so here’s the first passage this morning. Ephesians chapter four, verse one and two:
As a prisoner for the Lord, then, I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love.
This is such a beautiful calling. Paul writes this, he encourages the church to say, “This is the higher calling for us on how to live for us as believers.” And it’s like, man, he’s calling us to live a life worthy, right? And representing God well in all that we do. And I don’t know about you, but there’s so many days—because I’m either in the flesh and my own shortcomings and things—I just feel like I fall short. And many days I just don’t feel like I’m living this life worthy of this incredible calling that God has placed on me into representing him. And, you know, as we think about this passage, we’re all called to live this way. And we don’t get there overnight. We have so many different hangups, right? It’s like, you don’t just get saved, and you don’t just show up on a Sunday morning and boom, you got your wings and all of your things in life is sorted out, and now you’re just perfect. It is an ongoing process of the work of the Holy Spirit, the sanctification work of the Holy Spirit, working in our lives. And a lot of times, sometimes, we’re stubborn, right? And we ignore some of the challenges. We ignore the sin and we ignore the brokenness of things that is in our life. And we hinder this work. We hinder the work that God wants to do through us. And we sometimes drag some of the sin and hurts with us. And we’re just not willing to face this and say, “Okay, God, I am allowing you in to come and deal with some of these things in my life.” But God is calling us to live a life of—to be humble and to be gentle, to be patient, and to be bearing with one another in love. It is truly it is truly all about love. Can I hear an amen?
And again, I fall so short so many times in this area. A lot of things we do out of different motivations, right? It’s like different motivations, things that motivates us to do things. But sometimes it is not because of love. And I believe for us as Salem, part of the big vision that I have for us is that God will restore us, that God will heal all of us, and that we will become people that is healthy and whole, right? And that the one thing that will drive us is love, that that will be the force that is driving us in everything that we do, because when we do that, man, we’re gonna interact differently. We’re gonna care for our community differently.
And all I know is this, that we cannot do this in our own flesh and in our own power. We fall short. I am too selfish in the flesh. I cannot do this in my own power. It’s got to be the work of the Holy Spirit. And praise the Lord, I am way better than where I have been before Jesus Christ. But guess what? He’s still working in me. He’s still changing things in my life so that I can love my family better, that I can love you better, that I can be more patient with different circumstances. He continues to give me more wisdom and to just be patient even with that process. But there’s not a day that goes by, really, that I don’t press in and say, “God, I need you, and here’s some flaws that I’m seeing. I need for you to come and change and tweak and adjust, because I want to live this life that is worthy of this incredible call.”
And that’s why I even talked about the topic that I talked on last week, that we have churches—I’m not just talking our church, the universal church—we have churches, and we are not willing to address sin. We’re not willing to address some of these hard things that sometimes is going on in our lives. And so I think that’s why the church has lost its power in a sense, right? Because we’re not living up to the standard that God has called us, and to loving well. And so once again, it’s not about putting shame and guilt on people, but God is calling the church out and saying, “I have called you to be separate. I’ve called you out to look differently than the world,” so that the world can look at our lives and say, “Man, it is healthy. The Holy Spirit is working—the way that you’re loving, the way that you’re serving. There’s some—there’s a different fire in your eyes. There’s a different motivation.” The world is saying, “Man, I’m just gonna step on people so that I can get to the next level and the position and to make more money, or to become famous.” That is the drive in our world. And sometimes those same things is happening in our church, and God is just calling us out and saying, “No, here is the standard. Here is the life that I want you to live: a life that is completely humble and gentle and patient, bearing with one another in love.”
And again, this is for me as your pastor. Oh man, there’s been some moments, like I said, just the whole COVID thing—it’s like I feel like I should just go and lay on a counselor’s bed right now as I’m thinking about some of the stuff that it did in my life and the hurts that it created. And I’m so grateful that the Lord has dealt with me this summer and the sabbatical and even this weekend. I’ll tell you a little bit about that soon.
But I wonder in your life this morning, as you read this passage, are you living a life worthy of this incredible call that he’s got for us? And this is it. This is the vision for us. Part of our vision for us as a church. If we can live like this, man, the church will be so attractive. God’s people will be so attractive. I believe that the church will be like a magnet again and just drawing in people all over from our communities and to say, “I want to be part of this.” Amen? I believe it. I totally believe it.
The Image of God
The second passage that’s been speaking to me, and it actually—in our SAGE group… If you’re retired and you want to go deeper, there’s a group meeting Thursdays at 1 p.m. here at church, it’s called SAGE. And we’re starting to work through the book of Genesis. And I shared with them kind of as we were looking through this passage, kind of tease the group, and this is the passage in Genesis that really has been talking to me:
Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.”
And so here’s kind of the key piece, just right there in the beginning of Genesis, it says, “Let us make mankind in our image.” And so in the Latin, that means, the image of God, imago dei. Imago dei. And it’s actually really rich in theological conversations. There is so many different aspects to this idea that we are created in the image of God. And it’s still very relevant even to some of the things that we’re experiencing today. There’s so many different issues in our world, just even when we think about pro-life and pro-choice and abortion and murder. A lot of it is because we don’t understand this one theological principle that we are created in the image of God. And what does that mean? So God, in a sense, is saying, “Hey, I created Adam to resemble me.” We are created to resemble God. And again, it’s a little complex. You can come Thursday at one o’clock; we’re gonna try and deal with some of these slices. In what areas? How does that impact our lives? What does it look like that we resemble? But can you feel the weight a little bit of that? Right? It’s like, “Man, I am created in the image of God.” Now just look at the ugly person that’s sitting right next to you right now. No, you’re all beautiful. You’re all beautiful. And you’re beautiful because you are created in the image of God. Do you know this morning—we all have maybe different views about ourselves when you’re standing in front of that mirror; there’s maybe some things that you don’t like physically. You don’t like your ears or your nose or your mouth or your teeth or whatever it might be. Your love handles, right? All of these different things. And it’s easy to just kind of have all of this negative talk about yourself. And somehow we lose sight that we are created in the image of God, that God came, and he created Adam, and he blew his own breath into him. And in the same way, when we read scripture, we are reminded that God came and he formed us in our mother’s womb. He’s the one that is right behind your design, your character, the way you look. It is not a surprise to God. And even the timing of your birth isn’t a surprise. That you’re in Duluth, Minnesota in this time, it is not a surprise. I believe that God is behind all of those things in our lives.
But I just want you to know that first of all, that you are created in the image of God. And like I said, we’ll go a little deeper, because more than just this idea is maybe not just the physical form. Actually Christianity.com gives us kind of a good definition here. It says, “The biblical passage does not imply that God is in human form, but that humans are in the image of God in their moral, spiritual, and intellectual essence.” And so it’s when you bring all of these things together that we reflect the image of God.
Now, it’s one thing for the church and for us to know this, but it really impacts us in the way that we see other people. You see, within the church, it is easy to go, “Oh man, Sam, he’s awesome. I can get along with Sam. He is created in the image of God, I like him, we’re talking the same language,” but it is a whole different story when we leave this church building and we walk amongst the brokenness of our world. And somehow we look at people, and we lose this sight that they are also created in the image of God, and that God has called us to live into this higher calling to love and to care for them. Instead to look down. Part of our conversation, even this weekend in our silent retreat—I know, you say, “Man, they were talking in their silent retreat.” Yes, we had some moments. Dean and Bruce just really likes to talk; I had to give them opportunity to just get some stuff out, right?
I was going to say something about that. Probably not important. I was going to talk nonsense, I guess. What was I going to say? Okay, we’ll just move on. I believe the Lord just wants me to stop there.
When we think about people being created in the image of God, when we keep that in mind, it will help us to recognize the inherent dignity and value of every human being as they are created in the image of God. What will it look like—oh, I got it! Thank you, Lord! Yeah, there we go, I’m drinking from that very uncomfortable cup this morning.
We were saying, oh, how we’re not looking to a new political season here, with the elections coming up, right? And there’s, in a sense—I like politics, it gets me fired up. I like the conversation, but I hate how it brings a division amongst people, and even in a church. How we suddenly just think blue and red again, and it’s us against them, and the way that they view things. And it’s in the heat of some of those conversations, and in the heat of October, November, as things are heating up, right, that we lose sight that this person is created in the image of God, and that I should care, that I should love, and that I should minister to. And so I want to just even plant that seed in our lives this morning. This political season, how are we gonna respond? Are we gonna just fall into the trap again of, oh, blue and red conversations and trashing people, right? Or are we gonna say, “I might not agree with all of your views, but man, I love you, and this is not gonna impact my relationship with you. You are created in the image of God.” It doesn’t help we try and save the world and we want to raise all this money—by the way, thank you for helping us with raising the money for Mozambique. I just saw this morning over $7,000. It’s like, wow, that’s amazing! Do you know how far $7,000 will go in Mozambique? That is gonna impact many, many lives. But guess what? It doesn’t help we just do that there, and in our own communities, in our own families, we treat each other like dirt because of political views or whatever it might be, our differences.
Your wife, your children, are all created in God’s image. And we have this higher calling that you and I need to live to according to God’s Word. When we do that, we appreciate the gift of creativity and the ability to contribute positively to the world, mirroring God’s creative nature. It is so beautiful when the church and when God’s people comes together and we bring our different gifts and our talents to the table and say, “Man, we can make a difference in our community. We can make a difference,” right? And it’s through all of that, again, that we shine, that we resemble God. And it’s in all of those small little things that we do. Every time that you’re using your creative gifts and your talents, guess what? Man, it reminds us that you’re created in the image of God, because you’re not that smart or creative in your own. It’s God that plays that inside of you, amen? Some of us have a little bit more gifts than others.
And it helps us to strive for holiness and moral purity, aspiring to mirror God’s holiness. Man, I’m looking forward to a season where God calls the church—or God has called the church to holiness, but where the church is really taking that to heart again. And to say, “Man, I’m called to something better. I’m called to something way more beautiful than what the world is showing.” It’s this call to holiness. And it is not to put a burden on us, but it is to protect us. And so that you and I can look different and so that we can be an inspiration to a broken world.
Get Out Of Your Comfort Zone
Now, I’ve just warmed you up for my sermon. Here’s the actual passage that spoke to me for this weekend that I really want to share with you. So if you have your Bible with you—and this is kind of how it happened. So in our conversation this weekend, so I’m wrestling with the sermon, and it’s just not coming, and then Saturday morning, the guys are sitting, and one of them talks about that we should never be on a place where we’re not willing to experience new things in our lives. And as soon as they said that, it just clicked for me in my heart and my mind. I was like, “This is it, this is what I want to share with—what I think the Holy Spirit wants me to share with us this morning.”
And I don’t know about you—and so part of our conversation was, maybe you can relate to this, you might have your favorite restaurant in Duluth. Who’s got a favorite restaurant in Duluth? Okay, Natasha, what’s your favorite? OMC? Okay. These rich youth pastors, man. I was going to say Burger King for me, but OMC. Who else? What’s your favorite restaurant? Perkins. Is there one thing on that menu that you always get? Chicken what? Chicken fried steak, that sounds good, now I’m hungry. Yes. In the back. Hannah, what’s your favorite? Texas Roadhouse. Man, now you talk my language. Is there one thing that you get? The cinnamon buns? Okay. Yeah, but that’s just free. That’s just like… what’s the… from the menu? BLT? Okay. For us, going to Texas Roadhouse, most of the time it is the steak kabob. And so every time. Sometimes I shake things up a little bit, then I’ll do rice instead of potato. I was like, man. And then sometimes I really get crazy and I say, “Add some extra mushrooms on there.” And then I confuse the waitress like, “I’ve never heard that before. You must be from Iowa.” I say, “Yes, I am from Iowa. They do weird things and speak weird in Iowa.”
But so easy to fall into the habit of just going to the same restaurant and eat the same thing that you eat and drink there all the time. And so when we go on trips, usually when we leave the country and stuff, I just, man, I don’t want to see a Texas Roadhouse. I don’t want to see a McDonald’s. I don’t want to see Applebee’s. I want to eat what the locals are eating. I’ll do the weirdest stuff that they have. It’s like, man, I want to understand your culture. We just had mofongo, right? It was mofongo? Anybody had mofongo? Okay, you’ll have to Google that. I don’t know how you spell it, but just Google mofongo. Right? And it’s like, “Whoa, this is a whole nother meal and a whole nother treat. I’ve been missing out. Somebody has been lying to me.” There’s some other good stuff that’s out there. And all I’m saying that is that I believe that the Lord has some new things for us as a church. The Lord might have some new things for you in your spiritual journey. And we just kind of have to get out of our comfort zone, out of our bubble. So we got to just trust him a little bit.
So let’s read—this time is going… I thought this was gonna go way slow this morning. All right, Luke chapter five verse… let’s see. Thank you. If I just look at my notes, that will be helpful, right? All right.
After this, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector by the name of Levi [we know him as Matthew] sitting at the tax booth. “Follow me,” Jesus said to him, and Levi got up, left everything and followed him.
Then Levi held a great banquet for Jesus at his house, and a large crowd of tax collectors and others were eating with them. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law who belonged to their sect complained to his disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?”
And Jesus answered them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”
They said to him, “John’s disciples often fast and pray, and so do the disciples of the Pharisees, but yours go on eating and drinking.”
Jesus answered, “Can you make the friends of the bridegroom fast while he is with them? But the time will come when the bridegroom will be taken from them, and in those days they will fast.”
Verse 36:
He told them this parable: “No one tears a piece out of a new garment to patch an old one. Otherwise, they will have torn the new garment, and the patch from the new one will not match the old. And no one pours…
And this is kind of the key verse for us this morning:
And no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins; the wine will run out and the wineskins will be ruined. No, new wine must be poured into new skins. And no one after drinking old wine wants the new, for they say, ‘The old is better.’”
To summarize that very quickly, what is happening in context with this passage. In the Old Testament, people had a certain way to do religion and how they worship God. And there was all of these rituals and sacrifices, and Jesus came, and he is telling them now, and saying, “There is a brand new way. There’s a new way.” And so he is giving them this wonderful metaphor. And the way he’s doing it, he’s talking about all this new stuff. He says, “You don’t go and cut out from a new shirt some material to patch this old one, because when you throw it in the washing machine it’s gonna shrink, and then it’s gonna ruin.” And in the same way, even with wine, he’s saying, “Hey, don’t take new wine and put it in an old wineskin.” That’s kind of—if you have to go and Google it, they didn’t do it like the way that we know today in all the glass bottles. They put this wine in a wineskin. It had to be a new one because of the process. If you put new wine in an old wineskin, it needs that… the skin needs to stretch. And it needs to create space where it can release some of those gases. Otherwise, it will explode.
And so what Jesus is trying to tell them here is like, “Hey, I am doing a new thing in my people’s life,” right? And today we have the gospel. And God is saying, “Hey, don’t hold on to the old religion. You don’t need that anymore. Here is the new wine, and the new wine is Jesus Christ.” The content of that is Jesus Christ came to die on the cross for us, and the Holy Spirit lives inside of us. And so he is trying to communicate this, and the Pharisees are so upset and so frustrated that they want to crucify Jesus and throw him off the mountaintop because they are not getting it. All they want to do, they are feeling very safe to the old ways of doing things, to the old rituals, to the old songs. And here God is saying, “Man, I am giving you a new way, a new way.”
Holding on to the old may hinder progress and growth. And so maybe even today God is just calling us—and even at church when you think about the past several years, maybe think about the church the way that you grew up. A lot of things have changed. Can I hear an amen? A lot of things have changed in Salem, and hopefully for the good. There’s a lot of wineskin pieces that need to change. The way that we do church today looks different than the way that we did church back in the 30s and the 20s. And that’s okay. It’s a good thing. But the content, the wine, doesn’t change. The message doesn’t change. The work of the Holy Spirit, the gospel message doesn’t change. But it is the new wine in our lives. And somehow we cannot—God is calling us to say, “You cannot mix the new, the work of the Holy Spirit, what Jesus Christ did on the cross, and you can’t make other things, and mix it together.” It just won’t work. It’s either God, Jesus, what he’s done, and coming by faith, receiving the salvation, Him alone—we can’t mix politics, we can’t mix other religion in there. That wineskin will burst. Amen?
And so God wants to do a new thing in our lives, and that might mean that you have to say yes. That might mean that you have to give up on some past hurts, that you might have to give up on some bitterness, so that God can do a new thing in us. Because again, I just believe that God wants to restore us as a body. He wants us to make us healthy and whole. If you’re sitting here, Jesus tells us this morning, He says, “I am here for the sick.” And in all reality, all of us are sick. We’ve got some issues. And that’s great! It’s awesome that we have this hospital where people can come and receive healing and restoration.
And I experienced part of that even this weekend. I’ll tell you a quick story, and I apologize if it sounds too spiritual or too weird, but it is what it is. So I went into the spiritual retreat weekend, and just was excited to hang out with the guys and to have some time to just pray and to read scripture. And nothing too spectacular Friday night, and we prayed, and we kind of went into our different cabins. And I just couldn’t sleep. I was just wide awake. A lot of times I’ll sleep with earphones in and with a podcast. I’ll listen to a sermon. And I was just like, “No, this is going to be a silent retreat. I’m going to just cancel all of these voices.” And so finally, probably around 10:30 or so, I fell asleep.
Somewhere early in the morning—I don’t know exactly the time, I think it was just somewhere before six—I had a dream about with my dad. Now, some of you know, kind of when my mom passed away, I had a lot of anger issues with my dad and some hurts that really impacted me as a kid. And I thought I have dealt with all of this stuff, and really have been intentional just with healing. The Lord has done some great healing things in my life, in my dad’s life when he was alive, and our relationship was totally restored. But I woke—just this dream where I was so angry at him. And I woke up, and I was just awake. I know I dream, but I can’t remember my dreams, right? Venessa can remember a lot of her dreams. And so a lot of times for me, it’s just like, “Man, I probably had some weird pizza,” or whatever it was, right? But there’s a handful of times where the Lord has really ministered and spoke to me through some dreams. Like I said, handful of times. Usually I don’t remember my dreams at all.
And in this dream, I just—as I was sitting up that morning, so it was around 6 o’clock, I’m sitting on my bed, made some coffee, and I was just like, “What do I do?” And so I’m not trying to force anything and, you know, come up with answers. But I just know, in that moment, the Lord dealt with some anger and some hurt that I didn’t even realize was there. All I can say this morning to you is I feel so much lighter and released and healthier. I don’t know exactly what God did, right, in that dream and how that all plays out. I can’t tell you the ten steps. All I’m telling you is that the Holy Spirit did a powerful work and healing in my life. But I’ve been very intentional the last several months of just inviting Him into my life and saying, “God, I want to be the healthiest person that I can be because I want to live according to the calling that you have for me. And so come and heal, come and restore.” And so many times we’re not willing to deal with that stuff and we just sweep it under the rug.
I’ll give you one hard story. I was reading a book just kind of in preparation for last week’s topic. In the story, it talks about how women sometimes get stuck into some of the sin things that we talked about last week. And there’s a family, the girl loved going to a supermarket that was near to their house. We’ll just call her Carol. And so Carol loved running to the supermarket to go and buy bread and milk for her mom. And somewhere, at some point in time, the owner of the supermarket overstepped some boundaries in touching her. And this continued over several months, and just the impact that it had on this little girl. And at some point, her mom realized that her daughter doesn’t want to go to the supermarket anymore. And so she’s having conversation with her and said, “What’s the issue? I see you’re not excited about going to the supermarket anymore.” And she tells her mom what’s been happening. Instead of her mom reaching out and loving and hugging on her, she’s just like, “Well, you don’t have to go anymore.” And they kind of just sweep that under the rug and they never told anybody about what happened.
And that led to some other things in the church. Same thing, kind of a youth worker, this gal ended up in a church and youth ministry, and a youth worker overstepped his boundaries in some things. And the same thing, because she has learned now to kind of just put stuff under the rug, sweep things under the rug, she didn’t tell anybody of what was happening. She later got married, got involved in some things on the internet. And then that led her later to several affairs in her life. And praise the Lord, through a church that was talking through some tough things and created a space for healing in some of these areas, she was delivered and healed and set free, where she can live a life worthy of this calling. But it was really becoming honest with some of the pain and learning for her to say, “I gotta bring this stuff out in the open. I gotta deal with this stuff. I gotta allow the Holy Spirit to minister to me.”
And again, big part of the vision for us this year is to just say, “Are we gonna take that challenge? Are we gonna live a life that is honest with our shortcomings?” And where we’re gonna say, “Lord, it is time for this new wine. And it’s time for a new wineskin. I can’t hold on to the old things, things from the flesh and from my old life. You are doing a new thing.”
