Hi there. My name is Preston POUTEAUX. Welcome to the Lake Ridge Community Church Podcast. This is where we share some of our messages from Sunday mornings. So we're glad you're here to listen.

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We'd love for you to join us in person. We meet on Sunday mornings at 10:30 a.m at Our Lady of Wisdom School here in Chestermere. At our core, we're a community of people, so we gather on on Sundays, but we also do a lot in the week. Together, we are people learning to follow Jesus and love our city. So to learn more, visit lakeridgecommunity.com.

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Hope to check in and visit with you soon. Take care. Thanks for listening.

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Let's pray together. Father, you are good to us and we love you. Give us imagination, for your spirit is speaking to us today. May we find a new way. Show us the way.

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Jesus name, we pray. Amen. Amen.

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There is grace for this journey of faith in Jesus. You have a God who deeply loves you. He has thought of you before the creation of it all. He has made you nothing about you as a surprise to Him. Maybe sometimes you raise his eyebrow, I'm sure, but he has even accommodated for that, and it is good.

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We are on a long journey over this whole year to talk about what it is to be human in the hands of a loving God. And it's exciting and it's good. But maybe on your journey of figuring out what it is to follow Jesus and take a look at a world around you that is in shambles, you might pause for a second and come up with a strategy for being a Christian in a broken world. This is a little bit what we're going to talk about today, our journey, and I'm going to weave all these pieces together. We are talking about what is the mission, friends?

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A pious way to be human? We are in the Covenant Church, which has its roots in Piatism. We're going to unpack that for us a little bit here. But maybe you are standing there and reading the news. Maybe you're like me.

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I look at Twitter every day to see if Ukraine has finally got the Russians out. That's that's pretty much what I use Twitter for. And as I do, I go through a long, winding journey to figure out what to do in this world. What does following Jesus have to do with all the complexities of my human existence here? I'm going to show you five ways to start, and I'm not going to comment on them except to tell you what they are.

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And you might put a pin in some of these and go, oh, that's me. When I started following Jesus, that's how I thought the world would get changed. These are from a guy named Richard Neighbor. And Richard Neighbor, he might be rolling over in his grave when he sees how I summarize something that was deep and complex theological stuff into something as simplistic as I'm about to present it. So if you know a neighbor scholar, say, yeah, Preston probably butchered this, but I think that he might actually think that I did a pretty good job here.

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I'm going to show you five. He calls them different things, but I'm going to call them this. The first one on the far side. This is dealing with a world that's crazy. And you decide to follow Jesus.

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You might decide to be what's called what I call through Nebra. I call it a bunker Christianity. What is that? A bunker Christianity. The world is very bad.

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Very, very bad. And so I have found Jesus and I have found a safe tower, a safe bunker to go and hide. It has a four foot thick door. I'm going to get in it and close it. I know Jesus says, love neighbor, but have you seen my neighbors?

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They're crazy town, right? I'm going to live in a bunker, and hopefully pretty soon God will, I got a ticket to heaven, so God will extricate me from this terrible world and we'll be done. That I call Bunker Christianity. It's all bad. We hide, we separate and protect ourselves from the world around us.

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The next one. So if that's bunker Christianity, here's something I call bleeping Christianity.

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Bleeping Christianity. Yes, the world is bad, but we'll bleep out the swears, right? As long as we close our eyes, keep our head down, we have to go in the world because we need to work. We have to go in the world. And I guess God does say love neighbors, but I'm only going to really love certain ones.

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And really, if there's something bad, if we bleep it out, cross it out, create a veggie tail, subculture for it all, we can kind of close our eyes enough and keep our little circle healthy. Some permeable walls to let some people in, but we keep it clean. Close your eyes and figure a way through that's. The second one, third one, chainsaw Christianity. The world's kind of half good, half bad, right?

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But guess what? If we work together, we can cut out the bad parts, right? We can slice out the parts that are bad. And if we do this really well, we'll actually remove the bad and keep the good. And we've got to now work out what parts are cut out and what parts are kept, right?

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Chain cells, zoom zone. We're going to go through bit by bit as the church and figure this out. Have you put a pin in yet? Are you stopping in one of these? Here we go.

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Next one. Number four. I call this power suit Christianity, right? What does a power suit do? They know that the world isn't all bad.

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In fact, if I put on my power suit, if I figure out I can use the world's ways, I can use the world's techniques to get Jesus's accomplishments done, right. The world actually has some pretty good things. Like if we just vote for the Republicans or the Democrats, we are going to figure this out. Power suit Christianity. If we can get in places of power, then we will be in control, right.

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If our nation was only just ever Christian and we got there and we had enough people operating there, we would be good. God can use the bad things of the world to his advantage and recreate the world in a better way. At the very least. If I'm a lawyer or a businessman or parent, jesus has some little hot tips to help me get through things, right? I'm mostly of this way, but the pro tips of Jesus give me the advantage.

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I have some values advantage going on on my side if I follow Jesus a little bit. And the last one, hot tub Christianity. I like this one. Look at this. Chill dude.

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Whatever happens, happens. I don't want to look any different than my neighbor. I want to look like the world around me. Right? The world around me is going this direction.

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Well. Jesus helps me just go with the flow, dude. Right. All is well. I just soak in whatever feels good.

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I don't look any different than the culture around me. I am exactly like it in every way. If you were to put a taut tub Christian beside anybody who wasn't Christian, you would not really see a difference. They would be about the same. So you see from bunker Christianity all the way through, nebras points these out.

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He has different ways of talking about them in his Christian culture book. You have probably read it and we get to the other side with hot tub Christianity. What do you think? What do you think?

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Who are you? Or maybe it's easier to point figure out somebody else. Who is that Christian that you know, that you really don't like very much, right? Are you frustrated with the hot tub Christians that you know, oh, they're just caving in, right? Are you frustrated with the bunker Christians who is hiding away from the world or somebody in between?

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Richard Nebras points these five out. How do you go forward with it? What do you think is the right answer? Which is the best way? Is there another way?

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I think sometimes we have to pause and wonder at how Jesus is helping us navigate the world around us. And in this room I almost wonder if we have somebody in every one of those camps in one way or another. And so when we encounter each other, we go how are these people navigating the world? Why do they see it differently than me? Well, the pietists are these people who were dealing with the same things that you are in the world.

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But it was a long time ago so they didn't have running water or electricity, which made it just a little bit harder. But they still had great challenges around them in the world, and there were very major challenges. And there's a story, it's one of the starting stories of pietism. And I've shared this one other time, and a lot of people talk to me about it, but it's a story of a woman named Maria Nil's daughter. I came across it