Matt Chandler - All of Life for All of Life

Well, good morning! It’s good to see you. If you have a Bible, go ahead and grab it; that will be our passage. I really just want to pull two things out of this passage together. Today, we’re kicking off a new series we’re calling «Formed.» The heart behind it is to discover, in some way, what the Holy Spirit is doing among us as His people, you and I. We’ve come into this room today, and here’s what we all have in common: Everyone in this room this morning is a product of a set of circumstances that have led you to this moment in your life. So, the things you love about yourself, the things you hate about yourself, or the things you look at and say, «I’m really proud of this,» or those you view and think, «Man, I wish that had played out differently,» all these moments have shaped you. We have both arrived at this moment through our experiences with God, our interactions with other people, and we are products of our repetitions and habits. We’ve given ourselves over to certain thoughts or actions; those three things collide, and they’ve brought about your present form, whether you’re sitting in a chair, on a couch, in a theater, or listening in your car.

We are products of something; we didn’t start this way; we became this way, either through encounters with God or through never having an interaction with Him. We’ve developed into who we are due to our relationships with others, some positive and life-giving, while others have been hurtful and traumatic. All of this has shaped us in significant ways. We all give ourselves over to thoughts and actions repeatedly, and there is no real formation outside of repetition. One reason I’m emphasizing this gently, which isn’t typically my style, is that scrolling through Instagram at night before bed is forming you in ways you might not be aware of because it is a habitual, ritualistic action, and all these actions shape us.

If you give your mind over to anxious thoughts, you become increasingly anxious. If you give your mind to worship, you become more worshipful. If you focus on lust, you become more lustful. Whatever we think about and do habitually shapes us. So, right now, whether you love yourself, feel proud of yourself, or whether life is difficult and you’re really frustrated with yourself, our current state is born from those three factors. That’s how we arrived at this moment.

Over the next four weeks, I want to discuss God’s commitment to making you more and more like Jesus. In fact, God is so committed to you that in Hebrews 6, the writer states that God swore by Himself, as there was nothing greater to swear by. God is committed to you; He promises to take you as you are and help you look more and more like Jesus. He says, «Help me, for everything feels weak, ” so He commits to you to change you. He will send you joy and sorrow along the way to achieve this transformation.

What I want us to look at is how we are being rehumanized by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, making us more like we were meant to be. I literally just returned from Australia yesterday, so this is a bit of a blur for me, but I’ll stick to my notes. I was having a conversation with one of our Australian pastors while engaging in some Acts 29 activities. He’s written a book, and as I studied this, he explained that God created us as human beings—male and female. He placed us in Shalom, where we had right relationships with God and each other. Then, sin entered the cosmos and fractured our humanity, causing us to become dehumanized. We fell from what we were meant to be, giving ourselves over to darkness.

Then Christ, the perfect man, came. He lived a Spirit-empowered life to show us what is possible. He was crucified, resurrected, ascended to the Father on high, and then sent the Holy Spirit to dwell within us. Over an extended period, the Spirit seeks to rehumanize us, lifting us from our dehumanized state to the original state He designed us to walk in. That’s the kind of discussion I want to engage in over the next four weeks. I want to explore what it means…