Heavenly Father, we gather this morning on this Midsummer Lord's Day for the same reason that we gather every Lord's Day. We are in great need of your grace. We desire to give you the worship and the praise and the gratitude that is your due. We need to hear from your word. We need the fellowship of the saints. We need the various means of grace that you have put in the church. And Lord, we are thankful for this time even before our worship service to spend some time together studying your word, studying the Christian life, studying you and your ways, trying to better understand this world and ourselves and what it means to be living in the midst of our redemption. Lord, I pray that you'd be using these sessions on how people change to help us understand how the gospel applies to all of life, how Christ is at the center of life, how we can live lives that honor and glorify you without falling into either legality and self-righteousness on the one hand or an antinomian, casual attitude towards sin on the other. And so Lord, we pray that Christ would be our guide, and we would look to him in this as in all things, and that you would meet with us even as we meet together this morning. We pray these things in Christ's name, amen. All right. As we are going through how people change, we have arrived this morning at a session that is called The Big Picture. And everything really that we've been doing so far, talking about the gospel gap, about the counterfeit hopes that we run to in life when we're scared, when we're confused, when we're stressed, when we're exhausted, talking about the place that God is taking all things, what His big story of redemption looks like, what it's like to be caught up in that, how our personal change is a community project, how we are called to our personal sanctification within the context of the sanctification of the local church, all these various things that we've looked at have really been preparatory and an introduction for looking at the big picture, biblically, of how people change. So we're going to survey that and introduce it today, and then the rest of our time in this series is really gonna be spent not going beyond anything that we see this morning, but going deeper into various parts of it. So this is gonna be both a big picture of how people change and also a roadmap for everything we're going to do in the rest of this Sunday school. So what I would like you to do first, I want to start with an illustration. And I want you to picture yourself on a very busy intersection in the downtown of a major city. Let's say maybe it looks a little bit like this, OK? So it's just a throng of people. Imagine this is all moving very quickly. Some eagle-eyed people can probably figure out what city this is, but that's not important. You're just in this busy downtown city, and I want you to come to my house. So you're standing here, and I've invited you over. And so here's what I give you to get to my house, okay? Here's my house. Come on over. So you're here. And I've given you this. Are these helpful instructions? Why not? Here's my house. I don't know what the problem is here. There's not enough. Okay. There's not enough information. What else is wrong with this? Yeah, it doesn't lay it out for you at all. This is really pretty bad, unhelpful directions. What's your reaction gonna be if this is all I give you, you're standing right here, and I say, look, you've got to come to my house. Here it is. How do I get there? And how are you going to feel in this moment? I heard frustrated. Not happy with me, fair, okay. confused, yeah, you're going to feel frustrated, maybe even a little resentment. All this can really do is mock me with the place I'm not. I don't have any idea how to get there. So OK, fair enough. We go back to our busy city street. And I heard that you need directions. So rather than just have you standing on the busy city street and hold up to you this as your destination and leave you in that place of frustration, fair enough. You want step-by-step directions. Here's what you do. I want you to go left, left, right, right, right, left, left, left, right, do a U-turn down the one-way street, left, right, right, left, left, straight on till morning, and you're gonna be at my house. No, actually I couldn't, and that's part of the problem. Okay, so is this better? No, it's not better. I heard some bold no's. Why is this not better? Okay, so there's some things about it that are a little insufficient. What if we even did give some of the street names? That's better, yeah. Okay, so there's a lot to try to process and hold together. That's a problem as well. Yeah. I had to do that. What day is it? I had to do that two days ago in Spokane, actually. I did a U-turn and realized, yeah, the cars were all coming at me. So I don't know where I got the idea for this illustration. So let me ask you this. If what you have is just the printed out directions, turn by turn, even with street names, what do you do when you look up and you don't see any of those street names? What do you do when you're lost? You could call out for help, but you don't get good reception in this city. My illustration, my rules. So that's not gonna work. What are you gonna do when you're lost? No, that's a good answer. I mean, you can try to backtrack, you can just wander the city aimlessly, but that's part of the weakness of this step-by-step system. Here's the rules, here's the things to do. Well, what happens when I get off course? All of a sudden, I'm somewhere and I don't really know where I am. Let's look at something better. This now is the big picture. Immediately, it can seem a little overwhelming to look at a big picture, right? There's a lot going on here. But the more we look at it, we start to see, OK, it's carefully laid out. And maybe the actual map has the various street names. And even better, boom, I'm here. Oh, OK, that's where I am. And my house that you've been invited to, boom, right there. So now, if I'm standing here, what is superior about this? I can lay out a plan. I can understand. What happens if I get off track? Okay. So if I get off track and my GPS has this for me, what is my GPS going to tell me? How to get back on track, right? If I'm feeling lost, if I'm in some alley that is like, this is definitely not where I intended to walk down, I can actually see where I am because I have the big picture. So behold the parable of how people change. A lot of times in the Christian life, what we do is we just hold this up. We just say, look, this is where it needs to get. And we have this nicely decorated house with things in proportion. It's very welcoming. And it's kind of like this picture of a mature Christian life. And we say, oh, that's wonderful. That's definitely where I want to be. But all we have is the picture of what it is. And so how does that end up becoming to us? kind of like just having the picture of the house I'm trying to get to when I'm on the busy street corner, that can leave me very frustrated with where I'm not. Because I can just see the ideal. I can see the picture. I'm supposed to be more like Christ, and I see Christ, and I see how I'm not like him, but that's all I'm left with. What about if we bring in the step-by-step method? And we say, well, look, here's the rules. Here's what righteousness is. Here's the commandments. Here's the things you do. Is that better? Yeah, that's good, right? That's a gift. God shows us how to live, that's wonderful. But where in the Christian life do we actually need more than that? What does that do for us? when we're lost? What does that do for us when we find ourselves continually not walking down those paths and falling into the same sinful patterns? What we really need in the Christian life is a big picture. And what the Bible gives us is more than just an ideal held out to us that we have no understanding how we're supposed to make progress to it. And what the Bible gives to us is far better than just a step-by-step method to undertake in our own power that can't actually help us when we get off track. The Bible gives us something better than that. Quote from How People Change. The author's right. One of the mistakes we make in handling God's word is that we reduce it to a set of directions on how to live. We look for directions about relationships, church life, sex, finances, marriage, happiness, parenting, and so on. We mistakenly think that if we have clear directions, we will be all right. But we keep getting lost. All of the wise and precise directions given to us in Scripture haven't kept us from getting lost in the middle of our personal big city. Isn't that true? You know, when I examine the times in my life when I've felt lost, off course, stuck in the Christian life, very rarely has my problem been a lack of information. Very rarely has my problem been, I just don't know what the Bible would have me do. As a pastor, when I meet with people who are stuck in some sinful pattern or some discouragement, I don't think I've ever had the experience of saying, you know, the Bible says you shouldn't do that. And them going, oh, thank you for your pastoral wisdom. Now everything is different. It's not that simple, is it? The quote goes on, the Bible cannot be reduced to a set of directions for successful living. The Bible invites us to fly above the streets of everyday life to get this panoramic view. It invites us to see how, in God's plan, everything connects to everything else, and how God's grace enables us to move from where we are to where he wants us to be. It wants to show us the profound realities we would never understand if we stayed at street level. Have you ever thought about the Bible like that? The Bible, we live lives where we feel like we're just on that busy street with cars zooming past us. And you've maybe seen or maybe if you've traveled internationally, our traffic, our city streets are nothing like the traffic and city streets in some places in the world. And we can feel like, okay, I can see that God would have me to go these various places. He would have me to live a certain way and to live for certain things and to leave certain things behind. But the cars are just whizzing all around us and maybe we're bold enough to get partway out on that street, but now we feel like the trucks are honking, they're swerving around us, and it can feel very overwhelming. What the Bible does in being God's revelation of Himself, and his revelation of us and what we're really like and this world and what it's really like, is it actually gives us an opportunity to be lifted up above the fray and get that big picture, bird's eye view of what this world actually is like, what we're like, and how our lives actually play out, how our heart interacts with every moment that we come into contact with. The quote goes on, and the Bible invites us. It doesn't just give us that big picture. It doesn't just give us the big map. It invites us into relationship with the one who is the ultimate guide. Jesus sees everything from origin to destiny and leads us where we need to go. The Bible imparts to us a wisdom so complete and practical that it can keep us from getting lost again. I want to just throw out a series of ways that you may feel lost, just to get us thinking along these lines. So I've used this illustration of being lost in a big city, needing to get somewhere, but not really having any idea how to get there. And that is how all of us to some degree or another in some areas of our lives feel. If you don't feel lost or overwhelmed or challenged in some area of your life, you're really just not paying attention. What are some of the areas we might feel a little lost in? In your marriage. You may feel that things aren't right. And you may feel that there's change that needs to happen, but you're just not really sure what to do or how it's going to happen. Might be in parenting. You may feel that your home has been invaded by aliens, and you don't understand how it is you're supposed to parent and interact with these strange creatures. Not talking about the Alfred kids, of course. It might be in some friendship. You may have some tension, some difficulty, and you know you need to address it, but you're not even really sure how to start. You're not even really sure how it got so off track in the first place. It might be an anger issue. You may have a short fuse. You may so quickly just be thrown into a simmering rage over the smallest of things. You may be explosive towards even the people in life you love the most. It could be fear. You could be just an intensely fearful person. In some areas of life or in all areas of life, the unknown, the unexpected could just consume you and control you. It could be envy. You could feel incredibly lost right now because you think everybody else knows exactly where they are and where they're going, or they have the things that would finally make your life okay. And if you only had that, things would be different. It could just be discouragement. You could be exhausted, discouraged, depleted. It could be bitterness. Something happened in your life or something didn't happen in your life and you just can't get over it. It might be some addiction to some sinful behavior, to something you run to in your life to try to soothe you when you're feeling stressed. It could be your assurance. You believe in God, but you just can't quite settle the fact that he actually loves you and has saved you. It could be regret. Isn't that one of the hardest things to struggle with? Because it's the struggle we can't do anything about, and that compounds it for us. All we can do is regret it more and more and more. It may have been some abuse that you received, and it just seems like you're living your life on, but it's still just hanging there right over your head. It could be loneliness. In a room full of people, you still feel like you're all by yourself. It could be lust. You could just be fighting this battle and feel like you're not gaining any ground. It could be apathy. You used to care, and you're still going through the motions, but they're just motions. etc., etc., etc. We all have various areas of struggle. We all have areas where we feel off course in the busy city of life and we're struggling to know how to get where we need to go. Another quote, God enters our lostness. with the comprehensive and practical wisdom of His Word. The Bible unfolds life as God sees it, inviting us to know God, to know ourselves, to know life, to know how God works to undo the damage sin has done to each of us. The Bible is the ultimate spiritual compass, able to tell us exactly where we are and where we need to go. Question, how is that different than just the bad directions of showing us the end, but not telling us how to get there, or of just giving step-by-step methodologies? How is this different? So I want to make sure we're understanding the difference. So it's not just us alone in a city. There is the one who is revealing all this to us is the one we're also invited into a relationship with. That's critical. There is a powerful presence, a person at work guiding us. That's beautiful. Anything else? Yeah. It's not just all up to us. We're not just on our own. Yeah. Anybody else? Yeah, Patty. It's good. Right. We're not alone because we're in relationship with the Lord and part of the way that he is with us is he's given us a community of fellow believers to walk with. Absolutely. That's really good. That's really good. There is a difference between laying out a system for you to engage a step-by-step method that's optional and describing to you the way that life actually works, describing to you a process that you are actually already in the midst of. It's the difference between just being given a step-by-step set of directions for you to follow versus being given the map that shows you where you are and describes to you life as it actually is. Do we get the difference? Getting some nods. They're not like super confident nods. They're kind of like, mm-hmm. So maybe someone do a better job than me. Who can explain what I'm saying? Jeff. OK. I think it's great, yeah. What we need to understand in what this book is trying to do in talking about how people change, you may have heard that and said, okay, that's going to be a method for me to employ. In reality, what it's doing is describing to you a process you are already living out. And it's gonna describe to you why you are already having the struggles that you are. Why you are already seeing the progress that you are. And in understanding that, you're gonna know God better, you're gonna know yourself better, and be able to see where you are on that map and why. But it is a description of something that is not optional, but is an objective reality of how people are changing in this life. So, Let's do this. Let's... skip a whole bunch of stuff, and go to the big picture that the Bible lays out to us, essentially can be summarized in four things, okay? So this is where we're gonna start getting into the material that, again, we're not gonna go beyond this in the rest of this whole study, we're just gonna go deeper into these things. So the big picture can be described as, first off, it explains to us what life in this fallen world is like. Not what it should be like, but what it is like. The objective reality of what life in this fallen world actually is like, no matter what we may tell ourselves. It's then going to tell us who we are as fallen human beings. And then who God is as Savior and Lord of all things. And finally, how He progressively changes us by His grace. These are the four essential elements of the big picture, but they're not very memorable when we put them that way. And so what the book does is it gives them to us in a very helpful picture that can be derived from Scripture as well. The picture is that we take those and we say that first thing, our situation, what life is like, that's the heat. That's life in a fallen world. Secondly, who we are as fallen people, that's the thorns. The thorns of this life. Third, God as Savior and Lord, that's cross. That's the gospel in the midst of it. And then fourth, fruit. How he is progressively working in us. And this is what finally takes us to the graphic that you have on a handout. And if you don't have on a handout, perhaps you could raise your hand right now and someone could bring it to you. But you should have on a handout that has this graphic on it. But before we talk about that, turn it over and you'll see on the back side printed out Jeremiah 17, 5 through 10. So on the graphic side, you have those Four things, heat, thorns, cross, and fruit. And that's a little cheat sheet for you. But on the Jeremiah side, let me read this text for you, and then we're gonna look at these four elements within this text together. So Jeremiah 17, five through 10 says, thus says the Lord, cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. He is like a shrub in the desert. and shall not see any good come. He shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green. and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit. The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick. Who can understand it? I, the Lord, search the heart and test the mind to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds. Okay, so starting with heat. This is a person's situation in daily life with difficulties, blessings, and temptations. Where do we see heat in that passage from Jeremiah? Okay, so verse eight has it. Why don't you read the portion? Okay, so what is the subject of our Jeremiah passage? It's a little shrub, right? That's what we're talking about. That's what the picture is giving us. It's a little shrub. The cursed man of verse five, verse six, is like a shrub. The blessed man, verse seven, is like a tree. It's a botanical picture. It's a plant. And the plant has a situation, and that situation is the heat. So the heat is the world that the plant is living in. We are the plant in this, okay? And so the heat could be... just the providential situation I find myself. It could be the blessing that I'm enjoying right now. It could be the temptation that I'm struggling with. Whatever my situation is, that is the heat. Somebody talk to me about thorns in this passage. Even if the word's not literally there, the principle as it's described on the other side of the page, which is the person's ungodly response to the situation. Okay, so where in verse, I heard verse nine first. Okay. So the thorns represent our sinful responses to the heat. And you took us to the heart, which is where the text goes. Is this text about our behavior? I don't know. Think a little more. Is this text about our behavior? It's more about our heart. How is behavior related to heart? Yeah. OK. So in our reaction to the heat, Where does our reaction start? In the heart. And then what does it bring forth in our life? Fruit, which is described to us as thorns. Why do we fall into the temptations we fall into? Why do we get into these various lost places? It's because of, is it the heat that's at fault? The heat reveals what's in the heart. Remember how much time we spent early in this talking about the centrality of the heart and how what comes out of us comes out of us because it's what's inside of us, right? When you squeeze a tube of toothpaste, what comes squirting out of the end? Toothpaste. Why? Because there's toothpaste inside the toothpaste tube. These are not trick questions, right? So when we get squeezed, when we feel the heat of life, what often comes out of us? Sin, why? Because it was inside of us. Is that the heat's fault? No, it came from the heart. Where else in this text do we see some thorny issues? Verse five? Thus says the Lord, cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. Again, the centrality of the heart. But let's talk a little bit about, well, let's talk about cross. This focuses on the presence of God and his redemptive glory and love. Through Christ, he brings comfort, cleansing and power to change. So where is the cross? Where is the Lord in this Jeremiah passage? He's trustworthy? Why do you say that? Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord whose trust is the Lord. You see, it's not just this solitary shrub out there trying to squeeze its thorns back in and bring forth blessed fruit on its own. Just like Carol said, and just like Maddie added, we're not alone. There's a powerful presence. Their relationship with the Lord is at the heart of this. Blessed is the man, not just who self-produces all this fruit, but who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. The Lord is powerfully, personally, redemptively at work in this passage. And so let's talk about fruit. This is the person's new godly response to the situation resulting from God's power at work in the heart. It includes behavior, the heart renewed by grace, and the harvest of consequences that follow. So where is fruit in this passage? Verse 8. Someone read it for me. He is like a tree planted by water that sends out its roots by the stream. Alright, so on the other side of your page now, and on the screen behind me, look what we have. We have Jeremiah 17, 5 to 10, diagrammed for us. This same model, this same pattern, is unfolded for us again and again and again in Scripture. We're not going to take the time to go through all of them, but the book actually takes various passages. and explains how this pattern plays itself out again, and again, and again, in the Old Testament, in the New Testament. And what do we have up top? This may have been, the first time I flashed this thing up, I understand this may have just looked like complete gibberish, but now, taking everything we've been seeing in this study, and everything we just saw from Jeremiah, what's going on up top here? Look, it's a sun, it's a heat, and it asks the question, what is your situation? What is the occasion of whatever is going on in your heart right now? And then that sun is burning down and look, here we are represented as the shrub or the tree. And so often what the heat does in our natural self is it's gonna produce thorns. You see what the tree is growing out of down there? It's a heart, right? So out of our heart, there's thorns that come out. It's the bad fruit of our reactions. And then there's the consequences that we reap from that. See, we have the heat, and this is a cycle that we are so often, in our natural man, stuck in. We have remaining sin. Thorns do come out in reaction to heat. That's a reality of this life. But it's not the end. It's not the only reality. Because at the center of this is the cross. A powerful redeemer. The scriptures tell us who God is and it tells us what He says and does in Christ. And through the work of the Spirit in us, it is possible for us actually to react by the power of the Spirit at work in us with fruit to the heat. we can actually start, as we seek God in repentance and faith, as we acknowledge our sinful thorns, as we repent of them, God is actually powerful to be at work in our lives, helping us to produce more and more good fruit in our lives. Is that making sense? Okay, good. It's very important to understand, though, that if this diagram has a weakness, I'd say it's this, the two hearts and the two trees. Because what's the reality? We have one thorny, fruitful heart. We have one battle raging within us. And they actually, well, let me read this first about the overall diagram. Skipped some things I wanted to say here. They say, what you are studying is your own spiritual biography. That's what this is. It's your own spiritual biography. This biblical picture is meant to be a mirror you use to see yourself as you are. Again, this is not just a method, this is a description of reality. It is a diagnostic tool, telling you what is wrong inside, a map that helps you see where you are and how to get where you need to go. It is meant to be a window to a whole new way of living, even when circumstances say the same. That is so critical. Even when it's the same heat, we can live differently. We can live fruitfully as we understand our heart and the Lord at work within us. It is a shovel to help you to dig beneath the words and actions to understand why you do what you do. It will also remind you that you are never alone in your struggle and that everything you need has been provided in Christ. It teaches you how to tap into the resources of God's grace to become what he first meant you to be. Each element of the picture is about your life in relationship to God. And so, what I just said a moment ago about our mixed hearts, that quote's actually on your printout, it's right underneath Jeremiah. I thought this was important enough, I printed it out on the handout. As Christians, we are not either a fruit tree or a thorn tree. Instead, our lives will always contain some combination of fruit and thorns. As we turn to Christ in repentance and faith, the Spirit will enable us to grow more fruitful. So, I have a couple of application questions here. Let me just read them for us, then I'd encourage you to really think through these things, pray through these things in preparation as next week we're gonna start looking more in depth at the heat, the situations in life that we encounter that occasion these thorn and fruit responses from our hearts. This might be a good thing to talk about in your own households. Number one, identify a difficult situation or a big opportunity in your life right now. Sort out the situation and your responses to it using the four elements of this model. Your struggle might be physical suffering or the kind of suffering we experience when someone sins against us. or your struggle could be a personal struggle with a sin pattern. Think about what shapes the way you see the circumstances that you are in and how you are responding to your circumstances. And then secondly, what aspects of the heat thorns cross fruit model do you tend to emphasize the neglect of others? This could lead to some very interesting self-examination and discussion. Some examples, Pharisees emphasize behavior over the heart. People who have suffered or been abused tend to emphasize the situation, the heat over everything. The overly introspective person tends to spend most of his time in endless heart examination. The Jesus and me person tends to focus on the cross in isolation from everything else. The legalist tends to look only at consequences and conclude that bad consequences prove that there must have been bad behavior. See Job's counselors. That could lead to some very interesting conversation. Those are all taken directly from the study guide on how people change. Why don't we go ahead and close in prayer and we'll have worship in just over 15 minutes upstairs. Heavenly Father, thank you for this time together. And I pray, Lord, that as we begin to engage with this understanding you've given us of who you are and what life in your world is like, we would see within it very clearly the power of redemption at work through Christ. We thank you for him. And I pray that you would use this all in our lives. We pray these things in Christ's name. Amen.