Sermon Recap

This Sunday, Pastor Jon Tyson continued our Formed series with a teaching on vivification. Vivification is the process by which the Holy Spirit imparts new spiritual life to a believer, animating them with the life of Christ and empowering them to live in obedience, faith, and love. It's the positive aspect of sanctification, where the individual is not only turning away from sin (mortification) but is also being energized and renewed to live a life of righteousness and holiness. As Christians, we want to build an inner world that can handle the pressure of anything happening in the outer world.

To accomplish this, there are four shifts that must happen in our inner life. The first shift is from outer exhaustion to inner power. From Ephesians, we know that we are strengthened by God's glorious riches and don't have to rely on our own inner resources. From His inner riches, we receive an inner Counselor, Guide, Comforter, Teacher, Accountability, Helper, Sanctifier, Intercessor, Empowerer, Illuminator, and Visionary. We receive the same Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead.

The second shift is from outer rejection to inner love. We live with Christ in us, the hope of glory. Therefore, we have an inner voice of love reassuring us whenever we need it and replacing the voice of accusation. We have access to the full experience of God’s love — the breadth, length, height, and depth. With Christ, we get to create a secret world from this source of love, and can be filled with the fullness of God.

The third shift is from outer fragility to inner stability. Because Christ dwells in us, we know He's not just visiting; He's making a home and settling in. When we know we are rooted and grounded in His love that dwells with us, we can give our lives away freely and with security.

The last shift is from cultural rumination to kingdom imagination. Rumination leads to hopelessness and produces ressentiment, which is deep-seated resentment, envy, and hostility that arises when we perceive ourselves as powerless and oppressed. We get a wounded identity that refuses to believe we have agency, resilience, and hope. On the other hand, kingdom imagination is the belief that God can break in and do something new at any moment. Jesus wants to shift our faith from believing anything is possible to everything is possible in the lives of believers. We must get our inner vision focused on the person of Jesus, and come to Him for all things in prayer, believing that He can accomplish the impossible.

Finally, we must care for our inner worlds. We can do this by "keeping the stream," which means protecting our hearts from the potent poison of culture. We can also establish rhythms of renewal, which are the ways we respond to stress. We can either retreat to a "third world," where we medicate, numb, and escape, or we can go to the secret place with God, where we are renewed and restored in power. Lastly, we must strengthen ourselves in the Lord. Ultimately, we are not fated to deal with life out of our own resources. Rather, we are given power, love, stability, and kingdom imagination as a result of the life-giving Spirit in us.

If you missed this talk, you can watch it here today.

Discussion Questions

Connect

1. What are three words you would use to describe your inner life right now?

Character

Ask someone to read Ephesians 3:14-21 aloud. Then, ask the following questions:

1. What words, images, or phrases stand out to you in this passage?

2. What does this passage reveal about what Jesus has made available to us?

Consider

1. Pastor Jon spoke about how we need to move from a reactive to a proactive way of living our faith amidst the chaos of the world. Where do you feel like you fall on that spectrum right now/most often?

2. Pastor Jon also mentioned our third worlds, places that we create and go to when we're experiencing pain in our lives. How do you self-medicate your inner world when you're under stress, instead of going to God in the secret place?

3. What does it look like to establish rhythms of renewal to “keep the stream” in your life right now? What's keeping you from doing so?

Cover

Spend time asking for God to reveal which aspect of the Spirit (Counselor, Guide, Comforter, Teacher, Accountability, Helper, Sanctifier, Intercessor, Empowerer, Illuminator, and Visionary) you need in your inner world this week. Pair up and pray for the Holy Spirit to show up in these ways until you meet again.