Fully Alive

This is what Jesus came to do — to give life, and a certain kind of life: an abundant life. The Greek word here is peri περισσόν — perisson, and it means exceeding, overflowing. It means something that is beyond what is expected or required. Jesus comes to offer a life beyond our expectations. This is so profound. It's not our life plus a little extra. Jesus doesn't come to offer us some upgrades to our lives. I know this is an old reference, but Jesus didn't come to pimp our rides — you remember that old show? Like, okay, you've got something good going on, let me just give you some cool speakers and a subwoofer. Nothing wrong with a good set of spinners, but that is not what Jesus came to do.

It's life of a qualitatively different order altogether. Jesus isn't offering or promising you a better version of the life you already have. He's not offering a spiritual add-on to an otherwise ordinary existence. He's describing something categorically different, something categorically better — a life that is so full, so alive, so oriented towards its proper end that it barely resembles the life that most of us have settled for. That's what Irenaeus was reaching for: the glory of God is a human being fully alive. This is him interpreting Jesus — I have come that you might have life and life abundantly.

That's the life I want. It's the life I crave. It's the life I know in the depths of my being that I was made for. And I also know it's very rarely the life I'm actually living.

Now, there's something else I want you to notice in John 10:10 — something that is so simple and obvious, and something that most of us have actually misheard and mismemorized. I've heard people quoting John 10:10 so many times, and they don't quote it accurately. The text says this: "The thief comes only to steal, kill, and destroy. I have come that —" it doesn't say "you." Doesn't say "you." He says, "They — I've come that they might have life and have it abundantly." And that makes sense in the text in John 10. It's what we call the good shepherd dialogue. Jesus is establishing Himself as the good shepherd that comes from the flock, the shepherd that knows them by name. But the whole context of what Jesus is talking about is a people, a flock, a family. It's relational and communal at the core.

And so in this promise and this offer of life that Jesus gives us here — "I've come to give abundant life" — He doesn't come to give it to individuals. He comes to give it to His people, to His family. He's talking about a community gathered around a shepherd, moving together, living together, protected together, growing together. Jesus offers us life together. The abundant life Jesus is promising here is not a private spiritual achievement. It's not something you unlock individually through the right combination of belief and behavior. It's the life of a people — a gathered, known, led people under the care of the one true shepherd.

We live in a culture that's told us since the moment we were born, over and over again, in every way possible, that the self is the most important thing. That your spiritual life is between you and God — private, personal, and nobody else's business. That growth happens in the quiet of your own soul, with your own personal private quiet time, with your own Bible study, in your own way. And tragically, from my perspective, the church has not pushed back but has acquiesced to that, and that's problematic. Because the life that Jesus is describing, the life that Jesus provides, the life that Jesus is promising here, is not a solitary life. It's not an independent life. It never has been.

You were not made to behold God alone. You were made in the image of a God who is within Himself a community — Father, Son, Spirit — in eternal relationship, eternally giving and receiving. Relationality is not something added to your humanity as a bonus feature. It's a core part of what it means to be a human. So when we think or talk about beholding Jesus, when we talk about arranging a life around the vision of God, we're fundamentally talking about something that is done in community, that is done relationally. It's something we do together. I'm not saying we don't have our private devotional life. I'm not saying we don't have our individual prayer times or those things. What I am saying is there is this corporate reality to beholding that you can never experience by yourself, by definition. We'll come back to that — it's going to be what I finish this sermon with.

But for now, I want to take you back. I want to show you from a beautiful passage of scripture that this idea of "we become what we behold" is ancient — it's as old as the mountains. And I want to take you to a specific mountain. But before we do that, I want you to look at a picture. What you're looking at is one of the most famous sculptures in the world. Michelangelo made it around the year 1515. It sits in a church in Rome called San Pietro in Vincoli, and it is maybe one of the greatest pieces of art ever created by human hands. It's absolutely extraordinary in the detail, in the intensity, in the movement of it. It's something that has captured the eyes and the hearts and the imagination of everybody that sees it.

But there's a detail in it that I find so fascinating. If you look at his head, you see something really interesting. Michelangelo carved Moses with horns — two horns sticking out of his head at the top. And Michelangelo, arguably the greatest sculptor who ever lived, a man who understood the Bible and Christian theology deeply, sculpted Moses with horns. And he did it on purpose. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't a stylistic choice. It wasn't artistic license. He did it because his Bible told him to.

Michelangelo worked from the Latin Bible, the Vulgate, translated by Jerome in the 4th century. And when Jerome got to (Exod 34:29), he translated the Hebrew with a Latin word, " cornuta," which means "horned." Moses came down from the mountain with a horned face. And so Michelangelo carved him that way. Now, Jerome wasn't exactly wrong — the word קָרַן — qāran does have kind of that connotation of horn. But when we look at the Septuagint and other translations, they translate that word as brilliance, as light, as shining. And so that's how most of us are probably familiar with the text in Exodus 34 — Moses comes down from the mountain and his face is radiant. It is projecting something, and it is shining.

So let's look at Exodus 34 together. Let me set it up. Moses has been up on the top of a mountain for 40 days and 40 nights — sound familiar? The text is specific about that. And he's been up there with no food, no water, just Moses and God, face to face in the presence. Moses is in the presence of God in a way that no human before or since has occupied quite like it. God is re-giving the law to Moses after the disaster of the golden calf. If you remember the golden calf, Moses comes down with the law, the covenant. He comes out, he finds the nation worshiping the golden calf, engaged in a terrible sin, and he breaks the tablets.

After all of the dust settles from that moment, Moses goes back up to the top of the mountain to meet with God. The mountain is covered at the top by a cloud and lightning and peals of thunder, and Moses is up there for 40 days and 40 nights, and there God gives him another copy of the Ten Commandments. But now he's coming down the mountain. He comes down with two tablets in hand. He rounds the last bend in the path and there the camp is spread before him. He sees the tents. He smells the smoke of the cooking fires, the noise of the people going about their daily business. Moses is coming home and he's bringing the word of God back to the people that he loves.

Listen now to the text.

The story is very simple at one level. Moses goes and spends 40 days and nights in the presence of God. And when he comes back, he comes back changed, shining. His face is shining. It's not a soft glow, not lit up in a pleasant way. Shining, radiating, projecting. It is hornlike in its intensity. It's so much so that when the people see him, they're terrified. They back away from him. He has to call them and then ultimately he has to veil himself in their presence. Moses spending time in the presence of God transformed him so much so that everyone else was afraid of him and he had to veil himself in their presence, because something of where he had been was still with him, something of who he had been with lingered with him.

And I love the detail in verse 29. He didn't know. He didn't know. It says Moses did not know that the skin of his face shone. He had no idea. Moses wasn't performing. He wasn't managing. He wasn't checking a mirror on the way down the mountain. He wasn't posting selfies. He wasn't even aware that anything had happened to him. He just came down the mountain the same way he'd gone up — tired, probably carrying the weight of two stone tablets, thinking about the people waiting at the bottom. But he'd been with God. And when you're with God, stuff happens. That's theologically absolutely rock solid. When you're with God, stuff happens. And his face was on fire.

Now, this is the key, and I need you to grab this this morning. Moses did not go up the mountain to get a glow up. He wasn't seeking the shine. He wasn't even seeking that transformation. He was seeking one thing and one thing only. He was seeking the presence of God. He went because God called him up. He went because there was a covenant to renew and a people who needed a mediator and a God who was willing — a God who was graciously willing to deal with a people that were addicted to their own sin. That's what drove him to go and meet with God.

Moses went up the mountain as an act of obedience and desperation. He went because he had no other option, no other place to go, no other source of hope. He went for God and he came back differently. Not because he tried harder, not because he performed better, not because he had the right spiritual technique or the right devotional method or the right number of hours logged in prayer. He came down different because of who he had been with. I hope you're hearing me this morning. The transformation was not the goal. The goal was God. The goal was being in the presence of the One who made us for Himself. The transformation is what happened involuntarily and, for Moses, unknowingly. He didn't even know that when a human face stayed in the presence of God long enough, it began to shine.

It's a beautiful illustration of becoming what we behold. We become what we behold. You've heard me say this for seven weeks here in the oldest of possible forms. On the mountain in Sinai, the very face of Moses demonstrates the reality that when we are in the presence of God, we are transformed.

Now, it's this moment on the mountain that inspired Paul to write a verse that I quoted in, I think, every sermon in the idol series. 2 Corinthians chapter 3, verse 18:

You go back and read the context around what Paul is doing here. He's specifically describing the events of Exodus 34, Moses coming down from the mountain, the veil coming on and off. And he says this unbelievably important thing. He says, "We all — not just Moses — we all with unveiled faces beholding the glory of the Lord." This is what Jesus has made possible and what the Spirit makes real and available to all of us. This is what Jesus has invited us into. No longer is Moses alone on the mountaintop. We've been invited to experience and witness the goodness and glory of God.

We've been called to take off the veil and be in the presence of God. We don't have a veil on because Jesus has given us the right to be called children of God. I can't help but think of another veil — not the veil that Moses put on, but the veil between the outer court and the inner court, the veil separating the Holy of Holies, that when Jesus breathed His last and said, "It is finished," was torn from top to bottom.

The veil of the temple was torn from top to bottom. Not from bottom to top. From top to bottom, symbolically saying everyone has access to the mercy seat. Everyone's invited to come into the presence and into the glory of God. No more separation. Jesus has opened the way. We become what we behold. We all with unveiled faces beholding the glory of the Lord are transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another.

The word here for "behold" in the Greek is κατοπτριζόμενοι — katoptrizomenoi. And it comes from the Greek word for mirror — katoptron.. That metaphor runs throughout the idol series — we're made as mirrors, living mirrors to receive and reflect the glory of God. Here's where it gets interesting. This word in the Greek can have two different meanings simultaneously. It can mean to gaze on something, to behold as in a mirror, but it can also mean to reflect, as a mirror reflects. Theologians love to argue about these kinds of things. Reading through a bunch of commentaries, some say it means one thing, others say another. But Paul so often is a both-and guy. He's so brilliant and so intentional with how he writes. It's absolutely convincing that he chose this word knowing both meanings and wanting us to see both, because that's how mirrors function. It's two sides of the same coin.

A mirror functions by something coming into it, and a mirror functions by projecting that thing back out. That's what mirrors do. What Paul is saying is something like this: as we gaze upon the glory of the Lord, as God's glory is manifest to us and we turn our faces toward Him and look, we begin to reflect that which we are looking at. The beholding and the reflecting are the same act. If you look long enough at the glory of Christ, it starts to come back off of you. That's what Paul is calling us to, just like Moses.

But here is the image to hold on to for the rest of this series. A mirror without light is useless. You can have the best mirror in the world — the best glass, the best backing, designed to the millimeter to capture and return an image with perfect fidelity. You can polish it until there's not a single smudge on it. You can have the greatest mirror ever made, and in a dark room it is absolutely useless. And that's not the mirror's fault. You don't look at the mirror and say, "What's wrong with you? Generate some light." That's not how it works. The mirror is not the problem. The mirror is not broken. The mirror is not failing at its job. The mirror is simply waiting for what it was made to receive.

And the moment light enters the room, the moment a single beam of light falls on that mirror, it comes alive and it does what it was designed to do. It receives the light and it reflects it. You are that mirror. That's who we are. That's what we were made to be. We were made, designed, crafted as image-bearers to bear the image of God from the first moment of our existence. That's what we were made for. We were made to receive and perceive God's glory, and we were made to reflect it back into all of creation.

That's who you are at the fundamental design level. It's who we all are. This is not a metaphor for something vague and spiritual. This is a description of who we actually are, of what it means to be human. And the spiritual disciplines — the disciplines we're going to unpack for the next eight weeks together — they're not the light. Don't misunderstand. The disciplines are important, but they're the means to the end. They're not the end themselves. The disciplines do not produce the transformation. You cannot manufacture light by polishing the mirror harder. The disciplines are simply the practice of keeping the mirror turned towards the light. That's what they are. They're gifts — gifts of God given to us because we need them to orient us to God.

Now Paul adds something else to (2 Corinthians 3:18) that must not be missed. He says, "We're being transformed from one degree of glory to another" — ἀπὸ δόξης εἰς δόξαν - apo doxēs eis doxan - from glory into glory. It's a phrase about direction and rate. The direction is fixed: towards glory, towards the image of Christ. You're not wandering. You're not circling. You don't have to decide which light you're supposed to reflect. It is the light of the glory of God reflected in Christ. The destination is set, and so is the rate.

And the rate is one of the most frustrating things about this for our human experience. The rate is slow. It says from one degree of glory to another. The direction is set. The rate is slow. We don't go from zero to glory in a weekend. We don't go from broken to whole in a six-week program. It's degree by degree by degree by degree, glory by glory. Moses didn't glow after one afternoon on the mountain. It was forty days and forty nights. There's something about the process. Transformation actually works through constant exposure, a level of time and habit that can't be rushed and can't be bypassed.

It's not fast food. It's not a spiritual upgrade that you install and immediately have. It's not Neo in the Matrix downloading a program and saying, "I know kung fu." That is not how it works. Deeply, desperately, the wish is there — God, why can't it work that way? God, give me a pill. Give me a program. Give me a verse. Give me a prayer. Give me something that boom, makes me. But He calls us to behold His glory, and degree by degree we are changed and transformed. It's a slow becoming.

And then Paul adds this final phrase, and it is so liberating. He says, "For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit." That just brings a deep and free breath. Paul's message isn't, "Hey, you've got to transform yourself." His message is: if you aim the mirror of your life toward Jesus, He will do that work of transformation.

The transformation is not your job. Your job is the beholding. Your job is keeping the mirror tuned and turned. Your job is to go up the mountain and show up over and over and over again to seek the presence of God. His job is the transformation. His job is the impartation. Oh, what freedom there is in Christ. Moses didn't produce the glow. He couldn't have. We can't manufacture the glory of God through sufficient effort or discipline or sincerity. It's the Spirit that transforms. We behold and then we become.

So what does this actually look like in a body in time — dare I say it, in the normal traffic of life? Because this is the key. It's one thing to say we behold what we become, but how are we living it out? I want to direct you to two verses of Paul's in Romans 12. Paul says this:

That passage starts with the word "therefore," and that word is carrying a heavy load — everything before it. Romans chapters 1 through 11: the diagnosis of sin, the miracle of justification, freedom from condemnation, the fulfillment and promise of Israel extended to all, the mystery of grace — eleven chapters of what God has done for us in spite of us. And then Paul says, "Therefore, by the mercies of God." Therefore, by the mercies of God, here is what a life looks like in response. It's not a performance program. It's not a checklist for earning God's approval. It's not earned, because it's by the mercies of God. But that doesn't mean there is no effort involved. He calls for a natural, embodied, whole-life response to what God has done for us.

Because God has done what He did in Jesus for us, our response is to present our bodies as a living sacrifice. Present your bodies — not just your mind, not just your soul, not just a prayer on a Sunday morning. Your body, your schedule, your sleep, your appetite, your attention, the physical material embodied reality of your daily existence. That is what Paul says we are to lay at the altar — everything. And he calls it, and this is such a remarkable phrase, a "living sacrifice," which by itself is an oxymoron. In Paul's day, sacrifices worked one way. You brought an animal, you put it on the altar, and you killed it. Paul redefines sacrifice for the new covenant. Jesus is the once-and-for-all sacrifice, so now our sacrifice is not to die but to live because of the life that Jesus gives us.

So he says we present everything we are to God as a living sacrifice. It's made holy and acceptable unto God because of Jesus — it's all in that "therefore," it's all in that "by the mercies of God." Because of who Jesus is, because of what Jesus has done, is doing, and will continue to do, because of the Spirit that now dwells within us, we can — and oh, how we must — offer everything. We must offer our bodies as living sacrifices. Not a one-time moment, but a continuous, daily, embodied posture of availability to God. This is what the disciplines look like in a body. They are the practice of staying on the altar.

Before going any further, I want to address what may be an elephant in the room for some people, and that is simply the word "disciplines." Some of you are wired in such a way that you hear the word discipline and it sounds like a really good thing, a gift — we're talking about structure, clarity, something to hold on to. But for others, and it's probably the majority of us whether we like to admit it or not, the word discipline has a negative connotation. It tends to land like a weight. It feels like obligation. It feels like the opposite of freedom. And that's challenging for us because we live in a culture that values freedom and autonomy above all else. And so sometimes we hear the word discipline and we recoil.

Sometimes the recoil comes simply from our cultural love of autonomy. We live in a culture that has told us that freedom means doing whatever you want, when you want, and how you want — that the self-directed life is a free life, and that any external structure placed on your desires is repressing and restricting you from being who you really are. So the word discipline feels like a cage, like someone is trying to take something from you. The second reaction that some of us may have — and this one occurs specifically within rooms like this, within the church — is that some of us have heard discipline preached and taught as a weapon. Maybe someone in your life, a parent, maybe a church or a system, used spiritual disciplines as a measuring stick. How early do you get up? How long do you pray? How many chapters of the Bible have you read? How often are you at church? How much do you give? On and on and on it goes. And the result isn't transformation. It's shame. It's envy. It's comparison. It's guilt. A chronic sense of never being enough, never doing enough, never measuring up to the standard that God apparently requires of serious Christians.

I want to say this morning that that is the wrong map. That was never what disciplines were supposed to be. What the disciplines actually are — what they have always been — is something closer to what we already looked at this morning: Michelangelo's Moses. What do I mean by that? Michelangelo did not sit down one afternoon and make that sculpture. Michelangelo began drawing as a child. He spent years, decades, as an apprentice, grinding pigments, preparing surfaces, doing the unglamorous, repetitive, constrained work of learning his craft under someone else's direction. He submitted himself to the demands of stone, of chisel, of proportion, of light. He practiced the same techniques thousands of times before he had the freedom to do what he ultimately did — before the art could flow from him with that kind of power and freedom and mastery.

Freedom to do anything original with them. And that decades-long discipline produced what many people feel to be the greatest act of sculpture ever produced. All that constraint, all that repetition, all that submission, all that discipline didn't produce less freedom. It produced more. And give me a chisel and a hammer — I'm not producing that. The path to freedom is actually the path of discipline. The master craftsman has more freedom than the beginner. Not despite the discipline, because of it. It's true with sculpting. It's true with languages. It's true with music. It's true with anything in life.

The disciplines of the Christian life work the same way. They're not a cage. They're not a measuring stick. They're not the enemy of being fully alive. They're the pathway to becoming fully alive, and they are the only pathway to it. Far too many today have a version of Jesus that's created out of what we imagine him to be or what we desire him to be. A warm Jesus, a loving Jesus, a Jesus who never calls us out, who never challenges us. I'm so grateful that's not the real Jesus. That is not the Jesus of Scripture.

Listen to Jesus. This is not me. This is not Irenaeus. This is not Paul. This is not any man. This is Jesus, the Word made flesh.:

That sounds a lot like discipline. That sounds a lot like making choices about what we direct our lives to, about what we orient around, about what we look at and gaze at and fill ourselves with. Jesus has no problem calling out — hey, if anyone wants to come, anyone can come. But here's the path: you have to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Me. This is not a suggestion. He's not offering one option out of many. He's describing the shape of the life that follows Him.

And the shape is this. The self that insists on its own autonomy, its own direction, its own unbounded freedom — that self has to die. Not because God is cruel, not because freedom doesn't matter, but because the self organized around its own desires, its own kingdom, its own image, is the self that is slowly killing us. The cross is not the obstacle to the fully alive life. The cross is the doorway to it. If you want to grab the life that Jesus is offering, you have to let go of the idols that have occupied your hands. You have to come out of the darkness and direct the mirror of your life to the light. Deny yourself. Take up your cross. Keep the mirror pointed at Jesus. Follow Him up the mountain.

This is what Paul is getting at in Romans 12:1–2. Look at verse two with me now. He says:

He gives two commands set against each other. One: do not be conformed to this world. Two: be transformed by the renewal of your mind. The first command names the problem. The world is not neutral. The world is not a passive backdrop to your spiritual life. You don't live in Disneyland. You've been born into a battlefield. The world is actively running a formation program, shaping your desires, calibrating your expectations, defining for you what the good life truly is. The Greek here for being conformed is the word for pressing something into a mold, cutting off the excess. You're being formed by something. The question is, what are you being formed by? Don't be formed. Don't be shaped. Don't be pressed into the mold of the world by the world. Do not be conformed to the world.

The second command counters it. Be transformed. It's the word we get metamorphosis from. It's the same word used in (2 Corinthians 3:18), and it's in the passive. It doesn't say transform yourself. It says be transformed. Allow the transformation. Place yourself in the conditions where the Spirit does what only the Spirit can do. And he says, do it by the renewal of your mind. That word for renewal — anakainōsis — is a word that means renovation. And I'm not talking about a coat of paint on something. This is structural. It's comprehensive. It is a reworking. He says, do this by the renovation of your mind. The same renovation that Paul called for in Philippians 2 — have in yourself the mind of Christ. Don't think like the world has trained you to think. Don't think like your flesh wants you to think. You need to learn to think the thoughts of Christ. Your mind being rebuilt slowly, degree by degree, around a different center.

This is the grammar of the spiritual disciplines. The disciplines in and of themselves don't transform you. The Spirit transforms you. But the disciplines are how you keep showing up. They are how you put yourself in the place where the Spirit can do what only the Spirit can do.

Let's go back to the communal idea that we started with. Jesus said, "I came that they might have life" — not a singular, but a people. And this matters because of who God is and who we are. We were made in the image of a God who is within Himself a community. We are trinitarian — Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Not three gods, but one God in eternal relationship. Eternally giving and receiving. Eternally knowing and being known. Relationality is not something God added to your humanity as a design feature. It's the very thing your humanity is made from. You are irreducibly, constitutively, by the deepest architecture of your being, a creature made for community.

Which means the solitary version of the spiritual disciplines — the private individual "just me and Jesus" version of beholding — is not the full version. It's never been the full version. It's not wrong. It's just incomplete. A mirror can face the light alone, but a room full of mirrors facing the light together does something that one mirror alone cannot.

Can you think about your relationships within this community from the lens of spiritual growth? Let me ask you this question this morning: does anyone in this room really know what God has been up to in your life lately? That's a deeper question. Not the surface version, not the "oh yeah, things are good" version, not the shiny happy Christian face we all put on when we come to church. How you doing, brother? I'm blessed. I just had a crazy fight with my wife and my kids are a disaster, but I'm blessed, right? Just crazy to me.

Here's what I want you to understand about your relationship with Jesus. It was never meant to be a private possession. It was meant to be shared. The life God is building in you, the slow degree-by-degree transformation from one glory to another, is not just for you. It's not a personal spiritual achievement to be quietly managed and occasionally displayed. It's something that belongs in the room. What God is doing in you, what God is doing to you, matters — not just for you, but for others. It's something that other people need to see, need to hear, need to be encouraged by. And when you hide it under that bushel, when you put the drape over the mirror, you're not only hurting and limiting yourself, but those around you.

Some of us keep our relationship with Jesus private because we're afraid of what other people will think. "Well, if they really knew what I struggle with..." We've learned in church sometimes that the right answer is always "fine." So we wear masks in the one place we should be able to be ourselves. Some of us keep it private because we think we're genuinely capable by ourselves — we don't ask for help, we don't need help, we've never needed help, and asking for it feels like a confession of failure rather than an act of faith. You know, the Bible has a word for that. It's called pride. And the Bible talks about it really clearly: God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. Some of us keep it private because nobody's ever really asked. Not really. Not in a way that communicates, "I really want to know who you are. I really want to know what God is doing within you."

All of that — all of it — is completely understandable. And all of it keeps us from experiencing the abundant life that Jesus offers. The full life, the abundant, fully alive life that Jesus offers, has always been a shared life. You were made in the image of a God who has never been alone. Not for a single moment of eternity. And the life He is building in you was designed to be witnessed, to be shared, to be spoken, to be carried together.

So here's what I want to ask of you this week. Not a program — just a next step. Open yourself to someone. Some of you have been meaning to go to a Bible study or a small group. You've been meaning to. You've always had reasons — good reasons, busy reasons, tired reasons. Go. This week, go. Not eventually. Go. Turn the mirror. Some of you have been carrying something — a struggle, a fear, a sin, a weight — and you've told exactly no one about it. Here's what I want to tell you: don't just go tell anyone. Don't go eeny-meenie-miny-mo — you get to be discerning. We always have to exercise wisdom. But if that's you this morning and you're walking with this heavy weight all by yourself, you're not supposed to carry that alone. Find someone this week. Turn the mirror.

Some of you just need to have somebody over for dinner or invite somebody out for coffee. You need to stop waiting for somebody else to make the first move and make it yourself. Because we are better together than we are alone. I say this all the time: you will never be who God made you to be, and you will never do what God is inviting you to do, by yourself. That's not a motivational statement. It's a theological one.

So let me end this morning where we started. The glory of God is a human being fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God. I know some of you have tried the disciplines before. You've tried the quiet time. You've tried the Bible reading. Maybe you've tried fasting or journaling. Maybe you've had an accountability partner. Maybe you gave it real effort — you showed up, you did the things — and somewhere along the way it stopped working, or it never quite worked the way that you thought it should, or the way others told you it should. And so you quietly concluded that either the disciplines don't work for you, or you don't work.

If that's you this morning, I want to speak directly to you and say: the failure is not yours, and the failure is not with the disciplines. The problem is the frame. Somewhere along the way — in a book, or a church, or a well-meaning conversation — you were handed a map that said, "Do these things and God will show up." Practice the disciplines and earn the presence. Log the hours and then receive the transformation. And you tried to follow that map, and it led you somewhere dry and exhausting and quietly shameful. That's the wrong map. It's a backwards map, an upside-down map.

Moses didn't go up the mountain to earn the glow. He went because God called him. He went desperate and obedient and out of options. And God met him there. And the transformation — the radiance, the shining, the thing that stopped Aaron in his tracks at the bottom of the mountain — was not the product of Moses's effort. It was the byproduct of God's presence. The disciplines are not how you earn access.

You already have access. The veil's already been torn. You've been given by the Spirit through the gospel the very thing that Moses had to climb a mountain to receive. The disciplines are simply what you do with the gift God has already bestowed to you. They're the practice of keeping the mirror turned, of going back up the mountain, of arranging your ordinary embodied communal life around the one thing that actually matters and around the one thing that can transform us — around Jesus, the glory of Christ, beholding and being beheld, degree by degree, glory by glory, slowly becoming what we were always made to be.

This week I was thinking about the name of our church — Estrella Mountain Church. If you don't know, estrella means star. Star Mountain Church. It's a fitting name for this sermon, isn't it? Shining light, a mountain, a called-out people. We've talked about this before, ten years ago when we did the Shine Campaign. Philippians chapter 2:

Church family, we are called to shine. But I hope this morning that you're hearing and understanding what that means and what it doesn't mean. It doesn't mean you're called to generate light. It means we reflect it. The very next words of Paul bring that home:

Holding fast to the glory of Christ. Holding fast to the light that we receive and reflect. To the light that shapes and transforms us. As we hold fast to the word of life, as we behold His glory, we align ourselves to the light of God and we reflect it.

Oh, church, hear me this morning — we reflect it together. That is what God is calling us to. Not a collection of individually impressive Christians managing their private spiritual lives. God is calling us to be a family, a people, a room full of mirrors turned together towards the glory of Christ, being transformed together from one degree of glory to another, shining together into the darkness that desperately needs the light. The light is already here in the room. Let's turn the mirror, and let's shine together. Amen.