Live by Dying.

Be Filled by Being Emptied.

Let’s start with two sentences that, if you really hear them, will not let you go for the rest of the week.

A Christian lives by dying.

A Christian becomes full by being emptied.

Read that twice.

Now let me tell you what is wrong with both of those sentences.

Everything.

Everything in your culture, everything in your phone, everything that has been whispered in your ear since the day you were born in America — everything — is built on the exact opposite of those two sentences.

The world says:

Live by living. Become full by acquiring.

That is the entire economic engine of the Western hemisphere in eight words.

The gospel says:

Live by dying. Become full by being emptied.

That is the entire economic engine of the kingdom of God in nine words.

And the reason we are so tired, beloved — the reason our anxiety is at all-time highs and our depression is at all-time highs and our churches are emptying and our marriages are crumbling and our kids are on antidepressants by the eighth grade — is that we have been running the world’s math on the gospel’s hardware, and the hardware is starting to smoke.

Let me explain.

The bestseller list, in case you missed it

The five best-selling self-help books of the modern era have titles like:

Live Your Best Life.

Find Your Purpose.

Unleash the Giant Within.

The Power of Now.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a [Whatever the Title Says, Bless His Heart].

Every one of those titles is a small heresy.

Not because the authors are evil.

Most of them mean well.

But because every one of those titles, beloved, is selling you the same product:

A bigger, better, fuller, louder, more optimized YOU.

You at the gym.

You in the corner office.

You on the beach with the boat.

You on the stage with the microphone.

You with the audience.

You with the brand.

You with the life.

And the unspoken promise of the entire industry — from the morning-routine influencer with the cold plunge to the LinkedIn guru with the protein shake — is that if you just keep adding to yourself, you will eventually be enough.

This, beloved, is a lie.

It is the oldest lie in the book.

It is, in fact, the literal oldest lie in the Book — first told by a snake in a garden when he leaned over and whispered to Eve, “You will be like God.”

The serpent’s pitch in Genesis 3 is the same pitch your phone makes at you eight hundred times a day.

Add to yourself. Become more. Optimize. Upgrade.

And here is the part nobody on the bestseller list will tell you:

The more you add to yourself, the heavier you get. And eventually, you are going to discover that the most exhausted people on earth are the ones who have spent their lives trying to fill themselves up.

Jim Carrey, accidentally preaching

A few years ago, a comedian named Jim Carrey — who has more money than most countries — said something in an interview that I have been chewing on ever since.

He said:

“I think everybody should get rich and famous and do everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.”

Read that twice.

A man who climbed every ladder the culture told him to climb, who got every prize the culture told him to want, who became — for a while — one of the most famous human beings on the planet — stood on top of the mountain, looked around, and said this is not it.

Jim Carrey, who has never to my knowledge preached a sermon in his life, accidentally preached one of the best sermons of the century.

Because what Jim Carrey discovered the hard way — what Solomon discovered three thousand years before him — is that the strategy of living-by-living and being-filled-by-acquiring is a dead end.

It does not just fail to fill you.

It empties you while pretending to fill you.

It is the most expensive empty there is.

George Michael sang about his success in music saying:

It filled my pockets and emptied out my soul….

What Jesus said, with extra snark

Now I want you to hear Jesus, who said this so many ways in the gospels that we have apparently developed a spiritual cataract over it.

“Whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will save it. What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?” — Mark 8:35-36

Now Grace Church — read that with me, because we have heard it so many times that we have stopped hearing it.

Whoever wants to save their life — will lose it.

That is the entire self-help industry in one sentence.

I am going to save my life.

I am going to grab it by the collar and drag it into the version of itself I want it to be.

I am going to optimize it, brand it, monetize it, leverage it, and make it work for me.

Jesus says: good luck with that. The harder you grab, the faster it dies.

Whoever loses their life for me — will save it.

That is the gospel in one sentence.

Give it up. Let it go. Surrender it. Hand it over.

Jesus does not say if you give it up, you might find something.

Jesus says if you give it up, you will SAVE IT.

The opposite of what every part of you is screaming at you to do is the only thing that actually works.

This, beloved, is the most unpopular sentence Jesus ever spoke in America.

It does not poll well in focus groups.

It will not get you a podcast deal.

It is the single hardest sentence in the New Testament for an upwardly mobile, achievement-oriented, branding-obsessed twenty-first-century Christian to obey.

And it is the only sentence that will set you free.

The grain of wheat

Jesus said it again — like He knew we would need to hear it twice — in John chapter 12:

“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.” — John 12:24

Picture it.

A single grain of wheat. Sitting on a kitchen counter. Perfectly preserved. Bright. Dry. Whole.

That seed, beloved, will sit on that counter for a thousand years and never produce anything.

It is preserved.

It is intact.

It is useless.

The only way that seed can produce more wheat — the only way it can produce anything — is for somebody to take that seed, push it down into dirt, cover it with mud, and let it rot.

The seed has to die.

It has to be buried.

It has to disintegrate.

And then — and only then — does it produce a stalk that produces an ear that produces a hundred more grains that produce a field that feeds people.

The seed that refuses to die remains a seed forever. The seed that dies feeds a town.

This, beloved, is the central paradox of the Christian life, and Jesus drew it from agriculture because He knew every farmer in His audience would understand it instantly.

The you that you are clutching onto — the you you are trying to preserve, optimize, protect, brand, and bulletproof — is the seed on the counter.

The you God is trying to make — the you that produces a hundredfold harvest — is the seed in the ground.

You cannot have both.

And the most exhausting Christians I have ever pastored are the ones trying to live on top of the counter while telling everybody they are buried in the field.

What Jesus did, before He asked us to do it

Now here is the part that takes this from a sermon to a gospel.

Because if Jesus had only taught this paradox — live by dying, be full by being emptied — He would be a great teacher and we would all be a guilty audience.

But Jesus did not just teach it.

Jesus did it.

Philippians chapter 2 — read it tonight, beloved — says that Jesus, though He was God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made Himself nothing.

The Greek word there is kenoō.

It means poured out. Emptied. Drained.

The Creator of the universe — the One who hung the stars and named every animal and knit you together in your mother’s womb — emptied Himself.

He got smaller.

He got poorer.

He got more human.

He got more vulnerable.

He got more disposable.

He went from being adored by angels to being changed by a teenage girl.

He went from the throne of heaven to a feed trough behind a no-vacancy sign.

He went from the worship of the cosmos to the spit of Roman soldiers.

He went from the eternal Word to a corpse in a borrowed grave.

God Himself, beloved, demonstrated the gospel paradox before He ever asked you to live by it. He emptied Himself first. He died first. He went into the ground first.

And then He came out of the ground on the third day with the keys to death and hell jangling on His belt and said to a frightened group of disciples — as the Father has sent Me, even so I send you.

Sent you to do what?

The same thing.

Live by dying.

Be filled by being emptied.

Lose your life to find it.

Fall to the ground like a seed.

That is not a clever spiritual metaphor.

That is the job description of every person who has ever called themselves a Christian.

What it actually looks like, for the rest of us

So what does this look like for those of us who are not getting nailed to a cross this Tuesday?

It looks small.

It looks like dying to your reputation when somebody slanders you and you do not defend yourself.

It looks like dying to your right-to-be-right in an argument with your spouse.

It looks like dying to your calendar when a neighbor needs help and you had a list.

It looks like dying to your bank account when the Spirit tells you to give and your math tells you not to.

It looks like dying to your need to be seen when nobody notices what you did, and you do not point it out.

It looks like dying to your need to be heard when somebody else is talking and you have a better point.

It looks like dying to your offense when a brother apologizes badly and you accept it anyway.

It looks like dying to your self — the self the culture has spent your whole life telling you to expand, optimize, brand, market, and serve.

And here, beloved, is the paradox you have to taste before you will believe it:

Every single one of those small deaths produces life you would not have had any other way.

The dying-to-defend produces peace.

The dying-to-be-right produces a marriage.

The dying-to-the-calendar produces a friend.

The dying-to-the-bank-account produces a treasure in heaven you can never lose.

The dying-to-be-seen produces an audience of One that is the only Audience that has ever mattered.

The dying-to-be-heard produces wisdom.

The dying-to-the-offense produces a brother.

And the dying-to-the-self — the cumulative, slow, daily, unglamorous dying-to-the-self — produces the only kind of person who has ever been happy on this planet.

A person filled with Christ.

Because the gospel math is upside down from the world’s math, and the kingdom of God runs on a different operating system than the marketplace, and the only people who have ever figured out how to be full are the people who finally agreed to be poured out.

The landing

So here is where we land, beloved.

Your culture is wrong.

Your phone is wrong.

The bestseller list is wrong.

The morning-routine industrial complex is wrong.

Your own gut, which is screaming at you to protect yourself, fill yourself, build yourself, is wrong.

A Christian lives by dying.

A Christian becomes full by being emptied.

That is not a self-help slogan.

That is not a sermon point.

That is the actual operating instructions for a soul made in the image of a God who, when He came to save us, came as a baby in a barn and left as a body on a cross, and turned out — three days later — to have figured out how the universe actually works.

You can keep grabbing.

Or you can let go.

You can keep filling.

Or you can let yourself be emptied.

You can sit on the counter, preserved and useless.

Or you can fall in the ground and become the harvest the Lord has been planning to grow through you the whole time.

The choice, beloved, is yours.

But the math will not change.

The math has never changed.

The math will not change for you.

The Best Is Yet to Come

Your Hope Dealer

Pastor John