Would God Want To Meet You?

Let me ask you something, and I don't want the church answer. I want the real one.

If you were God — and I mean the God, the whole thing, the one who set the stars spinning and put breath in your lungs this morning — if you were that God, and you had chosen to forget yourself, to pour yourself out into a life, into this life, into the person sitting in your chair right now...

Would you want to meet you?

Not "are you good enough." That's not what I'm asking. I'm asking — would you be interesting to God? Would you be someone the Creator looks at and says, "Yes. That's why I did this. That's what I wanted to experience."

Or... would God be bored?

See, that changes things. Because most of us were raised on a version of faith where God is up there — separate, watching, judging. And we're down here — trying to earn something. Trying to behave. Trying to get the grade. And the sermon every Sunday, as one philosopher put it, is really just: "Dear people, be good." Fifty-two weeks a year. Be good. Be good. Be good.

But what if that's not the question at all? What if the real question isn't "are you being good enough for God" but "are you being alive enough for God?" Because what if God isn't watching you from a distance? What if God is watching through you? What if this — right here, this room, your hands, your heartbeat — is what God chose to experience?

And if that's true — if the kingdom really is within you, like Jesus said — then being boring, being isolated, being closed off from each other... that's not just a personal problem. That's a cosmic one. You're wasting God's trip.

Now I know some of you are thinking, "Alright, he's gone off the deep end." And some of you are leaning forward. Good. Both of those reactions mean you're paying attention. And that's all I'm asking for right now — just stay with me. Because what I want to show you today is that this isn't New Age. This isn't Eastern philosophy dressed up in Sunday clothes. This is in your Bible. It's in Paul's letters. It's in Jesus' own words. And the church has been stepping over it for two thousand years.

But before I take you there — I want to hear from you. Not later. Right now. When I asked that question — "would God want to meet you?" — what came up? What was the first thing you felt? Because that feeling — whatever it is — that's where this sermon starts for you.

Thank you for that. Hold onto what you just said — what you just felt — because Paul is about to put words to it.

Philippians chapter 2, starting at verse 5. And I want you to hear this fresh. Pretend you've never heard it before. Pretend you don't know where it's going.

"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross."— Philippians 2:5-8

Now — most sermons stop here and tell you this is about humility. "Be humble like Jesus." And yes, it is. But that's the surface. Let's go deeper.

Paul says Jesus was in the form of God. Not "like" God. Not "blessed by" God. In the form of. He was that. And what did he do with it? He didn't cling to it. The Greek word theologians use is kenosis — it means self-emptying. Jesus, who was God, poured himself out. He didn't hold on. He let go of the whole thing — the glory, the power, the knowing — and became a man. Became limited. Became someone who could be hungry, and tired, and confused, and afraid. Someone who could suffer. Someone who could die.

Now here's what I need you to sit with. Why?

Why would God do that? If you're everything — if you're infinite, if you're the whole show — why would you empty yourself into something small and fragile and mortal?

And the answer I want to offer you today is: for the same reason you'd press "play" on a movie you've never seen. For the same reason a child closes their eyes during hide and seek. You forget — so you can find. You empty — so you can be filled. You separate — so you can have the joy of coming back together.

God didn't become human because humanity needed to be fixed. God became human because God wanted to experience what it's like to be you. To be limited. To not know the ending. To have to trust. To have to reach out to another person because you can't do it alone.

That's kenosis. That's the self-emptying. And here's where it gets personal — because Paul doesn't start that passage by saying "admire this about Jesus." Look at verse 5 again. He says "Have this mind among yourselves." He's saying: this thing that Christ did? This pouring out? That's yours too. That's your inheritance. You're not just watching kenosis from the outside. You're living it.

Every single one of you woke up this morning and you did not feel like God. You felt like a person with bills, and back pain, and a to-do list. You felt limited. You felt separate. And what I'm telling you is — that feeling? According to Paul? That's not a punishment. That's the plan. That's what God signed up for when God signed up to be you.

The question is: now that you're here — now that you're in the middle of this beautiful, difficult, human experience — what are you going to do with it? Are you going to cling to your separateness? Or are you going to start remembering?

Because the whole story of scripture — from Genesis to Revelation — is a story of God forgetting, and then remembering. Emptying, and then being filled. Separating, and then coming home.

And Jesus is the one who remembered first.

Now — what I just said is going to make some of you uncomfortable. And I want to honor that. Because we've been taught — many of us since we were children — that there is God, and there is us, and there is a line between those two things that we do not cross. Jesus is God. We are not. End of story. Anything else is blasphemy.

And I understand that. I do. Because that's what the church has said for a very long time. But here's what I want to ask you: is that what Jesus said?

Turn with me to John chapter 10. Verse 30. Jesus has just told the crowd, "I and the Father are one." And they pick up stones. They're ready to kill him right there. And look at what he does — verse 34. He doesn't back down. He doesn't say, "No, no, you misunderstood me." He says:

"Is it not written in your Law, 'I said, you are gods'?"— John 10:34

He's quoting their own scripture back to them. Psalm 82, verse 6. "I said, you are gods, and all of you are children of the Most High." And then Jesus says — verse 35 — "If he called them gods, to whom the word of God came — and the scripture cannot be broken — do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, 'You are blaspheming,' because I said, 'I am the Son of God'?"

Do you hear what he's doing? He's not just defending himself. He's defending the principle. He's saying: God already told you what you are. It's in your own book. You're the ones who forgot.

[pause]

Now let me be careful here, because I don't want anyone walking out of this room saying, "Thomas told us we're God." That's not what I'm saying. God is God. The Creator is the Creator. You and I are not the cosmic source of all things — and claiming we are would be exactly the kind of pride that scripture warns against.

But here's what is true, and what the Bible says plainly: the Holy Spirit of God — the same Spirit that raised Christ from the dead — lives in you. Romans 8:11. Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Paul says the Spirit dwells in you the way a family dwells in a house. You are the house. The Spirit is the resident.

"You are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him."— Romans 8:9

And look at what Paul calls that Spirit — in the same verse he calls it "the Spirit," "the Spirit of God," and "the Spirit of Christ." Three names for one presence living in you.

Then in Romans 8:15-16, he takes it further:

"For you did not receive the spirit of bondage again to fear, but you received the Spirit of adoption by whom we cry out, 'Abba, Father!' The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God."— Romans 8:15-16

Do you hear that? We are not God. We are children of God, adopted through the Spirit. The Spirit witnesses to our spirit. Two distinct things in relationship. And because of that relationship, we don't come to God in fear — we come saying "Abba, Father." That's a child running to a parent. That's intimacy, not identity.

So we are not God. But we are of God. We are filled with God. The Holy Spirit connects us to the Father the way a branch connects to the vine — we don't become the vine, but the life of the vine flows through us. And when Jesus prayed in John 17 that we would be one as he and the Father are one, he wasn't saying we'd become the Father. He was saying the same Spirit that unites them would unite us — to God and to each other.

That's the difference between pride and participation. Pride says, "I am God." Participation says, "God is in me, and I am in God, and because of that, my life has purpose and power and responsibility that I didn't earn and can't ignore."

[pause]

Now go to John 17. This is Jesus' final prayer before the cross. The last thing on his heart. And listen to what he asks for — verse 21:

"That they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us."— John 17:21

Verse 22: "The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one."

Verse 23: "I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one."

This is not a prayer for good behavior. This is not "Lord, help them be nice to each other." This is Jesus — in his final hour — praying that you and I would experience the same unity with God that he has. The same oneness. The same indwelling. He says, "The glory you gave me, I have given to them."

That's not a locked door. That's an open invitation.

So what happened? If it's right there in the text — if Jesus himself said it, prayed it, defended it — why don't we teach it?

[pause]

I'll tell you what happened. The apostles loved Jesus. They were in awe of him. And awe is beautiful, but awe can become distance. They worshiped him — and then they did something very human. They said, "Yes — Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God. But let it stop right there. Nobody else."

And so Jesus got put on a pedestal. Kicked upstairs, you might say. Made so holy, so far above us, that his actual experience — the experience of knowing your oneness with God — became untouchable. Unreachable. Reserved for one man, two thousand years ago, and nobody since.

And anyone who did have that experience? Who touched that same fire? The church, when it had the power to do so, shut them down. Meister Eckhart — condemned. Giordano Bruno — burned at the stake. The mystics who spoke from the same place Jesus spoke from were treated as threats. Because if everybody can access what Jesus accessed, then you don't need the gatekeepers anymore.

The great heresy — the one the church has always been most afraid of — isn't that someone might claim to be God. It's that someone might realize the Spirit of God already lives in them. And that they might tell other people. Because once that door opens, it doesn't close.

[pause]

But look — I'm not standing up here to tear down the church. I love the church. I love this church. What I'm saying is that we've been reading these scriptures with one eye closed. We saw the part about Jesus being God, and we underlined it. But we skipped the part where he said the same glory lives in you. We skipped John 17:22. We skipped Psalm 82:6. We skipped the part where Paul said in Phillipians "Have this mind among yourselves."

Jesus didn't come to be the only one who woke up. He came to be the first one who woke up. And then he spent three years trying to shake everybody else awake.

And that's what I feel called to do in this room today. Not to put myself above you. Not to play God over your life. But to point at the same scripture we've always had and say — look again. It's right there. It always has been.

The kingdom of God is within you.

You are the temple of the Holy Spirit.

It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.

Have this mind among yourselves.

[pause]

The question was never whether you're allowed to wake up. The question is whether you will.

So if all of that is true — if Jesus said it, Paul wrote it, the Psalms declared it — then where is it? Where is this kingdom? Where is this oneness? Because if I'm being honest with you, I don't feel like God most days. I feel like a man who's tired. I feel like somebody trying to figure it out just like everybody else.

And I think that's where most of us live, right? We hear something like "the kingdom of God is within you" and we think, "That sounds nice." And then Monday morning comes and the car won't start and the kids are fighting and your boss is on your back and you think — where? Where is this kingdom? Because I can't find it.

And I think Jesus knew we'd feel that way. Because when the Pharisees came to him — the religious experts, the people who had memorized every line of the Torah — they asked him the most natural question in the world. Luke 17, verse 20: "When is the kingdom of God coming?"

They wanted a date. A sign. Something they could point at and say, "There it is." A king on a throne, an army in the streets, Rome on its knees. Something external. Something big and obvious and undeniable.

And Jesus says — verse 21:

"The kingdom of God does not come with observation. Neither shall they say, 'Look here!' or 'Look there!' For behold — the kingdom of God is within you."— Luke 17:20-21 (KJV)

Now, scholars will debate that translation until the Lord comes back. Some say "within you." Some say "among you." Some say "in your midst." And you know what? I think they're all right. Because that's the whole point. It's not in one place. It's not behind one door. It's everywhere you are. It's within you, it's among you, it's between you. It's in the air of this room right now. You didn't have to go find it. You just had to stop looking out there for something that was already in here.

And that's the tragedy of religion when it goes wrong. Not that it points to God — that's beautiful. The tragedy is when it points to God over there. Up there. Far away. Coming later. Because every time we do that, we train people to ignore what's already living inside them.

Paul knew this. First Corinthians 3:16 — and I want you to hear this as if he's saying it directly to you, right now, in this room:

"Don't you know that you yourselves are God's temple, and that God's Spirit lives in you?"— 1 Corinthians 3:16

That's not metaphor. Paul's not being poetic. He's making a statement of fact to ordinary, messy, struggling people in Corinth — people who were fighting with each other, people who were confused, people who were getting things wrong left and right — and he says: you are the temple. The Spirit of God lives in you. Not "will live" someday. Not "might live" if you're good enough. Lives. Present tense. Right now. Whether you feel it or not.

And then Galatians 2:20 — Paul gets even more personal:

"It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me."— Galatians 2:20

Christ is God is he not? Think about what that means. Paul — a man with a past, a man who persecuted the church, a man who had blood on his hands — Paul says: the old me is gone. What's walking around now isn't Paul anymore. It's Christ, living as Paul. Experiencing the world through Paul. The divine, wearing human skin.

Does that sound familiar? It should. Because that's kenosis again. That's Philippians 2 lived out in one man's life. God emptied into a person. And Paul's saying — it didn't just happen to Jesus. It happened to me.

[pause]

And this is where I need you to make a choice about what you believe. Because either Paul is speaking truth, or he's not. Either the Spirit of God really does live in you — in your actual body, in this room, today — or it's just nice words on a page.

I believe Paul. I believe Jesus. And if I take them at their word, then I have to accept something that changes everything about how I walk through the world:

There is nowhere I can go where God is not. Because God is here. Not watching from a distance. Here. Seeing through my eyes. Hearing through my ears. Reaching out through my hands.

And the same is true of you.

And the same is true of the person sitting next to you.

[pause]

See, this is where it stops being philosophy and starts being practical. Because if the kingdom of God is within me — that's wonderful, that's a beautiful private revelation, I can meditate on that all day. But if the kingdom of God is also within you — within the person I don't like, within the stranger, within the one who hurt me — now I've got a problem. Now I can't just dismiss people. Because every time I look at another human being, I'm looking at another place where God chose to show up.

And that brings us to the real heart of this whole thing. Because knowing the kingdom is within you is only half of it. The other half is: what are you going to do about everybody else?

So here we are. The kingdom is within you. The Spirit lives in you. Christ is in you, and you are in Christ, and Christ is in God. Jesus prayed for it. Paul testified to it. The Psalms declared it before any of them were born.

Now what?

[pause]

Because here's the thing nobody tells you about waking up. It's not the end. It's the beginning. And the beginning of what? The beginning of a responsibility that most people would rather not carry.

See, it's one thing to sit with the idea that you are filled with the Spirit of God. That's comforting. That's warm. You can journal about that. You can feel real good about it on a Sunday morning.

But if you are filled with the Spirit — then so is everyone else who has received it. The person you love the most and the person you can't stand to be in the same room with. The one who lifted you up and the one who broke your heart.

God is in all of it. Working through all of us.

And this is where it gets hard. Because somebody right now is thinking: "But what about the people who suffer? What about the evil in the world? If God is in everything, then God is in that too — and how is that okay?"

And I'm not going to give you a cheap answer to that. I'm not going to wrap suffering up in a bow and tell you it's fine. It's not fine. Pain is real. Injustice is real. The world breaks people every single day.

But here's what I will say. There's a line that hit me this week and I haven't been able to shake it. It comes from a philosopher named Alan Watts, and he's wrestling with this exact problem — if God is playing every role, then what about the ones who suffer? And he says this:

[let it sit]

Now that will either set you free or make you furious. And both of those are the right response. Because what he's saying is — if this whole thing is God experiencing itself through every life, through every joy, through every wound — then there is nobody on the outside being hurt by a God on the inside. The one who experiences the suffering is the one who chose to enter the game. Not because suffering is good. But because the experience — all of it, the whole spectrum, the dark and the light — is what God signed up for by becoming you.

And that doesn't erase your pain. But it changes what your pain means. It means your life is not an accident. Your struggle is not a punishment. You are not a forgotten soul drifting through a universe that doesn't care about you. You are the universe — caring. You are God's Spirit, in the trenches, doing the hard work of being human.

And if that's true — if every person in this room carries the Holy Spirit doing the hard work of being human — then we have exactly one job while we're here:

Don't waste it on isolation. And we must preach the gospel to all who are in need of the holy spirit.

[pause]

And if you need Jesus to say it more bluntly — go to Revelation 3. The letter to the church at Laodicea. Verse 15:

"I know your works, that you are neither cold nor hot. I could wish you were cold or hot. So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth."— Revelation 3:15-16

Now — most people hear that and think Jesus is saying, "I'd rather you be against me than half-hearted." But that's not what's happening here. The Laodiceans would have understood this instantly. Their city sat between Hierapolis, which was famous for its hot mineral springs used for healing, and Colossae, which had cold, pure water that refreshed and sustained. By the time water from either city reached Laodicea, it had become lukewarm — useless for healing, unpleasant to drink, and good for nothing except to be spat out in disgust.

Jesus isn't talking about the temperature of their passion. He's talking about the effectiveness of their faith.

Hot water heals. Cold water refreshes. Lukewarm water does nothing. The church in Laodicea wasn't being called out for its spiritual temperature but for the barrenness of its works. These believers probably showed up every week. They participated. They went through the motions. But their faith was functionally useless — it didn't transform lives, didn't meet needs, didn't bring healing to the broken or refreshment to the thirsty.

And that is what made Jesus sick. Not their lack of enthusiasm — their lack of impact.

So I ask you — are you hot water or cold water? Are you bringing healing somewhere? Are you bringing refreshment to someone? Or are you lukewarm — present but purposeless, taking up space in the kingdom without doing anything with it?

Because the kingdom within you is not a decoration. It's not a trophy you put on the shelf. It's a resource — and if you're not using it to heal or to refresh, then you're the Laodicean water. And Jesus is clear about what he does with that.

[pause]

I said at the beginning — would God want to meet you? But now I want to flip that. Would God want to meet you and find you alone? Would God show up to the party and find you in the corner with your arms crossed, refusing to dance with anyone?

Because that is what happens when we cut ourselves off from each other. When we hold grudges. When we build walls. Every time we do that, we're shrinking God's experience. We're making the trip smaller.

And here's what I believe — and this is my conviction, you can wrestle with it — I believe that if we refuse to learn how to get along with each other, if we refuse to show up for this human experience with openness and humility and a willingness to see God in the face of another person — then we're not just hurting ourselves. We're boring God. We're running the same loop. And eventually — whether you want to call it the next life, the next eon, the next kalpa — God moves on. Not out of cruelty. Out of creativity. Because God didn't pour the Spirit into the universe to watch you sit in a room by yourself and be bitter.

God came here for this. For the mess of it. For the collision of it. For the moment when two people who have no reason to love each other choose to anyway. That's the kingdom. Not a place. Not a future. A choice — made between people, in real time, right now.

[pause]

That is your place in the kingdom. If you would achieve it — good. Good for you. Truly. But don't achieve it alone. You cannot achieve it alone. The kingdom is not a solo act. It never was.

We are here to wake each other up.

I'm almost done. And I want to end with something simple.

John 14:12. Jesus speaking to his disciples. And he says something that should stop every one of us in our tracks:

"Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do."— John 14:12

Greater works.

Not "similar works." Not "lesser works if you're really devoted." Greater.

[pause]

Now — if Jesus was meant to be the only one, if the whole point was to worship him from a safe distance and wait for heaven — why would he say that? Why would he promise that the people who come after him would do more than he did?

Unless... he meant it. Unless the whole point was never to be admired. It was to be followed. Not followed like a leader you march behind. Followed like a door you walk through.

Jesus didn't wake up so that we could spend two thousand years talking about how amazing it was that he woke up. He woke up so that we would wake up too.

[pause]

And I'll be honest with you. That's why I'm standing here today. Not because I have all the answers. I don't. Not because I've figured it all out. I haven't. I'm in the same mess you are. I'm tired. I'm uncertain. I get it wrong more than I get it right.

But something happened to me. Something I can't un-see. I looked at these scriptures — scriptures I'd heard my whole life — and for the first time, I didn't just read them. I felt them. Philippians 2 stopped being a passage about something that happened to Jesus and became a description of something that is happening to me. To us. Right now. The self-emptying. The forgetting. The slow, beautiful, painful process of remembering who we are and who we are to each other.

And once you see it, you can't go back to sleep. And you don't want to go back to sleep. You want to grab the person next to you and say, "Do you see this? Do you see what's in you?"

That's all a sermon is. One person who caught a glimpse, trying to point everyone else toward the window.

[pause]

So here's what I'm asking you. I'm not asking you to agree with everything I said today. I'm not asking you to throw out what you believe. I'm asking you to go back to your Bible this week and look again. Read Philippians 2. Read John 17. Read Psalm 82. Read Luke 17:21. Read them slowly. Read them like nobody ever told you what they mean.

And then ask yourself that question one more time.

Would God want to meet me?

And if the answer is yes — if something in you says yes, this life I'm living is worth God's time — then live like it. Go be that. Not alone. Not in isolation. Not hiding in a corner, hoarding your little piece of the kingdom for yourself.

Go find someone else who's still asleep. And wake them up.

[pause]

That's the gospel I read in these pages. God poured out. God forgot. God lived. God suffered. God loved. And God is waking up — in you, in me, in the person you'll meet tomorrow who doesn't know it yet.

The kingdom of God is within you.

Have this mind among yourselves.

Let's go.