Wake Up, Look Up

Hello everyone, and thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ. I'm Zach Weihrauch and in today's episode, we're asking the question, do you need a kingdom? This is prompted by an article I read recently in the Wall Street Journal by Natasha Dengor Karl called They're strangers united by one goal. Drink 1 million beers. This is a story that begins with a WhatsApp group of over a thousand people, most of them strangers, and their collaborative attempt, to together drink 1 million unique beers. So, you go to a bar, you drink two beers, you log in. If no one else has ever registered those two exact beers, then you upload them. We're now too closer to to a million. The group has already logged 100,000 beers, 10% of the goal, and is projected. I love this. Projected to reach 1 million. I don't know who's doing that projection. By 2034, they meticulously photograph every beer, compete on leaderboards, and even delete erroneous entries or beers that are duplicated. They are serious about it. Participants log beers from weddings, vacations, honeymoons, all kinds of creating a humorous kind of, here's where I was and what I was doing while I drank this beer. one participant described the project as the Herculean effort of doing 1 million beers between 1,000 people. You know, when I read this story, I couldn't help but chuckle at, in some ways, the meaninglessness of this task that people have found meaning in. Here's where I think this is coming from. God wired human beings to be a part of something greater than themselves. when God made Adam and Eve and he placed them in the Garden of Eden, he gave them a pretty big mission. He told them to have dominion over the whole Earth, to be fruitful and to multiply, to cultivate and keep. He basically made a planet and gave it to them and said, do something great with it. So innate in us as humans is this idea that we're wired to accomplish. We're wired to be successful. And not just personally, but collectively. you know, even at the, end of kind of the descent into sin, of Genesis 1 through 11, when you get to chapter 11, is the tower of Babel. The Tower of Babel is a human collaborative project, only not fully for God, against God. The point being, whether we acknowledge God or not, we will find ourselves participating in collaboration towards doing something great. It's part of what makes us human. The problem, though, is when we don't have a connection to God, we end up finding it in weird places, meaningless places. Look, you can laugh at people wanting to drink a million beers. You could laugh at the silliness of it. But is it any different than building your life around your favorite sports team? Is it any different than living vicariously through your middle school students, athletic careers, following your favorite band around the country? All these things are in some ways meaningless pursuits that we find meaning in. But as a Christian, here's what I want to challenge you with. You don't actually have to find meaning in meaningless things. There is a collaborative project, it's called the Kingdom of, of Jesus through the local church. Jesus says it this way. Matthew 6:33. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. Jesus saying, the life you're looking for, the meaning, the purpose, the collaboration, the being a part of something bigger than yourself is available to you in my kingdom. But every brick laid in the kingdom of Jesus is an eternal one because the kingdom will go on forever. I'm not saying you can't be a part of clubs or organizations or drink one of the million beers if that's what you want to do. I'm just encouraging you to ultimately find meaning and purpose in the unique role that God has for you to play in his global spanning generations kingdom that he's building in Jesus Christ. It may be that the longing you have for meaning and purpose will not be fulfilled in anything outside of that. But that's okay. It's what you were made for. It's what you were built for. It's what you were born again for. So when you see a story like this, let it be a reminder to the fact that innately in your heart, you know you were meant for more. And there's more for you in the kingdom, of Jesus. Hey, thanks for checking out Wake Up, Look Up. For more content, be sure to visit the Christ Community Chapel app or website ccchapel.com.

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