The Disease or the Cure?

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

Welcome to the City Lights Church Podcast. Wherever you are, whatever you're doing today, we hope this message inspires you to follow Jesus. You can find out more about City Lights Church at city-lights.church.

Gwendy Lefebvre (0:24)

Well, my name is Gwendy Lefebvre. I'm part of the team here at City Lights. And I share my time during the week between working in a missions organization and being at home with my kids. I'm a mom of two young kids. And those things together mean I live a very exciting life. And it's always got something new and different in it. Sometimes it takes me to new nations of the world, and sometimes it takes me to the emergency room, like it did this week, because my son is great at injuring himself.

My husband and I have had the privilege of serving in Youth with a Mission for over two decades now. And we have also had the honor of being a part of this church, basically since it began. So it's awesome for me to be able to stand up here and see a room full of people, because when we started, it was 15 And so this is a really wonderful morning for me to see all of your faces out there. This morning, I get to share the final message of our series, Thriving in Babylon. And the focus of the series has been following Jesus in difficult and challenging circumstances. And we've been exploring the book of Daniel in the Bible, looking at the example of Daniel and his three friends as a bit of a case study for how to follow God in an environment that is opposed to our beliefs, an environment of difficulty. And the testimony of their lives was that it is possible to live in faithfulness and obedience to God in a culture that opposes your beliefs. These four young men were exceptional young men. They were taken from their homes in Jerusalem to Babylon, to help with the skills shortage that arose because of the rapid expansion of the Babylonian Empire. And they were chosen because of their intelligence, their wisdom, and their good looks. And I think that if these circumstances were playing out in society today, in our culture today, that Pastor Andrew and Danny Pentony, who have shared the previous messages in this series, would have been taken with Daniel's cohort. I think they are exceptional and they did an exceptional job of sharing the word over the last couple of weeks. But not to worry for the rest of us, those of us who would not have made it into the high standard of that category, we wouldn't have been left out for very long because after the Babylonians took the clever and attractive ones, they came back for everyone else too. So what a relief for the rest of us, hey?

And though the Book of Daniel tells their story with very little detail, I believe there are some deeply important messages that can come out of their lives, their situation as well for us. And so today I'm going to be exploring their side of things from a different book of the Bible, but it's connected with the story of Daniel. So the book that I'm going to be drawing from today is the Book of Jeremiah. And Jeremiah was a prophet who God had used to speak his words to the people of Judah, both before and during the time of the Babylonian exile. Now, the situation in Babylon isn't hard for us to imagine since we live in a society today that is also in obvious opposition to the values of God and that we endeavor to live by as followers of Jesus. As a parent of young children, this rival culture is something that I am very aware of, conscious of every day. And I feel like my kids are growing up in a world that is very different from the one of my childhood, a world that looks a whole lot more like Babylon than just one generation ago, when I was coming up.

I think today's children have a lot more difficult things that they have to navigate than we did as kids. I was bullied, but let me tell you, cyberbullying is a whole different animal. It's a much more severe in many ways form of bullying, that they've got to navigate. They've got to navigate the effects of social media on their development, on their mental health, their emotional health, and they need to deal with things like conflicts of gender and identity that I don't feel existed, at least to the same capacity as they do today when I was a kid. And you can look at all of these things. Those are just some of the examples. You can look at all of these things that they have to navigate and become very quickly overwhelmed by it. Honestly, for me as a parent of young kids, it's a temptation to surrender to fear. When I look at the state of the world around me today, that my kids are growing up in, I don't want to, but I am tempted to be afraid of the world. And to see the world as the enemy, as the disease.