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Some time ago, I had a conversation with an older guy that's listened to me preach uh ever since I was first starting out. He's followed my ministry now for over three decades. And when you got somebody like that in your life, somebody that's on the outside that takes in the big picture, they can often see things that you can't. And he said to me just a few days ago, Brian, after listening to you for many, many years now, I've noticed something that there are themes that keep resurfacing in your preaching consistently and faithfully. You're always talking to people about the deep stuff, the heart stuff, the soul level stuff, the stuff that if we will lean into will make us more like Jesus. And then he used a word in that description like it was common. He just dropped it into the conversation and he just kept going. He said, It's obvious that your spiritual formation and the formation of other people is important to you because your themes are always connected to interiority. And then he just went on as if I was supposed to know what that meant. And then I just stopped him and said, Hold up for a second. I think, based on the context, I know what you mean when you say interiority, but I'm not sure I've ever heard that word used. And I need you to explain. And he said, interiority is when you make your inner life a priority. It's focusing on the life within the life, the hidden and unseen part of you. It's making the formation of your soul, the eternal part of you, the priority of your life. And he said, as I've watched you all these years, that has been your heart and the focus of your preaching. It's been about interiority. And it was one of those moments to kind of say, huh? When somebody that you trust gives you vocabulary to describe what has been a major theme of your life, and it just felt right. But I immediately had to run to the computer to make sure interiority was a real word. And believe it or not, it is, according to Miriam Webster, the first known use of the word was all the way back in 1701, and it means what my friend said it did the focus on the quality and character of your inner life. And my first dive, digging a little deeper into the word, kept turning up Catholic authors that were pointing me back to the monastic tradition, the monks and mystics and contemplatives who went and shut themselves in to focus on their souls. The Catholic tradition latched onto this concept and this practice because for 1,500 years they had an institutional home for it, the monastery. Communities of people whose entire vocation was to lock themselves in, search inward, and then report back to everybody else. But when the Reformation came, Protestants kind of did away with the monastery because you can't fulfill God's agenda in the world and live out his kingdom principles holed up in some spiritual fort somewhere. But the unintended consequence of losing the dedicated space where the interior life was intentionally cultivated has led to an unhealthy focus on the exterior life and a neglect of the inner life. Today we have a louder, more visible spirituality that has lost a lot of its depth and maturity. Interiority is not a Catholic concept, it's a biblical concept. And our own traditions have their own great voices on the inner life, like A.W. Tozer, Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, Richard Foster, and so many more that for decades have been telling us that the interior life matters. And that's why I introduce you to that word today. But I'll be honest with you, a conversation like this is probably better suited, especially for us as a church, in January, where we kick off the year with prayer and fasting, and our focus is it's the rhythm of our church to focus on spiritual formation at the beginning of the year with prayer and fasting. This is probably not a great summer conversation when people are traveling and taking vacations and they're in and out. That's why a lot of churches focus on lighter things. And you'll see a lot of churches this summer doing series like at the movies or something else. And I'm not blasting those lighter topics. I'm not criticizing anybody that does that. I understand why people do that. It's just not me. It just feels shallow to me. Maybe it's not. It just feels that way to me. And I can't make myself do something that feels like I'm wasting a Sunday of your life just because it's June. I feel the burden every week to do everything I can do to move the spiritual needle forward in your life towards Jesus, to move you toward becoming more like Jesus. And here's what I hope for you. I hope the summer gives you some emotional margin. That the pace slows down in your life a little bit, that the schedule will open up a little bit, and you can find a back porch somewhere or some shade at a lake somewhere, just some quieter moment somewhere in your life to have the space to go deeper if somebody would just invite you on a journey and show you how to focus on your inner life. And that's what I want these next few weeks to be. Next week we're gonna talk about desire, about how you are not primarily what you think, you are a product of what you love. And your loves are not formed by what you feel, your loves are formed by what you repeatedly do. Your interior life is fundamentally a life of desire, and we have to talk about how our desires are shaped and reshaped because they determine what we love and how we love. The week after that, which is Father's Day, we're gonna look at one of the most profound passages in all the scripture on the inner life. It's about a man whose life fell apart and it forced him to stop long enough to look inside. He didn't like what he saw, but he found a moment of healthy awareness that sent him on a search that ultimately led him to the transforming power of God's grace. He took a journey inward and it changed everything. And then we're gonna close the series by looking at John 15, that famous passage that tells us to abide, to stay, to remain in Christ, to make your home in him. Because the interior life at its deepest maturity is not a life of striving or trying harder, it's a life of sustained connection. Jesus told us clearly in John 15, if you will abide in me, I will abide in you. We have to remain in the vine. Four weeks, one word, interiority, and one journey inward. And I promise you, this can be something that points you in the most spiritually formative direction you've ever traveled. So let's start taking a look within. And honestly, I believe this cultural moment, the one we're living in right now, is begging for us to have this conversation. Pastor and author John Mark Comer is one of the more recent voices on spiritual formation. He says, the modern world is a virtual conspiracy against the interior life. Now think about that. He's not saying the world is just indifferent to your soul. He's saying that the forces of our modern world, the noise, the pace, the algorithms, the endless scrolling, the busyness that we wear as a badge, all of those things and more, are actively conspiring against your capacity for depth, for purpose, for meaning. The world is working against your capacity to connect with God. So instead of going shallow for the next several weeks, I want to invite you on a journey to the inside because that's where real change and transformation happens. And I think it would be good to kind of lean on a certain old hymn and turn our attention to the words of Fanny Crosby, where she wrote about the inner life all the way back in 1890, the famous hymn of the church, where she said, He hideth my soul in the cleft of the rock that shadows a dry, thirsty land. He hideth my life in the depths of his love and covers me there with his hand, and covers me there with his hand. This is a conversation about the hidden life, him being in you and you being hidden in him. Before we go any further, let me give you the verse that's the anchor for this entire series. There's a phrase from the Apostle Paul, and it's just one of those loaded phrases that we could sit here and unpack and never really get to the bottom of it because it's that deep. Colossians 1 27, to them God chose to make known how great are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory. That's the message of the gospel. Christ in you. Those three words, Christ in you, is what this whole series is all about. The preposition in describes the location, the indwelling, the intimate union between the believer and their savior. It's not about proximity to, it's about presence within. Paul does not say that Christ is with you, he doesn't say he is near you, he doesn't even say he is for you. All of those things are obviously true. But when Paul chooses one phrase to describe the believer's hope, both our hope for present salvation and our eternity, he says that hope is Christ in you. And contrary to New Age and pop psychology, we don't look as believers within ourselves to find ourselves. For the Christ follower, looking within is focusing on Jesus and where he said his spirit dwells. And notice what Paul calls this, he calls it a mystery. It's not just any mystery, it's the riches of the glory of this mystery. Paul stacks all those words on top of each other, riches, glory, and mystery, as if there's no single word large enough to hold what he's trying to say. What is the mystery? The mystery is that the God who spoke the universe into existence, who is transcendent, holy, and utterly beyond us, that that God has chosen to make his dwelling in us. Not in a church or a temple built with hands, but in you. In ordinary, complicated, sometimes fateful, sometimes not, interior of a human life. And then Paul says something that makes this even more meaningful. He says, This is our hope of glory. The indwelling of Christ in your life is your hope, not just for eternity, but for your present transformation, for you becoming who God wants to make you to be. This kind of hope is you can't get it in a program. It's not found in a system, you don't get it by trying harder. If you're a Christian, it is found by learning to cooperate with the life of Christ that is trying to live through you. But Paul doesn't stop there. Two chapters later, he shows us the other side of the very same coin. And when you put these two verses from Colossians together, you get this interior theology that he's trying to talk about in this letter to the Colossians. In Colossians 3, we've been reading from Colossians 1. Now, Colossians 3, he said, For you died to this life, and your real life is hidden with Christ in God. Now here's how the message paraphrase uses that, says that same verse in the paraphrase of talking about the hidden life. It says this, your old life is dead, your new life, which is your real life, even though invisible to spectators, because it's hidden with Christ in God, because He is your life. Don't miss what He's saying. Your real life, not your performed life, your public life, not your image-managed life, not your social media life. Your real life is your interior life. Your real life is the hidden life, the life that is invisible to spectators, and it's tucked away in the most interior place imaginable, hidden with Christ in God. So here is Paul's complete picture in the book of Colossians. In chapter one, it's Christ in you. God has moved in, he's taken up residence inside you. In chapter three, it's you in Christ. Your truest self, once you become a believer, is hidden with him. Your interior life, your inner life is where everything real and eternal is happening within you, not out there somewhere in here. That's what interiority means for a follower of Jesus. It's not self-examination for its own sake, it's not therapy dressed up in religious language, it is the practice of paying attention to the one who has taken up residence in the deepest part of who you are and learning to live from that place outward. Now I want to point you to a reference that I read from last week, but I go back there because it's one of the places in Jesus' teaching where he focuses primarily on the inner life. If you carefully read through the Sermon on the Mount, which is recorded in Matthew's Gospel, chapter 5, 6, and 7, you'll realize that that entire sermon is fundamentally about interiority. Jesus isn't primarily giving people a list of behaviors to perform, he's describing the kind of life lived by a person that has Jesus at the center. And in chapter 6, the span about 20 verses there, Jesus says something three times. He uses the same phrase three times in a row, which in the Jewish tradition for a rabbi was never an accident. Three times in a row was a signal. He's saying to his listeners, you better pay attention to this. This is a priority. And here are the excerpts from that segment of Matthew 6 in the sermon. And your father who sees in secret will reward you, verse 4. And your father who sees in secret will reward you, verse 6, and your father who sees in secret will reward you, verse 18. Three times. Your father who sees in secret. Verse 4 is about giving. Verse 6 is about prayer. Verse 18 is about fasting. Three of the most fundamental practices that form your spiritual life. And every single time Jesus anchors them, not in their public expression, but in their hidden one. Look at what he says about giving in verses one through four. Watch out. Don't do your good deeds publicly to be admired by others, for you will lose the reward from your Father in heaven. When you give to someone in need, don't do as the hypocrites do, blowing trumpets in the synagogue and streets to call attention to their acts of charity. I tell you the truth, they have received all the reward they will ever get. But when you give to someone in need, don't let your left hand know what your right hand is doing. Give your gifts in private or secret, and your Father who sees everything will reward you. Here's what Jesus is teaching. He's not saying don't give, he's not saying don't pray, he's not saying don't fast. He's saying something a lot more precise than that. He's saying there are two versions of every spiritual act. There is the version that is performed, and there is the version that is that's oriented toward the human audience, and there's the hidden version, the version that is motivated by a desire to become more like Jesus. And here's the devastating thing he says. When you perform your spiritual life for a human audience, and you receive their notice and their approval, that's the only reward you're ever going to get. The applause of people, the approval of the crowd, the likes and the recognition and the reputation. But when you do the same thing in secret, because it's the fruit of your hidden life, when you give without announcing it, when you pray without performing it, when you fast without broadcasting it, your father who sees in secret will reward you. Now notice the word that Jesus uses for the people who perform their spiritual lives for public approval. People whose focus is on the exterior life, not the interior life. Jesus calls them hypocrites. In the times of Jesus, a hypocrite in Greek theater was an actor. Somebody who wore a mask, played a character on a stage that was not their real self. The hypocrite had an outside and an inside that was not the same person. The performance was not the person. And Jesus is calling, he's not calling these people, he's calling out people in Matthew 6, but he's not calling them villains. And the danger is he's warning them not against malice, but about misorientation. They have organized their spiritual lives around the wrong direction, the exterior, around the wrong audience, the applause of men. And the tragic irony is that neglecting their inner life and prioritizing human approval caused them to forfeit the favor, the blessing, and the approval of God. And this is the fundamental problem focusing on your interior life will address. For a lot of us, it's not that we're doing bad things, it's that we're doing good things for the wrong audience. We're performing our spiritual life because of cultural expectations or family expectations or for the sake of tradition, instead of having a deep, meaningful, life-giving relationship with Jesus Christ. And here's the question Jesus keeps getting at in Matthew 6. It's not, are you giving or are you praying? It's not, are you fasting? The question is, who is your hidden life oriented toward? You already have a hidden life. Every one of us do. The question is not whether you have an interior life, the question is what's going on in there? Who is your inner world organized around? What is driving the life beneath the life that all of us see? Dallas Willard, one of the most well-known voices on the interior life, puts it this way: the hidden dimension of each human life is not visible to others, nor is it fully graspable even by ourselves. We usually know very little about the things that move in our own soul, the deepest level of our life, or what is driving it. Our within is astonishingly complex and subtle. It takes on a life of its own. Only God knows our depths, who we are, and what we should do. Don't miss that phrase, our within is astonishingly complex. Willard is saying that the interior life is not a simple place. It's not a neat room you can quickly tidy up. It is deep, it is layered, and when you look inside, it's often really surprising. And only God truly knows it. And yet, God's invitation is not to try and manage it from the outside. Let him live his life through you. This is where Colossians 1 27, Christ in you and Matthew 6 come together. In Colossians, Paul says, Christ living in you. That's what this is all. About. In Matthew, Jesus says, Your father sees what's in the hidden place. And both of them are pointing to the same truth. God's primary address in this world is your interior. And the life he is most interested in forming is the one people cannot see because it, the inner life, determines who you really are, and your inner life will inevitably impact the fruit of what people eventually see. A.W. Tozer, one of my favorite writers, died in 1963. He spent his entire preaching and teaching ministry and his writing ministry talking about the interior life. He never used the word interiority, but he talked about it a lot. He describes the God who meets us in the hidden place. Hear what Tozer's saying. He's saying the journey inward for a Jesus follower is not a journey away from God or a journey toward yourself. It's a journey toward Him. The God you're looking for is not out there somewhere across the distance. He's within if you are a believer. That's why the interior life is not self-help. It's not therapy. It's not navelgazing. Stopping to focus on your inner life will form and shape you into the image of Christ faster than anything else, because the one who made you and redeemed you is in the process of transforming you. Most of us spend an enormous amount of energy managing our outside life. We manage our reputation, we manage our image, we perform our spiritual lives for audiences that, if we were truly honest, don't really matter as much as we live like they do. We've been, to use Jesus' words, actors. Not because we're dishonest people, but because the outside is the most visible and it gets the most attention and the inside is not. And we've learned slowly and subtly to focus on what people see. And meanwhile, the interior you, the real you, the deep you, the you that God is actually after, has been sitting there undeveloped. But the Father who sees in secret has been watching and searching and looking at your hidden life all along, waiting patiently there for you to turn inside and grow with him. The invitation of this series is simply this intentionally turn your focus to the Christ in you. Not to perform some better version of yourself, but to become more like the one who is already there, Christ in you, the hope of glory. Here's a word from A.W. Tozer that I want to leave you with today. He wrote this in 1948, and it sounds like it was written for this room, this summer, for this moment. He says, I want to deliberately, I want deliberately to encourage this mighty longing after God. The lack of it has brought us to our present low estate. The stiff and wooden quality about our religious lives is a result of our lack of holy desire. Complacency is a deadly foe of spiritual growth. Acute desire must be present, or there will be no manifestation of Christ to his people. Acute desire, strong, intense desire has to be present. And we're gonna talk more about that next week. That's the starting place of the interior life, not a technique, not a discipline, not a program, a desire, a longing, a holy dissatisfaction with surface-level faith. And if you have even a flicker of that kind of desire in you today to be formed more into the image of God, even the smallest ember of that kind of desire, then you're already moving in the right direction. Because that desire is Christ in you. He put that desire in you for more of him, and he's trying to fully awaken it in your life. You don't master the interior life by just thinking about it. You got to practice it. And I know it's summer, but but each week I want to give you something that you can take away and practice. Um, this is not a Christianity-like conversation, but there are some things we can do to act on what we're gonna be talking about. There's a practice in church tradition known as examine, um, it was practiced by ancient church fathers like Ignatius, um, the ones that were holed up in monasteries doing the inner life, where they would end their day with prayerful reflection, examination of their lives. They stopped at the end of their day to review the day, reflect on their actions, express gratitude, recognize where God was present in their life and where he felt distant in their life. They just did it was called an awareness examin. And so I want to challenge you this week. It's not hard. Just do your own version of an exam this week at the end of the day on a back porch, sitting on the side of your bed before you fall asleep in a quiet moment wherever you find yourself. If you're on vacation, camping out, whatever you're doing, find a place at the end of your day and ask two questions. Number one, where did I feel most alive and connected to God today? Don't overthink it, just notice, and maybe you go through days at a time and never even think about where you felt God. That's why this is an important question. You shouldn't be going through a day and God never crossed your mind. So you need to stop at the end. You needed to do this for a few days in a row, okay? Where did I feel most alive and connected to God today? And the second question is: where did I feel most disconnected, most performing, most like I was focusing on the exterior life? The interior life begins with honest attention. And honest attention takes simply stopping long enough to notice because our minds have been so trained to focus on the exterior and the performance that we have to discipline ourselves to think differently if we want any attention on our inner life. And that starts by stopping to prayerfully notice it. Let me leave you with one more word from Paul. This is the ultimate goal of interiority, making your inner life a priority. Paul says in Galatians 2.20, my old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. When you get saved, that happens in a way, but for the rest of your life, you are surrendering your will, your want, your ways, your desires to where Paul had searched inside to be let Christ live his life through him that he could say, the Paul that I used to be is no longer alive. Jesus is living his life in me. I want that to be true about my life. But it doesn't happen by accident. Everything in this world is conspiring against that being true in you. So you got to dedicate some effort to saying, Jesus, I want to put myself in a place and I want to grow to where it can be true that it is Christ who lives in me. I don't know about you, but for me, music is important. It sets the stage for my praying, and occasionally I'll get in an environment where a certain song is helping me. Um, and as I've been working on this message in these series, there's I just passed this on to you. We haven't sung this here. It's just kind of been repeat on my playlist, just in case you want to look it up. It's called Christ in Me by Life Church out of Oklahoma City. Christ in me. And it's just that whole concept of Christ in you, the hope of glory. It's about me laying my desires down to let Jesus live his life. And if music's important to you, I challenge you, put that on repeat as you pray through these things over the next few days. Would you stand with me across the room today? And I'm gonna ask our prayer teams if they would across our campus families to come and make themselves available to you today, serve you in prayer. We didn't do this last week because we did the commissioning for all of our camps. Um, and we just had an incredible week of camps this week. Thank you for your prayers. Keep praying. But we skip the week, we don't normally do that with our prayer team being available. We want to make sure they are. If you need miracles, you need God to intervene, you need God to do something in some area of your life. We're here to serve you today across the campus family, wherever you may be. I have a prayer today, just a small prayer. It'll be on your screens. You can see it, kind of be our closing today. Father, you see in secret, you see what we perform, and you see what we hide. You see the interior we've neglected and the spiritual depth we've avoided. Today we turn inward, not to fix ourselves, but to find you and be formed into your image. Christ in us, the hope of glory. Begin your work from the inside out. We are ready. Amen. Now, Lord, would you bless them and keep them? Would you make your face shine down upon them? Would you be gracious to them? Would you turn your countenance their direction? Would you give them peace and make us all more like you in Jesus' name? Amen.