Light on the Hill

Guest (Male): What drives you and your decision making? Is it self-gratification here and now? Or are you motivated by your identity in Christ and what awaits you in the future? Here's Pastor James.

James Kaddis: I am not one of these guys that's all about visualization. It's not one of the things I've ever taught anybody, and it's something that I certainly don't agree with. But the one thing that I do think we need to spend a lot of time visualizing in our minds and our hearts are the things that are true.

Understanding how God chooses to place things in our lives, recognizing what awaits for us in the future, and allowing our understanding of our own identity as well as what lies ahead to be the thing that controls how we live in the moment. If we allow the gratification that we receive in the moment to control how we live in the moment, we'll never be satisfied and eventually we'll drive ourselves to a place of destruction.

Guest (Male): God is doing something that so many people are missing. That's tragic in and of itself, but there is a way to reconcile it. Jesus gave us the solution in Mark chapter nine. These may be some of the most consequential words to come out of the mouth of Christ Jesus. Get ready for an eye-opening study today on Light on the Hill. Here's Pastor James Kaddis with his message, "Make Yourself Ready."

James Kaddis: And after six days, Jesus taketh with him Peter and James and John, and leadeth them up into a high mountain apart by themselves, and he was transfigured before them. Verse three: and his raiment became shining, exceeding white as snow, so as no fuller on earth can white them. And there appeared unto them Elias—so of course we're talking about Elijah—with Moses, and they were talking with Jesus.

It's interesting because we all seem to be aware of who one of those witnesses are going to be in the Book of Revelation. I think most people are pretty settled on the fact that we're talking about Elijah based on what the Bible says. But then there is a lot of fighting and a lot of argument back and forth as into what the second one will be. A lot of people say that it's going to be Moses because Moses was the one that appeared here at what they would call the Mount of Transfiguration. I think that's kind of broken thinking. Who the second person is going to be, I'm not quite sure. I have some ideas, but I'm not going to get into the ins and the outs of that because we certainly don't have time.

One thing I do want to point out is the fact that these disciples are looking at something extraordinary. What we're going to find out is they are looking at Jesus post-resurrection and ascension. They're looking at Jesus and the condition he is in after he defeats death. Remember that's a very easy, impossible thing to do because Jesus is of course one that can transcend time. He does transcend time. He transcends literally every element that exists right now, and I think that's an important thing. God is not beyond showing this to some of his people.

They are looking at something uniquely consequential that they've never seen before in their lives. Can you imagine how they're reacting? Can you imagine how Peter's got to be reacting or John? It's just an interesting thing. James, they've got to be blown away at what they're seeing. They've got to be overwhelmed because they're looking at something so powerfully tangible. They're seeing something that up until this point they've never even heard about. They don't even know.

Look what it goes on to say. Verse five: "And Peter answered and said to Jesus, Master, it is good for us to be here. And let us make three tabernacles: one for thee, and one for Moses, and one for Elias. For he wist not what to say, for they were sore afraid." There's a lot of people that will do messages on this, Bible studies on this, that will mock Peter, that will put Peter down. They make Peter look like a dummy who didn't know what to say when he saw what he saw. Some people will say that when the Bible here says, "for he wist not what to say because they were afraid," that what Peter was saying was just founded in a bunch of stupidity. There was no real foundation for what he was saying.

What a lot of people are not recognizing in this moment is that Peter is watching something that is so extraordinarily supernatural that even in the midst of the fear that he's experiencing as a result of watching something he's never seen, he's wanting to prolong the moment because the moment is in essence the currency in which he's thinking. He's not thinking beyond the moment. He's thinking in the moment. He's thinking about what it's doing for him at the time that he's speaking. He's thinking about the emotional experience that he's having. He's thinking about the very things in the moment that he is passing through, and he wants to keep it there.

As human beings, one of the things that we're becoming better and better at doing because of the world in which we live—because of the world of instant gratification that surrounds us, because of the tools that we've been given, even the financial instruments that have been given to us to provide that instant gratification—we have become so good at creating conditions for ourselves that put us in a place of escape in a way because that's the only place we know to maintain our sanity. It's funny how that works. Distraction helps us to maintain our sanity, the way that we have created our lives and the way we've conditioned our lives.

In reality, the glimpse that God gave them in the future—or of the future, or of the current moment as it sat if you really talked about Christ being outside the realm of time—was designed to give them an awareness and an understanding of the things to come, yet so much as to inspire the way that they live their life in the future. I am not one of these guys that's all about visualization. It's not one of the things I've ever taught anybody, and it's something that I certainly don't agree with.

The one thing that I do think we need to spend a lot of time visualizing in our minds and our hearts are the things that are true. Understanding how God chooses to place things in our lives, recognizing what awaits for us in the future, and allowing our understanding of our own identity as well as what lies ahead to be the thing that controls how we live in the moment. If we allow the gratification that we receive in the moment to control how we live in the moment, we'll never be satisfied and eventually we'll drive ourselves to a place of destruction.

If we allow ourselves to take vision of the power that sits within the Kingdom of God that we are loosely a part of now, but will one day be intimately and intricately involved with later, it will completely change the way that we live our lives today. The world we live in right now, especially in the church world, it's all about the showmanship. It's all about the, "Let's build tents. Let's build tabernacles. Let's create the condition that brought us the show that we're watching right now and let's seek to replicate it."

This is why you've got guys doing seminars that they're making pastors pay hundreds and thousands of dollars to go to because they're teaching them how to replicate an emotional moment within the church that will cause people to be so charged and so motivated that they will, in a cult-like way, seek to do whatever it takes to achieve the same high, yet not taking into consideration what it should all mean for the future. God doesn't want us to experience the emotion in the moment and then allow that to become our escape moving forward.

God wants us to see the power that exists to us now and what it will become in the future and allow that to become the thing that drives us in denying ourselves to find the better place. It's a biblical principle. It's the way God created the heavens and the earth. It's the way God assembled mankind. It's the way God breathed into us living life. He used the same tools. Yet for whatever reason, we want to reach out for the moment. We want to reach out for the very thing that we think we don't have because we think that having that one thing will provide for us great benefit.

It even happened with Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were told by God, "You can eat freely of every tree." You had everything. You had access to everything in existence. Just don't touch the one tree. Okay, fine. Can you imagine? You don't touch the one tree and you can have anything you want. I would take that tree and I would encase it in the most solid glass. I would pour metal all over it so that nobody could ever break into it and touch it again and then forget that it exists.

Why? Because I have access to everything. But mankind doesn't think that way. Mankind does not think about their future. Mankind thinks about their moment. And the more they continue to give themselves to the thought of the moment, the more they allow themselves to become degraded because they don't think about what it means. Peter and John and James were confronted by two critically important choices. You could technically say three, but I wasn't prepared to get into the technical side of that.

There were two pretty critical choices. They could see what they were seeing in the moment and choose to find the same level and maintain the same level of gratification that they received in the entertainment value of it. Or they could have used it to give them a glimpse as into what they were working towards and what the ultimate plan looked like. When you say, "Let us build three tabernacles," the whole idea is, I want this to stay here. I want to experience it.

I wouldn't be so quick to condemn Peter because the moment must have been so exhilarating that he probably wanted it to continue on. I'm almost certain of the fact he would not want it to have shut it down, and I think that if I was in his position, I'd probably feel the same way. But that wasn't God's intent for all of this.

And there was a cloud that overshadowed them and a voice came out of the cloud saying, "This is my beloved son, hear him." Isn't it weird how Peter would be freaked out with his buddies and then all of a sudden say let's build three tents? And after he says let's build three tents, then there's this mystical moment that takes place where God the Father, presumably God the Father, says, "Listen to what he's saying. This is my beloved son, hear him."

There's something really interesting that comes out of all of this to me, and that's this. You have a moment of gratification that you can experience right now, and that moment will bring you temporary joy. And it might even give you a false sense of strength that carries you through something that you wouldn't normally be able to go through because of the emotionally charged moment that sits. But when it's all done, it has deadening value to you.

Or you could choose to, in the moment of great emotion, say I'm going to ignore what I'm looking at for purposes of gratification in the moment and I'm going to use it as an opportunity to walk in obedience. It's kind of a hard picture. I think the greatest challenge of any parent who's raising children—especially when those children tend to be very emotional—is the digital media that exists there. I talk to parents all the time that come to me and ask me about raising their kids and what the best idea is. They tell me oftentimes how much time their children is spending playing video games or how much time their children is spending watching this TV show or watching that TV show.

The one thing that I tell them, and they never like it—as a matter of fact, sometimes they just won't even listen to me, they'll just leave, they won't even come back and talk to me—is I say get rid of it all. Don't get me wrong. I think it's wise to prepare your children for the future that they're going to be facing and that's going to involve them understanding computers and TV and all that other stuff that's in front of them.

But the goal of us as parents, whether your children are at a tender age or your children at an adult age, the goal that we have for parents is to instruct our children to appreciate the moment that they're in, understanding that the excitement that that brings is going to create a lot of emotion. In the midst of the emotion, they must program themselves to use that emotion as a reminder to walk in obedience rather than gratify the flesh.

I'll admit that as a parent that's a very hard thing for me to do because as a parent there's no greater joy in my heart than to see my children giggling and laughing and having fun. I want to see them do that all day every day, and I think it's healthy for our children to giggle and laugh and have fun. But when my children get caught up in the emotion of the moment that they're experiencing, it's critical to them to understand that God gave them those emotions so that they could be blessed and so that he could be blessed.

Obedience is the most critical factor in that time. If I can teach my kids to walk in obedience during the greatest heightened times of their emotional experiences, then I can also teach my kids how to use the emotion as a reminder for the discipline in the moment to be able to ensure that they will get to experience the fullness of what that emotion represents in the moment. In other words, if I can teach my children to walk in obedience no matter what the mindset is in the current moment, I can also show them how to find victory in everything they'll ever face in their life.

This is what destroys gamblers. What do gamblers like doing? They go, they gamble. But do you think it's just, "Hey, I'm going to throw away money" and you think that's attractive to anybody? No. What's attractive is I'm going to give you a certain amount of money and when this great gain comes out from that, the desire to see that happen again overtakes the prudence in walking obediently and navigating through the issue.

It's perhaps the greatest and most significant danger of people who say they want to undertake trading in the stock market because they'll go and they'll make a trade, they'll see the great gain that it makes, and then immediately they'll want to replicate it. So they engage in another transaction while not paying attention to the rules of discipline and obedience that they need to and then they destroy their lives. One day is great, the other day you lose everything.

That's the story of life. I'm just using those as illustrations because those are easy ones to understand. But I think that God did us an amazing favor and taught us an incredible lesson in this story of transfiguration because what he showed to us vividly is in the greatest moment of vulnerability when they're experiencing the most high level of emotion watching what they're watching, God says, "This is my son, obey him."

There is some serious power in that, isn't there? There's something super consequential in understanding the need to walk in obedience in the midst of tremendous strain and difficulty while also in the midst of extreme joy and exhilaration. If you don't take obedience into account, you're never going to allow the moment of great heights to become the tool that teaches you to achieve even greater ones in the future.

That's really important. I think that's the difference between what we would call mediocre and what we would call extraordinary in this world. Those that are mediocre find themselves in a position of accomplishment, they experience the gratification of that accomplishment, and then they rest in it. And then when that accomplishment brings them greater expectations and greater responsibilities, they don't want to do what it takes to prepare for that moment.

As they rest in what they've accomplished, they actually damage themselves because they become overwhelmed, burned out, and destroyed. I am facing this on a regular basis in my own life. The temptation to want to rest in what I have and think that what I have is enough, when in reality every single victory God gives me is designed to be a tool to remind me to obey him because he has greater things.

We've lost the sight of what it means to pray to God to broaden our shoulders. We've lost sight of what it means to ask God to expand our horizons. There's a lot of people that talk about these things in the Bible and they say that oh, we should ask God to give us more, more, more, but we don't recognize the most important prayer in that. And that is, in the bounty you give me, God, give me the discipline to be able to handle the responsibility that comes with that and broaden my shoulders that I may carry a heavier weight so that I can grow beyond what you've given me to be ready for the next glory that comes my way.

The way that these men should have thought when they got to the point that they got to is, while this is incredible and I'm blown away and I'm exhilarated by what I'm seeing, and yes, I'm a little scared and yes, I'm a little overwhelmed, but what can I take from this very moment that will prepare me for what I know is coming in the future? They got a glimpse of something that they were not ready to see. They got a glimpse of something that they are going to experience in its wholeness at one point, but weren't there now.

Instead of wanting to extend the moment and bask in it and go, "Haha, this is great," what do I do to get to the next place? Where's the next step? Where do we find the place of walking in obedience that creates the contentment that I need to experience the greater level?

Guest (Male): Thank you for joining us today for Light on the Hill. What you just heard is one part of a study in Mark's Gospel from Pastor James Kaddis. You can hear it again at lightonthehillradio.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Not long ago, Pastor James released his new book on the first half of Revelation. It's entitled "The Last Book." He points out that Revelation isn't a book of fear but rather a book of hope. Pastor James will help you understand the world we live in and current events through a biblical lens, preparing your heart for what lies ahead. Get a copy by going to lightonthehillradio.com or through Amazon.

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James Kaddis: Look what it goes on to say because this is where it gets really interesting. And suddenly—that's a very important word to focus on by the way, okay?—and suddenly when they had looked round about, they saw no man anymore, save Jesus only with themselves. They hear that and then boom, it goes back to where they were. Jesus the same way that he was prior to this moment, everything. Can you imagine what that would have done to their psyche in the moment that it had happened?

Look what happens next. This is pretty incredible. Verse nine: "And as they came down from the mountain, he charged them that they should tell no man what things they had seen, till the Son of Man were risen from the dead. And they kept that saying with themselves, questioning one with another what the rising from the dead should mean." Let's look at some pretty significant things that happened right here. The first thing is they were told to tell nobody until the Son of Man were risen from the dead. So they listened. They didn't tell anybody.

At the time, they were not focused on not telling anybody. They were focused on what it means when they say he's going to rise from the dead. By the way, Jesus just finished talking to them about the fact that he was going to be greatly persecuted. Jesus just finished talking about the very cross that he wanted them to take up. Jesus talked about the suffering that he was going to undergo. In their minds, they're hearing, "Yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," but we're going to overtake the Romans. That's probably what's going through their head because they're thinking about the moment that they are in rather than focusing on the bigger picture that Christ is trying to teach them.

I don't know about you, but when I read this, it's kind of like one of those moments that's so striking to me that I'm obsessing over so many of the details, like literally obsessing over so many of the details of what may have been going on in their psyche because at the time they didn't completely understand it. Why is that so important? How do we synthesize this? How does it get processed? It gets processed perhaps the same way I want my children to process my instruction to them.

They watch something in front of them that didn't make a lot of sense but they knew was spectacular. Although they didn't understand completely what they were seeing, they saw the power of it. They saw how exceptional it was because they'd never seen anything like it. Then they get told to listen to the Lord, to hear him. After experiencing all of that, they get told don't say anything in essence to anybody until Christ rises from the dead.

They look at the Mount of Transfiguration, they see what's happening, they don't fully understand what's taking place, but they're blown away by it. They're scared, Peter says something crazy because he just doesn't know what to say. A voice comes out, it's the Father who says, "This is my son, listen to him, hear him." Jesus tells them exactly what to do, and a big part of what Jesus told them what to do they did not understand because the Bible tells us they didn't understand. Let me read that part to you again. They kept that saying with themselves, questioning one another what the rising from the dead should mean. Next time on Light on the Hill, we'll see how demons operate as Pastor James returns to Mark chapter nine.

Guest (Male): This program is listener supported and brought to you by Calvary Chapel Signal Hill.