Open Up: The Posture That Changes Everything

There's a video on my phone of my son Solomon riding a roller coaster for the first time. He spent the whole week building it up. Telling anyone who would listen that he was ready. He was — for about ten seconds. Then the first drop hit.

We got off the ride and Solomon had made a decision. A firm, clear, non-negotiable decision. He was done. To this day, you can walk past a roller coaster with him and the walls go up immediately. I'll say, "Hey buddy, what about that one?" and I get the look. The look that says: Dad. I know what you're doing. The answer is no.

Here's the thing — I'm not trying to scare my kid. I know what's on the other side of that fear. The rush. The adrenaline. Both of us laughing so hard at the end that our legs don't work right. I want him to have the FULL version of being alive. But he got scared once. And the posture is mostly closed.

I think that's the most accurate picture I can give you of what happens to a lot of us spiritually.

Most of us didn't start closed. We started open. Excited. Ready for whatever God had. And then life did what life does. A prayer went unanswered. A plan fell apart. A gap opened between what we were sure would happen and what actually happened. And somewhere on the other side of that thing, we made a decision. Maybe not consciously. But we made it. We closed off. We still show up. We still know the songs. But the posture changed. We learned to engage God at a managed distance, from behind a wall we built so nothing could surprise us the wrong way again.

In Luke 8:16-21, Jesus stitches together three short teachings that all point at the one heart posture that matters most if you want to be close to God: open up.

First, He says nobody lights a lamp and then covers it with a jar. In a first-century home, one little oil lamp lit the whole house. Putting a jar over it didn't just hide the light — it defeated the whole point. Jesus is telling you something. There is something in you that God put there. A capacity. A calling. A gift. A story. It was not placed in you to be covered up and managed. It was placed in you to be set in the center of the room so that everyone walking through your life can see by it. The jar you've been hiding under is not protection. It's a lid. And it's working against what God is trying to do in you and through you.

Then He says, "Consider carefully how you listen." Two people can sit in the same service and hear the same word and walk out completely different. The difference is not the word. The difference is the posture. A deposit only lands in an open account. Maybe what God has been trying to deposit in you is peace — not a concept, but actual peace in the middle of the specific thing keeping you up at night. Maybe it's clarity on the decision you've been spinning on for months. Maybe it's courage to do the thing you already know you're supposed to do. Maybe it's healing from something you've been carrying longer than you should have to carry alone. He hasn't run out of any of it. The account just needs to be open.

Then Mary and the brothers show up. In Jesus's culture, you stopped everything when family arrived. But Jesus looks at the room and says: my family is the people who hear God's word and put it into practice. That's the whole definition. Not the people with the best resume. Not the people with the most history. The people who let something out, let something in — and keep doing it.

Maybe you've been far from God for a long time. Maybe your story is messy and you feel like there's too much distance between you and the family of God to qualify. Not one word of Jesus's definition is about your history. He doesn't say His family is people who never messed up. He says it's people who open up to what God is saying.

And here is why the invitation is real. On the cross, Jesus took the most opened-up posture a human body can occupy. Arms stretched wide. Nothing hidden. Nothing protected. Everything seen. In that moment, God drew the love of God out of Him and the weight of our sin into Him — and Jesus stayed open. He held the posture all the way through. He went from "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" to "every tongue will confess Jesus is Lord," and the path between those two ran through wide-open arms.

You don't open up to prove something or earn something. You open up because the same love that opened His arms on that cross is the love moving toward you right now.

We'd love to have you join us on Sunday.