Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Lisa, I have.
[00:00:04] The language that I'm comfortable with is not cars and guns. I don't, I don't know anything about those things. I'm fine. I love, I love cars and I love people who love guns.
[00:00:20] But I don't. I don't know. I don't know what those people talk. I try to fit into those conversations. Have you ever tried to fit in a conversation where you didn't belong?
[00:00:31] I have to do that somewhat in East Texas, I'll have to say. Yeah. It's a sure. A bolt. Bolt action 22 with a slingshot aim nozzle. And so you just don't like. You start talking and it just falls apart pretty quickly. Where I don't know the language. I don't know the language of car.
[00:00:52] It's the.
[00:00:54] I take the car to the mechanic when it is needed and when.
[00:01:00] Which is my neighbor. My neighbor is our mechanic, but he's all the way in town, so he doesn't like me just pulling in his driveway.
[00:01:10] But it is so embarrassing to go to the mechanic as someone who knows nothing of the language. I don't know how many horses are powerful.
[00:01:24] Like, I don't know, like people say, well, it's a. It's a something cc. I just, I. I don't know. It's making, it's making that noise.
[00:01:33] It's making a noise and it feels like it's there. Can you, can you check what's making a noise? And I'm always terrified. You do you know the feeling of going in and it's not going to make the noise when that you said it was making. They're going to look at you like, well, are you sure it's not you? I'm like, I know it's not me. I know it's the car.
[00:01:55] I don't like being in conversations where I'm not fully equipped with the vernacular.
[00:02:02] And sometimes I think because I grew up in church, I think sometimes our religious conversations might make people who aren't comfortable with them feel like outsiders when we want them to feel welcome.
[00:02:19] Even growing up. I grew up in a church of Christ, which we have our own language.
[00:02:25] We had certain phrases that we liked. I don't know if all churches stand and sing.
[00:02:32] No stand and sing.
[00:02:33] But we all. Okay, yes. That means the sermon is done and we can almost go to lunch.
[00:02:39] I don't know if all church. But I'm used to church of Christ language.
[00:02:46] We didn't do.
[00:02:48] I have some Baptist and Methodist friends.
[00:02:52] We didn't really do a hedge of protection. A lot of.
[00:02:55] But they ask for hedges of protection quite a bit like a hedge, which is a bush, like a.
[00:03:02] That you trim a hedge.
[00:03:05] Not incredibly protective.
[00:03:08] I like a solid concrete wall of protection. God against some things. But they asked for hedges of protection and they had. But I was a minister before. I heard a very common Baptist phrase that made me laugh. And I didn't laugh at the time, guys, I was polite.
[00:03:29] I was at a meeting for kids. They met at lunch during school hours to pray and have a devo. And it was like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which seems pretty pretty non inclusive of nerds like me, but Fellowship of Christ. They would all come in and we were taking prayer requests and the teacher in the back said, I have one unspoken.
[00:03:58] Did y' all know that was a possibility?
[00:04:01] My whole life I didn't know that unspoken prayer requests were something.
[00:04:06] But she said unspoken and it threw me. I stumbled. I said what I didn't know. I wasn't able to connect. I didn't know she was just saying, pray for me. I'm not going to talk about it. I.
[00:04:20] It took me a minute because I wasn't. Oh my goodness. That's a language barrier within my own tribe, within my own group. We're Christians and I didn't know that language. I didn't know that saying. So surely somebody, when they come into our world probably feels a little unwelcome. Not necessarily intentionally, but because we have our own way of doing things in our own language.
[00:04:45] I was in college and we invited our.
[00:04:47] The neighbor in our dorm to come to church with us.
[00:04:51] And surprisingly he said yes because he was a rascal.
[00:05:00] I don't know if he'd ever been in a church building in his entire life.
[00:05:06] I wasn't sure if he, up until college if he'd been in a building.
[00:05:13] He just was. He was one of the most heathen people I've ever been around.
[00:05:19] Funny as all get out, but just.
[00:05:22] We were like, oh, you want to come to church with us? And we on the way to church, my friend started telling him how to act at church.
[00:05:33] He said, all right, listen. The first thing he said was, listen, you can't swear.
[00:05:39] The guy said, what?
[00:05:41] He had no idea that this was the way that you can't swear. Try to stay seated the whole time. Like, don't wait. You can't make fun of people. He was listing the things that this guy regularly did that weren't allowed in church.
[00:05:58] And that was the problem, wasn't it, that we were asking him to Conform to us.
[00:06:07] Instead of him showing Jesus to whom we've been conformed, we were asking him, like, hey, well, you've got to act the right way in this place. Or what?
[00:06:22] They'll see you truly, they'll see your true person.
[00:06:28] We wanted him to put on the same disguise that we were used to putting on.
[00:06:35] We wanted him to, like, play along, have the language, say this. If someone asks you how you are, do not tell them how you are.
[00:06:46] Because I'm pretty sure after a Saturday night, on a Sunday morning, he was a certain thing still.
[00:06:53] And we didn't want you. Don't. When people meet you at the door and say, welcome to church, how are you? The answer is, fine, I'm fine.
[00:07:08] Blend in.
[00:07:10] Don't stand out. Don't be vulnerable.
[00:07:13] Do your part to keep up the facade.
[00:07:20] And that's where I feel like Jesus might stand in the midst of us and say, whoa.
[00:07:28] Like, where? Jesus might have a problem with sometimes our language, our being able to just make people feel left out because they don't know exactly the right wording or the right way to act or the right way to perform.
[00:07:48] In the statements he makes to the teachers of the law, to the Pharisees, he has this one little bit about oaths, oaths, where it's a little confusing, but I want to read it. And it's okay if you feel a little confused, because you should.
[00:08:12] He says in Matthew 23, woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites.
[00:08:20] Well, that's not it.
[00:08:21] Let's go to the next one. Let's go to verse. Yeah, there we go. 30.
[00:08:26] Nope, that's not it either.
[00:08:29] Open your Bibles.
[00:08:34] Verse 16 of Matthew 23. Woe to you blind guides. Who say, whoever swear blind guides is a funny insult.
[00:08:45] Let's just put that out there. Good for Jesus. That's. That's good. Not just blind. Like you're a blind person leading a blind person or leading people.
[00:08:57] Woe to you blind guides who say, whoever swears by the sanctuary is bound by nothing. But whoever swears by the gold of the sanctuary is bound by the oath. Okay, so that's. That's what it is. If you swear by the sanctuary, then you're not bound by it.
[00:09:15] It's a good Jewish crossing of the fingers.
[00:09:21] But if you swear by the gold that's in the sanctuary, then it is binding. He says, woe to you for doing that, you blind fools. For which is greater, the gold or the sanctuary that has made the gold sacred? And you say Whoever swears by the altar is bound by nothing. But whoever swears by the gift that is on the altar is bound by the oath. This is actually things that they would say, whoever swears by the altar is not bound.
[00:09:52] I swear that I will do a thing by the altar.
[00:09:56] And people would say, okay, thank you for swearing. But apparently it doesn't mean anything.
[00:10:02] And there were legal problems with this. Like you would.
[00:10:05] Would this hold up in court when they were trying to decide who. Who was right in certain agreements and certain contracts? Well, he swore by the. He swore by the altar. Well, he didn't swear by the gift of the altar. Gotcha.
[00:10:20] You didn't read the fine print.
[00:10:24] Which is greater? He says, how blind are you? For which is greater? The gift of the altar or that makes the gift or the altar that makes the gift sacred. So whoever swears by the altar swears by it and everything on it. And whoever swears by the temple swears by it and by the one who dwells in it. And whoever swears by heaven swears by the throne of God and by the one who is seated upon it.
[00:10:53] Now, this might not be something you struggle with, these like, modifications of swearing, but it was something that they were wrestling with and it connects to us in a way because what they were doing were technicalities that were ridiculous on their face, but they had just sort of accepted them.
[00:11:13] Right?
[00:11:16] So to make an oath binding by law, if you swore something in there, they had decided, the rabbis had decided that it had to include one of three things.
[00:11:27] It had to either include the word oath, which, which, my goodness, stay away from that.
[00:11:33] They wanted to say, if I swear an oath, then it's binding.
[00:11:40] Secondly, it had to, if it included the name of God, I swear by God.
[00:11:47] And so several of the Hebrew names of God worked into, were important there.
[00:11:54] Or if you swore by a gift.
[00:11:58] So the gold in the temple or the gift on the altar, or by the name of God.
[00:12:04] And Jesus addresses all three of these at the end here of this woe, he says, whether you swear by the temple or the gold in the temple or the altar, or the gift on the altar, or whether you swear by heaven or the God that reigns in it, it doesn't matter.
[00:12:26] Now, this is not directly applicable to us, but the direct application of the oaths themselves are not the problem Jesus has with the blind guides.
[00:12:39] Because Jesus originally said, don't even swear at all.
[00:12:43] If you say yes, mean it. If you say no, mean it.
[00:12:48] Don't no promises, no oath, no swearing. Just let your Word be a good word.
[00:12:55] But here, his problem later on in Matthew, he says that early on in Matthew that Lisa read for us. But later on in Matthew, his problem is they are skipping on technicalities that they know the language to. And other people. It's hurting the other people.
[00:13:12] We love a good loophole when it benefits us.
[00:13:19] I was at a church for a long time, but here, here I'm just Doris. I just love when Doris speaks and shares her heart and her opinions about vape shops. And I love everything about being invited to the table to hear the voice of someone who's lived a completely different life, life devoted to Jesus. I just love hearing her talk about communion.
[00:13:48] But I was at a church for a long time where women weren't allowed to do that.
[00:13:53] It was a biblical thing. And I get people's arguments with that. And if that's.
[00:13:59] I understand those churches, I serve those churches and love those churches. And those churches knew that my opinion was different than their practice.
[00:14:09] But I loved them and I was called to those churches. So I walked alongside them. It's no problem.
[00:14:15] Well, once we had a lady get up and give an announcement about vbs. An announcement. She didn't even mention God.
[00:14:26] Just joking.
[00:14:29] But people got really upset.
[00:14:36] She was in charge of vbs. We were making her do all of the work.
[00:14:43] But don't you dare talk about it in front of people.
[00:14:47] Well, people got really upset.
[00:14:50] And people is what we called one of the elder's wives and his mother.
[00:14:58] People got really. I say people. Three women got really mad that a woman was talking. And we were in a conundrum because we didn't want any of them to lead, apparently.
[00:15:10] But I was talking to the lady who made the announcement. She got up and she said, hey, we've got VBS coming up. Please come, please come, do this, do this, do this. Talk to this person. If you're bringing this, talk to this person. She nailed it better than any man who was not in charge would have done.
[00:15:27] And what she told me later, she said, either I get up and make the announcement, or I correct Mike from the pew, which is true. He'd say, well, we're having VBS tomorrow. We're having tacos fajitas.
[00:15:43] Okay, we're having.
[00:15:44] Bring this. No, we have enough of that. It would just be this conversation back and forth.
[00:15:50] Same church.
[00:15:52] A young woman had come home from a mission trip and wanted to talk about the mission trip she was on. And we were going to do this on a Sunday night. We were going to talk about the Mission trip.
[00:16:06] So we sang a song, had a closing prayer, and then she talked.
[00:16:15] We had a 15 minute official service, told God it was fine to leave, and then let a woman talk.
[00:16:24] At that same church where that happened, I was. We were.
[00:16:28] I thought this was silly enough to say it in a Bible class. It's kind of funny how we do that with loopholes. And a lady raised her hand in the Bible class and said. And interrupted me. Didn't raise her hand and asked me. She just said, I think women should be silent. Which is a conundrum, isn't it?
[00:16:46] I didn't know how to handle that.
[00:16:49] Technically I was supposed to ignore her.
[00:16:58] But we have, like. We have ways around, like, what we believe is the exact way. And whenever it's a little weird, we just. We can.
[00:17:06] We can work our way around it.
[00:17:10] We are. We are proudly.
[00:17:14] Proudly, and we will continue to be proudly a congregational a cappella church.
[00:17:20] We like that. It is our tradition and we're good at it.
[00:17:26] We worship deeply and intensely. And it brings me back to God every Sunday. And I'm so thankful for the work DJ does and the praise team that they lead us in worship.
[00:17:38] We are proud of that.
[00:17:41] I will not open my Bible to defend that, because it's the thing we sound the silliest about.
[00:17:52] There was once a man who argued in an actual book with editors. Editors were involved in this book where he said, notice that in the picture of the King of Heaven given in Revelation, whenever John peeks his head into heaven, he sees people holding harps. And the guy said, church of Christ guy. Notice they're not playing them, just holding them.
[00:18:26] Now, we all admit, we can all acknowledge that when we're not in the depth of that argument, we're trying to. We're.
[00:18:34] That's silly.
[00:18:37] That's ridiculous.
[00:18:41] But it's the same as saying, well, you notice the oath wasn't on the gift.
[00:18:47] It was. I swore on the altar.
[00:18:51] Technically, it was not the gift.
[00:18:57] Like using technicalities. Anytime that you have to use some sort of technicality to keep yourself right, you. You might want to reposition.
[00:19:08] Anytime you use a loophole, then maybe your life is focused on around the law and not on the grace offered by God.
[00:19:21] And what churches seem to value most. Sometimes what the religious organizations tend to value most is our correctness that we love being right and we love having our getting our way. And if we could just use the right language. And then all of a sudden we validated ourselves.
[00:19:52] But then the world comes in and they see, well, that's Kind of ridiculous.
[00:20:00] We say, oh, well, you just don't speak our language yet.
[00:20:05] But the Great Commission is not for all the nations to come unto me.
[00:20:11] The Great Commission is not, oh, all authority has been given to Jesus on heaven and on earth. Therefore may all the people come to me and speak my language.
[00:20:27] The beauty of Pentecost. The beauty of the Spirit coming into the people on Pentecost and the disciples getting up and proclaiming the Word. And everyone heard them in their own language. The beauty of that is that they went to the people and the. And learned the people's language and experienced community and Jesus with them there.
[00:20:54] That people shouldn't have to come to church and get acclimated or comfortable and learn the language and learn. Let's get them in a class where we teach them to be like us.
[00:21:08] Because God eventually is going to send us somebody who knows nothing of Jesus. But when they decide that Jesus, when they decide that Jesus is the one to follow, we immediately need to understand more about them.
[00:21:21] There are people we're going to learn from on day one of their relationship with Jesus. There's bound to be.
[00:21:30] But when we get caught up, and I love this church. We are not. I haven't heard y' all get caught up in a lot of technicalities on things that's.
[00:21:38] We know those are silly.
[00:21:43] I was talking with a Baptist friend of mine once in college, and we had a difference of opinion about, like, a certain passage brother in Christ, difference in opinion.
[00:22:00] And I said, it turned out we were just using different language to describe the same thing.
[00:22:10] And no wonder the world's confused.
[00:22:14] No wonder the world's confused about what we value and what we mean when we say things, because they don't even speak our language.
[00:22:26] And whose fault is that?
[00:22:30] Is it ours or is it theirs?
[00:22:34] Are we called to go unto them or are they called to come unto us?
[00:22:43] And it's technicalities and loopholes and laws and unspoken rules. Those are the things that keep people from feeling welcome in a place.
[00:22:55] He calls them blind guides.
[00:22:59] Because where you are taking people, you're not even sure where you're going either.
[00:23:08] Again, notice it's not about oaths and it's not about practice either. Churches can do a lot of times what churches look please like. Their practices and their norms, their order of service, the way in which they like. A lot of times like that, that can be just preference.
[00:23:27] You ever been at a church that has communion after the sermon?
[00:23:32] It's weird how little things like that will throw you for a loop.
[00:23:37] My Niece. Her name is Cora.
[00:23:43] She is younger than my kids. I don't know, I don't keep up. Four or five. She's around there. She's what, six?
[00:23:52] How old is she? You shook your head. I don't know. Anyway, she's in age real young.
[00:23:57] But when she was about three, they started going to a different church, just for a brief time.
[00:24:06] And they went to a church from a church that takes communion like we do with the little, you know, self serves.
[00:24:18] And they went from that church to a church where they passed the trays and she watched Cora watched them pass the trays for a little bit and then said really loud, oh, these people don't do this right.
[00:24:42] I mean, she just knew, like what I'm used to is right and what I'm not used to is wrong. And let's justify those battles.
[00:24:52] But when people come into our place and see us arguing about these little minutia over little bits of language. Well, technically we didn't actually say and tech. When people see that they aren't going to see Jesus and we can guide them wherever we want, but we're blind the whole way.
[00:25:16] Our technicalities keep us from showing them Jesus and secondly, it keeps us from seeing Jesus.
[00:25:34] When we get so entrenched in our norms and our language, sometimes we forget how big and important the thing we're following actually is.
[00:25:45] The thing we're proclaiming actually is.
[00:25:50] We're so used to the songs.
[00:25:54] When Doris read Nothing but the Blood, how many of you got chills?
[00:26:01] Not a thing that I have done.
[00:26:07] It's not the work in me, it's the blood of Christ.
[00:26:11] It's not the goodness in me, it's the blood of Christ.
[00:26:17] To re acclimate ourselves with the gospel message that is Jesus and to sing with great power that he is our living hope.
[00:26:33] Music does that for me. It brings me back to this place where I can have a grasp on the rules of church all I want, but I can't get my head or my hands or my arms around the enormous grace and love of Jesus.
[00:26:50] I like to say. I like to say we've got things figured out. This is how we do service. This is what we believe. Here's our doctrine. But my goodness, when I picture the goodness of God and how much he has done for me, how much, how much he has done for us, how much hope we have in Him. I can't get over it.
[00:27:09] I don't have language for it.
[00:27:12] I'm blown away by it.
[00:27:16] And when God loves me like that, I've got to give up my rightness so that I can go to people and speak their language and tell them how big our God is, how big his table is, how much grace he offers, how much hope we have, how he is King. I've got to share that.
[00:27:38] I can't get over it. But our little language, our little debates, our little doctrines.
[00:27:50] Satan would love it if we came to church every Sunday and knew our doctrine very well.
[00:28:02] What evil does not want is for us to know our God.
[00:28:10] Not know about him, but to know him.
[00:28:16] And to know that he is our only hope.
[00:28:22] To know that the bigness of his grace and love and mercy can't be explained. And it can't be whittled down. It can't be chipped away at.
[00:28:38] And there are no loopholes in the grace of God.
[00:28:42] There are no technicalities in his forgiveness.
[00:28:47] There's no getting around his grace.
[00:28:53] We are saved by the grace of a faithful Messiah, a loving God and a powerful spirit.
[00:29:05] May our language never be diluted by technicality and loophole and doctrine.
[00:29:13] But may we always return to the living hope, the power in the blood, the beauty of amazing grace.
[00:29:25] May we always return to the fact that God loves us.
[00:29:32] And that can't be summed up with words, technicalities and laws and practices.
[00:29:42] It just has to be overwhelmingly present in the world out there.
[00:29:49] It was said in class this morning that every time we bless others, we show them the kingdom of God. Now, I taught class, but I didn't say that. A man much wiser than me said that.
[00:30:01] But every time we bless others, we show them the kingdom of God.
[00:30:07] Small graces, small love, small acts of love, small mercies. In small moments they might see a glimpse of the bigness of God.
[00:30:21] And we're not going to try to get them to sound like us, to have our language.
[00:30:27] But we can show them the love of God.
[00:30:31] Go to them, because all authority has been given to him.
[00:30:35] And show them through our love for them that they are loved by Him. Let's pray together.
