Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] I love hearing you guys sing. I love hearing you guys talk about what you're doing. The work at the gathering is so important.
[00:00:10] Do talk to Leann. Don't let that be a thing that happened at the first of the service that you forgot by the end of the service.
[00:00:18] Let's sign up. Make sure you pick a week and pick two or four or three.
[00:00:27] A number. Pick a number and get involved in that. She is right. It is not a difficult thing to do, but it is a great thing to do. And so please get involved with that. It is definitely worth your time.
[00:00:48] I have seen a thing going around Facebook, and I want to talk about it for just a second.
[00:00:56] It's a comparison between the King James version and the not inspired, the NIV. I'm just kidding.
[00:01:08] And it's basically, King James is best because it doesn't. The NIV doesn't translate things the way the King James does. Now, I want to talk about circular arguments.
[00:01:23] You can't say the King James is a standard, and then something is superior because it doesn't end up like the king. You can't argue that something's better because it's the best. Like, you can't. That's not a good argument. But I've been dealing with that argument a lot of my life. The first big scolding I got from an elder was because I read from the Niv from a pulpit.
[00:01:54] I didn't know that was a rule. Neither did the other elders, but it became a rule quickly.
[00:02:02] A man who had passionate opinions scolded me, and that's fine. That's fine. And when I moved to Arkansas, I didn't mess with that much in Texas, and I was in Texarkana. I got a good scolding, moved to Teague, Texas, and, you know, not a ton of scoldings and teague. They just. They just. They're happy there. Then I moved to Arkansas, and I posted in on Facebook one day, just a scripture. I said God's word, and it was a picture of a scripture, and I said God's word about something, and it was just that. And then the first comment was someone saying, remember, it was all caps. So I can't imagine he's either shouting or using, like, a fun accent. So remember, the Niv is not the Bible.
[00:02:58] It's like, well, that is news to me.
[00:03:03] Now, in the end, if you don't know any of the original languages, just don't have an opinion on the matter.
[00:03:12] That's a good rule.
[00:03:15] If you're not, at least well versed enough to look up the original.
[00:03:20] Why care?
[00:03:22] Why care?
[00:03:24] Well, I deleted that guy as a friend and deleted the comment and blocked him immediately because I don't get in arguments on Facebook.
[00:03:33] How many of you have ever seen an argument on Facebook end with both sides going, you know what I learned from you today?
[00:03:44] I don't do that. There's no sense in it. Just don't engage in that. So I just unfriended it. And I was talking to a guy that I've been studying with who knew that world better than I did, that community of that church in particular, that was fussing at me. And I said, well, here's the thing. I'm not going to be combative. I'm going to be friendly, and I'm going to be affable.
[00:04:12] And they may, by the end of my time here, they may still vehemently disagree with me, but they're going to like me.
[00:04:24] And he looked at me and he goes, Benjamin, they're never going to like you.
[00:04:33] And guess which one of us was right?
[00:04:36] He was. Eight years it took, and it just never happened.
[00:04:44] It's tough not being liked by somebody.
[00:04:50] I've kind of got that in me. I want to be liked.
[00:04:54] Not just loved, liked.
[00:04:59] Why are they mad at me? I wonder sometimes, not really ever here. But I also go to. Do you ever go to an event and maybe you're there and you, like, met some new people and you say things and you talk and it's like no one wrote anything for you to say. So you just had to come up with it out of your brain. And that gets you in trouble sometimes. And then you're on the way home and you thought, should I have said that?
[00:05:31] What did they think when I said that? You try to control that situation from, like, an unhealthy place just deep in you. You wanted to be liked by those people, and they're strangers.
[00:05:52] It is frustrating when no matter what you do, somebody doesn't like you.
[00:06:06] Sometimes you'll chase after those people and sometimes you'll forgive them.
[00:06:13] But it's this word that we're dealing with today in Philippians four eight. It's the only time this word ever shows up in all of scripture.
[00:06:25] It says, finally, beloved, what is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there's any excellence, if there's anything worthy of praise, think about these things. And I think it's important to put it into the context. He here is saying, this is how us english speakers would structure this sentence, think about this is important. That's the important verb here. If you can go to the next slide. Think about whatever is true, honorable, just pure, pleasing, commendable, excellent, or worthy of praise. Now, that word pleasing is a lot of times translated lovely.
[00:07:12] We don't use the word lovely or pleasing.
[00:07:17] The way that he here is using that word.
[00:07:22] Lovely for us is often like an aroma.
[00:07:27] Like, you'll walk into somebody's house and like, what is that candle burning?
[00:07:32] And they'll say, oh, it's midnight beach sand.
[00:07:40] Like, oh, I thought that's what that was. I'll say.
[00:07:45] And then we'll say, well, isn't that lovely?
[00:07:50] We speak of.
[00:07:53] We use the word lovely, like, for potpourri and just sort of pleasant things, things that are, as the translations will see, pleasing.
[00:08:07] Well, that's pleasing.
[00:08:10] I can't think of lovely without thinking of the church lady from Saturday Night Live.
[00:08:18] I don't know why.
[00:08:20] She says, well, isn't that special?
[00:08:24] But for some reason, I have one of those, you know, you have a brain hiccup, where you just always call McDonald's Walmart for some reason, or whatever it is that you like. You just have a brain hiccup. You never can say it right in my mind. She says, isn't that lovely? And so when I think of lovely, I think of isn't that lovely? Like, I think of just a.
[00:08:48] But lovely built into the word is this understanding that somewhere, somehow, love is involved.
[00:09:02] Now, we don't say that. We don't mean that about aromas.
[00:09:08] And oftentimes, whenever we say lovely in any other context, it's derisive.
[00:09:14] Oh, that's lovely.
[00:09:19] We don't use this word the way he used this word, but lovely, essentially. And it is. You've heard the words of love from scripture. You have Agapo, and you have Fileto.
[00:09:38] You have these words of godly love, like this all encompassing love that we talk about when God loves us. And then you have this filet, this brotherly love. We hear that in the word Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love.
[00:09:57] So this idea that we like or are in community with. We would call them our brother and our sister.
[00:10:08] We enjoy them. We enjoy being in their presence.
[00:10:13] That's filet o. Now, they use those words pretty interchangeably, but if you want to get down to the heart, the central part of that meaning. And they did overlap a little bit. But Agapo is this big love. That is grace. And given like you are. It's like what we mean, when we say God loves everybody, and you'll say everybody, and we'll be like, yeah, because it's Agapo.
[00:10:42] It's godly love. God has to.
[00:10:46] And I Agapo everybody.
[00:10:52] But filet o is like a. You know, it's like brotherly love. That's like my inner circle.
[00:11:01] That's people I get along with. The relationships are pleasant, pleasing, lovely.
[00:11:12] God feels about me and this godly love, and I feel. Supposed to feel that about the world, right?
[00:11:24] But then sometimes I wonder if God likes me all that much.
[00:11:34] I feel like growing up, I could voice to you that God loved me.
[00:11:46] But throughout mistakes and brokenness and failures, I never quite could get to the place where God liked me.
[00:12:06] When I was in college, I transferred to Harding.
[00:12:13] I love Harding. I love Harding. Loved my time there.
[00:12:21] I didn't know it at the time that I loved my time there.
[00:12:29] Transferred in. It's hard to transfer in to Harding.
[00:12:34] Harding's one of these big schools where they, like, your freshman year, you come in and you drop in, and they're like, all right, big time show. We're going to get everybody together, and you're going to find friends, and you're going to, like, look over there. That's the man you're gonna marry. And so on and so forth.
[00:12:51] They couldn't have said that to me.
[00:12:58] So there's this big production of how, like, we're marching the freshmen in dun dun dun dun dun dun dun, and they're all excited, and they're from all different countries, and we all proclaim their praises. It's the freshmen.
[00:13:13] But if you go to Arkansas Tech for a year and a half, major in vocal music, almost flunk out because you didn't go to class, and instead you learned guitar, hypothetically speaking, and then transfer to Harding because you decided that, like, the calling on your life was to be a pastor, was to be a preacher, and Arkansas Tech's preaching program lapped.
[00:13:49] And you walk into Harding, spring of zero two.
[00:13:55] They barely even turn their head when you show up.
[00:14:01] There's no, I'm a sophomore. More technically, I'm showing up to school.
[00:14:10] Zero friends, zero connections.
[00:14:19] The first week, it felt like it wasn't the first week, but it was just that first semester, I was playing basketball. It was the closest thing I had to having a, like, a group of people. I would go and play basketball, and there were a lot of good people there, but I was trying to show that I belonged and, you know, had hopes of making the team. Eventually drove in the lane planted and my knee said nope.
[00:14:57] And everything went.
[00:15:00] Had a giant immobilizer on my knee. This was back whenever. If you had pre existing conditions, you could not get health insurance. My parents did not have health insurance. They were actually in the process of signing up for health insurance when I blew up my knee. So I went eight years without having surgery on that thing. That first little bit like, I guess I don't play basketball anymore.
[00:15:24] I didn't know this because I was a southwestern Arkansas kid, but I was depressed.
[00:15:37] I just thought I was lazy.
[00:15:41] Like, I always got out of bed. I was a kid. I was the kid that never slept in. I got up, 730. I'm up. Doesn't matter if it's Saturday school. I'd wake up at four to go run.
[00:15:55] It was easy to get up out of bed. I got up and went to do stuff.
[00:16:00] I would go to school sick to take the test I needed to take and then go home.
[00:16:07] But get to college. I can't get out of bed.
[00:16:11] That feeling of I'm not liked by anyone here, and I'm not sure if God likes me at all.
[00:16:30] I don't know if you've been there, but it is a horrific place to be. And what drives me predominantly as a pastor, not just preacher, I've got to take the word to the people, but like someone who goes out into the world and loves people, is there are people out there who feel that way not just about God, but about me, that I don't like them, that christians don't like them because of a, b, c and d and fill in the blank. But a lot of times it's e. All of the above is that their life has been difficult in such a way that they just can't quite get over that thing that they've been wrestling with.
[00:17:18] And because they still wrestle with it or because they still just. They don't understand how their life, what their life is supposed to look like. And they've never really even been shown love or kindness. They feel like the church doesn't like them. And we preach about, oh, we're supposed to love people.
[00:17:41] You might want to get to the place where the world thinks you like them first because you're never going to be able to convince them that God loves and wants to have a relationship with them. If you love and do not want to have a relationship with them, it's not going to happen.
[00:18:03] When we think about things that are lovely, and this word means think about things that are toward the goal of love, to love pros Philao to them, understanding that I like them, that I am happy to be around them.
[00:18:32] My church had a. In Texas, Canada, when I first started. They had a ministry where they gave food and clothing to people who came through once a month.
[00:18:45] This is when we. After we merged churches, and this church was Nash, and now it's Hampton Road. And we were. We had this ministry, and I went a couple of times because, you know, the youth minister. I wasn't the youth minister. I was the associate minister who emphasized youth because youth ministers were unscriptural.
[00:19:06] But, you know, God loves a good loophole.
[00:19:13] God. The first was like, no. And then we heard how we phrased it. He was like, okay, yeah, nailed it.
[00:19:21] But we would serve people.
[00:19:25] And I watched as people, and that was one of my big complaints. I went to those, the people who were serving, and I said, it doesn't look like you like these people that are coming in, wanting food and wanting canned goods and clothing.
[00:19:42] It seems like you dislike them.
[00:19:48] God is not going to impact the people we interact with if they can tell that we do not like them, if they can tell that our goal is not toward brotherly and sisterly connection, toward love.
[00:20:17] And so whenever I see the word filet o in scripture, I think about the way I love the people I'm connected to.
[00:20:28] Not floaty, sort of idealistic love where we just love, you know, we love the world, but the people I'm connected to, how I love them and feel closeness to them. There are people who are desperate for that.
[00:20:50] And that scripture that Claire read so well, John 16.
[00:20:58] We'll start in verse 20.
[00:21:00] He says, truly, I tell you, that's where I do. I do like the King James there. Verily, verily.
[00:21:09] I like it. It rhymes. I tell you, you will weep and mourn, but the world will rejoice.
[00:21:18] You will have pain, but your pain will turn to joy.
[00:21:24] When a woman is in labor, she has pain because her hour has come. But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world.
[00:21:43] I think this checks out, but I haven't talked to every woman, but there is this sense of, I went through something difficult, and it brought something beautiful, and I don't look at the child anymore and think, oh, you were tough.
[00:22:09] Not that any woman I've ever met sounded like that you were tough.
[00:22:17] The beauty overwhelms the pain, and he connects this with, you're going to suffer pain in the world.
[00:22:25] You're not going to win. So you have pain now, but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take that joy from you.
[00:22:38] Did it go away?
[00:22:41] That's okay. I looked at it and fixed it. It's going to come back on.
[00:22:48] No one will take that joy from you.
[00:22:52] I'll show up on that day.
[00:22:55] You will ask nothing of me.
[00:22:58] Very truly, I tell you. Oh, there's a city. We're going to open our bibles. Sorry, I usually have a covenant screen back there.
[00:23:07] Did the computer reboot or did I?
[00:23:10] Let's find out. Let's find out. All right. We are in John 16.
[00:23:17] We'll start in verse 25. He says, I have said these things to you in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures, and I will tell you plainly of the father. On that day, you will ask in my name. You will say to me. You won't ask in my name. I'm sorry. On that day, you will ask in my name. I do not say to you that. I will ask the father on your behalf, for the father himself feels connected to you, loves you. Filet owes you.
[00:23:52] For the father himself loves you. Because you have loved me. You've been in connection with me. You've been in relationship with me. Our relationship with Jesus doesn't just bring us salvation. It does bring us salvation. Our relationship with Jesus does. It doesn't just bring us forgiveness. It does bring us forgiveness. We do not only have hope because of the resurrection, we.
[00:24:20] When we have a relationship with Jesus, what also shows up is a deep, intimate connection with God.
[00:24:32] God loves you.
[00:24:38] God likes you.
[00:24:45] I'm certain there are parts of me that God wants to change.
[00:24:49] But at my core, I am his child.
[00:24:57] And whenever I am stressed and anxious and worry, as the first part of Philippians four talks about, he says, don't worry about those things, but instead consider or think about these things.
[00:25:12] What's true, what's honorable, what's righteous, what's pure, and whatever promotes relationship, a relational love, think about those things.
[00:25:32] What makes it better, what makes your love for others better.
[00:25:38] I'll tell you what helps me, and maybe this will help you, but it definitely helps me.
[00:25:44] I don't know your story.
[00:25:48] I don't know what you've been through. I don't know what you're going through right now.
[00:25:54] I don't know what is happening in your life. You know what? I don't even know all of the things that have happened in my life that affect me right now.
[00:26:07] You don't even pay attention to it.
[00:26:10] You grew up a certain way and you sort of just roll with it. You float down the lazy river of your life.
[00:26:20] So how am I supposed to know all of the details about your life that make you as wonderful and as difficult as we all are?
[00:26:35] How am I supposed to know?
[00:26:39] Now there's a good practice. It's difficult. I don't know if you've tried it, but listening helps.
[00:26:53] Listening, well, now everyone's guilty of this, but men in particular. I don't mean thinking of what you're going to say next while someone's talking. That doesn't count as listening.
[00:27:09] But hearing people's stories, the number of you, I've sat with you in hospital rooms and at tables to eat and heard your story.
[00:27:25] There's not a person who, upon hearing their life story or their just incidents, went from growing up or difficulties they had. There's not a person that I feel less connected to because of that.
[00:27:43] Our love grows deeper when we listen to people, people who struggle with things I've never even thought to struggle with.
[00:27:57] When we listen, we understand, to know people, to have connection with people. And I think it's deeply important that we have connections with people who sin in different ways than us, who are broken and hurt in different ways than me, who are tempted by and fight and give into different things that I am tempted by.
[00:28:30] And to have deep empathy and love and connection for what they're going through, to join them in that walk.
[00:28:46] That is the hard work of thinking about those things that are toward love, to step into someone else's shoes and see what it's like to be them.
[00:29:08] To have the same attitude as Christ Jesus, who, being in the very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be be grasped, but instead left his throne and became man.
[00:29:28] Humbled himself to become a man.
[00:29:32] Not just a man, but a man who died. And not just a man who died, but a man who died the death of a criminal.
[00:29:42] Because he humbled himself, God exalted him to the place that his name is above every name that the name of Jesus, every knee should bow. Our God is powerful and loving.
[00:30:01] Our God is bigger than we can understand, but decided to come be with us so he could understand.
[00:30:11] Our God is loving and strong and gracious and kind, all the things that we need to be when we're trying to have good relationships with one another. We learn from God and we in Jesus.
[00:30:41] So praise be to God that he loves us and likes us, and may we be the kind of people who do the hard work of loving and liking the world.
[00:31:00] I love them, but I don't gotta like them. I heard that a lot growing up, and I understand it. I understand the sentiment.
[00:31:13] But people will never believe the way God feels about them if they haven't felt it from us.
[00:31:21] They'll never believe the church stands with Jesus. If they experience Jesus in a way that feels connected and they show up at church and don't feel delight.
[00:31:34] We are the people who are living out the mission of God toward love, toward connection, toward relationship.
[00:31:50] We have got to feel a little discomfort along the way.
[00:31:56] We've got to listen to stories, stories of people who are different from us, who live and act differently than we do, hear their stories, love those people, be in relationship with people.
[00:32:16] And maybe then, once we've had the fileto, once we've had the community, we can speak confidently about the love God has for his people.
[00:32:30] It's.
[00:32:32] It's not from conversations around, you know, at the cashier place where you go up and you say, hello there, robot, which I do the self checkout. So I have to talk to robots, but say, hi, how are you today? And Rachel. Rachel says, don't talk to people people, because she knows me.
[00:32:55] But there also is a way I got to be friendly. You know, I've got a, hey, how are you? And they say, fine, okay, and we move on. It's not those conversations. It's conversations around tables that matter.
[00:33:11] It's conversations that can go deeper. We can have some weight to them so that they'll know that we believe passionately in the way of Jesus, and that the way of Jesus starts with all those things that lead to love, the difficult things that lead to love. That is lovely and that is pleasing, a pleasing aroma to our God. Let's pray.
[00:33:48] Father, thank you for your.
[00:33:52] For all the ways in which you love us.
[00:33:55] It's hard to pin down exactly how all of that works and how all the ways you've loved us. But, God, the fact that you want relationship with us that you sent your son, that Jesus established relationship for us.
[00:34:14] Father, we are so thankful for that relationship.
[00:34:19] God, help us to be overwhelmed by your love and affection and desire for relationship, help us to be overwhelmed so much that we demonstrate that to a world that is depressed, that is anxious, that is hurting, and is alone.
[00:34:42] It's in your son's holy name. We pray. Amen.
