Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Good job.
[00:00:04] I want all of our kids, not just our seniors, but all of our kids. I'm not making you gonna do something. I'm just, in the future, here's what I want for you to primarily be able to parse what is serious and what is not.
[00:00:25] Like, there are things in life that are incredibly serious.
[00:00:31] There are things in life that need to be taken seriously.
[00:00:37] Going to class, especially having a, having good relationships and good friends, taking seriously the commitments that you've made.
[00:01:00] Are any of you the type of people that make commitments?
[00:01:04] Long way out. We'll be there.
[00:01:07] Then, day of, you're like, I kind of want to stay home.
[00:01:11] I found some of you. The rest of you aren't here today.
[00:01:19] They're taking seriously certain things. And then, and I think this is just as equally important.
[00:01:30] Being playful with things that aren't serious, you know, doing them well.
[00:01:38] But in the end, knowing the difference between what is important and worthy of our seriousness and what is worthy of our playfulness is an incredible wisdom to find early and to find at all.
[00:01:59] I mean, I go occasionally to churches and tell stories. You know, they'll say, hey, will you come be. Typically, they ask me to come be funny. That's the rule. That's what they want from me. I'll say, you know, I can talk about God, too. And they're like, no, don't do that.
[00:02:16] Be funny for a little bit. At our Valentine's Day banquet. That's what they want from me. And so I will go and I will do that. Do you know who is the most easy people to offend?
[00:02:33] Church folk.
[00:02:38] There are so many sacred golden cows in every church.
[00:02:49] They are all over the place, and you can't, you got to be careful, and you got to know which church values certain things. I was at the church recently, and I was talking to their education department, and I said, hey, what do you, what's the craziest thing a four year old has ever asked you? This woman had been teaching four year olds forever. I'm not going to repeat the question.
[00:03:19] It was a medical condition with a part of the body I didn't want to deal with at the moment.
[00:03:25] He asked that Bible class teacher what that medical condition was. And I said, well, do you have a puppet for that, children? It's just a funny, I thought it was funny to say.
[00:03:40] She said, oh, no, we don't do puppets here.
[00:03:45] She was dead serious. Like I'd offended the sensibility of the church. We're not a puppet church.
[00:03:52] I'm sorry, I should have assumed by the name on the sign.
[00:03:57] But there's a.
[00:03:59] They have all of these different things that are very sacred.
[00:04:03] But here's the problem. When everything is sacred, when you've uplifted your order of service to your carpet color, to the hymnals you use, no offense, but to the like, he loves hymnals.
[00:04:20] If you've uplifted everything to the level of, this is incredibly serious, guys.
[00:04:31] Nothing's serious.
[00:04:34] Nothing is sacred at that time, everything. At that point, when everything is uplifted to sacred, everything's normal.
[00:04:44] You have to decide what you're going to take seriously. The letter to the philippian church was written because two people wanted their points of view, their perspectives to be taken seriously. And Paul writes them and doesn't once say, you know who's right here?
[00:05:06] I'm Team Euodia.
[00:05:09] Paul didn't start the letter with hash syntyche.
[00:05:14] He said, he said, if you turn your attitudes to Jesus, if you look like Jesus won't solve all your problems, it will unite you in the end, but it won't solve all your problems. But what you got to remember is that your way of doing things is not the most important thing in your life. God's way of interacting with his people, interacting with you is the most important. And so Paul's coming to them and saying, let's remember to have the same attitude as Christ Jesus, who, being in the very nature of God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but instead humbled himself, became a man, not just a man, a man who died not just death, but death on a cross.
[00:06:12] But God exalted him. And at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow. Every knee will not bow at the name of Euodia or at the way of syntax, but there is a way of existing that takes seriously what God has to do, has to say what God feels about us and about the world, what God's mission is in this place. We have to take that seriously. And sometimes that means we have to knock over a couple of idols on our way to taking God seriously.
[00:06:51] You have to say, this is not as important as what God's doing.
[00:06:57] We can keep tradition, but it's not the mission of God.
[00:07:03] The mission of God is not to keep tradition.
[00:07:06] We can have our opinions. The mission of God is not your correctness.
[00:07:13] The mission of God is for the way of God to make its way into the world via or in cooperation with his kingdom, his people, his children, that we've not just joined salvation. We've become a team that's incredibly serious.
[00:07:35] But sometimes we take our own way, we take our own perspectives, our own, and we amp those up to, this is the most important thing. The thing I've got going.
[00:07:50] The most important thing is the thing I think is important.
[00:07:55] And I've wrestled all week, all week with how to visually show you guys what we probably look like when God sees us taking seriously ridiculous things.
[00:08:14] So a serious attitude about ridiculous things.
[00:08:19] And I couldn't find it until I walked in to the gathering room this morning and, Howard, can you put that picture on the board? Okay, so that's what we look like.
[00:08:36] Very, very serious. I set a timer, so it's just up there for 8 seconds.
[00:08:42] Yeah, that's. Yeah.
[00:08:46] But there's things we are. It is important for, you know, we take worry more seriously than rejoicing.
[00:08:58] Paul says, rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say, rejoice. Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not be anxious or worry about anything.
[00:09:10] You can go to the next slide, Howard.
[00:09:13] But in everything, by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be known to God. Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What you're supposed to dwell on is that which is worthy of joy, that which is worthy, not of your anxiety, but it's important.
[00:09:45] The second one he uses where he says, whatever is. He says, whatever is true, whatever is honorable. Okay, so that word honorable is used three times in the New Testament. It's used here, and then it's used twice when describing deacons. And it's translated in most translations as serious.
[00:10:01] But that's not serious and honorable. Don't quite get the word.
[00:10:10] If you go back to Homer, the philosopher, not the Simpsons, if you go back to philosopher writer, Homer uses this term, his first term person, to use this in a sense of, like, seeing something. And the word essentially means to step back to being knocked backwards a bit. We say, I was taken aback.
[00:10:41] It's a similar idea.
[00:10:44] And the root of this word, the greek word here is used in acts 16, the passage that lily read. We can put that on the screen. I want to show you where it's used. On the Sabbath day, we went outside the gate by the river where we supposed there was a place of prayer, and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God. Okay. Worshiper. Here is an odd phrase.
[00:11:17] Okay? So there's this group of people named. They don't have a name. They just. They were called things. They didn't call themselves this. So let me tell you how it worked. Let's imagine you're a gentile.
[00:11:30] Most of you, it's pretty easy.
[00:11:34] You're a gentile, not a jew. But you show up to listen to somebody talk about God, and it's a rabbi or a prophet, maybe you went out into the desert and heard John the Baptist.
[00:11:49] John the Baptist would say, God is the only God. Would tell the story of God. And everyone would say, oh, that's great. And then some people would go. Would fully convert.
[00:12:05] They call them proselytes.
[00:12:08] But women and some men couldn't go through procedures. They could not be circumcised to be fully converted to Judaism. And so they called them God fearers.
[00:12:27] And this word here is the word used for fearing God. The people who, when they saw God, took a step back when they see something that's worthy of our, worthy of our praise, worthy of our honor and our worship.
[00:12:49] It took them aback.
[00:12:51] They are a group of people who didn't. Weren't able to be circumcised or didn't and. But they were called God fearers, or sometimes it's translated as worshippers of God. She was a person who, when she saw God, was taken aback.
[00:13:10] And whenever Paul says, you guys need the thing, you need to dwell on the thing that needs to be in your mind if you want to be free from anxiety, from worry, if you want to be free from a certain.
[00:13:22] Some of the silliness that we get caught up in as christians, just absolute silliness.
[00:13:35] We had a man pray for the cup first. I know. Hold on.
[00:13:44] Pray for the cup first. This is one of my earliest memories is this man getting up, and it was time for communion, and he said, all right, here's the cup. And he started passing out the trays for the cup first. Y'all hear me? How serious is.
[00:14:01] The men got the trays for the cups, and then being bamboozled by this swindler, they delivered the cups, and we took the cup first.
[00:14:16] We were primarily a church that took the bread first. I don't know how you grew up.
[00:14:24] They passed those out and they went on their way, and then they got back and they realized, we don't have any cups to pray. So they decided to do the bread, and they did the bread that night.
[00:14:45] I vaguely remember the mess up the out of order communion.
[00:14:52] But that night, that man came forward and repented.
[00:14:57] It ached him.
[00:15:02] Taking our logistics seriously often leads us to not take seriously the abundant grace God has offered us.
[00:15:18] Taking our traditions and our legalism seriously often keeps us from focusing on the fact that I am free in God.
[00:15:28] God loves me more than anybody or anywhere.
[00:15:35] Like, if I can keep in my mind, if I can consider the love of God and be taken aback regularly, if I can be thrown off my normalcy because of the just immeasurable grace of God, what peace might I have in that moment?
[00:16:02] The things that work us up out there in the world at Target.
[00:16:13] Like, guys, I was in line at a Starbucks, and a lady at Starbucks wanted.
[00:16:28] She wanted, like a. It was like a croissant thing that they didn't have. It was somebody else's meal. When I worked at McDonald's, that happened a lot. They would. They would show up and they would say, we want french toast sticks. And I would say, we don't have french toast sticks. That's burger king, not McDonald's.
[00:16:51] And they would say, actually, I had one guy say, well, I thought. I thought, here, you could have it your way. I said, no, sir, that's also Burger King.
[00:17:00] I'm sorry to break the news to you, but this woman wanted a thing. It was like a. She wanted a fruit. Fruit croissant or something. That was sausage croissant. And the lady was like, we don't sell those. The woman was also on her phone. She's like. She's saying, they don't sell them. Like, not. They don't sell them. Do you hear that? She's saying, this liar.
[00:17:31] This young lady say. She says, they don't sell them.
[00:17:37] So she said, well, they don't sell them. Well, I won't. I want one anyway. Like, she wanted one anyway. Took forever.
[00:17:45] Well, my nature is that when I'm next in line to go, can I have a sausage croissant, please? Like, just to.
[00:17:51] And I did.
[00:17:54] And that woman, the woman taking her order went from anxiety, like, oh, no, not again.
[00:18:01] To when she realized I was joking. She was like, oh, yeah, that's ridiculous.
[00:18:09] And I shouldn't feel anxiety about it. Like, go from, like, anxiety to playful.
[00:18:15] Most of the time. That's where we need to go. But we also take very serious things. Not very serious at all.
[00:18:23] The unity of the church, the grace of God, the command to love, the command to lose in scripture.
[00:18:36] We don't take that very seriously.
[00:18:39] It feels like we've got our priorities flipped, doesn't it?
[00:18:43] We are not regularly taken aback by the grace and power and might of God, the God who created all that. We see the things that actually do take our breath away, and they should.
[00:18:59] The expansive sky, the eclipse a couple of weeks ago. Just beautiful stuff that's happening all around us. We shouldn't be cynical about fantastic things and we shouldn't be serious about mundane things.
[00:19:21] We've got our priorities flip.
[00:19:24] We are called to consider by Paul. Paul says, listen, if y'all are in all these arguments, take time to consider what's true and consider what takes your breath away.
[00:19:37] Consider what should be taken seriously. Consider what makes you take a step back.
[00:19:45] There are very serious things in life and they deserve serious attention.
[00:19:55] But there are also some things that we give way too much serious attention to, and they're pretty laughable.
[00:20:07] If we can find teenagers, seniors, seniors and everyone in between.
[00:20:22] If we can find the wisdom that the spirit provides to see clearly what is serious and to see clearly what's just mundane.
[00:20:38] And never get the too confused.
[00:20:43] Never be taken aback by things that you should be playful with and never take for granted the God who has poured so much love and grace onto us, shown us so much mercy and brought us a community.
[00:21:06] Never get the fear of God out of our minds. By that, I don't mean like, I'm afraid of God.
[00:21:13] I was afraid of dogs when I was a kid.
[00:21:17] I didn't want them to jump on me or murder me or whatever.
[00:21:23] I didn't know what they would do if they jumped on me. I didn't like it. I'd scurry back up in the truck when a dog would come running.
[00:21:31] I'm not afraid of dogs existing. Do you know that? Like, I'm not afraid of, like, dogs. Like, being here.
[00:21:38] I'm not afraid of dogs now, but I was afraid of what they might do to me.
[00:21:50] Same thing for heights. People who are afraid of heights aren't also afraid of wits.
[00:21:58] Like, it's just a dimension.
[00:22:00] What you're afraid of is the capacity of the height.
[00:22:04] You are aware that you are high up and that that could change quickly.
[00:22:13] And you don't want it to change quickly. You want it, you want to stay, but you just don't. I'm afraid of heights. You're afraid of falling.
[00:22:23] And that's also a legitimate fear.
[00:22:28] But when we fear God, it's the same principle. It's not with heights and dogs or bees. You're just kind of like, I'm afraid of what they're capable of.
[00:22:44] I understand what they are capable of. And I want that to be in the front of my mind.
[00:22:52] But when we fear God, it's not a fear of God. It's we are taken aback by what God is capable of.
[00:23:02] And God is capable of love. To the point where we're just sometimes a little confused by the people he loves.
[00:23:12] Grace. To the point where we think maybe he shouldn't have shown them that grace, mercy. To the point that sometimes we're not even sure why we deserve it and we don't. But God loves us.
[00:23:27] And when we fear God, it's not that we think we're nervous when he's around. We respect what God is capable of and we take it seriously. Seriously.
[00:23:40] We are aware of what God can do and he does great things.
[00:23:47] If we could sharpen our mind and consider in moments of anxiety and consider in moments of difficulty, of division, if we can consider things that are true and things that just sort of make us take a step back and worship and honor, they're worthy of being taken seriously.
[00:24:23] If we could figure out what is what and where to put our focus, I think we'll be ahead of a lot of people.
[00:24:33] Ahead of a lot of our have matured further than we can imagine. And teenagers, if you can do that now, what a jumpstart.
[00:24:49] Seniors, how many of you took senior citizens, it took you longer than 18 to figure out what was honorable, what was serious, what was worth taking a step back for.
[00:25:05] And another things you started you were very worried about. But then in the end you look back and think, well, that wasn't even worth worrying.
[00:25:13] Maybe I should have considered what was actual, what was true and what is worth taking a step back and honoring.
[00:25:23] So may we honor God this week, honor God and consider this magnificent, worthy God that we serve and worship.
[00:25:36] And may it mundane, may we not give it strength it doesn't have.
[00:25:45] Let's pray together.
[00:25:48] Our father, we are so thankful for your presence in this place.
[00:25:55] God, I love how different we all are in thought and story and background, but here we are together.
[00:26:09] May we bring all of our anxieties to you.
[00:26:13] And may the unity and forgiveness and hope you provide be something that we can celebrate together and take seriously together.
[00:26:29] Give us wisdom to see what is worthy of our praise and honor and reflection and what we can dismiss as the mundane and the unimportant.
[00:26:49] Maybe not give up those things, but just not take them.
[00:26:53] Give them as much credit as we give you.
[00:26:58] Conquer us, God.
[00:27:02] And may we take the power of your spirit and go into this world in your name.
[00:27:09] It's in your son's holy name, we pray. Amen. Let's stand it.
