Discovering True Wisdom and Purpose in Church

1. "None of us are here, I hope, to be entertained, right? None of us are here because we ran out of things to watch on Netflix, or because the game doesn't start for another two hours, right? There's a much higher purpose for why we come to a place like this. But the more I thought about, all the things wrong with the message, I realized if I were able to have a conversation with this man, if I were able to, and we were honest with each other, and we leveled with one another, I think we would get to a point where even he would admit that his issue with church doesn't really have anything to do with the entertainment value therein, right?" [01:22] (44 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


2. "We're called to be followers of Christ alone, right? And Paul went on in 1 Corinthians 1 to remind us that we're not called, the way that we were called was not through worldly wisdom. It wasn't through, entertainment, as that man in the truck spoke out against. It wasn't through convincing or passionate preaching, and it's interesting that Paul says that when he was in Corinth, he didn't preach with eloquence, because we have 13 letters that Paul wrote, memorialized for us for all eternity in the New Testament, and he's a pretty eloquent guy, right? He had that eloquence available to him. He's a deep, philosophical thinker, and yet he held away from doing that, from preaching that way, for a reason and for a purpose, because he said, as he said, he didn't want to empty the cross of its power in the minds of those who came to follow Christ because of his preaching." [04:07] (57 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


3. "God wants us to hear his truth, to receive his wisdom, and to learn to walk by the power of his spirit when we're in church. If you have your Bibles with me, why don't you open up? We're in 1 Corinthians 2, verses 6 through 7. The passage goes like this. What God has prepared for those who love him. so, again, we look in the beginning of our passage to that first word, yet, right? It's a clear transition. Paul is going to begin telling us what we're here for and what we're doing when we assemble together. He says, yet, when we are among the mature, we do impart wisdom. Among the mature, he's meaning among the church, right? Among the saved, among those who call themselves Christian, among those who call on Christ. And he says we do impart wisdom." [05:34] (60 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


4. "And so we know that hearing God's word preached, hearing God's word taught, reading it even for yourself has a purpose no matter which of these two groups you belong to, right? It's just a different purpose. So if you are saved, if you are here, if you are a believer, you're meant to be growing in spiritual wisdom. If you're not, and I would say if you're not and you're here and you know you're not, that's a good thing that you know that. But the goal is a little bit different, right? The goal for an unsaved person to hear the word and to hear the gospel is to respond to it. And there is a process there where there's information gathering and you have to learn about it, right? But at the same time, those who are not believers in Christ aren't here to grow in spiritual wisdom. Because it's not spiritual wisdom or spiritual truths that save us." [11:06] (59 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


5. "And so while we have the spirit available to us, while some of us have received that spirit, the Holy Spirit, from God through Christ, we still are made of flesh. And we still have our own earthly, worldly desires that we follow at times that lead us away from him. And so in thinking about how we treat the Bible and how we deal with it, especially when we come across things that maybe we don't even like or that we don't want to do, I was reminded of, you know, when we got to the wedding, when we got up to Wisconsin, we stayed in a hotel, and the hotel had the most wonderful thing that you could have as a parent, it had a breakfast buffet, right? So we show up in the morning, and, you know, it's just lined up with food. We have three pretty picky children. And so it's nice to be able to just, A, not make breakfast that morning, and B, be able to walk down that line and be like, All right, Aaron, you don't want eggs? You want seven pieces of bacon? That's fine. Take seven pieces of bacon. I'm going to have eight. You want a cookie with breakfast? That's fine, too. We're on vacation, right?" [24:52] (74 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


6. "God's Word is the same way, that when we come across things that strike at our core, whether we're reading God's Word, or I've had experiences when I'm hearing a sermon, I've told Pastor Tim at our Sugar Grove campus before, you know, there are hundreds of people, here, you don't have to talk just to me all the time, right? We all have experiences where we hear things that come out of God's Word, that speak truth right into our heart, and right into our mind, and we realize that we need to change, right? And so it becomes very important, you know, how are we doing this? How are we dealing with God's Word? This is the way that he has sent his truth to us, and we know that he's given it to us, not because he's sitting on his throne in heaven, thinking, Ha! There's all this stuff they want to do, and I am not letting them do it, right? He's doing it because he created us in his image. He knows better than any of us what human thriving looks like, and it's by following his will." [27:56] (62 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


7. "And so we see that when these things happen, when we receive these truths, when we learn to walk by the wisdom, when we receive that wisdom of God directly from him, from his Word, that he regenerates us, right? That's what having the mind of Christ means, that we have been regenerated. God came into our lives, gave us the Holy Spirit, he gave us the mind of Christ, he has changed us already, right? And yet there's still this division that we need to deal with, right? The natural person does not accept these things, but we have the mind of Christ. And so we see that it's not about information, right? It's not about knowing what God's Word says. You could have hundreds of passages memorized, right? I always think of the Pharisees, and I think of the Pharisees, they were kind of the biggest enemies of Christ throughout all of the Gospels in some ways, right? And yet to be a Pharisee in the time of Christ, I've heard it said that many of these Pharisees had the entire book of Psalms memorized. So these are men who knew God's Word, at least knew what it said, right?" [28:51] (78 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


8. "And so the question becomes, these truths that we hear, have they sunk into our heart? Have they sunk into our mind? Have we received, as the promises in this passage, the mind of Christ? Or are we just memorizing things? Are we just learning things? About Scripture, right? It's not about... It's... And in this passage from James, it's not even about that you say God is real and that you say Jesus is the Son of God, but who do you say he is to you, right? And how has that changed your life? And so the question becomes, if I'm a natural person, how do I become a spiritual person, right? And it's great to hear that there's, you know, the baptism class that was in the announcements today. I have the privilege of... I teach the baptism class at the Sugar Grove campus, and I've done that for about six or seven months now. And the really cool thing about when you teach that class is you meet, you know, several people every month, and the story of how they came to Christ is always different, right?" [30:32] (69 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


9. "And so I can't tell you what it would look like for you to make that transition. I remember when it happened to me, I was, you know, I lived... in some ways a very, I think, American Christian life. I was raised in a very loving home. I don't have very many memories from my childhood where we weren't all just like dying laughing. We were raised in a church. And yet, as I got older, I started to have these questions that came up, and I just didn't have... I don't think I had the courage to really voice those questions to anyone. And so I just lived with those questions, and those questions soon became doubtful. And later in life, that even became outright denial, right? I, at one point, considered myself an atheist. But God, in his goodness, he reached through that and revealed himself to me. And the way that he did that was just by revealing to me how much of a hypocrite I was, right? That in even though I called myself an atheist, I still found myself at times, as I talked about with the Tetons, just realizing how wonderful the world is, holding my first hand. And I was in the middle of my first child feeling like wanting to pray and to call out to God. Also, through some hard times in my life, when I lost a friend, I found myself again praying. And I thought, what a hypocrite. Calling myself an atheist, and here I am arguing with God, right? And so I started to consider that maybe I was wrong, right?" [31:14] (98 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


10. "And around that time, my wife and I started attending village. and we started hearing God's word preached in ways that I just hadn't heard before. And maybe it was more in my mindset or maybe it was the exegetical preaching that I was receiving. We also joined a small group soon after starting to attend church and we not only heard God's word, but we started living life alongside people who were desperately trying to live it out in their lives. And I saw God's word change and impact people and I wanted that for myself. And I still didn't really know how to do that, even though I knew I wanted it. And then one day we showed up to church and it was the Lord's Supper. And so Pastor Mario was preparing the congregation for communion and he asked us to consider where we would be on the day that Jesus died. Because he said, it's amazing when you think in scripture, Jesus had many followers and when he said, when he went and preached that there would be many people who followed him. And of course he had the apostles. And yet on the day that he died on the cross, only a very small few were there with him and many actually had run from him and left him. And so Pastor Mario asked us to consider this, not in a way to build ourselves up or to have an ego and say, oh, I know for certain I would have been at the foot of the cross, right? But instead just to consider it in a very real way and to ask ourselves, because if we could answer ourselves where we would have been on that day, it would help us to consider where we are now, right?" [33:46] (100 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)