We’re continuing our series on Strange Stories in the Bible. And I love this series because these extreme stories help us to understand things about God that we wouldn’t see otherwise. This week is about a guy named Jephthah from the first half of the Bible, back in the time of the judges. He is put in charge of the army of Israel to fight against the oppressive Ammonites… but he makes a mistake. He thinks that in order to ensure his victory against them, he has to make this strange contract with God.
This leads us to our question for the week; How can we protect ourselves from life’s biggest mistakes? The answer we get from our bible story this week is that we need to know God’s characters and his laws.
Our interactions with people are really important. It doesn’t just keep us from being lonely but talking, listening and communicating in general is a huge source of gaining information and truths. We’re in a really weird place and time with information and truth. We’re in a climate where everybody has their own truths and they’re supposed to be all equal. For example, if I thought the Earth was flat, you’re not allowed to offend my beliefs. Or, we’re in a time where truth is distorted and there are terms like “gaslighting” where people make others question their belief system and worldview. We’re in a time where we can completely ignore and CANCEL their career because of some dirt we found on them 20 years ago.
What do we do with this? Do we follow people blindly? Do we gaslight others? Do we cancel people? No. We should do what is most beneficial for us and God’s Kingdom. And that is to learn and gain wisdom from our interaction with others. Wisdom is rare, but Jesus in our passage today gives us the tools to gain wisdom from any interaction you have.
So our focus question today is,
HOW CAN WE GAIN WISDOM FROM OTHERS?
And our answer to that is that we gain wisdom from others by learning from their:
Truths
Mistakes
Today, we are starting a new sermon series, and it’s called Taking out the Trash. Over the next few weeks, we will be looking at Jesus confronting the religious leaders of his day and as it turns out, there’s a lot of wisdom to be found during this interaction. So we’re going to try our best to learn from Jesus’ words as hard as they are to hear, so that we can be effective in our lives and our God-given mission.
There are so many toxic cycles we fall into. We can have a toxic cycle with body image, where we have a bipolar relationship with food and fitness. We can fall into the same toxic dating patterns where I’m sure you see it with your friends but people date the same kind of terrible partners over and over again. And we don’t know why. There are cycles of unhealthy mindsets like rage quitting where you’d fall into the mentality of “screw it, everyone sucks, nothing matters. Nothing I do changes anything.” But of all these cycles, the greatest one that encompasses the rest is the cycle of sin.
Now what is sin? Sin is missing the mark. When you do something that is off-track with what life should be about. With that said, sin is not simply a rare mistake someone makes once in a while but rather, it can be defined as not living with perfect values that God has intended. Things like love, justice, mercy and faithfulness. Whenever our lives are off track with that, that’s sin. And you probably realize that nobody can do that perfectly. And so every Christian, no matter how mature they are, must constantly deal with this vicious cycle of sin. If we are arrogant or appethic to our sin, our rebellion, our toxic tendencies and cycles, it’s going to cost you a lot in the future.
And so that leads us to our question: How do we break out of a cycle of sin?
And the answer we see today in our passage is that we break out of our cycle of sin when we:
It’s mind-blowing, that the disciples of Jesus were face-to-face with the greatest event in history; the resurrection of Jesus where, HE IS RISEN and they were face-to-face with the Risen Jesus himself, and they were completely blind to it.
I think this story is in the Bible to teach us that we are often like these disciples; blind to the greatness, mission and presence of Jesus.
And so our focus question today is, How do we deal with Spiritual Blindness? Through our story today, we learn that we can deal with spiritual blindness through:
I think often times, when we are overwhelmed, it’s not this sudden thing and you have to figure out what to do right away. It’s usually something that slowly builds up. Like procrastinating projects and neglecting responsibilities for a long time… we let it gradually build up until we can’t handle it anymore.
This has been a common pattern and theme recently because I’ve been in contact with a lot of people who are just falling apart emotionally and mentally. More often than not, we’re stuck in these problems for a very long time.
But we find hope in the middle of overwhelming trouble when we 1. Go to God 2. Trust what God says
As we continue our series on mental health, it’s most natural to talk about community, because healthy communities and relationships make a huge difference. We need each other, because as we enjoy life together, support each other, speak truth to each other and really empower one another in the mission of God, our mental health is going to be much better than if we were to go at it alone.
So on that note, the question we’re looking at today is: How can we shape an amazing community?
In our context, how do we become the church that Jesus intended? What does that church even look like?
I think a wonderful description of such a church is found in Romans 12:15, where Paul says: “Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep.”
An authentic Christ-following healthy church is filled with members who can so deeply identify with one another that they can rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep. People who love their neighbours as much as they love themselves. Jesus told us this would be the mark of his disciple. When we get it right, we have a depth of love that is arguably greater than anywhere outside of Christian community.
We’re walking through two points today on how we can cultivate such a community;
Logic (Where we’re going to look at the why)
Empathy (Where we’re going to look at how it’s practically lived out)
Adultery is where people sleep around with others and betray their marriages.
We read this commandment, and we are so fast to just move on because it’s like the biggest “DUH” ever. No one gets into a serious relationship or a marriage and thinks, “Huhu, hey I’m going to cheat on this person.” But I think this needs a second look because the reality is.. It happens. And it happens so frequently too.
But there’s more to this commandment. To understand it properly, we need to understand what it’s doing in the Ten Commandments. As we’ve been going through the ten commandments, it’s more than just random rules. We see it as God claiming control and sovereignty over all dimensions of our lives. And in this commandment about adultery, the full meaning is that we need to give God control of our whole love life, not just the physical part, but also the emotions and the thoughts. That’s how Jesus reads this commandment.
Today, we’re talking about parents. We’re continuing our series on The Ten Commandments, and instead of just viewing these as seemingly random rules to memorize and follow, we’re looking at each one as a different dimension in life that God is claiming sovereignty and control over.
God’s showing us how to live in step with him with our WHOLE lives rather than just our Sunday mornings. Last week, David talked about how God stakes a claim over our time. And this week, we see how we can love and worship God through our family life.
I’ll be focusing on our relationship with our parents today, but you’ll find that a lot of these principles apply to other members of your family too.
Love is the difference between a great life and a terrible one. Between a blessed life and one full of regret. Love is all that God asks of us and as Christians, we are marked by it. Like that one song says, “They will know we are Christians by your love”. And yet, we come across many Christians and even moments where we ourselves are very unloving.
So our experience tells us that love is not automatic. Which brings us to our main Bible passage, because our passage teaches us how to grow in love. We’ll learn that if we want to grow in love:
1. We need to FIGHT 2. We need to DRINK.
It kind of just sounds like I’m describing a very toxic relationship but to be more precise: we fight the evil inside of us, and we drink what Apostle Peter calls spiritual milk.
Even if you are a strong Christian, it can feel like you’ve been forgotten, and thoughts start bubbling up in our minds like:
“If God is supposed to be here with me, then why are these bad things happening to me?” And we often subconsciously answer these questions by making up assumptions. Maybe God’s not real. Maybe He’s not in control. Or maybe he’s in control, but He’s not good, He doesn’t want what’s best for me. Or simply, God’s too busy with other things to waste time on me. And because of our misunderstanding of God, many Christians get bitter or become complacent in life.
Our story today reminds us that when these hard moments come, we are exactly where God wants us to be and we just need to continue believing in what he is doing and to work with him. But what IS God doing in difficult times?
