The Experience Community
2 Corinthians - Chapter 11 (M. Lee 6-30-24)
How's it going, everybody? It's good to see you guys. For those of you who I've met, my name is Mike. I'm one of the pastors here. It's great to be here with you guys as we continue through the book of 2 Corinthians. So, seven years ago when my wife and I, we were actually attending a church in West Nashville, and my youngest daughter, Chandler, and her then fiance, now husband, Austin, has started attending here. And we were at lunch one day with them and they said, "Hey, you know, my daughter, Chandler," said, "Dad, you and Mom need to come check out the experience. You'll love Cory. He teaches through books of the Bible, and you'll love the music and everything." And it was in the summertime, so my wife and I, you know, prayed about everything. So, we came and we came actually to the nine at that time, sat right over here. And so, it was simple worship. So, we heard, you know, Kyle do his thing. That's, you know, really cool. He amitched to that today. And then, when it was time for the person to get it, it wasn't Cory, it was another one of our pastors. And so, afterwards, we went to lunch with Chandler and Austin and Chandler said, "Now, you're going to come again, right?" And I said, "Yeah, yeah." So, for those of you who thought you were going to be here in Cory, you're going to come again, right? Yeah, so, yeah, so what we do is we go through books of the Bible and we're currently in second Corinthians. We're coming to the end of it, actually. We've only got this week and then two more weeks of it. And last week, Pastor Greg did an amazing job of taking us through chapter 10 of second Corinthians. And one of the things that we see in chapter 10 is that Paul takes a turn in what he's talking about to the Corinthians because what has happened is a group of guys have come in. He's going to call them sarcastically super apostles. And these guys have come in after Paul is left. And they've begun to kind of tear down who Jesus is, tear down what the gospel is about. And they do it in the spirit of pride, so with the wrong motives. And so, what we see in chapters 10, 11, and even into chapter 12 next week, we're going to see Paul kind of go toe to toe with these super apostles and kind of go after their theology and go after their motives behind why they want to be recognized by the church at Corinth. And so, in chapter 10, Greg kind of focused in on the idea of what's the evidence of our lives that we are pursuing Christ, that we're following him. And are we doing it to be known by people? Or are we doing it for an eternal reward? And one of the things I really liked that Greg said and reminded us of is this idea that the evidence that we produce should come not from behavior modification of I'm just going to try harder and do better and that kind of thing, but it comes from a renewed mind and a changed heart. It comes from being changed by Jesus Christ so that ultimately our behaviors are a inside out response to how we should be living. And then he asked them, basically that last question was again, what are we going to do for Jesus? How are we going to live for him? What are we going to do in our life? So again, Paul is going to hit several of those same kind of things in this week's lesson. As we think about being humble, as humble Christians, are we pursuing Jesus? And are we boasting in him and not in ourselves? Okay, are we making much of Jesus and less of ourselves? So that's kind of where we're going to be focusing in on today. When you came in, you should got a notes handout. It's going to have pretty much everything I'm going to say. If you have the experience community app downloaded, click on there, click on sermon notes. It'll have both the scriptures as well as the notes. And then everything will be up on the screens as well as we kind of dive into chapter 12 today. So again, really glad you guys are here and we look forward to seeing where God takes us this morning. So let's pray together and then we'll just dive right on in. Our Father, we are grateful for this day. We are grateful for the joy that we have to sing praises to your name and now to study your word. We pray for wisdom as we teach Lord that you will fill us with your spirit. Give us wisdom through your spirit to be able to understand and know your word better so that we might be more obedient to it so that we might live for you and give you glory in everything we do. We're grateful for the other churches in our city. They are meeting today, bless them, Father. As they preach the gospel, fill them. We pray, Father, for our other communities that we have churches in, Shebavol, Cannon County, and Telahoma, bless those campuses as well as the other churches in those areas. Thank you for the nonprofits like Possibility Place that we get to support, so grateful for that. We ask now, Father, that you would just be in this place in a very powerful way and we ask that you'll do it for your glory alone and we are grateful that we can pray all of this in Jesus' name, amen. All right, so chapter 11, beginning there in verse one, this is what Paul writes. "I wish you would put up with a little foolishness from me. "Yes, do put up with me, for I am jealous for you "with a godly jealousy because I have promised you "in marriage to one husband to present a pure virgin to Christ." But I fear that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your minds may be seduced from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if a person comes and preaches another Jesus whom we did not preach, or you receive a different spirit which you had not received, or a different gospel which you had not accepted, you put up with it splendidly. So Paul is telling people don't boast but then he begins to boast and he says, "I know it's foolish and the foolishness is this," is that when you begin to boast, you're boasting usually about yourself and not about other people. So it seems foolish for Paul to boast but what happens is when the gospel of Jesus Christ or Jesus himself is questioned and they question that through Paul's preaching, when Paul is backed up into that corner where you're saying, "I'm teaching a wrong Jesus," or "I'm teaching a wrong gospel," and you're gonna put me down before doing that, I'm gonna push back on that, and I will begin to boast. So you question his integrity, you question his ministry, Paul's gonna come back at you and that's what he does with these guys. But he does it out of love, he does it out of love for Jesus, out of love for the gospel, but most of all love for the people because he doesn't want them to be turned away from a true gospel. And so in Paul's time, when a father brought his bride, his daughter to be married to the groom, one of the greatest joys of that father was to present a pure virgin. But what Paul is using this marriage metaphor, he says, "I am afraid that you guys are becoming impure "as I prepare you for your groom Jesus "because you're turning away from those teachings "that I have given you, the true teachings "of the gospel of Jesus, and you're starting to follow "false teachers and false teachings." So one of the things that we learn from that is that we've got to be careful that we don't become impure in our understanding of the gospel by not knowing the majors of our faith. We've got to have a good understanding of what it is we believe and what we call majors. If you ever attend a next class, you know that one of the things that Corey started this church based on was that we would major on majors and minor on minors. So we're about to be in the book of Revelation. There's a lot of majors in that, but there's a lot of minors and most people argue over the minors. That's where they get all caught up over. Well, the majors though are those things that if you cease to believe these things, you probably are not much of a Christian. You're not in that Christian faith in what we would say the Bible teaches. Things like that Jesus is God the Son, the second person of the Trinity. Things like you got to believe that Jesus is the only way to heaven. He's the only name that can save. Those are things that are majors that if you press away from that, you're really moving away from traditional teachings of the scripture. So we've got to know the priorities of our life through the majors that the scripture teaches. And Paul also reminds us of what happened in the garden, how we got into this mess, right? With the seduction of Eve to the serpent. In other words, when the serpent came Satan, he began to question God's word, has God really said? By the way, that's what he still does today. He tries to get us to question the reality and the truth of this word. But Eve listened to those questions and began to turn away from the teachings of the Father. And so this deception continues, Paul says today through people who teach wrongly about who Jesus is, people who teach wrongly about what the gospel is, how we are saved. And they do it again with the wrong spirit, either to boast in of themselves or to purposefully turn people away from the truth. So the question is again, can we discern truth from distortions? Do we know this word well enough that when we are listening to a teacher, we know that maybe they're not saying things that line up with this word. My wife was a bank teller for a lot of years and she counted a lot of money and she handled money a lot. And one of the things that she learned there was when you were counting money, if you felt something that felt weird, you would set that bill aside and continue counting. And what the idea was, is that the more you handled the real thing, it was a lot easier to detect the false things. And so the question for us, are we handling these real things of the scripture enough that if we heard a teacher, a podcast, read a book that had something that was a little off, it'd be like handling that money, hey, we need to set that aside and look at that a little more because that just didn't feel right. So we need to be able to discern truth from distortions. And Paul says that you Corinthians, and he's saying this sarcastically, you put up with these false teachers and teachings splendidly. That's not a thing you want to be known as, right? That you put up with that stuff splendidly. But he says again, as the serpent questioned God's word, so these false teachers are questioning Paul's teachings. And again, that's what gets Paul all up in arms and he's going to push back against that because even though these people are cunning and even though they are doing everything they can to dilute the truth, Paul is going to protect his flock and his sheep. And just as an aside kind of a thing when we think about false teachers, most false teachers don't start off with a sledgehammer coming in and just saying, there's no way Jesus was God and you can believe anything you want. They don't start that way. Most of them start with a chisel and just say little distortions, right? This is why again, we can get enamored with the teacher when we hear them the first time and go, oh my goodness, they were so amazing, whatever. But where you really learn the faithfulness of the teachers over time, not just in one book, not just in one lesson, we need to listen to a long list of books or a long list of talks. And so we need to make sure that we are not giving in to these chipping away at the faith, okay? So let's continue on to the next part. Verse five, now I consider myself in no way inferior to these super apostles. So that's his sarcastic name for these men that these false teachers. Even if I am untrained in public speaking, I am certainly not untrained in knowledge. Indeed, we have in every way made that clear to you in everything. Or did I commit a sin by humbling myself so that you might be exalted because I preach the gospel of God to you free of charge? I robbed other churches by taking pay from them to minister to you. When I was present with you and in need, I did not burden anyone since the brothers who came from Macedonia supplied my needs. I have kept myself and will keep myself from burdening you in any way. As the truth of Christ is in me, this boasting of mine will not be stopped in the regions of Achaia or Achaia. Why? Because I don't love you, God knows I do, but I will continue to do what I am doing in order to deny an opportunity to those who want to be regarded as our equals and what they boast about. For such people are false apostles, deceitful workers, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder for Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no great surprise if his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will be according to their works. So these false apostles, part of the way they try to lift themselves up is by tearing Paul down and they tore him down both physically by his physical appearance, as well as by his pastoral presence. So physically, we have talked about this, but Paul probably was not an imposing figure. In fact, we're going to read a little bit about the sufferings he's been through. So his body bore the marks of all the suffering that he had been exposed to in serving Christ. His body was probably hunched over, he probably shuffled. He may not have had a very strong speaking voice. His hands probably were gnarled from all the broken bones. He probably was not someone you look at and go, "Oh man, there's someone that's got power and majesty." He probably looked weak and non-imposing, but they also pointed out his pastoral deficiencies, especially in his speaking. They said Paul was not one who was gifted in rhetoric, which was the speaking style of that time. And so they said, "Paul doesn't speak well, "he doesn't look good, he is just not much of a pastor at all "and not nearly as good as us." But what happened was is that there was a culture which I think we still live in where we elevate style over substance. And we have to be careful about that because truth is always more important than style, right? We have to understand that. So we live in a culture that loves to be entertained with silly stuff. And we often want that in church. And so I would rather listen to someone speak for 45 minutes who is a little boring than someone who told the truth, right? Then to speak to someone who could make me laugh, tell stories, entertaining, but it's fluff. I mean, for instance, that's like cotton candy. You know, cotton candy's great for about 30 seconds and then you forget what you had. And that's what a lot of churches and a lot of people in Christian culture, they want, they want that silly entertaining thing and they substitute style for truth. Let's never be that kind of people, okay? So again, Paul was also a person who contrasted himself with these super apostles by not taking a salary from the church. Now again, in 1 Corinthians, in chapter nine, he is not opposed to pastors making their living from the gospel. So he's okay with that. But in the case of Corinth, these super apostles were greedy men who kind of milked the people of Corinth for salaries. And Paul wanted to contrast himself with that. So instead of taking a salary from the Corinthians, he chose to take a salary from other churches who supported him so that he could never say, I was like the super apostles taking money from you guys. So what Paul did is he laid aside a preference. He said, you know, I know I have the preference where I could take this money from you, but I am laying that aside so it will not affect the gospel, which is something for us to remember that we sometimes need to lay aside our preferences for the good of others because here's the thing. In most churches, I think I've been in ministry for right at 40 years, okay? And so I've seen a lot of things happen in churches. Most churches have breakups, not over theology, but over preferences. And what a preference is is where my desires are more important than your desires and I'm gonna fight for my stuff and not your stuff. The problem is, is if everybody likes my preferences and goes my way, everything's great. But it says it, have you ever found this out? Other people have preferences too. And they don't always agree with mine and then what happens? Conflict. And that's pride welling up. And Paul says, look, I could take a salary, I'm not gonna do that because I don't wanna boast in you giving me money nor do I wanna be associated with those false teachers and stuff. So he's not gonna do that. And then he says something that is pretty controversial and pretty pointed. He says these super apostles weren't simply confused about what they were teaching. He says they were demonically motivated by what they taught. Now that's strong words, isn't it? He says, just a Satan appears as an angel of light, so these teachers appear as messengers of righteousness, but they are not. That's an incredibly powerful statement, but he says this because these men are intentionally deceitful in the message that they are proclaiming. And it says too that they wanted to be equal with Paul. Now you guys understand this, right? There was only one Paul. There was only one man who was on the road to Damascus. Jesus appears to him, knocks him off his horse, blinds him, takes him to Damascus, gives him his sight back, but also says now you're gonna go to the Gentiles and be the apostle to those people. There was only one Paul, only one story like Paul's. And so there was a lot of jealousy on the midst of these super apostles. They wanted to be like Paul, so they tried to elevate themselves and Paul said, "You can't do that because there's only one in me." And he wasn't boasting in that, that was just a reality. Now I wanna be really, really clear here. Not every false teacher is necessarily demonic. They may be confused, they may not be, have all the knowledge they need so they may be teaching some things wrongly at first. So I'm not saying every false teaching is demonic, but here's why I can promise you, the source of every wrong teaching is demonic because Satan opposes the things of God and wants to still kill and destroy. So whenever we begin to hear false teaching, we need to be careful because there is always behind things that oppose Jesus, a demonic desire to make him lower and to elevate confusion and elevate other things that do not line up with the gospel. And then Paul says also this about the super apostles that they're gonna reap what they sow. They are sowing deceit, they are sowing dispute with the gospel. They're sowing opposition to the real Jesus and the real gospel. They're sowing all of this stuff. And if they don't repent, they're gonna reap what they sow and it's gonna be eternal separation from the Lord. Which tells you how serious this is. We're not playing games when we talk about Jesus. We're not playing games when we talk about the gospel. This is eternally serious things, which begs the question for all of us, doesn't it, what are we sowing in our lives? And one day, what will we reap? Are we unashamedly proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ? Not worried about what people think about us or are we afraid of what people think so that we shrink back from teaching the real gospel. Listen, we live in a world again that we're afraid to lay out the demands of the gospel that says you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow Jesus. It's not your way, it's his way. It's not your desires, it's his desires. And most of us cling to so many things we don't want to let go of things to follow Christ. And even when we tell others about Jesus, it's almost like a reverse country song. Oh, if you come to Jesus, you'll get out of jail and your girlfriend or boyfriend will come back to you and your dog will be resurrected and all this stuff. But some of us have been walking this world a long time. Following Jesus is not a guaranteed the easy street, is it? In fact, sometimes following Jesus costs us more than we ever thought it would. We need to make sure we're sowing the true gospel so we can reap true conversions, okay? Next part, verse 16. Paul says, "I repeat, let no one consider me a fool, but if you do at least accept me as a fool so that I can also boast a little. What I am saying in this matter of boasting, I don't speak as the Lord would, but as it were foolishly. Since many boasts according to the flesh, I will also boast for you being so wise, gladly put up with fools. In fact, you put up with it if someone enslaves you, if someone exploits you, if someone takes advantage of you, if someone is arrogant towards you, if someone slaps you in the face. I say this to our shame, we have been too weak for that." So what in the world's going on here? Well, again, Paul says, "Look, I know boasting is foolish because there's only one we should compare ourselves to and it's Jesus Christ and we all fall short of Him. And when we compare ourselves with others, we always come out looking better than others, don't we? 'Cause I can always pick someone who's worse off than me and make myself look better." But Paul says, "These super apostles were boasting in themselves." And so Paul says, "Okay, if they're gonna be foolish and do that, for the sake of the gospel and the sake of Christ, I'm gonna boast as well. But I'm not gonna do it so I can compare myself to these super apostles. I'm gonna do it so I can contrast myself with them." Which again, Greg hit this last week, he did a great job. If you didn't hear that lesson, please go back and listen to it. This idea of why do we boast anyway as if we are someone's and did something ourselves? In fact, Paul says in 1 Corinthians chapter four, verse seven, that what do you have that you didn't receive? What do you have that you didn't receive? And you said, "Well, you know, and you start doing things, you know, me, me, me." Like, "Hey, I worked for that car. I earned that money and so I could go buy that car. I did that." Okay, where did you get the money? Well, my boss paid it to me. Okay, so you were dependent on someone to give you money. Doesn't that mean you received it? Yeah, but I earned it. Okay, well, how did you earn it? Hard work. How were you able to do hard work? Well, you know, I got up every morning. What air did you make to breathe so that you could get up every morning, right? What brain did you put in your head? Everything you have, eventually, if you keep going back, it eventually ends with God. He's the source of everything. So why do we boast? These are super apostles. They were boasting out all the things they were doing and less about who Jesus is and what he had done for them. And so Paul says, I'm not gonna do that, but here's what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna point out that these super apostles are incredibly overbearing in their way they treat the Corinthians. I mean, notice what he says about these and there's no hyperbole there. What he says about these super apostles that they were abusive spiritually, they're abusive emotionally and psychologically, and they were even abusive physically. They would actually slap some of the Corinthians. Now, I know when someone's sitting in your seat, you wish you could do that here too, but we don't do that, right? We don't abuse people. Why? Because we don't want to do anything that would take people away from the beautiful picture of who Jesus is. This is our goal. So again, Paul says, look, you may call me weak, but I'm too weak to treat people that way. Which points out the fact that again, when we live for Christ, we live in an upside down kingdom that looks weird towards our culture. Culture doesn't get us. They don't get that you would take an hour and a half of your day and come and hang out at a place. Listen to some music and sing and listen to a God talk for 45 minutes and then eat a little cracker, drink a little juice and call it worship. They don't get that. Why? Because this kingdom that we follow and the king that we serve, he's not like this culture. But we need to be free to live that way so that we can point people to a better way of living. Because heaven, we found out that what the culture offers is not very satisfying at all. And we need to offer an alternative that points people to the real stuff that comes with Christ. All right, last part, it's a little longer, so just bear with me. But in whatever anyone dares to boast, I am talking foolishly, I also dare. Are they Hebrews, so am I. Are they Israelites, so am I. Are they the descendants of Abraham, so am I. Are they servants of Christ? I'm talking like a mad man. I'm a better one with far more labors, many more imprisonment, far worse beatings, many times near death. Five times I received the 40 lashes minus one from the Jews. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning, three times I was shipwrecked. I've spent a night and a day in the open sea. On frequent journeys, I faced dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my own people, dangers from Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers at sea and dangers among false brothers. Toil and hardship, many sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, often without food, cold and without clothing. Not to mention other things there is the daily pressure on me, my concern for all the churches. Who is weak and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble and I do not burn within dignity? If boasting is necessary, I will boast about my weaknesses. The God and Father of the Lord Jesus, whose bless forever knows I'm not lying. In Damascus, a ruler under King Aratus guarded the city of Damascus in order to arrest me, so I was let down in a basket through a window in the wall and escaped from his hands. So Paul is going to boast and he's going to boast first in something that you expect him to boast in his lineage, but then he's going to boast in an unexpected way in his weaknesses. But he starts off boasting in his lineage. I'm a Hebrew of Hebrews of Abraham, a descendant of Abraham. All of these things, if you want to read more about that, you can go to Philippians 3 where Paul says, you know, on the eighth day I was circumcised, tribe of Benjamin, a Pharisee of Pharisees, he had an amazing resume. But what Paul says even in Philippians 3 is that, well, I once thought was so important in my lineage, I consider that nothing compared to knowing Jesus. Which is just as a reminder for us, why do we boast in our lineage? Have you ever thought about that? You boast about like, you know, hey, almost 75th generation Rutherford County in. As if you had a choice in the matter, right? You know, but here's the thing, we boast in our ethnic background. We boast in our socioeconomic situation. We boast, we boast in all things that are all temporary. If we're going to boast, we boast in God because he's eternal, if we boast in stuff that's temporary, all it is is pride inducing. And we need to live our lives and look at ourselves with humility and with gratefulness for the gifts that we receive, because again, what do you have that you didn't receive, including your lineage? So Paul says, I'm going to boast it, but ultimately, I'm going to say that's worth nothing compared to knowing Jesus. So the super apostles also boasted in their service to the Lord. So they pulled out their resume and they said, look at all of our accomplishments. Look at all of our achievements. We are some bodies. So Paul unrolls his and his is weaknesses and sufferings. And he says, I would much rather glory in those things than glory and what these super apostles say is important because the super apostles said that is disqualifying. Obviously, God doesn't love you because God wants you to be prosperous and to have success and he wants you to have money and he wants you to have health and he wants you to have all of these things. And we know that that is a lie from the pit of hell because Jesus himself said, in this word, you're going to have trouble. That doesn't come from just the world. That comes from the lips of our Savior, but he says this, but I leave you my peace and I will be with you no matter what you go through. Now that is the resume that Paul is glad to boast in, which is why our culture again doesn't get us. When I was growing up and coming into ministry in the 80s and 90s, it used to be that when you would tell someone about the gospel, you would start off with this phrase, hey, God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life and what most people meant when they said a wonderful plan for your life, they meant right now. Now, the gift that we receive at salvation is eternal life, which means that there's a better day coming, okay? So there was a book that was written several years ago that's called Your Best Life Now. And when I saw the title on that, my thought was this, if this is my best life now, I wanna refund, right? And again, when we come to faith in Jesus Christ, it doesn't mean easy streets and all that. It means that it's gonna be suffering and the world doesn't get how we can have faith in the midst of someone having cancer. How can you be cheerful when you've been diagnosed with a disease that could, that may kill you? Well, it's because this is not ultimately my home, my home is yet to come and it's better than you can ever hope for or imagine. And so we are counter-cultural when we live and boast in weakness, not in strength. So Paul talks about the physical torments he went through, that list they read. I talked for 2 Corinthians chapter four a few weeks ago and you may remember in that Paul talks about the momentary light afflictions that he faced. And this is what he was talking about. Now, when you read that list, none of it seems momentary nor light, but Paul says, "Hey, I'm okay with that." But then he says something in verse 28, look at it again. He says, "Not to mention other things, "there is the daily pressure on me, "my concern for all the churches." Yeah, the physical torments were hard, but you know what caused him greater concern and put more stress on his life was how he cared for his people. Why? He knew that the suffering was temporary, but the souls of the people he loved were for eternity. And he thought about that every day because he did not want them to turn away from the gospel. He wanted them to stay firm in the gospel. Which reminds us of this, the enormity of the work that we do is so heavy, but so important that it makes all the silly distractions of this world pale in comparison, doesn't it? Guys, you know we live in a silly world that does a lot of silly things for a lot of silly likes and hearts and thumbs up just so they can feel good about themselves. And all it does is it leaves them empty. The bad thing is, is that we as people who say we love Jesus and want people to go to heaven with us, we can get so caught up with some of the silliness that we forget the way to what we're supposed to be about. That we're supposed to be the ones also going out and telling people about Jesus and that there's hope in Christ and that you can find peace and security and you can know what it feels like to be forgiven and to have hope. We've got to make sure that we don't turn from the serious to the silly in such a way that we no longer love what's most important and that will last for eternity. Do you see the seriousness of what it means to follow Christ and are you undistracted by the things that would tug at you to keep you distracted from that? So Paul wants one thing and one thing only to make Jesus look supreme. That's all he wants. And whether he does it through a suffering, whether he does it through persecution, whether he does it through humiliation, he doesn't care. He would rather Paul to decrease and Christ to increase. And if it means that he gets lowered out of a basket, I mean, can you imagine that the only way you can be saved is, hey, Paul, get in this basket and we're gonna lower you out a window of wall. That's got to feel humiliated. And it's not like Tom Cruise going to fight the world, right? He's shrinking away in humiliation. And Paul says, I don't care what you think. That was for the cause of Christ and if it was for the cause of Christ, it makes him look great. I want people to know I value Jesus over my own reputation. Which begs the question, doesn't it? What in our lives shows to our neighbors and our family and our coworkers and our friends and the people that are our neighbors? What in our lives shows that we value Jesus over everything else? You know, just last week, a certain state university when the College World Series, right? The University of Tennessee, yeah, I know. I saw y'all's orange. And we watched it too and we loved, we were cheering for Tennessee, so it was great. But isn't it funny that some people know more about your college love than they know of your love for Jesus? That we will hoop and holler for that stuff. And guys, you understand the only trophies in heaven won't have anything to do with sports. You'll have everything to do with what we did for Christ. So let's wrap up a few thoughts here. First, we need to stay close to Jesus and we need to stay away from sin and be aware of sin that could pull us away from him, okay? Which means a couple of things. First of all, most of us will never have a spectacular fall away from Jesus. But here's what will happen and we will, as the great theologian Paul Simon said, we're gonna slip slide away. It's gonna be chipping away. And what I mean by that, so for many of us, when we first came to be believers in Jesus Christ, we read the Bible all the time. We prayed all the time. We couldn't help tell people about Jesus all the time. But I don't know many of us who are 10, 20, 30, 40 years down the road in our walk with Jesus, who would ever say, you know, I had that same burning desire for Christ today that I had been. I used to read the Bible every day, and now I read it maybe once every other day, maybe once a week. I used to pray for hours, now I barely even pray for my meals. I used to tell people about Jesus all the time, I didn't care what people think. They call me a Jesus freak, right? I didn't care, but now, you know, I've grown up. Are you slipping away? Are you chipping away at your faith? So that is not as important to you as it used to be. And part of the reasons we slip away is because we desire the applause of people more than we desire to be approved by God. And I get it, we see people, we don't necessarily see God. So I understand that, but still, we can get so caught up in what people think of us that we forget the most important one we need to care about is Jesus and what he thinks of us. Don't let the fear of man keep you from the fear of God that should give you the strength, not to be afraid of people, which means this too. We've got to make sure we are reading the Bible, and I believe you should do it every day. And here's what I mean, because what happens is we begin to not read the Bible as much ourselves, but we begin to read what people say about the Bible. We begin to hear what people say about the Bible. Now listen, the World Wide Web, it can be used for great things, it can be used for awful things. But one of the great things is done, it's just given us exposure to some really great teachers. So you can listen to that favorite preacher that lives in Texas or in California or wherever. You can read books that are amazing and help us. You can listen to podcasts. But how many hours do you spend listening to podcasts compared to reading the Bible? Because reading the source is way better than listening to someone talk about the source. We've got to be people that give our time and our attention to God's Word. Not just know what my favorite podcaster says about it, I wanna know what I say about it. I wanna know what I believe about it. I wanna know what it says for myself. I don't want the leftovers of what someone else is gleaned from it, I wanna know it for me. Again, I'm not saying you should stop listening to podcasts, I'm not saying you should stop reading good books. But what I am saying is that if you elevate those over your own time with Jesus, Jesus didn't come so you could listen to podcasts, Jesus came so you could have a relationship with Him and know Him personally and love Him and be known by Him. So yeah, can you listen to podcasts? I mean, our church has one, common questions with Jonathan Jagger. Yeah, listen to those things, but don't let that be a substitute for your own feeding and for your own reading and your own relationship with Him. We also gotta know the majors of our faith so that we don't fall into distortion. For some of you, maybe your first step in doing that is coming to our following Jesus class that starts here in just a couple of weeks. It's seven weeks and we're gonna teach you some of the majors of the faith that we hold dear at this place called the experience. That might be a great way for you to do that. But again, if you don't know the truth, you'll never be able to know the lie. Don't be so concerned about learning the lie. If you'll learn the truth, you'll understand when the lie comes, okay? So know the majors of the faith. And we also need to pay more attention to what it said than how it said. We live, again, in a silly culture that loves to be entertained and it's come to church. And so we want celebrity preachers who can captivate us with stories and captivate us with humor and captivate us. I mean, it's almost like they're a late night TV host more than they are the gospel preaching people that we need. Which is this is the warning and I put it in something so you could see it. Please don't become so enamored with celebrity speakers and writers who are clever and entertaining but not Bible saturated. Just because they keep your attention doesn't mean they have good content. Just because they entertain you doesn't mean they're giving you what you need to grow in Christ. And again, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be make the gospel boring. That's not all what I'm saying but why I am saying is you have to be careful. Just because they hold your attention doesn't mean they're giving you truth. Make sure you're not just being entertained. And the reason the law of this won't entertain is because we're bored with Jesus. Now, we would never say that in public company. But we're kind of tired of hearing this. Oh, I've been walking with Jesus for 40 years and I've heard it all. So I need something new to keep me interested. And Paul warns us about this that at the end of the age there are gonna be people who have itching ears. Remember when Paul went to Athens in Acts chapter 17? Those Athenians, they love to hear something new so they could talk and debate and things like that. And for some of us, that's what we want. Oh, I wanna hear some new knowledge. But our walk and knowledge of Jesus in his words shouldn't take us wider, it should always take us deeper. Always deeper. And what do I mean by that? So I don't know if you know this or not but when we go and either die or Christ comes again and we go to heaven, you know we're not gonna be like little cherubs and diapers on little clouds playing little harps. You know that, right? You're gonna be in a physical body free from sin, praise God, free from any desire to sin, praise God. You're gonna eat, you're gonna drink, you're gonna experience life the way it was meant to be lived without any hint of the presence of sin. But that's not what makes heaven heaven. What makes heaven heaven is Jesus. And what about Jesus? You will never come to the end of who he is. Now what do I mean by that? All his attributes are eternal. Which means this, his love is eternal which means you'll never come to the end of his love. His patience is eternal. You'll never come to the end of it. His kindness is eternal. You'll never come to the end of it. I know there's not necessarily gonna be days in heaven but every day we're gonna learn something new about God that's gonna blow our minds. And that's what's gonna make the eternal life so awesome because we're gonna be sitting around not talking about some silly stuff. We're gonna be going, did you know that about Jesus? I didn't know that. How cool is that? And we're gonna do that forever. Can you imagine, I mean you may come to the end of the internet, you'll never come to the end of Jesus. Praise God, right? So that leads to something I tell our interns in the MIT program. Theology always fuels doxology and doxology is worship. So theology is the knowledge of God. So when I read the Bible for myself and I read some of this stuff, if there aren't times where I shut my Bible, step away from it, get on my face before God and worship him, I'm not really studying theology. Because theology has nothing to do about knowledge. It has everything to do about Jesus. We read this Bible so we can know him more, so we can love him more and worship him with everything we have. That is what worship is about. So if Jesus is the point of everything, then we need to live that way. So we need to make sure that we're not boasting in temporary things, but we're boasting in the eternal. Can you cheer for your team? - Absolutely, but make sure that you keep that secondary to the primary things of eternity. We also gotta make sure that with that in mind, our money, our time and our talents are given to something that's gonna last forever. If you're giving your money and your time and your talents to stuff of this earth, Paul talks about it in 1 Corinthians, eventually it's all gonna burn. It's all gonna go away. Jesus said in Matthew chapter six, lay it for yourselves treasures in heaven because that's what's gonna last forever. Which then leads us with this last question. If I'm living for the eternal, that means I'm living for Jesus. And I've gotta ask myself in this world right now, is he really all I need? Do I need the applause of people then Jesus is not really your Lord? Do I need more money to make myself feel better? Do I need a better car? Do I need a better seat at the restaurant? Do I need all the things that the world says is important to make me feel good about myself? Then Jesus is not who you really need. But when Jesus is who you need and you seek after him, he's the bread of life, he'll never hunger again. He's the living water, you'll never thirst again. Isn't it time to turn away from the temporary? And start living for the one who will satisfy us forever? And he can start that now. Could you bow your heads with me?