Setting Priorities

SERMON: 2009-09-20--ac0929--setting-priorities SOURCE DURATION: 00:39:54.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidate 0 is the last segment of spoken sermon material ('things new.') before the subsequent candidates (1 through 15) begin a highly repetitive, rhythmic phrase that strongly indicates the start of music or a hymn. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:35:44.460-00:39:52.480 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- Well, I left you last week with the question, what does it look like in today's terms to be part of devoted community? The early church was a church that was devoted to the apostles' teaching, it was devoted to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer, and we have spent some time now in recent weeks looking at each of those terms in some detail, and the question now then is, what does that look like for you and me today? What does it look like for you and me today to be devoted to the apostles' teaching? What does it look like to be devoted to the fellowship? What does it look like to be devoted to the breaking of bread? What does it look like to be devoted to the prayers? How does that enable us to prioritize how we live and what we want to do? And that's what I want to begin talking with you about this morning and probably for the next couple of weeks as we talk a little bit now about setting priorities. And let me warn you ahead of time that there may be times when I come across sounding like the proverbial high school teacher who thinks his class is the only one in the school that counts and who piles the homework on on Friday because he thinks you've got extra time on the weekend to do it. Anybody here ever have that kind of teacher? I've had one or two, and I have to tell you in all honesty, they were not my favorite teachers, even a little bit. As a matter of fact, I could use much stronger language than that to describe some of the ones that I've had. But please understand this. If the church is truly the apple of God's eye, and if the church is truly the agent of God's redemptive purposes in the world, then would you not agree with me that it deserves our greatest attention, our best strengths, and our best efforts because at the end of history, it's all that matters. And so let's begin looking this morning then at what it means in today's terms to be devoted to the Apostles' teaching. We are to devote ourselves, the scripture says, to the Apostles' teaching. Well, to be devoted to the Apostles' teaching means a couple of things, I think. It means, first of all, that we are to familiarize ourselves with scripture. We read in 2 Timothy 3.15, from infancy, Paul writing to Timothy says, "You have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus." And Peter in 2 Peter 1.21 says, "No prophecy ever came by the impulse of man, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God." Scripture is the work of God working through human agents, and if most of the Old Testament was written, with some exceptions, by Old Testament prophets, most of the New Testament has been written by the Apostles or by their close associates. And so to be devoted to the Apostles' teaching, then, is first and foremost immersing ourselves in the pages of scripture. The psalmist said, "I delight in your decrees, I will not neglect your word." And that means, at the very least, that we need to take time out to read it. And to read not only favorite portions of scripture, the passages that speak to us or that make us feel good, but to really read scripture from one end to the other, for the Bible says, "All scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." And we need to do that not only individually, in terms of our individual devotions, but I think we need to also do that collectively, particularly as families. Now in the family that I grew up, as in many of the more traditional Dutch families historically, my father made it a habit to read a chapter of scripture at every meal where the family was gathered together. And when I say that he made it a habit, he really made it a habit. There was seldom a time it was skipped. And when he read throughout all of scripture, I mean all of scripture, including the begats and the genealogies. And there was many a time, I'm sure, that I sat there staring at the ceiling, wondering what the redemptive purpose was to know that so and so begat so and so, who begat so and so, and on and on it went. But you know, here's the interesting thing, and I don't say this to boast, but by the time I got to seminary, and in order to graduate from seminary with a degree, you have to pass a Bible knowledge test. I guess they sort of figured that the least thing preachers should know is their Bibles. So you have to pass this Bible knowledge test, and then they post all the scores on the bulletin board, and without boasting about it, by the time I took that test, I had one of the top marks in the whole class. And I had it not because I had read or studied so much of the Bible myself, but because as a kid I sat through so much Bible reading that by osmosis I picked it up. In fact, when later on as I got older I began reading the Bible for myself, there wasn't a single Bible story that I've ever encountered in my reading of scripture that I had not already remembered. And it was all effortlessly, because it happened on the fly. And I know that life today is busy, and I know that today kids always complain about being bored, but I would suggest that if you don't already make it a practice to read scripture with your family around the dinner table, or any other setting which you can find, then do it, because you're never going to learn it out of nowhere, and your kids are not going to learn it out of nowhere. We need to lay up God's Word in our hearts. The psalmist again said, "How can a young man or a young woman keep their way pure by living according to your Word?" Now of course little kids can't absorb complex Bible stories straight out of King James versions of the Bible, but there are many more contemporary versions around these days. And of course there are children's Bibles, and in our own family as well as in my family of origin when we were young, when our kids were young, we got ourselves a good children's story Bible, and we'd read children's story Bibles. You can't just leave it to Christian school, you can't just leave it to church school. Children's have the first responsibility to be familiar with scripture. It's a lot easier to remember things when you're young than when you get older. And I remember my father saying that years ago when we were kids and we just sort of wrote it off, but I'll tell you that what I know from scripture today, I learned back then because I could retain it in a way back then that is much more difficult today. And I bet you I'm not the only one around here who has some trouble remembering things these days. So first of all, if we're going to devote ourselves to scripture, it means we must familiarize ourselves with scripture, which means a disciplined approach to scripture. It isn't just going to happen, and it isn't just going to happen by osmosis, if we don't take the initiative to take that seriously, and if God's Word is as important as we say that it is, then we simply need to make the effort and get into it and get through scripture from one end to the other. And if you find that you get bored reading it from one end to the other, there's lots of Bible reading guides available. You can go on the internet and download any number of them from the Bible Society or even in the Today Booklet or the Word for You Today. There's always larger passages of scripture, but immerse yourself, immerse yourself in the pages of scripture. Secondly then, we need to expose ourselves to the Apostles' teaching, not only by being familiar with scripture, but by exposing ourselves to biblical preaching. Here's how scripture puts it. Second Timothy 2.2, Paul speaking to Timothy, "The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses and trust a reliable man who will also be qualified to teach others." Now ideally, each believer should be able to approach scripture. We should be able to read it, digest it, absorb it, and obey it. But you know just as well as I do that that's a function of maturity. And there are many times we come to scripture and we come away from scripture saying, "What in the world does that mean or how does it relate to my life?" And I'm always very gratified to note that the Apostle Peter had the same problem, particularly as it relates to his colleague, the Apostle Paul, because here's what Peter says in 2 Peter 3.16, "His letters," Paul's letters, "contain some things that are hard to understand which ignorant and unstable people distort as they do other scriptures to their own destruction." How many of us would agree with him? Paul's letters have some things that are hard to understand. Who of us haven't found ourselves in a place where, you know, you're trying to read the Bible and you close it in frustration because it doesn't make sense at all? For some reason I found myself this past week on Richard Dawkins' webpage and there was a whole blog full, I have to say this respectfully, of ignoramuses holding forth about how irrelevant and stupid the Bible was. And Richard, of all people, had to come to the defense of the Bible and say that the Bible actually had some pretty good stuff in it. So you know the other dudes were really way out to lunch. But who of us hasn't had that question, "Lord, why couldn't you make this a little simpler?" Or who of us in our own reading of scripture haven't just glossed over things and totally missed the complete meaning? I mean, I remember years ago, part of a Bible study that I was part of, we decided we were going to take on the Book of Romans. Now the Book of Romans is one of those Pauline epistles that has a little substance to it. And I wasn't able to be there for the first meeting. So by the time I came to the second meeting, I discovered in that first meeting they had covered all of the first chapter of the Book of Romans. And I said, "You folks are brilliant." But I said, "Allow me to ask you just a couple of questions about the content of Romans chapter one that you've studied." And I wasn't trying to show them up. But I said, "Well, you know, what does it mean in verse four that through the Spirit of holiness, Jesus was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead?" And I said, "What does it mean later on when in the gospel, our righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last. As it is written, the righteous will live by faith. What does it mean that the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth? What does it mean that God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death and they not only continue to do these very things, but also approve those who practice them?" It didn't take long for the Bible study to bog down just a tad. Because what people discovered, and you and I often discovered, I think, when we start trying to study scripture, is you kind of understand it and you sort of have an idea of what it means. But when you try to put it into words and you try to articulate it and you try to express it to somebody else, then many of us, we bog down real fast. And so we all find ourselves in situations where we can absorb things from scripture, but we sometimes need a little bit of help along the way. And one of the reasons then that we need good Bible teaching is that Bible teachers will help us to preach you the food so that we can absorb it and take it in. Here is how the book of Hebrews puts it in the context of maturing. In fact, though by this time you want to be teachers, you need someone to teach you the elementary truths of God's word all over again. You need milk, not solid food. Someone who lives in milk while still being an infant is not acquainted with a teaching about righteousness, but solid food is for the mature who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil. A couple of very interesting things there. Our ability to absorb scripture is a function of maturity. And just as an infant, you feed them solid food, you try to feed them meat, you'll have a choking child on your hand because they simply aren't equipped to chew it and they certainly aren't equipped to absorb it. And so you feed them milk and then you put them maybe in pablum and all those horrible stirred mixed fruit things that you feed the kids and somehow in the process produce growth. And then as the child grows, you change the variant. And spiritually speaking, the same thing is true when we're new believers or when we're immature in the faith, there's lots of things that will make sense. And there's lots of things we read in the Bible, it just doesn't compute. And we need somebody to help us understand, to explain it to us. You remember later on in the book of Acts, we have the Ethiopian eunuch. He is driving back to Ethiopia in his carriage and he's reading the book of Isaiah and he's reading a marvelous prophecy in Isaiah chapter 53 about the Lord Jesus and he was wounded for our transgressions and he was bruised for our iniquities and he is clueless about what it means until, who is it, Philip the Evangelist guided by the Holy Spirit or an angel of the Lord comes and visits with him and explains to him the message of the gospel and then once he understood it, it transformed his life. Now there's a lot of ways in which we can be exposed to good Bible teaching. We're blessed in this community to have a Christian radio station, UCB, tons of very excellent Bible teachers on there and exposing ourselves to that kind of thing is very useful because it feeds us at a deep level. People often say, "Well, I don't remember what I hear anyway." Well, you know, I got good news for you. I don't remember what I ate yesterday or the day before and I bet you, you don't either, unless it was real bad or real good. It's just part you do in life. But it changes you in the inside and it gives you strength even when you're not aware of it. And then of course, we're part of a local community and we have a lot of Bible teaching that takes place. We have our Sunday morning services. We have the midweek activities you heard earlier about Maranatha midweek and all the courses that are being offered, more this year than we've ever had. I think we have 11. Take a look at that and ask yourself, "Where does my interest lie? Where does my hunger lie and where can I grow?" It means, too, taking definite steps to expose yourself to that kind of teaching. Any given Sunday, there's an interesting fact, any given Sunday in the average church, one-third of its people are absent. Did you know that? Now, there are many reasons for that. It can range all the way from my kid is sick and I gotta stay home and I party too hard on Saturday night and I don't wanna get out of bed on Sunday morning to I gotta visit cousin Mabel, three times removed out in Timbuktu. And those can all be very valid and legitimate reasons and I would never wanna be so legalistic as to say, "Don't ever skip church because you wouldn't listen anyway." You understand what I'm trying to say, but see, a church like this and most churches are dynamic, they're moving. There is a progression to teaching even as there is a progression to music. And you will find that if you stay away for an extended period of time, you come back, there's a whole re-entry process that you go through because you have to catch up emotionally and spiritually to the culture of the church. So please understand that if you can't make it, our services are webcast live on the internet every day except today because wouldn't you know it, Cogeco is out of commission, causing us more than a few headaches this morning, but hopefully they'll resurrect that. When I was vacationing in PEI, that was the week of kids camp here and I asked them to webcast the kids camp program live. Now my sister has a wireless light high speed internet connection and you dial up the video and it stuttered and stammered and anybody that's been online will know that reality of the internet. But here's what I did. I opened up a second browser for the audio link, ran the audio which streamed faultlessly and the video which was jerking all over the place and eventually those two came together and I watched the whole program from my sister's house and I went, "Yay, Jinbob, great job." Lot of kids, very impressive. Also if you can't make a service, they're available on CD, they're available on DVD and they are also available now as a podcast. Our man, Gabe, is of course our IT person around here in this connection and he's done a terrific job. Here's a picture of what our webpage looks like. We are now podcasting each week on Apple's iTunes store and here is an iTunes link that says subscribe now. If you don't have iTunes in your computer, you can go to apple.com, download it for free. It's a great program. You click on our webpage, maranatha-church.com. On this link you get a form that says you can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. What that means is that every week when Gabe posts the Sunday morning service on the web and you will see this dude up here, that's last week's latest message and then we have archiving that goes back quite a ways, you can click on that link, subscribe to podcast and then every week when Gabe posts the new service, which is typically around Wednesday, it will automatically download to your computer, to your handheld or to whatever you want to play it in so you can take it wherever you want to go and listen to it whenever you want. The beauty of downloads, by the way, is that if you get tired of the preacher, you can not only shut them off, but you can fast forward and get to the part that is of more interest to you. That's part of the modern, don't you wish you could do that at church sometimes? I thought I better say that before you did. Modern technology can be a royal pain, but it can also be a powerful tool the Lord uses. And here again is how scripture put it, the psalmist, Psalm 119, "I love your law. I meditate on it all day long. Your commands make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever with me. I have more insight than all my teachers, for I meditate on your statutes." Don't know how many of you here are familiar with Bill Gotthard. Bill Gotthard was quite popular a number of years ago with his Institute in Basic Life Principles. He used to have huge meetings of 10,000 people just trying to walk them through biblical principles for how to do life. But Bill Gotthard, if you read his biography, will tell you that he had a hard time learning and he had a hard time just doing life in some significant ways until he ran into this passage in the Psalms that talks about meditating on God's law and gaining more insight than all his teachers. And he will tell you to this day that his level of learning even in secular subjects at school went way through the roof as he began to take seriously God's way to meditate means to chew your cud. And we've all seen images of cows lying in the pasture ruminating, taking the food that they have eaten and stored in one stomach, re-chewing it to get the best out of it. It's never going to happen by itself. The Christian life is a curious mixture of God as at work in you both to will and to work according to his good pleasure and you having to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. And if you're a normal Christian and if you're growing in Christ, then there will be a hunger that says, "I want to learn more about Jesus. I want to get answers to my life's questions. I want to understand what it is that God is doing in my life and in my family and in my world. God's word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path." So why do I belabor all that this morning? I mean, in some ways this is so elementary. We all know it. It doesn't necessarily mean we practice it, of course. But why is this so important? Well, it's important because we live in an age of biblical illiteracy. People don't know their Bibles. And that's not just out in the world where increasingly our culture has become so secular that a biblical world and life view is totally foreign to people's thinking, but that's even true many times in the church. I love this little story. It's way over the top, but it's funny as get-all, I think. The visiting church school supervisor asked little Johnny during Bible class, "Who broke down the walls of Jericho?" Little Johnny replied, "He doesn't know." But it definitely wasn't him. Well, the supervisor is taken aback by his lack of basic Bible knowledge, so he goes to the principal and he relates the whole incident. And the principal's response is that he knows little Johnny, and he knows his whole family very well, and he can vouch for them. And if little Johnny said he didn't do it, then the principal is satisfied that that is the truth. Well, even more appalled, the inspector goes to the regional head of education and he relates the whole story. And the regional head of education, after listening to the whole story, replies with this, he says, "I can see why you're making such a big issue out of this. Just get three quotes and fix the stupid wall." It's right up there with these responses made to a Bible quiz. Did you know that the wives of the apostles were called epistles, and that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife, and that a Christian should only have one wife? This is called monotony? Joshua led the Hebrews in the battle of Jaritol. Moses went to the top of Mount Sinai to get the Ten Commandments. And David fought the Finkelsteins, a race of people who lived in biblical times. And the people who followed the Lord Jesus were called twelve opossums. Matthew was one of those. And Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption. True answers. I mean, false answers, but it illustrates the point that I'm trying to make. And why is that so serious? Because the God of this age is constantly working at deceiving the children of God. Here's how the apostle Paul puts it, 2 Corinthians 11, 3 and 4, "I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion of Christ; for as someone comes to you and preaches of Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough. I'm afraid that as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray from a pure knowledge of Jesus." We are surrounded at every level of our society with a world and life view that is at odds with scripture, but that sometimes sounds so appealing and is so attractive that even people in the church buy into it. Let me give you one quick illustration, I've talked about this before, but back in the fall of 2006, Rhonda Byrne came out with The Secret. The Secret was released first as a DVD, a video documentary, and then released as a book and gained huge traction because in January of 2007, Oprah, bless her, featured it on her program, and other than that we had some technical glitches this morning, I was going to show you the trailer of what that looked like, because if you're familiar at all with The Secret, then you know that The Secret describes what is known as the law of attraction, and the law of attraction posits that feelings and thoughts can attract events from the working of the cosmos to interaction among individuals in their physical, emotional, and professional affairs. It also suggests there has been a strong tendency by those in positions of power to keep this central principle hidden from the public. In layman's terms, if you will think positively, you can engage the powers of the universe, and the powers of the universe will come to your help, and they will give you the health and the wealth and whatever it is that your heart desires. The film encourages the viewer to see the universe as a catalog that we can flip through and shop, and from which we can surround ourselves with positive people. The Secret requires you to do three things, now listen to me very carefully. Number one is you ask, know what you want, and you ask the universe for it. Number two, believe, feel and behave as if the object of your desire is on its way. And number three, receive, be open to receiving it. As you align yourself with the universe and open yourself up to receiving, the very thing you are wanting to manifest will show up. And the video is full of testimonials of people for whom this has really worked, and I want you to hear me well, don't ever think that stuff is simply bogus, or that all these people are lying. No, there is real power in the universe, and there is a way of tying into that power and getting what you want, but it's not the power of God, and it will cost you, eventually, your soul. I read this little description of ask, receive and believe, and what's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear that expression? The words of Jesus, is it not? I mean, what does Jesus say about it in the gospels? Luke chapter 11, "Listen, I say to you, ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks, the door will be opened." So what can sound more biblical than the secret? But it's out to lunch, you know why? Because number one, God is not a nameless power in the universe, and number two, he's not a heavenly vending machine who is sitting there waiting for you to push the buttons so that you can get what you want. And number three, he is almighty and he's desperately holy, and you don't have a relationship with him unless you've gone to him by way of the cross. And so it doesn't matter what you get, the devil offered Jesus the kingdoms of the world and all their glory if he would bow down and worship. And so how do we get immunized against the subtlety of that and other teachings? You know, Dan Brown just issued this past week his new novel, The Symbol, dealing this time with the Masons and the Catholic Church. You know how many copies of the Da Vinci Code sold worldwide? 80 million copies. That is an incredible spiritual hunger, and it's a hunger the Church needs to be able to identify, step into without getting sucked into. And if you've ever been into The Secret or have heard about it, and many of us here have not, although I know of at least one person in this Church who was really into The Secret at one point, then I would recommend Dr. Henry Cloud's book, The Secret Things of God, which was commissioned by the publisher as a biblical antidote to The Secret. Talks about seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, finding the answers to our deepest needs, not by trying to manipulate the spiritual powers of the universe, which is what all that stuff is, no, but having a relationship with God the Father through Jesus and knowing that He will give us everything that we need, not only for this life and for the life to come. Why is there so much talk about inoculation against the swine flu? Because there is a fear of a pandemic. By the time the pandemic hits, it's too late. And by the time deception hits you and me, it's too late. And the purpose of Scripture is to help us to be inoculated against the spirit of the age. So read the Bible, discipline yourself, go through it with your family from one end to another, and then submit yourself to biblical teaching so that you can grow up in Christ, so that when all has been said and done, we don't go with every wind and wave of doctrine that promises to find yet another solution to the world's ills. Because the purpose of Scripture is to point us to Jesus. Now when all has been said and done, it's Jesus and Him alone who's going to make all things new. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:35:44.460; remove through 00:39:54.000] Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. Rightward is the lamb unto my feet, and the light unto my path. [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:39:54.000; resume after this marked segment]