[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us
[email protected] be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast. Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
All right, we'll go ahead and get started with our study tonight. Those of you that are with us online, thanks for being here. In just a few moments, we've got a mic coming up. Just a few moments, we'll jump into our content for this week. For those of you that weren't here last week, we talked a lot about artificial intelligence and looked at a couple of different angles on that one. Definitely. Artificial intelligence has a tendency sometimes to, to amplify those echo chambers. And if you remember the week before, that's where we left off. And so the idea that AI can really, we can form relationships with the way companion AI algorithms are designed to engage and to keep that engagement. They're designed to cultivate a relationship really on some deeper levels, and particularly for those that are emotionally vulnerable, those that are much older and those that are much younger in our society are particularly susceptible to these machines and cultivating a relationship with them. We witnessed something that I've never seen before, a public discourse where someone actually changed their mind. I want to say thanks again to Bart for that. We had some really, really good conversation last week. So if you didn't get a chance to be here, weren't a part of that, feel free to go back. David Tennyson does a great job of getting our Bible studies put on our podcast. Just search for Madison Church of Christ Bible Study on any podcast platform and you'll be able to find it there. We also have a sermons podcast, Madison Church of Christ Sermons Podcast. Very, very creative when it comes to naming things around here, so should be easy to find. It's also on YouTube. So one of the other things that we left off at the very end that I felt like we didn't really get a chance to fully flesh out was this idea that AI oftentimes can be used for shortcuts. And we have several folks here that have used or that do use artificial intelligence on a daily basis in their task, in their work and occupation.
I think it was Mike Baker that mentioned he uses it to write a lot of scripts, especially sort of the rudimentary stuff, the foundational scripts that just take time, that are kind of tedious, but are not overly technical. It kind of automates those for him. In one sense, a shortcut can be seen as something that is efficient in other ways. It could be a shortcut to things that aren't quite as good, that don't have a net positive for us spiritually or just as a society.
I spoke to a group of teenagers in south Alabama earlier this year and spoke to a middle school group and a high school group and the middle school group. When they thought of AI, what came to mind was China and robots and the high school group exclusively. The only answers that were given of the six or seven students that responded were, it helps me with my homework. And then they looked at the teacher standing behind them and laughed. It did their homework for them. They were using it for the true shortcut. Growing up, we had textbooks, and in the back of the math book, you had the answers to usually all the even problems. You got really excited. Every now and then the teacher would forget and they'd give you the even numbers to work. But usually they gave you the opposite.
It was helpful to have the answer, but in math, you always had to show how you got to your destination.
So it wasn't truly a shortcut. It could be a guide, but you had to still put in the work to figure it out. AI is super powerful. Sometimes it offers us shortcuts. And when we look at the spiritual side of things, we looked at Genesis 3. We looked at first in the Gospels, the accounts of Jesus in the desert and how he was fasting for 40 days. And Satan said first temptation he gave to Jesus was turn this stone into bread.
That's a shortcut. Shortcut your fast.
Everything you see will be yours. All the kingdoms of the earth. That's a shortcut to God's plan. And there was another really interesting passage we looked at in Genesis chapter three, and this came about. Will Waldron and I were at lunch recently having a discussion about some of these things.
And I had kind of mentioned this. I think there's more connection to shortcuts in the garden, But I can't quite put my finger on it. And he said, it's funny you should mention that. And he brought up something that he had been thinking about studying about the idea that in the garden, when Adam and Eve were told to not eat of the fruit, of the knowledge of good and evil, when they did that, it was essentially Satan shortcutting God's plans. What if God had planned to reveal knowledge of good and evil to Adam and Eve in due time?
Well, then that would make the eating of the fruit bypassing God's plan in his time and shortcutting that. And there was an interesting connection that Will had read about that connects the garden where it says do not eat in the New Testament, with the Last Supper, where Jesus says, now take, eat. And that is sort of the fulfillment of God's timing of good and evil, good in Christ. So I asked Will if he wouldn't mind just elaborate just a little bit on that. And that's where we'll kick off and we'll move on from there this evening.
Yeah.
[00:05:29] Speaker B: So this is something that comes from several different things that I've been reading recently. Most recently, I was reading Perelandra by C.S. lewis, which is a part of what's mostly called the Space Trilogy, but by Lewis called the Ransom Trilogy. And the Ransom Trilogy, the second book, pulls on this idea from the garden. And in this book, the first man and first woman are not supposed to sleep on the central island in Venus. And you gotta read the book for a lot of context there. But I was reading through with that in the back of my mind, also studying things from the Bible Project. Bible Project, which the biggest thing it has given me when I've been studying it is, hey, if you take a look, if you just be aware that there are certain things, cycles and certain themes, literary, thematic elements that pop up over and over again in Scripture.
Those tend to get pulled on quite a bit. And so it comes from. I was just reading through Matthew, chapter 26 in preparation for communion, and it caught my attention that Jesus tells us to take and eat, but in the garden you are not supposed to take and eat. And it's interesting. I told Jason, this isn't definitive proof if you're a Bible scholar, but Matthew would be aware, at least of what the Greek Septuagint said. And the words that he wrote down in his Gospel for take is labate, which is from the root lambdano.
So you have that word at play. And if you look at the Greek Septuagint of Genesis chapter three, the same root word is there present in Genesis chapter three, that in the garden, Eve is taking of the fruit. So it's from the Greek Word, word lambano, excuse me. And then eat is phagote, and the Greek root is phago. And so you've got these two words at play which pop up in Matthew chapter 26, and in Matthew chapter, excuse me, Genesis chapter three. And so the idea goes from C.S. lewis and a few other different theologians is clearly Adam and Eve had the prerogative. They had the capability to learn good from evil because they were given a command and they were expected to follow it. Don't eat of the tree. So there was at least a concept of there are things that we should do and things we shouldn't do. We might not know why yet, but the idea is, if you see how God partners with human in the midst of creation, that all along the way he is always bringing them into fuller representation of his glory. And if that's true, and you look at Adam and Eve in the garden, it says that God walked with them in the garden. In fact, they ran and hid when God came walking looking for them in the garden. So you think if you were a human and you were sitting at the feet of the Almighty Creator, you're going to learn things such as probably along the way, what is good and evil. And so the idea is maybe, maybe, just maybe, that all along the way we were meant to learn through God's eyes by walking and following and talking with him what good versus evil is. But then you have the serpent who says you don't have to learn from God. In fact, he will gatekeep, to borrow a word we use in academia, he will gatekeep and you will never truly be like him, which we are already created in the image of God. We were already on that trajectory to more fully bear his image. And so with that in mind, the sin in the garden, the first sin comes from a couple of different things.
First off, we see that Eve, and this is echoed in First John, chapter two, that Eve saw that the food was good, good for food. She saw that it was attracted to her eyes. And I think what's important here too is desirable for making one wise. So she took it and ate it and gave it. And in the act of giving it was also sin because it wasn't hers to give in the first place. And so why is this a sin?
Is why scholars throughout the ages have wondered, like, why would God even put it there? Why was it a sin that she partook one? It is simply God's command. We don't break God's commands. But I think if you look into this a little bit more deeply, I think it was Augustine. Augustine.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: I'll allow either one.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: I don't know, you know, I'm from the south, just like a lot of people here. So Augustine is probably how.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: He's Augustine.
[00:10:09] Speaker B: Augustine.
So you've got Augustine, who throughout the ages, different theologians have tried to distill sin down into their most basic categories. You've got Lewis, who says all sin is born out of selfishness. Augustine, he says that sin is born out of either trying to be prideful and reach for Godness that is not yet ours to take. And then you've got the opposite sin of reaching below to our animal status and taking things that we are above. So being prideful would be one where you are reaching for God's status when it is not yours to take.
Committing sins of lust or things like that would be acting more like an animal. And so why is this sin? Well, it says specifically you can eat this fruit and be like God, which maybe God always had it intended that we were always going to be his image more fully all along the way, but that we would pick this up by walking and learning and talking with him. I think of this in terms of an intimate relationship, right? Like there is a.
There is an appropriate way that a relationship should progress.
It is wrong for a man to go and take something from a woman sexually to rape her. That is taking a shortcut, if you will. Whereas a more appropriate way to have that relationship is to know one another, to be married, to understand one another, and to be in that partnership together. Kind of how I put two and two together there. And you see this pattern of sin echoed throughout the rest of the Bible. In Genesis chapter 6, it says that the Nephilim saw the daughters of earth and took them. So we have taking and eating. You also see in Genesis chapter 11, they're trying to build a mountain to take what is God's place in the universe and be God themselves.
You see in Genesis chapter 16 that Sarah takes Hagar and gives it to her husband and they conceive of a child that was not the child of promise.
And First John 2 kind of is what lumps all of these different parts of this sin together. But then you have Jesus come along and where this is, this is in my notes. It's tagged as a half baked thought. So this isn't something that I've written my master's deed on yet.
But you have Jesus come along in Luke chapter 19, and he asks for a couple of loaves of bread and some fish from a little boy. And he takes it and he breaks it and he blesses it and gives it. But in doing so, because he is God, he is showing that this is the appropriate way that things should be taken and given.
And then you have Matthew chapter 26, where Jesus says, take and eat. This is my body. To me, this is the idea of what goes back all the way to the garden is listen, if you want to know good from evil, if you want to be like God, you have to learn from Him. This isn't something we can take for ourselves. It's not a spiritual shortcut that we can take. I have this conversation with my students all the time. I teach college students who use AI to do their homework for them. And I said I would trust an engineer who has 35 years under their belt to use this tool appropriately because they know the path that should be taken and they know which shortcuts are appropriate to be taken. But when God ordains a journey that maybe the idea is, yes, there is importance in arriving in the destination of being like God. I think this is Hebrews chapter one, right? So it says that Jesus is the exact imprint of the Father and, and that we are attain or we're striving to achieve that level of image of God. But the way to do so is by learning at his feet. And so Jesus says, listen In Matthew chapter 26, this communion, what it represents is we now are at a point where we can have this relationship, where we can walk and talk with one another. And I can teach you what this looks like. In fact, I'll send you the Spirit and he will be your counselor. He will teach you all of these things.
So if you want to know what appropriate taking and eating looks like, it comes from me, it comes from my hands. And I think this is also echoed in Philippians chapter two when it talks about Jesus. And one of the things that made him most like God was that he did not consider equality with God a thing to be grasped. That what do you do if you are godlike, if you want to learn what good from evil is, if you want to participate in the journey and not shortcut to the destination, you make yourself nothing. You pour yourself out and become a servant and you take on that servant nature.
Luke 24 the road to Emmaus Jesus took and broke bread and that's how the disciples were made known to him. That was something I just read this week, was the disciples didn't know they were walking with the resurrected Jesus until they sat down and had a meal with him. That the very fact that they broke bread with him, had communion with him. Jesus was made known to them.
So the main takeaway here, I know I've gone long, probably longer than Jason intended, but he should have known what he was signing up for.
God intended us to learn good from evil from him through his eyes and through. And Jesus is telling us in communion that he, God, are who we reach to and take from. We are ready to walk in this communion. We are no longer taking what is not ours. We are partaking in what is freely given.
And again, this connects back to the idea of the Holy Spirit being the one that is transforming us and sanctifying us. So there are shortcuts in AI and everything else.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: I also understand there are no shortcuts when it comes to asking a physics professor for a two to three minute summary of what you've been studying.
You see why I wanted him to share that. I appreciate you allowing us this little rabbit to chase, mostly because we have microphones and you don't. But I also think that it's really interesting because there is a much deeper level, and that's what we've been trying to dig into every week in this study, is we live in this physical, carnal world with these physical technologies. But there are spiritual elements to all of this.
Sometimes a physical shortcut is efficient and helpful. Sometimes a shortcut to your destination, taking a different route is helpful. When it comes to spiritual things, it's never ever helpful. It's always harmful.
Because taking the spiritual shortcut essentially is saying, God, I don't trust you to bring fulfillment or to bring about what's needed here.
I have to take matters into my own hands.
And so we see Jesus coming and being the fulfillment of the full journey, so to speak.
In Christ, we have our access to God. There's no shortcut to that.
In that sense, I guess he is the shortcut, right? No one comes to the Father except through me. And so this is the backdrop of everything we're talking about. And AI is one of those things that we can get in the habit of thinking that there's always a shortcut. But particularly those, as he mentioned, that have not grown up for 20 and 30 years learning how to do things, quote, unquote, the hard way. Which two generations previous to that guy says, well, you're actually doing it all the easy way because I did it this way. Right? They go all the way back to hand tools. Well, now you got power tools. That's a shortcut. Well, there's some expediency there for sure, but we're always looking deeper.
How are these technologies shaping how we think about work for one, but in particular, relationships.
Whenever a technology is a substitute for a relationship, whether that be a person, but particularly God, we're in really dangerous territory when it substitutes things. Last week we asked the question, is it wrong for an elderly person who's not able to fully take care of a living animal, a dog or a cat?
They're not necessarily in a place where they can feel, feed it regularly, bathe it regularly, take care of it, clean it, all that, but they still need and desire that companionship for them to have an AI powered robot dog or cat.
Is that evil? Is it wrong?
No, just right now it's kind of weird, right? It just feels weird.
Give it 10 years, it'll probably feel less weird. It's weird because it's not normal. Remember, normal is not good or bad. Normal is frequency. How often something is a part of our lives, so we need to think in terms of those things. We didn't really get to a firm destination on that. And even this little tangent here is not. There's not a. It's intriguing to me.
Once he writes his dissertation, I'll tell you whether I believe him or not. But essentially where we left off the last point here was lust, greed, covetousness, dishonesty, all of these things. Sin is a shortcut.
When we say, God, you can't bring sexual fulfillment into my life the way that I think I need it. So we pursue lustful content.
That's a shortcut. When we go and take something that's not ours, we say, God, you can't bring what I need in my life. That's a shortcut.
And when we get into this mindset without realizing it, we cultivate a heart that is geared more toward idolatry and anything other than Jesus rather than the gospel itself. I had lunch with a friend of mine earlier this week who is a forensic psychologist.
Speaking of weird, it was a weird lunch.
He has seen and been around some crazy things.
Remarkable, remarkable mind. And he introduced me to an interesting concept that I was not familiar with. And this is called the Johari window. And in psychology, this was. Two psychologists back in the. I think it was the 70s, came up with this model. One was named John and one was Harry. So Johari. That's their names together. True story, actually.
So they have this grid made up of four squares. The top rows, excuse me, the columns are things that are known to self and things that are not known about self. On the left side there in the rows you see things that are known to others and things that are not known to others. I know this may seem weird, but just follow me. We got a destination. Eventually.
Things that are known to me and things that I make known to others are called the arena. That's the part where I put on full display, you know that about me, because I want you to know that about me. I also know that about me.
You move into things that I don't know about myself, but you know about me.
Well, this guy always seems to be about himself, but he can't even see it, right? That's a blind spot. Those are the things that you don't recognize about yourself, but other people see it. That work with you, live with you, that know you, things that you don't know about yourself and things that other people don't know about yourself. That's the unknown.
Where I want to start tonight is that other box there for things that are known to self but other people don't know about you. The facade.
And I think this is really applicable in the context of church and congregational living because oftentimes we can. We talk about checking the boxes, right? We come and we play the part. We come and we show up and we put on a happy face. And the facade, right, that goes back to the theater where they put on the mask. It's an actual mask that we wear of everything. How are you doing? I'm good. Everything's fine. Everything's fine. I'm fine. Everything's fine.
And then the other side says, okay, good bye. And I'm fine too, by the way. And we can go through those motions on a regular basis.
Every now and then we need someone to say, hey, I don't think you're fine.
I don't know what's behind the facade, but I got a feeling there's something there.
And we need confrontation.
We need people to talk directly to us. And this goes back to last week, where oftentimes these companion AIs in particular, they're geared towards flattery. Really.
Why is the moon made of potato chips?
That's a weird thing. It's not made of potato chips. That's a dumb idea. Don't think that. But the AI would come back and say, what a compelling and interesting question. I'm glad you asked that. No, that's dumb. It's not true.
We need people to say, hey, you're being kind of silly right now, or, hey, that thinking is actually really dangerous. We don't need flattery all the time.
And most of these chatbots are geared to begin with flattery. They're geared with me as the destination, right, as the single point destination.
And then however they've been trained is the direction they're going to lead me from there.
This idea of a facade with social media and AI both, they can really embellish those kinds of things. They can amplify those kinds of things. And I want us to take just a moment and look at an instance in the Old Testament. Turn with me to second Samuel.
And this is sort of a good case study, hopefully in some cases a worst case scenario.
As we were having lunch and I was talking or listening rather as he was explaining to me this idea of facade. And he works with like really, really dangerous broken people, murderers, mass murderers, psychotic people, like truly clinically psychotic. And he's in these group therapy sessions and they go through the way this original Johari. Yeah, I always forget the name Johari principle was put together. There were 55 concepts in group therapy that each individual would go and identify or answer these 55 questions. And then the group would answer those same questions about that person. And so the places where other people saw things in you that you didn't see, then that was your blind spot. The places where there was overlap, both parties saw the same thing. That was the arena. And the things that you saw but other people didn't see, then that was of course, the facade. So that's an interesting, interesting arena to learn about that. But it's also. We see this reflected in Scripture in 2nd Samuel, chapter 11.
In the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle, David sent Joab and his servants with him and all Israel. And they ravaged the Ammonites and besieged Rabbah. But David remained at Jerusalem.
It's interesting, it happened late one afternoon when David arose from his couch and was walking on the roof of the king's house that he saw from the roof a woman bathing. And the woman was very beautiful.
And David sent and inquired about the woman. And one said, is not this Bathsheba the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite?
So David sent messengers and took her. And she came to him. And he lay with her.
Now she had been purifying herself from her cleanness. Then she returned to her house and the woman conceived. And she sent and told David, I am pregnant.
So David sent word to Joab, send me Uriah the Hittite. And Joab sent Uriah to David. When Uriah came to him, David asked how Joab was doing and how the people were doing and how the war was going. Then David said to Uriah, go down to your house and wash your feet. Uriah went out of the king's house and there followed him, a present from the king. But Uriah slept at the door of the king's house with all the servants of his lord and did not go down to his house.
When they told David, Uriah did not go down to his house. David said to Uriah, have you not come from a journey? Why did you not go down to your house? Uriah said to David, the Ark and Israel and Judah dwell in booths, and my lord Joab and the servants of my Lord are camping in the open field. Shall I then go to my house to eat and drink and to lie with my wife? As you live and as your soul lives, I will not do this thing. Then David said to Uriah, remain here today also, and tomorrow I will send you back. So Uriah remained in Jerusalem that day and the next. And David invited him. And he ate in his presence and drank so that he made him drunk. In the evening he went out to lie on his couch with the servants of his Lord. But he did not go down to his house. And in the morning David wrote a letter to Joab and sent it by the hand of Uriah. In the letter he wrote, set Uriah in the forefront of the hardest fighting and then draw back from him that he may be struck down and die. And as Joab was besieging the city, he assigned Uriah to the place where he knew there were valiant men. And the men of the city came out and fought with Joab. Some of the servants of David among the people fell. Uriah the Hittite also died.
Then Joab sent and told David all the news about the fighting. And he instructed the messenger, when you have finished telling all the news about the fighting to the king, then if the king's anger arises, and if he says to you, why did you go so near the city to fight? Did you not know what they would shoot from the wall? Who killed Abimelech the son of Jeruba?
Did not a woman cast an upper millstone on him from the wall so that he died at Thebez? Why did you go so near the wall? And then you shall say, your servant Uriah the Hittite is dead also.
Chapter 12.
And the Lord sent Nathan to David. Verse 1. He came to him, and he said to him, there were two men in a certain city, the one rich and the other poor.
The rich man had very many flocks and herds. But the poor man had nothing but one little ewe lamb which he had bought. And he brought it up and grew it up with him and with his children.
It used to eat of his morsel and drink from his cup and lie in his arms, and it was like a daughter to him. Now there came a traveler to the rich man, and he was unwilling to take one of his own flock or to prepare for the guest who had come to him, but he took the poor man's lamb and prepared it for the man who had come to him. Then David's anger was greatly kindled against the man. And he said to Nathan, as the Lord lives, the man who has done this deserves to die. He shall restore the lamb fourfold. Because he did this thing and because he had no pity, Nathan said to David, you are the man.
Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, I anointed you king over Israel, and I delivered you out of the hand of Saul. And I gave you your master's house and and your master's wives into your arms and gave you the house of Israel and Judah. And if there were too little, I would add to you as much more.
Why have you despised the word of the Lord to do what is evil in his sight? You have struck down Uriah the Hittite with the sword and have taken his wife to be your wife and have killed him with the sword of the Ammonites.
Here's a guy that struggles with blind spots and struggles with facades because he's the king.
First of all, it's the time of the year when kings go out to war.
But David stayed home.
David saw Bathsheba. David's in a place of authority.
David's in the place. He's the king.
He finds out who she is. He finds out she's a daughter, she's a wife. And yet his lust says, bring her to me.
And it's not until Nathan comes. And Nathan doesn't say, well, that's a good idea.
Nathan gives him a parable so that David can simmer in all of his righteous indignation.
That man is evil. He's awful.
You are that man.
When we go to these platforms and we go to these technologies, and every day we get our bias confirmed, particularly when that bias is not grounded in the gospel.
We become a little bit more like David in this moment.
We understand David's a man after God's own heart. We also understand David's a complex person.
David was not allowed to build the temple to God because his hands had blood on them.
David was an adulterer. David was a murderer. He killed Uriah and at the hands of the Ammonites.
We have experienced a lot of things lately in our country. Just in the last week we've had two very high profile murders.
One just today that we have to reconcile. We have to figure out how to make sense of these things. Murders happen all the time, people die all the time.
Some get more publicity than others.
These devices that cultivate our hearts and that shape our thinking, powerful.
When we have blind spots, sometimes these enhance those. They make them deeper. When we have a facade, they help us to curate that. Right. I've heard it said before that oftentimes, especially teenagers, they end up comparing their behind the scenes with everyone else's highlight reel. Because when I go to your profile, you go to my profile. Those generally aren't just my weakest and worst days. I don't tend to document those, not publicly. Right. We don't put those out there. We don't take a snapshot of that.
But when my kid hits a home run, you probably won't hear about it.
When there's something that I feel excited about, yeah, you probably get a highlight there. That's fun.
And I also grew up in a time when we had these little things called wallet size photographs.
There was a limit to how many of those you could put in your wallet because before it became a Costanza sized wallet and give you scoliosis when you sit down, so there was a limit to some of this stuff. With social media, there's no limits. That's part of the danger is that they take away the limits. Not everything was intended to scale up, particularly in the ways that technology scales up our voices and the thoughts that come into our lives.
If you read anything online in the last probably five years, what you're going to see is that there is a polarization, political polarization that has been really more than five years. But especially the last couple of election cycles, there doesn't seem to be a lot of purple left in our country. From a political standpoint, it's either deep red or deep blue. Right. And the crazies on both ends are the ones that get all the headlines. Well, that's not where most people live because that's not generally reasonableness.
But then when something happens, it's a tragedy. The tragedy oftentimes gets buried deeper and deeper into the story and the headlines get louder and louder with things that ultimately are more of the trivial part of that. The political tools, whatever politicizing of what's going on all of those things are heart issues.
We talked about this in the very beginning when Jesus talks in the Sermon on the Mount, you have heard that it was said, don't commit adultery. The act of adultery, he doesn't stop there. He says, I'm telling you not to look at a woman with lustful intent in your heart. Sin occurs in the heart. It's an issue of the heart. Always has been, always will be. Genesis 3. It's a heart issue.
God, I know you said, don't, but surely we won't die.
It's a heart issue.
It's a trust issue. It's a faith issue.
We are all humanity.
And when we allow, whether it's our devices or the people that we work with, when we allow technology in particular, to change, how we see other humans as something not as human as.
The same way we see a bot, the same way we see a post.
Posts are inhuman. There's a human behind that, that put it together.
When someone says, I'm having a bad day online, it's not just text on a screen. It's a cry for help. And as Christians, we see the humanity in that post, and we show up with a casserole or we show up in their inbox. Hey, I saw that. You seem to be struggling. What's going on? What can I be praying about? Well, we just show up at their doorstep and we cry with them. We also have a couple of families in the last several days that have lost loved ones.
Big, powerful and impactful people in their lives that are grieving deeply.
We show up, when we go to look them in the eye and they can't look us in the eye, we realize that's different, that's not normal. We dig a little deeper. We don't settle for the surface. We don't settle for the headline.
We read the full article. Millennials. We got to get better at that. You know, we don't allow the shortcut to make us feel okay.
The placebo of. Well, yeah, I mean, I knew that something wasn't right.
We don't sit there with that. We don't allow that to appease us anymore. When David was confronted by a prophet face to face, to me, there's a connection there, and I can't explain it through the language. I'll get Will to expound on that next week. But when Jesus is about to go on trial and he looks over and he sees one of his disciples, and the Bible does say, there, they made eye contact.
Peter denied him. And then he locks eyes with Jesus. And that rooster crows.
I cannot imagine the guilt or the shame in that moment.
To his credit, he chose a different path than Judas did. Judas probably felt something very similar, kissing Jesus on the cheek and then immediately realizing, do you realize what you've done? It's one of those moments.
And he ultimately decided to take his own life.
We have adolescents, we have teenagers that are growing up in this amplified, polarized world.
And in the midst of that, the political tends to lead the day and the spiritual sometimes gets politicized. The Gospel, explicitly and exclusively. The gospel is what our next generation of Christians need to know and understand before they understand all these other things. Because when we read those headlines, we process that through the lens of the gospel. It's really important.
If the church loses sight of that, there's no hope for anyone else to get right.
I give God's people. That's sort of the Pharisees. What hope do the people around them have if they're the teachers, but they're teaching the wrong curriculum?
Jesus, that's why he had these confrontations with them. If we show up at this building and we leave from this building without seeking to help change someone else's life, or without our lives and our hearts being changed, we're missing the point.
We're keeping appointments. We're not being the church.
AI and social media, in really big and powerful ways, they enable these facades because, again, they're optimized for engagement. And that's different from being optimized for spiritual growth.
That's different from finding spiritual value in something. It keeps your attention, it maintains your attention, but it's not always pointing your attention in the right place.
There was a book written a few years ago by the. Put out by the Fuller Youth Institute. So Kara Powell and the other author, whose last name is Griffin. I forget the first name. But there's three main questions they've identified that every teenager is seeking to answer. And that is, who am I? Where do I belong? Why do I matter? Identity. Community. Identity or belonging and purpose.
I want to spend a couple of minutes talking tonight about identity. In Genesis 1:26, it says, Then God said, let us make humans in our image and our likeness. Let them rule the fish of the sea and the birds in the sky, the domestic animals all over the earth, all the animals that crawl on the earth. So God created humans in his image. In the image of God, he created them. He created them male and female.
In Galatians 2, Paul says, I have been crucified with Christ. It's no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, the life that I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me, who gave himself for me.
When we read about people who are willing to. To assassinate other people because their ideas are different, the world needs to understand the identity of Christ.
That's why he died. That's why he was murdered.
Because his ideas were big and important. Ideas are important.
We have to learn how to hear other people's ideas and not be moved to murder. It's ridiculous. It's heartbreaking.
I want to know whoever did that. I want to ask what has happened to you. Tell me your story.
Talking with my friend the forensic psychologist, that's what we kind of inclusion we came to was these folks that do these awful things, particularly like sexually aggravated assault and horrible things to children, to weak people.
They're also victims on a level. And I know the first reaction is we just gotta lock them all up or we gotta kill them all or whatever.
But I think the first response is what?
There's a quote. What movie was it? He mentioned it. You may know it, but the line is, what makes a woman like you, a woman like you?
Nobody. I thought maybe that would. Okay, we'll Google it. It's an old movie. It was like Casablanca or one of those. But the question is, what makes a person like a serial killer to be a person like a serial killer?
I don't think people generally wake up and choose that.
There's a lot. It's a very complex answer.
We can do hard things. I know it's a simple statement. I say it probably too often.
Sometimes accepting the fact that this one person that did this one thing is just pure evil and there's no other.
There's no other side to that. Cube is sort of the shortcut in this moment. In Second Samuel, David is a murderer.
And David is also really committed sexual assault to some degree. You might can make a case for that. But definitely an adulterer.
We don't exclusively look at David through those lenses.
We also see him as King David. We see him as David the boy doing some really tremendous things. We teach about this guy, this adulterer, this murderer. He's like the theme of a lot of VBS's when he takes down Goliath. Not that part, but the Goliath part, right?
So we allow some levity there. We allow some humanity to come through.
We don't always allow that same humanity. And part of that's because of what we give our attention to. All the time.
And then when we come and we gather in these places, it affects how we see each other.
Well, they did something wrong to me that one time. They took my parking spot. They sat in my pew.
No, that's justifiable. Never mind they do something to us, right? Or they did something in their past that I know about.
And so we just sit kind of in that distant judgment seat, or we don't really want to judge them. We just don't know how to approach them.
And so we also keep that distance there. Adam and Eve in the garden, when they realized what they had done and God was coming, walking to them to.
To try to close that proximity, what was their response? They ran away and hid.
The line we've tried to cultivate in our family for our kids, one child in particular, is that when you do something wrong, I want you to know the right impulse there in this family, you will always have forgiveness. And if you always have forgiveness, there's no need to run, there's no need to hide, and there's no need to lie.
All three of those things happened in the garden. They ran away, they tried to hide.
And then there was this hesitancy for the truth.
There was a passing of the bug. It was the original Spider man meme, where they're all pointing at each other, you know, like, well, she told me to do it. Another certain serpent told me to do it, right? There's this passing off of the blame.
Well, when you live in a family, when you live in a house of forgiveness, you do something wrong, you have no reason to run and hide because you know you have forgiveness.
And so you run towards reconciliation.
Jesus says, if you go to the altar to offer your sacrifice, and you know somebody else has something against you, not that you have a beef with them, but they have an issue with you.
Leave your sacrifice. Go be reconciled to them. Paul says, we have a ministry of reconciliation. It's the essence of our relationship to God. We are reconciled to the Father through the Son, Jesus.
So why would it then not also be the core of our relationship with each other?
So let us lay aside every weight which hinders reconciliation. And sometimes it's these goofy little rectangles that we keep on us at all times.
It's those news stories that we want to be informed. We just don't want to be transformed or formed exclusively by those things.
So listen to different platforms that have typically opposing views where they overlap. That's probably where you're going to find closer to the truth.
And don't ever Let a device prevent you from seeing someone as an actual human.
Imagine if that happened to Jesus. If he saw any of us as anything less than designed and created in the image of his father.
Crucifixion's worth nothing. Then he saw every person, particularly those who hate him. Those he knew go on to not believe in his existence.
And he still died for them.
We talk about identity. We'll pick up here probably next week. We're talking about how we. How identity is formed. That's a hard question. Who am I? I think for a long time, adolescents have been asking that question. I don't know. The church has always been answering the questions that are being asked. We gotta make sure we're doing that.
Teach the things that they need to know that they're not asking. But we gotta make sure the things they are asking that we are answering. And we're showing them that scripture, God's people, the church, and in Christ, that's where those answers are found. Identity, community and purpose. All three of them right there.
If someone lives, a child lives in a home and in an environment where adults in their life reconcile, well, they're never grabbing the rifle to go and take a shot at another human. I believe that deeply.
When we know how to reconcile well, when our default setting is to give of self for the benefit of the other person. We have marriages that are strengthened and resilient.
We have churches that are healthy. They're not perfect. This is a hospital.
Sick people, injured people and people that want to help. Sick and injured people and random security guards. Those are the people that you find in a hospital.
Ironically, you find all those, not random security guards, very handpicked. You find all of those personalities here at church as well. Supposed to. Two things you should find in every congregation, encouragement and accountability.
And all of those are centered in the gospel.
I know today it was a weird day. I had no idea really where class was going to go tonight.
This is where it went, apparently. But I would encourage all of us to think deeply about the events that are unfolding, have unfolded. There's always an opportunity for us to love in a way that changes other people's hearts. That's what the gospel does and that's what we're a part of. That is where our identity is. So if that's our identity, then by default, that's going to happen to the people around us.
Find someone in your life tomorrow, at work or school or wherever, in your home.
Make a very intentional effort for them to be seen and heard by you and to Ask what you can be praying about for them, because it may be. It may be that one conversation that keeps them from stepping over the edge. We just don't know how many school shootings have we had. We have all these things my parents grew up with. The atomic bomb drills. Sorry. People that I know that are older in my life that grew up with those, an undisclosed age.
Our kids are growing up with school, active shooter drills, all these things.
We've got to make sure that we know how to heal.
We as the church have to be the ones that pronounce that the loudest. We have to have that ourselves. And that's part of the challenge, is that many of us, I don't think, have fully experienced that true reconciliation with God. Let's bow. Let's pray.
God, we thank you so much for allowing us the opportunity to wear your name and tonight specifically to gather in your name.
Help us, Father, to be keenly aware of the influences in our lives and to make sure that the ones that are the loudest are the ones that reflect your gospel. Your teaching, your son.
Help us to treat others not just with respect, but with the respect of the gospel. Help us to be self sacrificing in a way that causes people to say, that's different. I want to know more. Help us to live as a city set upon a hill, not to be a priority, not to be a spectacle of anything, but simply to point people to you. I pray that this church, this congregation, will be seen that way in this community.
And the way that we're seen that way is that each of us individually reflect the gospel, the forgiveness, the mercy, the grace, the encouragement and the accountability that comes with wearing your name. God, we love you. We pray for those who are hurting, for the families that have lost loved ones in all of these situations. You know every single situation deeply and intimately, and we pray that you would gently remind them of your presence. Christ's name, we pray. Amen.
Love you guys very much. Have a great week.
