[00:00:00] 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.
[00:00:37] Alrighty.
[00:00:39] Last week we took a little bit of time to kind of slow down with the events of the last couple of weeks and spend some time.
[00:00:45] We branched off of the AI discussion, talking about how AI does a lot of different things and the powerful nature of AI and how we need to think about that from a lot of different angles. And we didn't quite finish up the thought where I wanted us to go.
[00:00:59] So we'll do a quick summary of that, where we were last week, and then we'll dive in to this week. If you remember, this chart from last week talked about the Johari window, and this is four panels that kind of charts self awareness and group dynamics when it comes to knowing yourself. The things that you know about yourself and the things that you reveal to other people, the things that they know, that's the arena. That's everything's on display and it's truthful and it's honest. Then you move into the adjacent square that's red there. It's the blind spot. Those are the things about your personality that other people can see but you don't see.
[00:01:34] And if you move down, you go to the unknown and those are the things that you don't know about yourself and other people also don't know about you. And then where we spent most of our time was talking in that blue square, the facade. This is the thing that you know about yourself, but other people don't know it about you. This is that secret life sometimes that we cultivate. And we spent some time looking specifically at a fellow in Scripture that jumps back and forth from the facade to the blind spot. And that was King David in 2nd Samuel 11:12. We have his interaction with Bathsheba.
[00:02:07] He makes a series of really poor decisions and it doesn't seem to be until he is confronted face to Face by Nathan the Prophet, with an allegory, with a story in which he describes a man that has taken what is not rightfully his, that David is disgusted, and he said, everything should be returned fourfold and he deserves death. And the prophet looks him in the eye and says, you are that man.
[00:02:30] So in that moment, he has up what he thinks is this facade. He knows what he's done. He's taken Bathsheba, she's become pregnant. He's ordered the death of Uriah, her husband.
[00:02:41] And so he kind of seems to jump back and forth from this blind spot, but more of a facade because he is aware of his actions. And we talked a lot about how social media tends to amplify those things in us and our identity, the things that we know about ourselves, things we want people to know. The arena that we're trying to control. It's our highlight reel. That's what we post, that's what we share, that's what we cultivate and curate online.
[00:03:03] And what we've seen in a lot of studies is that the identity, in particular self esteem, especially among emerging generations living in that arena, is really challenging. Because when you start comparing other people's highlight reels to your behind the scenes, there's an imbalance there. There's a big imbalance. And so we start making decisions that reflect that. For more on that discussion, I would encourage you to go back and listen to last week's class where I wanted us to continue to move. And in light particularly of the national level events of the last two or three weeks, I want us to move in the direction of empathy and connect some of the things we've already talked about. In 1914, we're in the midst of World War I on Christmas Eve. And you've probably seen this in countless articles. Movies have been made about it. There's this random truce that happens on a battlefield. Germans on one side, French on the other. It happened in multiple places throughout the war.
[00:04:00] But on that particular night and throughout the next day, you have two groups that are literally entrenched and encamped against one another that are fighting a literal war. Bullets, bombs, death.
[00:04:14] In the middle of the night, you start to hear on the German side, what sounds like a Christmas carol, the Frenchmen. And other places, the Englishmen, they hear that and they start to sing along.
[00:04:25] And there are countless stories, countless events of people that were actually there, that have recorded their experience. This is a true story that in the middle of a war, two sides that were opposed to each other found a way to come together in one particular place. Someone on the German side just happened to have. Where's Zigfried? A football. Football.
[00:04:46] I practiced soccer ball for the rest of us, right?
[00:04:50] And they bring out this ball and these two enemies, these two groups of grown, or at least 17, 18 and older men that just hours before were aiming rifles at one another, pulling the trigger with the intention to kill, are now playing a game of soccer together.
[00:05:07] And in most of Those places, within 24 hours later, they went right back to the killing.
[00:05:14] It's possible to have enemies that you see as non human, and it's possible to change how you view that enemy based off of a personal interaction.
[00:05:28] I think this is a really important moment in history for us today, over 100 years later, because when we live completely in the online sphere, it's really, really easy to remove the humanity from the other side.
[00:05:41] And it's getting more and more difficult because half the time things that are posted that we read aren't actually human. They're bots, right? And so that just muddies the water even more. But the Christmas truce of 1914 hopefully will stick around for a long, long time in the memory of humanity as a moment where not even in the midst of a church experience, this is just war. This is a secular moment, if you will.
[00:06:06] They recognize, hey, let's stop for a minute. It's Christmas, at least for Christmas, right?
[00:06:12] So it's a very interesting moment. This is going to be the beginning of our talk tonight about empathy, contempt.
[00:06:21] I think a lot of times we really kind of gravitate towards the us and them dynamic, and we do it on different levels, right?
[00:06:30] Especially when you're like high school, middle school in particular, Just like the valley of life, horrific middle school time for most of us, maybe just me. There is this constant feeling that everyone else does this or that. I've had multiple conversations with one of my kids in particular who feels like everyone else at school has a DS or this game system or that game system. And so they're talking about games and experiences that they all seem to all of them like every one of them. As a matter of fact, they all have it. And I don't have that. And so I feel left out.
[00:07:01] Now it's possible that every one of them actually have that. It's factual that we do not have that.
[00:07:07] But in those moments when he's at school, what I hear from my young child is, I want to be a part of what everybody else seems to be a part of.
[00:07:17] You know, that fear of missing out, right? Fomo, that's a real thing. And it's not just a little guy thing. It's not just a teenager thing. It's a human thing. If you go back to Israel, throughout the Old Testament, as they're wandering through the wilderness, they go through these periods of devotion to God, and then they go through these other periods of just complete running away from God, essentially.
[00:07:38] But too often they're kind of looking over the fence saying, ooh, they've got kings. I think I'd like to have a king. We should get a king, right? It's like when you look over and you see your neighbor that has the, I don't know, a robot lawnmower or something, just hypothetically speaking, Mike Baker. And you think, well, sweetheart, we should get a robot lawnmower, right? Because you see the new car parked next door, or you see the whatever boys and their toys, right? We just get older, they get more expensive. But we still kind of have that envy of like, oh, I want that.
[00:08:08] That's what Israel has.
[00:08:10] The lack of contentment with what God provides for them. The lack of contentment of food, of safety, of just simply his presence, of being his people.
[00:08:20] Israel struggles with that. And we've connected this multiple times back to the garden. God gave them everything that they needed, and yet they believed that lie for just a brief moment, just long enough to take and eat.
[00:08:34] In that moment, they say, God, what you have provided is just not quite enough. And so we want to take that one step further. And in this digital age in particular, when Facebook market is always open, the store is never closed, Amazon is always a fingertip away, like, truly just one touch away.
[00:08:50] The idea of contentment is really, really difficult to settle into. And when we're never content, then that turns into contempt, contempt for one another, which is the opposite of empathy. So what is empathy? Let's start there. As Cohen and Strayer define empathy, they say the ability to understand and share in another's emotional state or context. Somebody give me the difference of empathy and sympathy.
[00:09:16] Empathy is saying, I've been there. Sympathy says, my heart goes out to you, right?
[00:09:21] Very, very similar, but distinct still, when it comes to an online culture and seeing someone simply as a bunch of pixels or a bot or text on a screen, the ability to see them as a human, to empathize as another human, to put yourself in their position or even to sympathize if you've not actually been there, is a really, really important skill. It's a really, really important muscle that we have to Flex on a regular basis. We have to make sure that we are doing everything we can to, to see properly the way God designed us to see other people.
[00:09:56] This is one study that says empathy among young Americans is on the rise. This particular study is a little bit dated, but it noticed that from the 1970s to 2008, empathy declined among young people by 40%. More than 40%.
[00:10:12] What's interesting is they did an update to this study about six or seven years ago and empathy now is on the rise. It's back on the rise almost up to the levels that it was in the 1970s.
[00:10:23] I would not have guessed that.
[00:10:25] I would have thought we're still plummeting. It kind of feels that way. Right.
[00:10:29] Because of, particularly in particular social media.
[00:10:33] Why do you think that is?
[00:10:35] What do you gather from the fact that now it's kind of on the rise since the early 2000s?
[00:10:41] What would contribute, you think, to a rise in empathy?
[00:10:44] Just the ability to find other people that have the same experiences as you. Okay.
[00:10:49] To connect online to find people with similar experiences. Yep.
[00:10:53] What else do you think that like Gen Z in particular just seems so much more aware of the world and the state that it's currently in.
[00:11:02] Pollution, bullying, all this kind of stuff. They just seem more aware of it, possibly from their connection to the Internet. So I think that makes them more empathetic because they're like, we want to live here for the foreseeable future, don't mess it up.
[00:11:17] Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I think maybe the fact that everyone's voice has been democratized, which there's some negative to that, but the fact that folks that live in the shadows, minority groups, folks that are marginalized online, they have the same volume. Right. They have access to the same platforms that everyone else does. And so to some degree that's created some equality there.
[00:11:41] I think this illustrates that there's kind of a two edged sword.
[00:11:44] What it shows me is that the fact that I feel the opposite of what the research says, I think that really highlights the end groups generally. I think most of us have learned to empathize. I think the fringe groups, the radical left and right of whatever topic it is, the loudest, the squeakiest wheels, those have gotten more boisterous. But that group may actually be much smaller than we realize.
[00:12:11] If on the whole these stats are accurate, then the majority of people have increased their empathy over the last decade or so.
[00:12:20] But we still have these horrific events.
[00:12:22] Those are at the hand of a small number of people. I think that's an important thing to think on when it comes to empathy and contempt. And I know we've got some help folks in the audience tonight, so feel free to correct me later, not in front of people if I get this incorrect. When it comes to being enraged, when it comes to being angry, some of these emotions that we associate with as negative emotions. A couple of the hormones that are released in your brain at excessive rates are cortisol and adrenaline. I don't know if you've ever had a true adrenaline rush, like maybe you've been in a car accident or you've had a public confrontation with someone or something happens and, and then a few minutes later, like 30 minutes to an hour later, all of a sudden your body just something changes and you come down from that adrenaline rush.
[00:13:12] You don't realize just how heightened your senses are. You don't realize how tense your whole body, your muscles have been. And then all of a sudden it just kind of drains you.
[00:13:21] When cortisol and when adrenaline get together, it's not easy to control what we think or what we say or what we do.
[00:13:30] When we have these little devices that on a regular basis continue to tap into that cocktail of cortisol, adrenaline and dopamine, it keeps us in this heightened state.
[00:13:42] You might call it the fight or flight state.
[00:13:46] This is from the Mayo Clinic website. It said when stressors are always present and you always feel under attack, that fight or flight reaction stays turned on. The long term activation of the stress response system and, and too much exposure to cortisol and other stress hormones can disrupt almost all of the body's processes. This puts you at a higher risk of many health problems including anxiety, depression, digestive problems, headaches, muscle tension and pain, heart disease, heart attack, high blood pressure and stroke, sleep problems, weight gain, problems with memory and focus. Essentially the whole system is haywired.
[00:14:20] It's on alert. And we were not designed to stay on, on alert like that. We're not designed to stay in this fight or flight mode.
[00:14:30] That is not what Jesus talks about when he talks about those who come to me know peace, I am the way, the truth and the life.
[00:14:40] When we find eternal life, it's not an eternal life of this heightened anxiety.
[00:14:45] That's not his design for us. And yet it is a really easy state for us to find ourselves in. And there's a lot of contributing factors. There's a lot of childhood trauma that goes into our lives that I think a lot of us don't learn how to deal with. We're not equipped at a young age to deal with some of those things. And then as an adult you try to reconcile and figure it out. And it's just a really hard process.
[00:15:10] We had lunch with Tony a couple weeks ago and he is a forensic psychologist and talks about some of the folks that he, he engages with and the traumatic events that they have. They have learned to be normal in their life, create, create the mentality that makes them do those things. They do right. It creates, that gives them all the ingredients to then go and be murderers, to be sexual predators, all of these things.
[00:15:36] I don't think you come out of the womb intending to do those things. I'm sure Zigre could give us just a vast array of stories from his time in prison ministry of people who have done horrific things, partly because the toolbox they've been given emotionally and cognitively is to do hurtful things, right? What do we say? Hurt people, do what they hurt people. It's a real thing.
[00:15:59] That's why reconciliation is the ministry that Paul tells Christians that we have. We have a ministry of reconciliation. That's why at the core and the essence of our relationship with God, he says that we have been reconciled to God through Christ. That's why forgiveness is not just something we need, it's something that we are supposed to be completely about. It is now a part of our identity.
[00:16:20] Not grudges, not keeping a record of wrong, not finding our way to bring up that wrong that was done to us over and over and over again. Not replaying those things over and over again. Not only listening to the anger and the hatred and the vitriol of the world.
[00:16:38] It's like opening the window to the, you know, the foghorn outside.
[00:16:43] We just leave the window open when we constantly stay in tune to our phones and that's all we hear. That's the only thing that pops up on our news cycles, 24 hour news.
[00:16:52] I don't think that was God's design either, to be quite frank. That's exhausting.
[00:16:57] And so I think what happens is that we all have this baseline of kind of emotional exhaustion.
[00:17:03] And so when we read that blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall inherit the kingdom of God.
[00:17:09] Our whole framework for what a peacemaker looks like is completely off base.
[00:17:15] In James, he says the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace by those who make peace. And ultimately he says mercy triumphs over judgment.
[00:17:23] But that does not get clicks, that does not sell.
[00:17:29] We're drawn to these really deep, powerful emotions. And typically the negative emotions are the Most powerful emotions. Turn with me to Genesis chapter four.
[00:17:41] And to some degree, I just. I want to kind of say, you know what? Those of US in the 21st century, we get a little bit of a break because we don't get more than two generations into humanity before we see contempt.
[00:17:55] Genesis, chapter four and verse one. Now, Adam knew Eve as wife, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord. And again she bore his brother Abel. Now, Abel was a keeper of sheep and Cain a worker of the ground. In the course of time, Cain brought to the Lord an offering of the fruit of the ground. And Abel also brought the firstborn of his flock and of their fat portions.
[00:18:16] And the Lord had regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering, he had no regard.
[00:18:23] So Cain was very angry, and his face fell.
[00:18:27] The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry? And why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.
[00:18:38] Cain spoke to Abel, his brother. And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel and killed him.
[00:18:45] Then the Lord said to Cain, where is Abel, your brother? He said, I do not know. Am I my brother's keeper?
[00:18:51] And the Lord said, what have you done? The voice of your brother's blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground which has opened its mouth to receive your brother's blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength.
[00:19:04] You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth. Cain said to the Lord, my punishment is greater than I can bear. Behold, you have driven me today away from the ground and from your face I shall be hidden. I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and. And whoever finds me will kill me. And the Lord said to him, not so. If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord put a mark on Cain lest any who found him should attack him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.
[00:19:33] Well, that happened quick.
[00:19:35] In the beginning, God creates Chapter three. Adam and Eve partake.
[00:19:41] Chapter four, the first domestic homicide.
[00:19:46] And Cain kills Abel.
[00:19:48] Why did he kill his brother?
[00:19:50] Anger, Jealousy. Why do you think? Anger and jealousy.
[00:19:54] God didn't accept his offering, but he accepted Abel's. Is that Abel's fault? So why did he kill Abel.
[00:20:01] Cain felt like he was out and Abel was in, perhaps.
[00:20:06] What did Cain offer?
[00:20:09] It's an open book.
[00:20:15] Okay.
[00:20:17] Fruit from the ground.
[00:20:19] And Abel offered firstborn. Right, the good stuff.
[00:20:27] One offered fruit, one offered an animal. That's what's different.
[00:20:31] But there is a detail there that Ken pointed out that is the only detail that I can find of significance in this interaction. Because I've wrestled with this.
[00:20:44] Not just like, why did he kill his brother? But why did God say no?
[00:20:49] What did God actually say?
[00:20:51] Somebody read verse six for me.
[00:20:55] Mike, would you mind reading that? This is my way of saying I'm sorry for choking on you for the robot lawnmower. It's out of jealousy, though. Sorry. The Lord said to Cain, why are you angry? And why has your face fallen?
[00:21:08] If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over.
[00:21:21] Seems like there's an opportunity for reconciliation, right?
[00:21:27] But contempt sets in.
[00:21:30] This vitriol, this truly unrighteous indignation. And because it seems like his hurt. What makes sense is that his hurt is because of God's response to his gift. His response is then to take it out on his brother.
[00:21:45] Because his brother got the response that he apparently wanted and he apparently still had access to to get. God would still lift his head if he resists sin crouching at his door.
[00:21:58] I think this is a really important place for us to think.
[00:22:02] Oftentimes things happen out in the world, and we find ourselves communicating with people about it online, each giving our commentary.
[00:22:12] And we develop this unrighteous indignation and vitriol for a person who when they're the recipient of our anger, but they're not the source of the anger when we do that in our interpersonal relations. Let's take the same dynamic in a sibling rivalry.
[00:22:30] Mom gives one person what seems to be favor, and they get to have TV time. The other person wants that TV time, but they didn't clean their room. And so they're angry and they hit their sibling.
[00:22:43] Hypothetically, they take it out on the sibling. Well, it's not the sibling's fault. The sibling just did what they were instructed to do.
[00:22:50] How often do we do that as adults?
[00:22:53] We misdirect or we redirect and we lash out at someone else.
[00:22:59] Road rage is an example of this. Someone gets out of their car and beats someone else to death or shoots someone because they cut them off in traffic. That's an irrational response to A traffic decision.
[00:23:12] That's how things escalate. That's how. That's one of the ways we got to where we are in our country today, right? The other part of that is that we live in the world.
[00:23:21] And the world has brokenness.
[00:23:23] And the things that we see that don't make sense, that don't look like righteousness, it goes back to Genesis 3.
[00:23:31] So it's okay for us to be appalled and to be shocked to some degree, but we can't really be all that surprised because that's what the world yields.
[00:23:43] And so when we find ourselves in these debates, particularly online, talking about worldly things, and we don't ever filter it through the explicit lens of the gospel, we will find ourselves staying in the midst of this vitriol, in the midst of this contemptedness for other people. And we're mad at them. But our enemy is not the person, our enemy is the devil.
[00:24:06] We are in the midst of a spiritual battle. Not a physical, not an earthly, a spiritual.
[00:24:13] And my fear is that we lose sight of that so quick and so easy. And these little thinking devices, they just cultivate that over and over again. And so when something happens, like some of the events that we've seen over the last few weeks, they're not unusual, right?
[00:24:27] The things that we've experienced in the last two weeks, murder, assassinations, go back to the 60s, it was there five years ago. Racial tension at what was considered an all time high, go back to the 60s, it was there, right? So again, like I said, the first week, it's the boomers fault. They did it all first. We're just copying that.
[00:24:47] We understand that the life that we live right now, there is nothing new under the sun.
[00:24:52] The access that we have to every single headline sometimes is not helpful.
[00:24:58] Brokenness has been around from the garden, there's no dispute of that.
[00:25:04] But we tend to obsess over it more than we used to and sometimes we don't even realize it. And I think it is an obsession because we're drawn to these devices. We talked a couple of weeks ago, we said that technology is a tool, right? Well, there's a difference in a shovel and a phone.
[00:25:18] If you leave the shovel out in the yard, where does it go? It stays right there. Does it ever say, hey, it's raining, come take me in, please, I'm getting wet. No, it just lays there because it's a shovel. But if you set your phone down, what does it do? It cries out to you. It says, bzzz, bzz, bzz. Bzzt.
[00:25:36] It makes these sounds and it makes these noises and it makes this commotion to grab and keep your attention. They're not the same. They're both tools, yes, but they are not the same. Not all tools are created equal.
[00:25:50] Another paper that I ran across is Narcissism and Social Networking, a meta analysis, and I'm sure you guys are as intrigued as I am to read like 17 syllable words. So instead we'll skip to the conclusion here. Overall, this study showed that not only it not only supported but also refined the notion of a relationship between engaging in social networking sites and narcissistic personality. Personality traits as we have spent more time online, particularly since 2012, narcissism has been steadily on the rise, particularly among emerging generations and particularly among people who spend an exorbitant amount of time online.
[00:26:32] Doesn't generally make us better people.
[00:26:35] It has the potential to make us more effective at communicating. It has the potential to make us more effective of seeing red flags in each other's lives.
[00:26:45] But when it's left to its own devices, it doesn't make us more spiritually minded people.
[00:26:52] It makes us narcissistic. That means that we think in terms of us. Instead of the gospel being the filter, we are the filter for all of our thinking. Carl Truman in his book. It's a great book. I would highly recommend you read it. He's got a very academic version of it that's like three times the size.
[00:27:06] I hear that's good too. But the one I read is Strange New World. And one of his quotes in there is that culture defines morality based on aesthetics, not ethics, which means what looks good, what feels good, what sounds good, not necessarily what is right or what is wrong.
[00:27:21] And that's why the same action in one situation is righteous and good in the other situation simply because they have an elephant on their shirt instead of a donkey, or it's red instead of blue and well, now it's evil, but over here it's good.
[00:27:35] Unless you're on the other side. Over here it's evil and over here it's good.
[00:27:39] That's why Jesus didn't come and say I came, that they may have more political life.
[00:27:46] I could care less about having Christians in politics. I actually hate that idea. I want faithful, godly people in the midst of government and crafting legislation. But that politics part, I could care less.
[00:28:00] The challenge is that they're so intertwined. It's really difficult. It's really hard to articulate nuance when everybody has a bullhorn.
[00:28:11] And when every conversation then becomes running to opposite ends of the room, there is no discussion, there is only vitriol, there is only anger.
[00:28:21] And those that pursue those things, it's such a dangerous place.
[00:28:25] Just like anywhere we go spiritually has danger, we do need to pray for our brothers and sisters in Christ that have influence to help shape legislation and the laws of our land. But we can never ever for one second put our actual identity and our true allegiance in that flag or in this physical country. That cannot be our identity at our core, because that flag did not die for our sins.
[00:28:52] And that is not at all to make light of any military sacrifice that died for the freedom of our country and our civic liberties.
[00:29:00] But there are Christians that have lived and lived faithfully under regimes under communism, under Marxism, under democratic republics. So that's not a necessary requirement for faithfulness and eternal living.
[00:29:14] And we can't talk like it is. We can't live like it is.
[00:29:20] That muddies the water. When it comes to articulating the gospel, there's another quote I really like Truman. It's a good book. He says we've seen this one before. I think we've created a digital world in which it is increasingly easy to imagine that reality is something we can manipulate according to our own wills and desires and not something that we necessarily need to conform ourselves to. We live according to the reality of Christ, the reality of the gospel, which is what we, we do conform ourselves to. We conform our thinking, our speaking, our actions to the gospel. The gospel says that when an enemy attacks you or when an enemy comes your way, you turn the other cheek. It's a hard thing to live out.
[00:30:02] Well, at what point is it self defense? I don't have all the answers, but I know that there's an interaction.
[00:30:11] Well, we'll get to that in just a minute. Before we get there, you've heard about the Zealots, like Simon the Zealot in the New Testament, one of Jesus, apostles, right. A loyal follower of Christ. The Zealots were a nationalist group, a Jewish group that absolutely wanted to get rid of Roman rule. They wanted the Jews to be their own actual state governing state.
[00:30:32] Now, the Sicari are a subset group of that. They are the ones that today we would call the radical group.
[00:30:39] They're called the Sicaris because that term was a knife like a blade. And they were known for going to these public gatherings and they would wear a cloak of some kind. They would smuggle in their knife and they would stab people and they would leave or they would act like, oh no, this is a great harm. They would assassinate people on the regular.
[00:31:00] That was their mentality. Because they wanted to take back the Jewish state, but by force, by any means necessary. It was a very militant minded group. We know of militant groups today. There's a lot of commonalities with that. They were a part of this zealot group. I don't think. Everything I've read doesn't seem to indicate that Simon was necessarily a part of that group, but he was a part of the zealots, which definitely wanted that separate state. So in today's terms we would use that term nationalism. And yet he walked with Jesus, by all accounts was considered a faithful apostle.
[00:31:33] Apostle, and that's not a thing. But an apostle who then was martyred at the end of his life on behalf of the gospel.
[00:31:40] So the nuance that we're talking about today goes back at least to the first century.
[00:31:47] And he clearly followed Jesus.
[00:31:49] He clearly followed Jesus unto death.
[00:31:53] I do think that, first of all, I love life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.
[00:31:58] I don't want to lose my life for my faith. I want to have the conviction to be willing to do so.
[00:32:05] I don't enjoy physical pain. I don't want to be hurt or injured or imprisoned for my faith. I have to have the willingness to do so.
[00:32:15] I don't ever want to leave this place, this community. I love it here. But if at some point in my life it's clear that God's will has me going somewhere else, I want to be willing to submit to him and not to me. So you see how the narcissistic thinking comes into play when we live all of our lives online and it cultivates this narcissism. Then when it comes to submitting to God's will in other areas of our life, we've made it more difficult for ourselves because we've fallen in love with comfort and with convenience and with things that are way more earthly than they are spiritual.
[00:32:50] This is why this study is really, really hard. It's really difficult for me. It's a lot easier to present than it is to live out every single day, because it offers a whole lot of opportunity to take steps backwards. Turn with me to Hebrews, chapter four.
[00:33:09] And this is what's so remarkable about Jesus.
[00:33:13] We think of the first century as just this completely foreign time. And it is in so many ways. I mean, I don't know how they lived in the Middle east without H Vac. I don't want to know. I don't Want to know the answer to that?
[00:33:25] But there's so much about their living that is the same as ours today. Because the commonality is humanity. We don't really change a whole lot. Hebrews chapter 4, beginning in verse 14. Since then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens. Jesus, the Son of God. Let us hold fast our confession through. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in a time of need.
[00:33:58] He can relate.
[00:34:00] We have a high priest who has entered once and for all that holy of holies on our behalf to give us access to God the Father.
[00:34:09] And he's not this just mystical thought out there that has no idea what we're feeling. It's. Have you ever met anybody? Ever met, like the actual President of the United States? A president, or like a king and queen?
[00:34:20] Yeah, me neither. But if you meet somebody super famous.
[00:34:23] I met Ozzie Smith when I was a kid. Wasn't a great interaction. He still owes me an autograph. But he was a guy that I was like, man, Ozzie, he's the wizard. He's great. He does back flips at shortstop. Fantastic. He was larger than life until he broke my heart.
[00:34:35] Sometimes celebrities and people that seem to have this distance to us. If you've ever been to a concert, they're up on the stage and you're. You're in awe of them, right? They're. They're this larger than life figure. Well, Jesus is kind of larger than life, yet intimate and accessible. And also has been tempted in every way and every sense that we have been tempted. That's important because to him, we are his children. We are God's children.
[00:35:05] To the person who was put on the cross, who was beaten, to the person who was who, people openly denied his Godness to his face multiple times, very public ways, humiliation, talking about narcissism. Those people gravitated towards him not to be his buddy.
[00:35:23] And yet those are the same people that he willingly puts himself on the cross. How often have we sung the song he could have called 10,000 angels to destroy the earth, but he died alone.
[00:35:35] For you and for me.
[00:35:39] So why would our response to those same types of people, which, by the way, as were some of us, as Paul would write in First Corinthians, why would our response to them be different than his because it's difficult, because it's counterintuitive to, to our humanness that wants revenge, that wants to seek out those things. J. Kim wrote in his book Analog Christian. When the person on the receiving end of our disdain and scorn is a bot on a screen or a handle on our social media feed, it feels less effortless to treat them as less than. It doesn't take a lot of effort, it doesn't take a lot of discernment, it doesn't take a lot of, hey, let's stop and pump the brakes for a second. It's all immediate.
[00:36:20] And if it's real easy, that should give us cause for concern.
[00:36:25] Not to go back to the same passage over and over again. But we are wide is the gate, broad is the way, easy is the way that leads to destruction.
[00:36:34] So the easy thing is to lash out. The easy thing is to not have discernment. The easy thing is to not swallow your pride and just let it all out, right?
[00:36:43] But that's not what leads to eternal life.
[00:36:46] In the book Hate Inc. We read factors like anonymity, invisibility, a lack of authority and not communicating in real time. Strength. Strip away the moors of society spent millennia building and it's seeping from our smartphones into every aspect of our lives. We think in terms of being the same person that we are in personhood in real life, that we are online. But what's happening, I think, is that the person that we are online is the person we're becoming in real life.
[00:37:13] There are different consequences to both of those landscape.
[00:37:18] For the Christian, the gospel has to be the filter for everything.
[00:37:23] Christ's teaching, his living, the apostles teaching.
[00:37:27] What we read in Scripture is essentially God's insight into who God is and the people that he has designed us to be and the life that he has designed us to live and the kingdom that he wants us to be a part of.
[00:37:39] And we read in Scripture or we don't read in scripture and we live this life and we just, we go through just reacting to things.
[00:37:47] Dying to self was not a one time gig.
[00:37:50] Confessing the name of Jesus was not that one time. And then you get wet. It is a daily denying of self, taking up your cross and following him, whether in person, in an embodiment, embodied interaction, or online.
[00:38:03] There is no separation of that in the Christian's mind. I don't believe that there's no separation because we are what we are crucified With Christ. It's no longer us who who live, but Christ who lives in us and the life which we now live in the flesh. We live by faith in the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for us. Just as Paul wrote in Galatians, the us and them pronoun here is just.
[00:38:29] It can be really dangerous when that becomes our identity, when that becomes the substitute, just like we talked about. AI is a danger when it becomes a substitute for some things of substance in our life. When we start looking at us and them and never seeing the humanity side of that people that are broken, then we struggle. In John, chapter 18, a passage that I really, really wrestle with.
[00:38:51] John 18, beginning in verse one, when Jesus had spoken these words, he went out with his disciples across the Kidron Valley, where there was a garden which he and his disciples entered. Now, Judas, who betrayed him, also knew the place, for Jesus often met there with his disciples. So Judas, having procured a band of soldiers and some officers from the chief priests and the Pharisees, went there with lanterns and torches and weapons. Then Jesus, knowing all that would happen to him, come forward and said to them, whom do you seek? They answered him, jesus of Nazareth. Jesus said to them, I am he. Judas, who betrayed him, was standing with them. When Jesus said to them, I am he. They drew back and fell to the ground. So he asked them again, whom do you seek? And they said, jesus of Nazareth. Jesus answered, I told you that I am he. So if you seek me, let these men go.
[00:39:36] This was to fulfill the word that he had spoken. Of those whom you gave me, I have lost not one. Then Simon Peter, having a sword, drew it and struck the high priest's servant and cut off his right ear. The servant's name was Malchus. So Jesus said to Peter, put your sword into its sheath. Shall I not drink the cup that the Father has given me?
[00:39:55] I love the show band of brothers because I felt like I learned more history watching that than I did in most of my high school history classes.
[00:40:03] But I also liked it because there is true fraternity brotherhood. There are these people that are fighting a noble cause, trying to fight for freedom.
[00:40:15] And we get to see different levels of relationship, different dynamics all throughout that whole series.
[00:40:22] In my mind, the apostles seem to have this band of brothers in the back of their mind that Jesus is going to be our king, and he's going to be king in the way that we're going to have a new, like, pro Jewish Caesar.
[00:40:35] The mentality I had when I went from being a freshman to a sophomore in college. As a freshman, you go through pledge week and you get Treated like less than human for a few days.
[00:40:46] End up getting some abs along the way after a lot of push ups. That was great, but very, very painful. There was not really a lot of reasoning to why we did the things we did, other than the fact that the people putting us through pledge week had to do the same thing.
[00:40:59] That's not a good reason.
[00:41:02] And so then when it was my turn to put someone through, I actually had to fight that. Like, nah, man, we did this. So you got to do it.
[00:41:08] I had to learn this way. You got to learn that way.
[00:41:14] In the minds of the apostles, I think they kind of had.
[00:41:18] We've been persecuted physically. And so now it's time for Jesus to reign supreme and out. Caesar. Caesar. But what did Jesus say about Caesar? Render unto Caesar what is his. Jesus doesn't have his name on a coin.
[00:41:32] He doesn't need your coins.
[00:41:36] He needs your heart.
[00:41:37] He needs our lives.
[00:41:40] This is a hard passage for me to reconcile in the midst of even just. I don't know if I'm a pacifist. I don't know. I know I hesitate to go to war. Little bit scared, to be quite frank. But also the idea of taking the life of someone else. That God has put the potential of eternity in them and his image is in them.
[00:42:05] When Jesus had the opportunity, this is like the first Tyson Holyfield, right? He cuts his ear off. Peter, bless his heart. Jesus puts it back on. Throughout all of this, Jesus is very calm and maybe that's the way I read it. I am he.
[00:42:17] I am he. Whom do you seek? I told you that I am he. He doesn't seem to be yelling. He doesn't seem to be screaming. When there's bloodshed, he's calm. He puts it back on.
[00:42:27] That's counterintuitive.
[00:42:30] What is the Christian's response? 2nd Timothy 2:23 26. Might be helpful for us. Have nothing to do with foolish ignorant controversies. You know that they breed quarrels. And the Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone. Able to teach patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness.
[00:42:46] God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to a knowledge of the truth, and they may come to their senses and escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will.
[00:42:56] Perhaps James is helpful. All kinds of animals, birds, reptiles and sea creatures are being tamed and have been tamed by mankind. But no human being can tame the tongue. It is a restless evil full of deadly poison. With the tongue. We praise our Lord and Father, and with it we curse human beings who have been made in God's likeness.
[00:43:13] And then lastly for us to consider, Romans 12, 17, 21 repay no one evil for evil, but give thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all, if possible, so far as it depends on you. Live peaceably with all, beloved. Never avenge yourselves. But leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, vengeance is mine I will repay, says the Lord. To the contrary. If your enemy is hungry, feed him. If he is thirsty, give him something to drink, for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head. Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good. These are difficult passages to completely embrace and to find how they need to be articulated and how we live how we live them out.
[00:43:55] Tonight I touched on things that I know are Volumes of books have been written about some of the things that we've touched on. We've got 40 minutes, right, and we can't possibly do it full justice. I'd love to continue the conversation with you. Mostly I want us all to consider our response, not even to the specific events the last couple of weeks. Those things are going to continue to happen in our lifetime. They've happened in every generation of Christians lifetime. So it's going to happen. It's going to happen to your kids and your grandkids as well.
[00:44:23] How do we respond?
[00:44:26] I don't have a lot of direct impact on national events, but I have a direct impact on every interaction I have with everyone in my life every day. And that's at least where we have to start in examining my own heart and my own reaction to evil and to wrongdoing.
[00:44:42] Trying to practice the way of Jesus.
[00:44:45] It takes a lot of practice for that to become our default setting. It's not easy. It is very, very difficult. But we have to encourage each other and we have to hold each other accountable to. To that, not to other forms of measurement. Let's pray and we'll be dismissed. Father, we thank you for allowing us to gather in your name tonight. We thank you for Scriptures, we thank you for your truth. We thank you for your spirit that comforts us, empowers us. We thank you for Christ, through whom we are reconciled to you, help us to seek reconciliation as much as is possible on our end, to forgive and to make a way for reconciliation. We pray for those who have committed evil acts and. And for those who have cultivated evil in their hearts. We pray, Father, that there is an opportunity for repentance and that each of us, in this room can play a role in bringing them back to you, to showing the world what it means to live a redeemed life, a life that is counterintuitive to the way that we live here in this earthly place. God, we love you. We thank you for forgiveness. Help us to also forgive. In Christ's name we pray. Amen.
[00:45:48] Love you guys very much. Have a great week.
