Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: You.
[00:00:00] Speaker B: 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 05:00 p.m. Or Wednesdays at 07:00 p.m. If you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison church, you can find us online at Madison church.
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.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Okay, so I did want to point out tonight I'm going to be the only one here. Robert is out of town on business, and so he has asked me, Matthew, chapters five through seven, that will take us all the way through the sermon on the mount. Now, the next two weeks, I am not going to be here, but Robert will be here, and he has a special guest teacher that I think you're all going to want to hear. I'm not going to say who it is, but he will be here for the next two weeks, and I think you all are going to want to be a part of that. So, very quickly, last week, we had actually asked you to read Matthews chapter five and six. I've added seven because I didn't realize as I was preparing that five, six and seven. Just again, my opinion here kind of need to stay together. It's sermon on the mount. And then next week for March the 6th, Robert's going to start going into chapters for sure. Eight and nine, maybe ten.
All right, so the sermon on the mount, anybody know what mountain it was on?
Any guesses?
Well, you're right.
The real answer is we don't know. We don't know where it is. It isn't explicitly called out in the scripture. You will notice at the end of Matthew, chapter four, it talks about he was in Capernaum. Okay? And this is actually from Google Maps. You'll see here the church of the Beatitudes. And if you'll also remember, this area right around in here is where Capernaum was. And so sort of the idea is they knew where Capernaum was. And it said he went up onto the mountain and they have this place and they built a church there. This is actually called the mount of the Beatitudes is what they call it. And that is the church of the Beatitudes. And it's in northern Israel on this Corazim plateau. I included this picture because this is taken from where that is. But just beautiful, honestly, when you look at know, it's there overlooking the sea of Galilee.
I always like to kind of know the geography as we're going into these sort of things. So this is again just where it likely could have happened. We don't know for sure, but this is passed down that this is maybe where it was. And you'll find as you study the present day Israel, the holy lands there, they do a lot of like they have a place that Peter's house is mentioned in scripture and they've got a place. They say this is Peter's house, but they don't really know. And same with this.
Okay, so I'm going to rush through chapter five and we're only going to hit a couple things in chapter seven. And I'm really going to dig in a lot on chapter six. And this is my opinion, the sermon on the Mount is not about who we are, not what we do. And even as I studied this, I'm going to talk about how in the Bible that I've got, it breaks things up. And in some ways I think that's a bit distracting. And I think this time I really focused on trying to read it all as kind of one narrative. I do have one electronic Bible that allows me to turn off the chapters and verses. And I do recommend that if you ever get a chance to do that. Now, I don't have a whole lot of jokes tonight, but I'm going to tell you guys one of my favorite jokes ever. And it's from the Beatitudes. That's one of the first part of the sermon on the Mount. That's the blessed R quotes could also be translated Happy R. But one of my favorite jokes is not original joke for me, but I still love it and I heard it this way. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. But that's okay. They're meek and we can take it back.
I don't know. Like I said, that gives you a little glimpse into my sense of humor. I love that.
So the beatitudes are the first part of the chapter there. Verses three through twelve, Matthew 513 through 20.
I've kind of just put phrases up there. I think most of us know the entire scripture there. This is where he goes into. You are the salt, you are the light. He's emphasizing the value of his disciples and then these bullets here are where I'm going to get into what I'm calling a sort of a disadvantageous split. So, in verse 20, he makes the statement. Unless your righteousness far surpasses that of the scribes and the Pharisees. And then my bible has a split there. And then it goes into the next portion. Which is where it says, like you have heard it said.
Love your enemy. Hate. Or excuse me, love.
What is it? Love your neighbors? Hate your enemies. And he says, but I say to you. And he's calling people to a deeper righteousness. Now, in my opinion, 21 through 48 is really the answer to that question or that statement, in my opinion, as I read it, just as one narrative. And I think it really goes back into this whole thing. It's not about what we do. It's about who we are. And we will see this continue. That theme continues into chapter six. When it talks about doing things to be seen. It talks about when you're giving charitably those sorts of things. So, again, not about what you're doing. It's about who you are. Okay? And verses 20 or so there through the end.
I've seen this used at times to equate different sins. Again, it's my opinion that's not what those verses are about. What he's saying is, again, he's calling us to a higher form of righteousness. Right? And I will summarize it this way. Jesus died. He's forgiven our sins. He paid the debt. Right? He wants us to be righteous, but he also wants our hearts. Okay. And what were the scribes and the Pharisees doing? They were making extra rules. And they were saying, okay, if you check these boxes, then God has to save you. That's what they were saying. And that's what he was speaking out against.
I'll also cover here if you have your Bible open. Matthew, chapter five, verse 45. Somebody read that for me. That'll let me get a drink of water as well.
In order that you may be sons of your father. Who is in heaven. For he causes us, the son. To rise on the evil and the good. And sends reign on the righteous and the unrighteous. I love that verse. Okay. And I'm going to tell you why. When anybody ever asks me the question. Why do bad things happen to good people? That's where I go. Okay. And to me, that's what that verse means. I think there are a couple of men that I know here. And we have talked about doing a class just about that. And we've already got a name picked out for it. But I love that verse. And again we say it again, exactly what it says. Just the second part.
He causes his son to rise on the people.
Right. Okay. Meaning some things just are right. That's kind of the way I take it.
All right, as we move into chapter six, I'm going to go ahead and warn you guys, okay, we're going to cover this in the next part. I'm going to do a little bit of a deep dive. And if you were in the young apart class last quarter, you're going to get a review of a topic I did there. It's one that could be controversial. Okay. If it is, I'm going to say what I say every week. I'll be right up here afterwards.
And I'm speaking for myself. I'm not representing anybody else, but I just kind of want to give that warning before we jump in to chapter six. So Matthew, chapter six, again my opinion continue continuation of the theme. He wants our hearts, verses one through 24.
It covers giving to the poor.
It covers how to pray and the Lord's prayer if you'll remember that's where he says, hey, when you pray, don't go out in public to do it. You go where it's secret. Again, back to my opinion, that theme, same thing for how to fast even covers in there when you fast, clean up, make yourself look presentable. Don't walk around like this. I'm fasting. Right.
Okay.
And then it gets into the verses on the treasures. I'm moving through this pretty quickly because again, as I studied this, I think these are areas that we study fairly frequently. Any comments or questions before I go on to the next topic?
Okay, what did I do?
Okay, so now we're moving on and this is where I say it may get controversial and we are going to be looking a lot. Matthew, chapter six, it's down in the verses 30, around 34 I believe is where it really starts talking about anxiety. And I prepared this lesson last quarter and I did it not knowing I was going to be teaching this class. So I'm recycling a lot of it. So we're going to start and I'm going to discuss why should we even discuss anxiety. And we're going to talk a little bit about what to do about it.
And I want to be clear here. I'm not a mental health professional.
I'm former engineer. I manage engineers now. But I will share with you, I am somebody that has struggled with anxiety. Okay.
In my was almost crippling and I'll get into it as we talk about what to do about it. I'm not ashamed to say I did get treatment and I was medicated for it for a while. So anxiety is something I'm not going to say I understand it, but I have definitely experienced it, okay. And experienced it bad way.
So why discuss it? Anybody got any thoughts on why we should discuss anxiety?
It is a problem in our country. Thank you. And it's not just in our country. It is actually pandemic level in our world society today, worldwide. I'm going to read this. Due to Covid-19 pandemic, the number of anxiety and depressive disorders grew.
Depressive symptoms grew from a base of about 193,000,000 people worldwide to 246,000,000, which is about 28% of all people, okay?
Which is about 28% growth. Anxiety disorders grew from about 298,000,000 people to 374,000,000, which is about a 25% increase. Now, I don't have the latest population statistics for the US, but I believe the US is about 350,000,000 people. Okay? So you can see what kind of problem it is when I say there's 374,000,000 people that are dealing with it. I'll also mention in the research I did, these depressive and anxiety symptoms are overwhelmingly, or not overwhelmingly, disproportionately affecting the young. Okay? From previous generations, it would have been almost unheard of to hear of teenagers and young adults suffering from anxiety, but it is an epidemic proportion. Okay? So I'm going to move on past this. We'll get to the what to do about it later in the class, okay? So for this class, and you all are going to have to bear with me here, okay? Because I try to be very precise with my words, and I'm actually going to admit right now, I'm probably going to be somewhat imprecise.
Fear is not anxiety. Okay?
I taught this class the first time to the teenagers. And so I said specifically, I remember this, to the teenage boys, absence of fear, it's stupidity, okay? Courage is being afraid and doing something anyway.
But fear is not anxiety. Fear is a response to a real and immediate threat. The example, I said, there's a snake loose. I taught this in the auditorium. I should have changed it. If I told you there was a snake loose in the room, it would probably be wise to be fearful and take some sort of action, okay?
And one of those actions could be, burn the room down. I don't like snakes, all right?
But anxiety is worry or a feeling of dread about things that have happened, are happening, or will inevitably happen or will never happen again. Taught this to the youngsters, and this is the kind of thinking that would go through my head. I have a big test tomorrow. If I fail, I will spend the rest of my life as a hopeless, lonely loser. Okay, so now as we go through this for this lesson, we're going to consider worry and anxiety interchangeable. I'm not sure that they are, especially after I taught this last time. If you were in that class, we ended up spending a couple of weeks on this. It was some of the best class time I've ever spent. It was very powerful. But as we go through this, if I say worry, I'm really talking about anxiety. Study from the University of Wisconsin says 40% of worries are worries over things that never happen.
30% of things are over. 30% of worries are over things that can't be changed.
22% are worries over things that are petty and needless. Do we have any mathematicians in the room? Anybody catch what would be left there?
Eight.
Both of you all sitting in a little group over there. That's cool. 8% are things that are legitimate. So I said this in the class a couple of weeks ago. So how effective or how ineffective is worry for us mathematicians?
92%. It's 92% ineffective. Okay, but let's read a couple of scriptures. We're going to spend a lot of time here. In Matthew, we're not going to read the scriptures in Philippians and in Luke. You can go read those for yourself, but because we are online, I'm going to read those scriptures aloud.
Okay.
For this reason, I say to you, do not be worried about your life as to what you will eat or what you will drink, nor for your body as to what you will put on. Is life not more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the sky, that they do not sow, nor reap, nor gather crops into barns, and yet your heavenly father feeds them.
Are you not much more important than they?
And which of you, by worrying, can add a single day to his lifespan? And why are you worried about clothing? Notice how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor, nor do they spin thread for cloth. Yet I say to you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so closed the grass field, which is alive today and tomorrow, is thrown into the furnace, will he not much more clothe you? And this is important, this next sentence, you of little faith do not worry then saying what are we to eat? Or what are we to drink? Or what are we to wear for clothing for the gentiles eagerly seek all these things, for your heavenly father knows that you need all these things, but seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be provided to you. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has trouble of its own. Okay, now as I said, I'm not a mental health professional. And again, I'm going to speak from the scripture and I'm going to speak a little bit from my own experience.
Verse 30. There, that last clause that I said was important.
What's a root cause of anxiety?
Again, not my words.
Lack of faith. You have little faith. Okay?
So I'm going to move on.
So some other things about anxiety here, Matthew 627 through 29 tells us it's unnecessary.
Matthew 636 32, Luke 1230 indicate it's a lack of faith. Matthew 634, I believe, categorizes it as sinful, it's prohibited and it can affect our prayers. Again, I'll leave those if you guys want to go look those up. Actually, let's go ahead and go look those up. I think the James one is the one that I really want to get. If somebody gets there before I get there, if you want to go ahead and read it.
But if any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously without reproach and it will be given to him. But he must ask in faith without any doubting. For the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea driven by the wind.
And then mark eleven.
Therefore I say to you all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them and they will be granted to you.
Okay, so how to stop being anxious? And this one's going to seem weird. First off, stop it. And I know that sounds horrible. Suffer with anxiety, tell you that it seems horrible.
It's ultimately a self inflicted wound. You're the one that's feeling anxious. Okay.
For me, this second one was a big one. Form the right relationships with God.
If you're anxious about things, a lot of times you've probably got something in your life going on where you don't have the right relationships with God and man and develop the right attitude of mine. Now I won't go back to the stop it. Okay, let me see.
I'm going to go back to stop it.
So a lot of my anxiety, I was actually having some health problems in my late twenty s. Okay, and I would go to a website that I no longer go to, and that website is WebMd.
Here's what I mean when I say the stop it.
I was worried about this health problem that I had, and I would go to WebMd an hour or two later, I'd be sitting there, and I'd have the problem that I thought I had, like, six others, right? So I had to say, I'm not going to Webmd anymore, all right? I was going to the doctor all the time. They were taking blood, and they were saying, this blood work doesn't look good. And I finally looked at the doctor and said, what can I do about a whole lot? I said, then stop telling me, all right, I'll just give you the blood. And it's hard. My wife's sitting right here. She knows all this, and she's laughing. And she was the one that told me she stopped going to Webmd.
Stop going to the doctor and listening to what they're saying. Just live your life.
But here's my point. With anxiety, with things like that, a lot of times there is a trigger. There is a trigger. And one of the things I learned as I got treatment is your brain will form a rut, like a rut in the road, okay? And so if you're anxious over something, your brain gets used to feeling anxious. And so when you're not anxious, your brain is going, hey, something's wrong. I need to be feeling anxious. Okay? So that is the first thing with the stop it. Okay. If you can figure out that going to webmD upsets you or going to the doctor upsets you or whatever, minimize those things, just stop doing them. Okay. Another one for me.
And I would get terrified on flight. I actually had a flight attendant walk over one time and sit down beside me and say, sir, are you okay? I don't know what I was doing. I thought I was fine, but I was apparently giving off vibes of he's about to go crazy or something. I don't know.
I couldn't stop the flying. But I did actually have a budy that was a pilot, and he talked to me some about the technologies and everything. He kind of helped me through that. Okay, so I'll sum that up by saying, do what you can and turn the rest over to God. Okay. And I used to hate that. How do you do that? How do you turn the rest over to God?
I'm asking, how do you do it?
I've got an opinion.
Prayer is one prayer, one tool prayer. I think it's the only tool, frankly.
And then once you pray about it, you got to let it go. You have to consciously decide, I'm not going to think about that anymore. And it takes work. It's hard. Okay.
The next one, live one day at a time.
What did it say right there in the scripture? What does it say about tomorrow?
Got enough trouble of its own. One of the things I don't think anybody I work with is in here. The guys that work with me, I have little daveisms. And one of the ones that they all laugh about now that I say out loud, and I said it today, I said, that's future Dave's problem.
Today. Dave is not going to worry about that.
Worry is something.
Yes, that is true.
Let me see. Trying to see what other.
So cultivate a faith and a realistic trust in God and his promises. Okay. Right there in Matthew, there were several promises at the end of this. I've got it here. If you want to take a picture of different. I've got several different promises that God has made to us. Okay. And this last one is one that I added just for this class. And I find this one really interesting.
Be grateful. Anybody know why you should be grateful?
It does take it back. That's not the right.
It was not the answer I wanted, but it is a correct answer. I'm just curious if anybody else has read this study that I read recently.
Your brain worry. That is true. He got it. The part of your brain that is worrying or is anxious cannot. I'm going to call it fire. At the same time that you're being great. It cannot happen. And I'm going to give you the citation here. This was from a study that I found on Numi.com by Cindy stellar. And it's called gratitude. And anxiety cannot coexist. The brain cannot respond to anxiety and gratitude at the same time. It is an either or situation. Okay? So I think one of the great things to do, say a prayer of gratefulness.
Okay.
Say a prayer of thankfulness. I will tell you guys the week that I did this lesson, do you remember what I just said about flying? So I still fly a lot, but this was back in December. And in December I have a software project I've been working on for a couple of years.
And we were flying that software on an experimental airplane. And last year or two years ago, I did not get to go fly on the airplane when they were flying the software. And so I told my boss, I said, okay, if we fly it this year, I'm going. I'm going to Baltimore, I'll fly it for the day, and I'm going to fly on that experimental aircraft because I really wanted to fly on this experimental aircraft. And I got there and they showed us the experimental aircraft. It was not what I was expecting. It was a little twin prop, the Havaland aircraft. It would carry at its best maybe ten or 15 people. And so I was like, okay.
And then they said, yeah, have you ever flown the plane? And I said, no. And they said, well, we've got some waivers you have to sign.
And I said, what sort of waiver? And they said, because it's an experimental aircraft, it doesn't meet the safety regulations for passenger aircraft, but it's going to be okay. And I was like, okay. And everybody was watching me because they all thought I was going to chicken out, and I didn't. And I got on the plane and they did actually a little bit of, I think, I hope it was gator for us. But we had our little headphones on and the pilot were checking their gauges, and then one of them looked, and I was sitting right behind like this.
And then he said, yours has got a different number on it.
And they were like, yeah, it does. And they got out manuals and they looked, flicked it again, and he was like, well, I know this will figure it out. And we took off. Okay. And we got up in the air and I was fine, but where I'm going with all this was when it came time to land. They asked anybody if you want to sit in the jump? And I said, yeah.
I got in the cockpit and got to watch the plane as it landed.
And my old buddy fear and anxiety came back as I sat there, because when you're flying and you do that, it's not much and you are looking down. But what was interesting was, because I prepared for this class, I remembered that. And I really thought back to me as a young man, probably 8910 years old, and trying to explain to that child what I was getting to do that day. And I was very grateful. And the fear evaporated.
So just some thoughts there. Now, this is another one that my boys, like this one, Aiden, said this to me, I think, the last time he was home.
And if any of you guys were ever on any of my basketball or soccer teams, you've heard this. All right, what do these words describe? Nausea, sweating, increased heart rate, trembling, inability to focus on anything else and difficulty sleeping. Any ideas what that is?
Yes, but not what I was looking for. Yet again.
Anybody else got any ideas?
Now, here's why I did that. Okay. This is another one that was really interesting. This is a study, an inadvertent study. They did. Somebody noticed this, and then they studied it, and they did it with Olympic athletes. Okay?
They would approach an Olympic athlete, and they'd be interviewing, and they would say, are you nervous? And 100% of them would say, no, I'm excited.
And do you know what the difference is? They studied it. And do you know what the difference is? Who all are engineers in here real quick. Engineers. All right, so you guys get systems. What are these for? A system. What are those for? Your nervous system. What is that? Begins with an I. It's input. Right?
Input.
That's right. You're like an accountant. Wow.
Yeah. So it's input. And these Olympic caliber athletes had trained themselves not to perceive anxiety. They had trained themselves to perceive excitement. It's the same thing. It's the same stimuli. The difference is the choice. It's the choice they're making on how to respond to those stimuli.
Okay?
These are promises from God. I'm going to leave them up. If you all want to take a picture or grab the slides afterwards, you can. And that's going to be all that I am going to cover tonight on anxiety. I know I went a little bit off script there and stayed a bit out of scripture, but I do think it's interesting. We talk a lot about the sermon on the mount and what a great sermon it is. And that's a big chunk of it that is dedicated to anxiety. Let me finish up by saying this. On anxiety. If you are suffering with it, do something about it. All right? Don't keep suffering with it.
Don't believe me. I know it's horrible. Okay? Do something. I'm not going to say precisely what, but do something. Go get help. You can get past it. Okay. You can. All right.
Before we move on into chapter seven, a lot of the focus that we put on anxious about things that we can't do anything about, but there is anxiety about things we can do about.
One of the things that, to me, is a lesson learned out of the COVID thing is that we have to answer the question, if we have anxiety like that, why do we have anxiety? I found that some people close to me that it was because they didn't have the right relationship with God. It was basically, we focus on what we can't do, but there are things we can do along those lines to get out of that situation. And I want to be clear here.
I did not arrange that with Craig. Okay? So two different people here. We've come to the same conclusion that many times. It is an indicator of lack of faith and relational problems with God and man. Now, I want to.
I wish I could go back and have the people that were in the class in here. We were in the young at heart, and they talked about some things they were going through and how those things were making them worry, and just bluntly asked the question, am I sinning? And we spent the next week talking about that. Okay? And I'm going to say this. Please don't leave here tonight and worry about worrying. Okay? And if you are worrying, and if you are anxious, you remember where we started the class.
God can forgive you of that.
Don't let worry about worry and the consequences of that overwhelm you. Okay? Everything we're talking about, it's overcomeable. And above all, you can be forgiven. All right, so Matthew, chapter seven.
We're going to hit this quick. There's the section about judging, section about ask, seek and knock.
There's the golden rule.
And then there is.
I got to get back over there.
I wrote that down. So can somebody read that if you're there?
Yeah.
What is that narrow gate for? The gate is many of those who enter by that verse. And we're going to get to that verse there. Those two verses are two of the most terrifying verses that I can think of. And I mean that. I told Bart Graham I was going to call him out, so you can tell him, Julie, that I called him out. When I hear that verse, I hear it in Bart's voice, because. Do you remember years ago, we did a video series, we interviewed some people, just different people, how they made the choice to become a Christian. And we interviewed Julie and Bart. And what was so powerful to me was Martin and Julie. Both were searching when they found Jesus. They were searching.
Mark called that scripture out, and he talked about how grateful he was that he's one of the few.
And that, to me, is incredibly powerful. It's a terrifying verse. It's a terrifying verse. But again, it makes me grateful that all of us, if you're here tonight, right, you've found that way. You're aware of that way. But it's terrifying to me that it says few. There are that find it few. It's horrible. Then there's a warning against false prophets. And then we're going to finish on Matthew 721 through 23. And again, this all goes back to that theme that we started with.
This one is, again, these two verses. Three verses here to me are terrifying. Not everyone who says to me, lord, lord. Will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my father, who is in heaven, will enter. Many will say to me on that day, Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons, and in your name perform many miracles? And then I will clear to them, I never knew you leave me, you who practice lawlessness. All right, here's why it's terrifying to me. And I'm curious if you guys feel this way as well.
Those things in verse 22, there are those impressive things that they were doing.
I mean, you'd think that people who did that were probably right with God, wouldn't you?
But what does verse 23 tell us may not be the case.
Okay. And so that's what I'll end my lesson with tonight.
God wants us to be hearers and doers, but not just doers. He wants our heart. Okay? And all the great things that we do, or even all the great things that this congregation of the Lord's people does. Right. I'm not saying anything negative against the things we do them, but they are useless if our hearts are not in the right place. All right, thank you, guys. I'll be back in a couple of weeks. Like I said, I think you'll want to be here the next two weeks for our special guest teacher, along with Robert. Thank y'all for your attention.
