Turning On the Lights for Thursday, September 5, 2024. 1 Corinthians and talk about our callings!
Good Morning, Good Morning my brothers and my sisters and welcome to Thursday’s edition of Turning On the Lights!
Hey! Go to YouTube and Like the video – or subscribe to “Turning on the Lights” from Apple or Spotify!
Shockingly, I get a little sidetracked today as I talk about vocational ministry – but then I bring it back around to how it all relates to Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 1 and 2.
I hope that this talk challenges and strengthens you and your faith. I pray that it inspires you to go into scripture and learn for yourself WHO God is and WHY He alone is worthy.
SEE YOU IN CHURCH!
This is a video recorded copy of the FaceBook Live event of Turning on the Lights! – Thursday, September 5, 2024. Watch here via the YouTube link!
This is an audio recorded copy of the FaceBook Live event of Turning on the Lights! – Thursday, September 5, 2024. Listen here or through your favorite podcast app!
This is a transcript from the audio of this episode of Turning on the Lights! – Thursday, September 5, 2024
Good morning. Good morning. My brothers and my sisters. Welcome to the Church Town Church of God. Let me show you a couple of things here. Do you need something? Do you have something to give? This is where we do all of our sharing, not all of our sharing, but this is a place in the corner of the church facing in front of the church. You can come if you are in need. There are paper products. There are hygiene products, soap. There are canned goods. There’s toys for little kids. The neighborhood is just what it says. Celebration Sunday, 5th Sunday celebration is coming up in September. We’re looking forward to that and hey this Friday, God’s not dead too. This Friday at 7 PM. This Friday at 7 PM. So here we are. I’m a little subdued this morning. I’m feeling good. Don’t get me wrong. You get all fired up here. Turning on the lights and hey we just turned on some lights. And we’re back. Church is feeling awfully nice with this very nice weather. Go up into the choir loft here. There’s a lot of waters up here. Nobody drinks them. I’m just saying. My speaker is making all kinds of noise. I think I better turn that off for now. I’m going to have to blow the fan off with some compressed air. That’s what it looks like right here. There’s the sanctuary. Oh, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. This sanctuary, the rectangle that you’re looking at was constructed in 1849. Pretty amazing stuff if you ask me. What a privilege to be a part of this tradition. There is no doubt about that. Fourth, as far as we can tell, good morning, Dale. Fourth oldest church on the west shore of the Churches of God General Conference. Legacy Church, as they say, the sanctuary that you’re looking at was constructed in 1849. Finished by the November, I believe 1849. The church itself started a half a mile up the road in 1833. It was planted by John Weinbrenner and his buddies as they came across the west shore. Moved from Camp Hill. Up through mechanics, Bergen, Lizburn and Little Church Town. Father, we pray that what we do and say today will honor you, glorify you, all eyes on you, Lord, your will, your purpose, your focus, your wisdom. You alone are worthy in Jesus name. Amen. It’s Thursday and you know what that means. It means that it’s it’s going to be mowing day. I think Kelly and I have plans this afternoon along with a friend to trim trees and bushes and all kinds of things and I’m going to be weed whacking and mowing grass and doing all kinds of things. So I’m actually looking forward to that. Like I said, just got some things on my mind this morning. One of our neighbors and friends and neighbors and friend of Church Town and all of that passed away. Not unexpectedly, but we just found out the news this morning and so you know you start your day out like that and you start your day out praying of course and praying for them and their family and all of those things. You get to know a lot about life being a vocational minister. We had an individual, a person in the congregation who’s mentoring somebody who is trying to discern that vision for their life, life, vocational ministry, and I know that the mentor that we have in the congregation who is a retired minister, retired pastor will provide them with the realities of ministry right. Dale and I joked about that. I think at last week or so start a class in seminary. No, I think it was Jeff Musser and I joked about it and it’s not really a joke. Start a seminary. The first class would be reality of pastoral ministry realities of vocational ministry right. I can’t tell you how many times I sat in the vocations commission and even chaired it for a couple of years and just listen to person after person have this little vision. Oh, I’m going to be a little part-time pastor and a little. I’m going to be a part-time pastor and a little true. Sorry my phone. I had to read something there for a second. I know but you’re live. This is live. If you’re listening on the podcast, this is live. You can check out all of this stuff on the YouTube channel at Church Town Church. Check it out on the Apple podcast. Turning on the lights look it up. Church Town Church Church Town Church of God Sermons is the other one like rate and review. We’ll get the word out. Hi Sean. So we’re kind of all over the place already today, but I was saying that vocational ministry. I can’t tell you the number of people that I’ve spoken to. They didn’t have a calling on their life. Now you say that’s not for you to decide. Brian. We all have a calling on our lives if we are. Determined if we are intentional in our relationship with God through Jesus Christ, we all have a calling on our lives. There’s no doubt about that live a life worthy of your calling. We are all gifted by God’s Holy Spirit in certain ways. Thank you, Rosie. But when we’re talking about vocational ministry, there needs to be a distinct call into ministry and that call it needs to be verified if you will by those in your inner circle. If you’re called and your husband or your wife is like now you really that’s a gigantic red flag. If you’re called and your husband and your wife and or your children are like I don’t know. Those are red flags if you’re called and you say well, I just I have this vision of being a part time minister and little pot lunches on Sundays and you know that sort of thing. Red flag. The minister of the gospel. I don’t know if you’ve read scripture. It is meant to be a job that is difficult and I’m not patting myself on the back or anything. I’m saying we must teach the reality is that it is taught to us through scripture that it is difficult profit after and not that I’m a prophet. I’m saying Old Testament profit after profit after profit Jesus Christ himself and then the apostles moving forward sharing the word of God speak about the bluntness of the word of God being divisive and those who are willing to share the word of God need to be prepared for that divisiveness for the push back of the enemy. Yes, we call him the enemy. He is the opposer of God’s will. He is the Satan and when we look at all of the things that are taught in scripture about men and women and families and mothers and fathers when we look at all the things that are in scripture that are taught about the church and the reality of the church and the preaching of the gospel and what we should do when we get together. We also see along with all of that comes the opposer of God’s will when we look at our culture today, we see men and women and family and traditional marriage and raising of children and we look at the way church is going today and things that are being taught in church and we can see every point of emphasis in scripture regarding how the image bearers of God are supposed to relate to God through Jesus Christ are supposed to submit themselves to his will his vision his wisdom. May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. How’s that accomplished? It’s accomplished accomplished through his followers. We know that that pushback, right, that spiritual warfare. That spiritual wall of evil that we come up against. We know how very real it is. We watch it destroy men. We watch it destroy women. We watch it destroy marriages. We watch it destroy children. We watch it destroy his bride, the church. So when you are the point of the spear, so to speak, and you know that you’ve been called to share this word and to rightly divide the word of God, and that the word of God is useful for all things relative to human existence and the life of the church, we know that. And you go into the word of God and you teach and you preach directly from the word of God. You don’t take a passage and then tell your congregation for 40 minutes what you think about it and spin off into crazy stories and all of that other stuff. Good morning, Renee. I keep coming back to the individual from the conference that we had here about two months ago. We do scripture. We get into scripture on Sunday, like a lot of scripture. And sometimes we’ll take a smaller amount and go deep, deep, deep. Sometimes we’ll take a larger amount. And so look how look, look at this. Look at the how this point that we’re making today is spread out over all of the gospels or through this prophet and that prophet and this prophet right out of Jesus’s mouth, those sorts of things, because we want to go deeply into the word of God, nothing else. You don’t come here just to hear sermons on marriage, money, sex, and stress. That’s a Andy Stanley version of preaching. Don’t worry about the word of God, he says. I read the book. I’m not putting words in his mouth. You’ll never be able to teach the average person, he says, about the narrative, the meta narrative of scripture. So don’t even try. If you want people in your churches preach about marriage, money, sex and stress, that’s all they want to hear about. I’m like, you need to go away. You’re doing more harm than good. He’s right. As far as scripture teaches, it’s about the tickling of ears, if you will, about the shallowness of teaching and preaching and that will get more people because less people want to go more deeply into scripture. What? I come to church to feel good, not to feel convicted. I know my friend Barbara and the call doesn’t end when… No, it does not. No, it does not. And again, this is not like an us and there are gifts given to all members of the body of the church. And one of those gifts that is given is pastoral leadership, if you will, vocational ministry. I see. I love that about you, Tracy. I love that about everybody here at church town. We’re like, let’s go deep today. Let’s get into a lot of scripture. And everybody’s like, yeah, love that. And I hope I give homework. I ask questions. I’m hoping that people are inspired by God to go into scripture throughout the course of the week. I said with prayer and communication, we’ve got several texting groups. We’ve got the church town weekly, which will be coming out very shortly. I do not have your email and you want to be a part of the church town weekly, you just message me your email. You don’t need to do it on here. This will be very public. You can message it to me if you want to get the church how we texting groups. We have a congregational prayer that is intentional every month. We have a council prayer that is intentional every month. We have several texting groups. We have all the friends groups we have. So if you’re not engaged in that spiritual warfare through prayer, that’s a you problem. That’s not a church problem. We got all kinds of venues and avenues and we still have the older folks of the church who still, they get it from someone. Good morning, Jane. They get it and they start calling one another because they don’t do social media texting and all of that. We still have all of that going on. You want to be engaged in the life of the church. We have turning on the lights. That’s kind of a Bible study in itself, right? Anyway, my point is to be intentional. Hi Kay. My point is to be intentional. We talked about it on Tuesday and we use that marriage metaphor, right? You have that mountaintop moment, right? You meet one another. You get to know one another. You’re getting to the crescendo, if you will, of the marriage ceremony and there you are face to face with Jesus and you give him your life. You repent and you give him your life. Hi, Michelle. And then you don’t talk to him except for five minutes in the morning and in five minutes in the evening. Or you don’t ignore you ignore his word except for Sunday morning or you ignore him. All of that. None of that makes sense if you want a deep, rich relationship. We led into 1 Corinthians last week or on Tuesday by talking about how God makes foolish the wisdom of this world. And we said right off the bat, all you need to do is turn on the television. And there’s this scramble almost every day on every topic to get experts on every topic to talk about whatever the topics of the day are. And you can see the foolishness that is inherent in human beings trying to control the narrative of history or control the narrative of something. You see the absurdity when individuals are professing that men can get pregnant and all of these different things and you go, my goodness, that is exactly what is being taught in scripture about how God will bring down the wisdom of the wise and make them look foolish. We see that in science, we, you know, in terms of medicines that are side effects of which are worse than the cure. Or we have medicines and then we create medicines for the side effects of the medicines and those medicines have side effects. So pretty soon you’re on seven different medicines because you had one something, one thing wrong, so to speak. And you’re like, this is foolishness. You hear political commentary and you’re like, this is foolishness. This is insanity. You hear social commentary on men, women, trans, all that stuff. And you’re like, this is foolishness. But these folks speak with such a sense of authority and wisdom, a sense of intelligence and expertise. So you need not venture far to see the reality and the truth of first Corinthians. Chapter one. It is foolishness to the Jews who asked for signs from heaven. It is foolishness to the Greeks who seek human wisdom. So when we preach that Christ was crucified, the Jews are offended and the Gentiles say it’s all nonsense. There you go again, talking about the call to proclaim the gospel. You know that people are going to be offended or just slough it off as nonsense. And that is not unlike the call of the prophets of old. When God directly calls Isaiah, God directly calls Jeremiah Ezekiel and says, I’m going to give you my words to share with the people. But you need to know that the people are so hard hearted, that they’re so stiff neck, that they’re so steeped in their sin, that they love their sin so much that not only are they not going to hear you, they’re going to reject you no matter what I ask you to do. Lay on your side for 40 days, wear a yoke around your neck and walk around just so you can get noticed. They’re going to reject you and they’re in many cases going to harm you or seek to harm you. Now, I’m not saying all of that like, hey, let’s just, you know, you’re, you feel like you’re being called to be a pastor or a minister. I’m just saying that here you go again. It’s not unlike that in the sense that, you know, because scripture teaches us that it’s going to be offensive or you’re just going to be preaching to deaf ears. But what are you called to do? Silence teaches us how can anybody know the gospel if nobody is willing to share it. So you go and where each one of us is shared to live it, are called to live it, called to share it. And each one of us needs to know that this will be true for each one of us. It’s just that as you’re called into vocational ministry, you may be talking to 50, 70, 200, 500 people at one time. But those called by God to salvation, hopefully that’s you, both Jews and Gentiles, Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. This foolish plan of God is wiser than the wisest of human plans. And God’s weakness is stronger than the greatest of human strength. Here’s all your experts out there telling you the way the world works. Remember dear brothers and sisters that few of you were wise in the world’s eyes or powerful or wealthy. When God called you, everybody has a calling on their life. Instead, God chose things the world considered foolish in order to shame those who think they’re wise. And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful. God chose things despised by the world, things counted as nothing at all and use them to bring to nothing what the world considers important. Are you picking up what God is putting down here through Paul? It’s the upside down, right? This is a first Corinthians chapter one. Right? I started with around verse 22, something like that. It’s the upside down nature of God’s kingdom. The first will be last, the last will be first. The social order of things is irrelevant in God’s kingdom because we are all made equal by the power of Christ within us. There is no Greek or Jews, slave or free male or female. All are one in Christ Jesus. All of the things of human society that have been created by human beings to order and structure society. All of those things which once were based on Christian teaching, but now is a complete free for all. We see what human beings have done with that. They’ve taken the wisdom of God, chucked it out the door, done things on their own and it’s complete and utter chaos and destruction from the inside out and sometimes from the outside in. It is the cult of abortion and that is something that is just, it’s been more and more pressing in on me and my prayer and my thought. The obsession, the utter dedication, devotion and worship at the altar of abortion. And no matter what, and that when we talk about the godly pushback on that, you are really cranking up the dial. God has united you with Christ Jesus for our benefit. God made him to be wisdom itself. Christ made us right with God. He made us pure and holy and he freed us from sin. Therefore, as the scripture say, if you want to boast, boast only about the Lord. And so we do. We share the gospel. We live the life of joy and peace and love. We fight the good fight every day, so to speak in this battle of spiritual warfare, because we know also from Paul by the power of God’s Holy Spirit that all of our battles are spiritual. We are spiritual beings in a physical body. All of our battles are spiritual. The opposer of God’s will hates God’s image bearers to begin with. The opposer of God’s will hates God’s bride and will seek to destroy it from the outside in, as you see around the world when armed gangs break into churches and massacre the congregation or from the inside out, as you see so insidiously in Europe and in America in particular with lies, twisting scripture, eliminating parts of scripture, ridiculous teachings, antichrist teachings within what they’re calling a Christian church. From the outside in or the inside out, we are called to live accordance with the word of God. We learn this from scripture because Jesus Christ himself lives in accordance with the written word. He is the word made incarnate and he will dictate all of the New Testament by the power of the Holy Spirit within the writers of the epistles and within the writers of the gospels, to be frank. But we see when he is confronted with Satan in the desert, he uses the written word of God for our benefit to show us for our benefit that the written word of God is the word of God and that is the power of God. That is the power of truth. The scriptures say we have everything that we need to continue on this path and to be strong and to be wise and to stay the course. We know that the ultimate victory has already been won and that the opposer of God’s will is like a lion caught in the trap, thrashing about trying to take down as many of God’s image bearers as he possibly can before time is up. We know that we are called to be in the kingdom of God. We know that there is no political system. There is no country that is ever meant to last. None ever have lasted. They come and they go. There is one kingdom that was eternal, one kingdom in which all of the human constructs are turned upside down, one kingdom that is ruled by a wise and just ruler. One kingdom that will not perish. One kingdom in which those who persevere to the end will be saved. One kingdom. So as I always say, yes, we do our diligence in the world we live in now. We do our diligence in the world we live in now. We try, we serve society and our culture according to our Christian way of life, the absolute best that we can. Civic duties and voting and all of those things. According to our Christian life, we do the very best that we can, but we understand that we are not of this world. We are in this world right now, but you have been reborn. You are a child of the most high God. You have been adopted as a son or a daughter of the most high God, and you dwell in the kingdom of God. And my, what we basically, we say all the time here at church town, don’t blow it. And what I mean by that is be intentional in that relationship. Be intentional in that relationship. Do not be afraid. Do not fear. The very power that raised Christ from the dead lives in you go and live out the calling that you have been called to live. I don’t know where that is. I don’t know how that looks for you, but you do. And in your prayer life, you can pray for vision and for discernment. Pray that the Lord will lead you where you need to be led. Say what you need to say. Do what you need to do in accordance with his will and he’ll take care of the rest. Like I’ve said a thousand times before, if you do what you’re called to do and you trust that God will do what he promises to do, your life is going to be a whole less, a whole lot less anxious. You are going to be a whole lot less fearful. If only we can trust, if only we can have faith. We’ve been reading a lot of scriptures about faith, right? We were reading scriptures about Jesus casting out demons, facing, facing the opposer, the satan first, and then using the written word and casting out demons using his spoken word because he is the word incarnate. He is God and he says, get out and they get out. They have to because he is sovereign over them. We even hear demons saying, well, are you here to torture us? It’s not our time yet. Meaning we’ve been, you know, set here to do as much damage as we can. We know that we’re going to be thrown into the lake of fire. Exactly. You’re going to be a slave to your own sin or you’re going to be a slave of Christ. But like the great philosopher, Bob Dylan, once said, wrote and sang, everybody going to serve somebody. That’s how you’re built. You can serve yourself. You can serve other human beings or you can serve Christ. There you go. When I first came to you, dear brothers and sisters, this is the beginning of chapter two, and we’ll get out here today. I didn’t use lofty words and impressive wisdom to tell you God’s secret plan for I decided that while I was with you, I would forget everything except Jesus Christ, the one who was crucified. I came to you in weakness, timid and trembling, and my message and my preaching were very plain. Rather than using clever and persuasive speeches, I relied only on the power of the Holy Spirit. I did this so you would trust not in human wisdom, but in the power of God. I’m trying to put into words, but you know, you know, when you are in the presence of an individual who is preaching and teaching by the power of God, as opposed to an individual who is trying to impress you with the way that they speak or the argument that they present or the things that they do or the illustrations that they use or whatever the case may be. Paul tells us that the wisdom of God will be shared by God through you if you will simply, simply, not just simply in a simple way. I’m not just saying it like we simply do this, but in a simple way, present the message of the gospel, the truth, the good news. I have a friend named John Thumma and I haven’t talked to him in a while, but man, for the first several years of my ministry, he was one of my biggest mentors and we would call and we would talk and oftentimes he would, you know, he was a, he’s a missionary in the Southwest of the United States dealing with native Americans on tribes and reservations and all of the different types of worship that they do and trying to bring Christ into that, all of that stuff. Simple yeah, we are simple. I tell, I tell the folks all the time, it’s just, it’s not rocket science. If it were rocket science, he wouldn’t have picked Brian Warner to do it, but I’d call up and I’d complain about this and I complained about that and I’d complained about the church and I complained about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And he would say right out of this passage, Brian, stop. Yes John, are you preaching Christ and he crucified? I said, yes, every weekend. He said, then you’re good, preach Christ and him crucified. Let the people understand who Jesus is, what he did during his ministry, what he did for all of humankind, the sacrifice that he made. Let them understand about the resurrection and the power of God that resurrects your human soul right now, the spirit of God in one day will resurrect your body so that you may walk with God again, body and soul in his presence. You will be made righteous right now. You are covered by the righteousness of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ. Are you living that way? Let me read that passage again. When I first came to you, because this applies to every Christian. This applies to every Christian who thinks they can’t share the gospel because they’re not a preacher, because they’re not a pastor, because they don’t think it’s a gift. This passage applies to every Christian. As we always say here, I have as many assistant or associate pastors in this church as there are committed Christians in the pews, because we are all called to live and to share the gospel. And you can take encouragement from this passage from Paul himself. When I came to you, dear brothers and sisters, I didn’t use lofty words and impressive wisdom to tell you God’s secret plan. Christ lived. Christ sacrificed himself for your sin. Christ rose again, the first of the resurrected. For I decided that while I was with you, I would forget everything except Jesus Christ and him crucified. You can do that. You can do that. I came to you in weakness, timid and trembling. And many of you sharing the gospel, thinking that you can’t share it, thinking that you will never speak in public if you’re called to or even share in a small group if you’re called to. I came to you in weakness, timid, trembling. And my message and my preaching were very plain. Rather than using clever and persuasive speeches, I relied only on the power of the Holy Spirit. I did this basically so you would recognize the authority of the word of God through me. And like I said, you know, you’ve all been among individuals. You recognize the authority of the word of God because God is using that individual and you can’t get a check, check, check, check, check, check, check that person checked. Oh no, not that person. You know it, you feel it because you’re a Christian that is inspired by God’s Holy Spirit and that individual teaching you as a Christian inspired by God’s Holy Spirit and you come together and you hear the authority of God’s word. You don’t hear the authority of that person. You don’t hear the brilliance of their argument. You don’t hear the amazing way that they speak in public. You hear the authority of the word of God through that person and you go, “Yes.” Because your spirit craves that. Your spirit craves the authority of the word of God, the truth of the word of God because you are a follower of God. You are a disciple. How about that? Paul got that early on. Very learned man, very educated, wise in the ways of the world as he says. Christianity seemed incredibly foolish, so foolish that anybody who followed Christ needed them to die because it was just destroying faith in God. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Now Paul’s spirit, Saul’s spirit is regenerated and we have Paul teaching us, “Set all that garbage aside. Speak the truth of the word of God plainly and simply pray and speak. Let the power of God’s Holy Spirit move through you, let the power of God’s Holy Spirit speak those words for the individuals whom God has placed in front of you, for your family, the home that is your church, your church that is your church, those random individuals that are not random by any stretch of the imagination that you meet when you’re out there in the world. Let the power of God’s Holy Spirit set your fear aside. Let him set any anxiety aside. Let him do the work. You do what you’re called to do and that is be the vessel. In Jesus name.” I want to read what Mama Dee had to say. Young Pastor pointed out, “The Bible itself is the sermon. We don’t need to add it. Its meaning is revealed through the Holy Spirit. If we’re speaking God’s word, we’re speaking with authority.” Yes! The authority of the word of God. That’s enough? You’ll hear me say an awful lot. I don’t know what I can say about that. We read it. What don’t you understand? That should be the sermon half the time. Reading a passage of scripture saying, “Is there anybody that doesn’t understand any of that?” Father, we do appreciate you and your patience, your love of us, your patience with us, the way that you, by the power of your Holy Spirit, bring us along in wisdom, in your wisdom, in your knowledge, knowing the word, knowing you, the many pitfalls that we experience along the way. We appreciate you being there constantly, leading, guiding, mentoring, teaching, rebuking. And Lord, we pray simply for the power of your Holy Spirit in our lives to lead us in our behavior and lead us in our words because we know that we are called, vocational minister or not, to share your word with the world. We know there is only one kingdom that will last and we dwell within it and we seek to do your will, the will of our King, our Lord, our Savior, Jesus Christ. It’s in your name that we pray this. Amen. It’s Thursday, my brothers and sisters. Sunday’s coming. Go, hear the authority of the word of God. In Jesus’ name.
0 Comments