Turning On the Lights for Tuesday, September 3, 2024. Let’s start something new! 1 Corinthians!
Good Morning, Good Morning my brothers and my sisters and welcome back to Turning On the Lights!
We open up a new conversation that is going to center around 1 Corinthians, but to start, we talk about a great many things.
The power of the Gospel is foolishness to those who are blinded by the god of this world, but for those who will have faith, it empowers us with the very power that raised Christ from the dead!
I pray that this conversation strengthens and challenges you. As always, you check us out on YouTube @ChurchtownChurch or on Apple or Spotify podcasts just search “Turningonthelights”
This is a video recorded copy of the FaceBook Live event of Turning on the Lights! – Tuesday, September 3, 2024. Watch here via the YouTube link!
This is an audio recorded copy of the FaceBook Live event of Turning on the Lights! – Tuesday, September 3, 2024. Listen here or through your favorite podcast app!
This is a transcript from the audio of this episode of Turning on the Lights! – Tuesday, September 3, 2024
Oh, good morning. Good morning, my brothers and my sisters and welcome to the Church Town Church of God. Welcome to turning on the lights from the Church Town Church of God. I didn’t need to turn on too many lights this morning. Look at that light that’s coming on this morning. Shining from the east, the eastern gate, the stained glass window at Church Town of Jesus at Gethsemane. Oh, it’s a classic and it’s beautiful as it faces east, especially in the fall and in the spring. The angle of the sun is just perfect at certain times and it makes a laser beam right to the other side of the church. It’s really amazing. Here are some really good flowers that we still have at the Church Town Church of God. They are two weeks old and they are going strong and they are beautiful and they’re going to stay there until they aren’t beautiful anymore. Shout out to Royer’s Flowers. Oh my goodness, they’re so good. You need anything flower wise, there you go. There’s the altar of the church. Got your candles and your cross and your big old King James Bible. Uh-huh. You got the chalice and the oil, bread and the cup. Oh yes. You even got a little angel candle snuffer. Uh-huh. Found that at a yard sale. A little angel candle snuffer at a yard sale. How about that? Well, how’s everybody doing on this fine Tuesday morning? I’m doing okay. I don’t know why I’ve got this little accent going on, but I do. But it is Tuesday morning. There is no doubt about that. I sound like a, what’s that dude that tells Alice’s restaurant? I was just sitting on the group W bench. Good morning everybody. Welcome to the church town church of God. Welcome to turning on the lights and to start something new. Hello, Ryan. We’re going to start something new today. We’re going to take a look at one of the letters of Paul. We’ve been in the gospels for quite a while in church on Sundays. We’re still in the gospels. We are examining the sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ and the whole theme of everything that we are preaching is bring me someone else who can do this and I will resign. Not only that, I will no longer be a Christian because a Christian means you are a follower of Christ. And if he alone is not worthy, if there are other gods out there worthy, then we’ve got to rethink everything. Of course, you know, the answer is you can’t, but we want to show that as we bring out God sovereignty, Jesus, God sovereignty over the physical last week over the spiritual this week over life itself. And so it’s going to be very, very intense in church on Sunday as it always is. It’s going to be a very patriotic theme on Sunday. Oh, and if you’re listening right now, Friday night, we have God’s not dead too. Oh, that’s pretty good movie. It’s seven o’clock here at church town. Father guy, we do pray that the word that goes out today would bless you, honor you, demonstrate to the world who you are and why you are worthy in Jesus name. Amen. Praying for everybody out there. Lots of prayer going around here at church town. There’s plenty. You know, this is always been a place of intercessory prayer. People have always been brought to us for prayer. They are adopted spiritually into our family and we will pray with them and for them through life’s journey, whatever piece of that journey they may be on. And it is a great honor and a great privilege Sundays after the time in the word, I should say, right? We have time in the word and then we have our songs that we sing. I’m doing, I’m doing well. I’m doing well. There’s a little bit of whoop, whoop every once in a while for those who don’t have any idea what I’m talking about. Woke up early Friday morning, like one in the morning and everything is spinning total vertigo. Friday night and Friday were horrible. Eased up Friday night. I thought, Oh, okay. All right. Not going to be that long lasting. Came back Saturday. It’s eased up again. Came back Sunday. Got a little bit better than each episode in the morning was less Monday, yesterday. Pretty good today. Even better in the morning. I’m judging how I’m getting by how I feel in the morning after laying down. So this morning I was like, okay, a little bit, a little bit of whoopiness. Whoop, whoop. But okay. So thanks for asking. Oh yes, it is a glorious day. Don’t you love this time of year? We go with that late summer into this early fall. I think the temperature is going to go back up, but okay. And in general, there’s a down trend and I can take that down trend any day. I got a long sleeve shirt and a riding shirt on today for walking the dogs. It was chilly. So yeah, there we are. We’re talking about the sovereignty of the Lord Jesus Christ. He alone is worthy. And so I thought in for the live stream for the podcast, we would take a look at an epistle. And for those who do not know what an epistle is, it is the female version of an apostle. That’s just a joke. And a pistol is a letter and the letters that are written by Paul and John and Peter and Jude, et cetera. But not Paul and John and Peter, et cetera. I need to probably quit while I’m behind already today. I want to take a look at 1 Corinthians. If you know anything about the letters to the Corinthians, they are almost completely different in their nature. The letter of 1 Corinthians is upbeat and it’s forward looking. It’s very encouraging. It’s very, a lot of baseline theological constructs right laying out who God is, why we worship him. He talks about the basics of church and being together in church unity and all of those things. He talks about the power of God. God is love. He talks about the unity that is brought together by the power of God’s Holy Spirit. All in all, there is some discussion of, as we see even in the first chapter of some issues in the church, but it’s like you guys are getting it. You guys are doing it, go fast to what we teach you, right? All of those. And then something went seriously wrong when you get to 2 Corinthians. He is disgusted with this church and these people. And he really is a very much more negative letter. It is like you are just messing up. Don’t you remember anything? Don’t you do anything that we ever taught you? Why not? Where have you gone, Corinth? What are you doing? Everything is out of order. Your church service is out of order. It’s complete chaos. So other and when you read into this, a lot of commentaries and a lot of scholarly material in the city of Corinth, you have so many sub religions, right? Little G gods, idols that people worship, male and female and sex cults and all these different things that are continually pressing into the Christian church. And it would appear as though that pressure invaded the Christian church in Corinth. And we read a lot in 2 Corinthians about, you know, you got to restore order. You’ve got to go back, right, to the fundamentals of the gospel of Jesus Christ and preach it every weekend or every time that you are together and you need to share in the Lord’s supper and you must remember your baptism, all of these different things. So the letters, if you read them back to back, you’ll really get that flavor of, okay, what happened here? What happened here? Something happened with Paul. He’s down, right? And he talks about how, you know, went to Asia, but the Holy Spirit rebuked him, would not let him enter. And he came back and he was distraught unto the point of almost taking his own life. That’s significant. When Paul talks about that openly in a letter, he says, we were just distraught at our emotional and spiritual and physical end. And I thought about taking my life in the effort to be with the Lord. Now that’s not a thought that is unique to Paul, but, and I think it’s in our Holy scriptures so we can understand that it is not certainly permission at all because Paul did not do that, but it’s much like what we read in the Psalms and so forth. It’s allowed in our Holy scriptures because God knows who we are. He knows how we are. And it is an encouragement that Paul continued under the worst of circumstances, physically, emotionally, and spiritually to put one foot in front of the other and keep on going. We all know how that feels in our own way, in our own life. And as we say in the Christian world, in our Christian walk, we understand what that may feel like to one degree or another. We talked a lot last week, the week before, and we talked in church and we talked on the live stream about what it means to be prepared and stay prepared and be vigilant and be intentional. That’s not easy for an individual as you continue your lifespan as a Christian and you’ve been a Christian 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years. Okay. How do you remain intentional? How do you remain inspire full of God’s Holy spirit and living that way? Well, you’ve got, you’ve got to be very intentional about being intentional. You’ve got to really stay steeped in the word and grossed with the church by the church supported and loved and moving forward. And then also of course, you’re not only taking being supported in love, you are giving. And that’s how you stay faithful. That’s how you stay fresh in your faith because when you are giving, when you’re allowing God’s Holy spirit to move through you, you’re going to have new situations nearly every day of your life that he’s going to lead you in different people that you will meet different things, people that you will talk to all of that. So really being prepared and staying prepared means being intentional in your relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Again, we’ll use the metaphor of marriage and I’ve done this a lot because it is very similar. You meet, you’re just in love with one another, right? The world is your oyster. You are in love and saturated in love and you want to be married and this is the one. Exactly, right? This is the one. And so you get married and you make that relationship official and then you talk to your spouse five minutes in the morning and five minutes in the evening. Or then you just sort of ignore them until you need something. Well, that’s not going to be a healthy relationship. You can’t really make that a healthy relationship with those sorts of interactions and your interactions with God through Jesus Christ are much the same, right? You have the moment when you’re like, this is true. I proclaim with my lips. I believe in my heart. Jesus Christ is Lord. Forgive me, Lord. I repent and you are saved and you are indwelled by God’s Holy Spirit. Then what? Right? There’s the marriage of the metaphor. Now what’s the relationship look like? And one thing that I talk about with young couples or couples that I am counseling is that you can’t just love love. Everybody loves love. Well, I guess there are sick people that don’t love love, but everybody loves love. You must love marriage. You got to make that little bit of a shift because when we read even in first Corinthians and I bring that up all the time about love, real love, sacrificial love, open love of God is impossible by you without the power of God. And even with the power of God, it’s not going to look like it does in first Corinthians because you are not God. So you have to not just love love, you have to love marriage, being married, the process of marriage, the process of relationship. As I say, you know, you at weddings, I’ll say, now you’ve got your masters, right? You started dating and you decided you were going to get married. There’s your bachelors. Now here you are at the wedding after the counseling and the waiting and all of those different things. Here’s your masters. Now you’re going to spend the rest of your lives getting your PhD, right? You got to love the process. And so when we talk about our relationship with Christ, let’s translate that over and we haven’t gotten to Corinthians, but this is a nice rabbit trail. When we translate that over to our relationship with Christ, do you love not just love? Do you love not just being saved? Do you love being a Christian? Do you love being in relationship with Christ? Are you willing to get your PhD in your relationship with Christ? What does it look like? Sound like, feel like, act like over the course of a lifetime, how deeply into relationship with Christ can I go? Continuing to engross yourself in scripture so that you can learn more and more and more about God, his character and who he is and what justice is and what true love is and how that translate in translates in the life of the Christian who is filled by God’s Holy Spirit. And we learned that all through the Old Testament and the New Testament and of course the gospels and the epistles and the book of Acts, I mean, Acts is an epistle, but you see what I’m saying. It translates from the teaching of Jesus directly into what it looks like in the epistles, the original commentaries on the gospels. And so you’ll never exhaust yourself. You can go 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years as a Christian. You will never exhaust the wisdom of scripture. You will never exhaust what scripture, how scripture reflects God. You’ll never exhaust the knowledge that comes from scripture as well. And thus you will never ever have to, unless you want to, you’ll never have to stop building your relationship with God through Jesus Christ. So I hope that that makes sense. It’s very practical. I spoke again Sunday about being very practical. When I got, it was called into this and I became a Christian, all of those things. And I read about all these spiritual disciplines and seven spiritual disciplines and nine spiritual disciplines. And you must do this and you must do that. And you must, I thought, man, this, this really does kind of like hardcore, man. I don’t know if I, you know, you call me into a relationship with you and then I’m forced into all these disciplines. Well, if you’ve heard me talk about this before, I don’t call them disciplines anymore. Just call them my practices of being intentional. Discipline sort of implies punishment. Discipline sort of implies drudgery for others. It may not for me. It does. Now I want discipline. Good morning, D. I want structure. I crave accountability as a Christian, but I don’t want to plan my day with, okay, first I do, I read from a prophet and then I read from a Psalm and then I read from a gospel and then I read from an epistle and then I do. And then I pray here and then I pray there and then I pray here and then I pray there and then I go and I journal this and I journal. Excuse me. So one of the books that I, that I came across when I was really, really struggling with this is from Henry now. And I’ve mentioned it in church on Sunday because I just gave it to another friend of mine. It’s a, it’s a, it’s a paradigm shifting book that breaks your spirituality down into three large categories, right? And these are stuck in my head. Flee, be silent, pray always from those. I am inspired to do this and to do that and to study here and to write this and to go here. But you can, you, it is you ultimately you and the Lord by the power of his Holy Spirit, the chaos around you, the confusion, the lies that press in flee from them. It is often said that the greatest distance in the universe is that from the head to the heart, can you get the world out of here and get back in your heart with Christ? You can flee from everything spiritually and it’s you and it’s him. Watch your words again. Head to the heart. What would Jesus say? If anything, what are you? Is he, is he trying to move you in a different direction, but you are not paying attention. How about you be quiet and pay attention? And how about you wire yourself to think godly thoughts, prayers. How about the thoughts that you have that are invasive in your mind are actual prayers that you’re training yourself to pray in that loop that is constantly going while you’re conscious. It will even affect your dreams. Flee, be silent, pray always. So we talk about the relationship and again, we’re going to relate that to Corinthians as we begin Corinthians here first Corinthians because Paul talks about that right off the bat. As a matter of fact, we can get right into the first scripture and it relates exactly to what I’m talking about now and we have time to do the first scripture here. First Corinthians one beginning with verse 18. First of all, before verse 18, he talks about the divisions in the church. I hear that there are divisions among you that some are following the preaching of Apollo. Some are following the teachings of Paul. And he says, couple of things. Well, let’s read it. I feel to you, dear brothers and sisters, by the authority of our Lord Jesus Christ, who live in harmony with each other. Let there be no division in the church, rather be of one mind, United in thought and purpose. For some members of Chloe’s household have told me about your quarrels. My dear brothers and sisters, some of you are saying I’m a follower of Paul. Others are saying I follow Apollo or I follow Peter or I follow only Christ. Has Christ been divided into factions? Was I Paul crucified for you? Were any of you baptized in the name of Paul? Of course not. And then he says, I thank God I did not baptize any of you except Crispus and Gaius. For now, no one can say they were baptized in my name. Yes, I also baptized the household of Stephanus, but I don’t remember baptizing anyone else. I love the down to earth nature of the letters. This is Paul being real, as we would say today. And I love the fact that God kept this here and gave this to us because here is a man in ministry trying to get it right. Following the will of God, following the power of God. And he wants to tell the truth and he’s being very intentional about trying to tell the truth. I love that. For Christ didn’t send me to baptize, but to preach the good news and not with clever speech for fear that the cross of Christ would lose its power. We’ve been taught we were talking about the power of the word last week, power of the written word and how Jesus demonstrates the power of the written word when he is going toe to toe, face to face with Satan himself. With other demons, other lesser demons who are possessing image bearers of God humans, he speaks and they obey. But he shows us in our confrontation with evil. Ephesians six. What we that that we have the same tools at our disposal as he did and does the written word. Really? Okay. I swear it’s original material. The message of the cross is foolish to those who are headed for destruction. But we who are being saved know that it is the very power of God. As the scriptures say, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and discard the intelligence of the intelligent. So where does this leave the philosophers there, the scholars and the world’s brilliant debaters? God has made the wisdom of this world look foolish. Look around you people. Since God and his wisdom salt to it that the world would never know him through human wisdom, he has used our foolish preaching to save those who will believe it is foolish to the Jews who asked for signs from heaven. Just Lord, if you show us the father, then we will believe. Right? Show us another miracle and we will believe. And it is foolish to the Greeks who seek human wisdom. Prove it to me. Show me the evidence. So when we preach that Christ was crucified, the Jews are offended and the Gentiles say it’s all nonsense. There you go. Right? The Jews are offended and the Gentiles say it’s all nonsense. Most of the preaching I do falls on not only deaf ears. I won’t even call them deaf ears, but unwilling ears. It’s either very offensive because you’re living by the power of demonic spirit or it’s just utter foolishness because you’re, again, you’re still in the hands of Satan, but you’re a rational atheist and you’re seeking the wisdom of the world. If the wisdom of the world could show me that there is a God, then I would believe and God says, ah, it doesn’t work that way. You have everything you need in our holy scriptures to make the decision that you need to make. There it is. And there’s only one ingredient that you must add. Faith. Your spark of faith. When God’s holy spirit gets inside of you, when you hear the gospel and you feel that warming in your soul, you feel that sense that there is something bigger than yourself. Answer that. I do believe Lord, help me now in my unbelief. Fill me and he will move you to repentance. And then the understanding of the power of Christ on the cross will come in its fullness to you. But if you want to go, you know, like I said, the other avenues, you’re never going to have, you’re never going to be saved because you are saved by faith alone. So we talk about the wisdom of the wise and the foolish, you know, and the foolishness of this world. And, and, and when we look out, we see that the world is absolutely, what do I want to say? Enraptured with themselves, right? Our political systems, our economic systems, our global systems, our wisdom and our understanding that we have progressed so far. We have progressed so far that we have no idea what a man or a woman is. We’ve moved beyond good and evil. We’ve moved beyond men and women. We’ve moved beyond, Oh my goodness, look at the advancement of the human race. We don’t need laws anymore. We don’t need governance anymore. Well, yeah. How’s that working out for us? When we leave human beings to their own devices, because we’ve advanced beyond, we have progressed, we are progressives. How’s that working out? Especially in the big cities, in the places where they’ve just, they’ve, they’ve eliminated laws against drug use and all these different when, when, when lawlessness runs rampant because people don’t need all of that oppression. Well, I don’t know. I think I will hang on to my foolish preaching for awhile and receive the guidance of God’s Holy spirit in my life to those who are called by God to salvation, 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 by faith alone. We know this by faith alone. We live this because it is our faith that leads to our repentance, our salvation and the indwelling of God’s Holy spirit. And we know, we understand, we see good and evil and we see the good and evil that is out there. We see the good and evil within us. And by that I don’t mean demonic spirits. I mean our ability to make decisions based on God’s will or our will. Right? Simultaneously center and Saint. We have the bigger picture and it’s amazing and it’s powerful and it’s wonderful. Remember dear brothers and sisters that few of you were wise in the world’s eyes or powerful or wealthy when God called you. Instead God chose things the world considers 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. As a result, no one can ever boast in the presence of God. 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. He freed us from sin. Therefore, as the scriptures say, if you want to boast, boast only about the Lord. Covered a lot of ground here this morning. Had a good conversation. I appreciate that. They’ll probably come out on YouTube in a little while and on the podcast. Go ahead and find those things. Tell your friends. And we’re going to continue in first Corinthians talking about the church, talking about the power of God and the individual talking about the power of God in church and the direction that we seek by submission to God’s Holy Spirit. And then in a few weeks, we’ll figure it will figure out together what went wrong in second Corinthians. Nobody really knows, but we’ll look at it and I’ll show you what I mean. So Father, we pray that your word would go out today. Changing hearts and minds. We pray that it would penetrate those who are think they’re wise. Penetrate those who think they are so important. Penetrate those in leadership. So we understand that yes, structure and boundaries and discipline are needed in our culture, if nothing else. So that we may settle and hear your voice in Jesus name. Amen. Good Lord willing in the Creek don’t rise. We’ll see you Thursday morning for Turning on the Lights.
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