What God Has Against the Church #4 - Illuminated and Studied
Message Description
Senior Pastor, Dr. Kurt Bjorklund, continues the message series "What God Has Against The Church" teaching from 1 Corinthians. Discerning God's voice is possible when Christians look to God's word and away from false detractors.
Message Transcript
Well, good morning. Again, welcome to Orchard Hill. Before we jump into the teaching today, I want to just give a shout-out to our Butler campus. I got a text yesterday, our Butler campus participated in a food drive in Butler, and I think they served over 160 families who were in a place of food insecurity, and that's just really cool. It got me to thinking about this last year as a church family, and sometimes when you come, you might miss a week here or there and not be able to string together all of the ways that as a church family, we've been able to participate in just helping serve in our broader community. Last year, we did something we called Love Pittsburgh, and it started early in the year by supplying food to the Pittsburgh Food Bank, all three of our campuses, the North Hills Community Food Bank, and the Butler Community Food Bank. So together, you filled those to overflowing several trucks full of food, just you, bringing food in and donating.
Then, we participated in the Walk for the Homeless, which was a way to help resource Light of Life, which is a great ministry that we've partnered with over the years. We participated through KidsFest with funding KidsFest Haiti, and then backpacks came in August, and we did the backpack fill-up for all the kids going to school. Then, we participated in the Million Meals in November, where we did 100,000 meals as a church family, that was you here, that was part of nine other churches that were doing that. Then again at Christmas, the Light of Life Tree where over 300 gifts were provided for families that are in a place of need in our community. On top of that, every week, we as a church, give resources to Light of Life, to provide meals for one of the meals, one of their days, that we fund every single week, and people from our Strip District campus serve those meals on a fairly consistent basis. I think every month we have a team that goes, and I was just telling you that to say, "Great job."
On top of that, you've given to the Eleos Fund, which you heard Mark talk about just a moment ago, which is money that is then used to help support people in the church, some in the broader community who are in need, and so way to go. You've just been so generous over this last year of providing a meal, a cup of cold water in the name of Jesus, to people in the community as a church, and so that's just really cool, so great job. Let's pray together. God, I thank you that so many of us who call Orchard Hill our church home, are in a place where we don't worry about where our next meal will come from. But God, I also thank you that we've been able to help just step into that gap in our communities over this last year. God, for those who are dealing with food insecurity, not knowing where their next meal will come from in our community, God, we pray that you would lead them to resources, to jobs, to opportunities. We thank you for just the small part we can play in that process, and God for families right now that are dealing with health issues, with different relational issues, God, we pray for your hand to be seen in the midst of those situations. God, as we're gathered here today, and in Butler, and the Strip, the Chapel, and online, I pray that you would meet each of us, that my words would reflect your word in content, tone, and emphasis, and we pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
So let me begin today by asking you a question. Do you consider yourself a theologian? Now, my guess is there would be a few of you who would say, "Well, I read some books. I dabbled in it." Some of you may have taken some classes in college and you said, "You know what? I kind of am that" but probably many of us would say, "Well, not really. I don't really like reading books by dead Germans, and so that isn't really my thing. I just do life," but I would love like to suggest to you today that everybody is a theologian. The reason I say this is because everybody that I know has some opinion about God and how God works. Even if you are a person who says, "I don't believe in God," "I'm an atheist," or, "I'm agnostic," you have an opinion about God. That, by definition, is theology. What you're doing is you're saying, "I have considered the options and I've landed here." That is a way of thinking about God. When somebody walks into a crowded space and they set off a bomb and they say, "I'm doing this in the name of God," that is a theology that's informing them.
I read recently that Adolf Hitler in his Mein Kampf, I didn't actually read Mein Kampf, I read a thing about this, but that this is what he said at one point. If you don't remember Adolf Hitler exterminating an entire race of people that he didn't like, this is what he said. He said, "I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the almighty creator." So, Adolf Hitler looks at his life and he acknowledges that his views were somehow inspired by, or in line with his understanding of God. This is the same thing that many of us do in maybe smaller ways. You go to Starbucks with a friend and a friend says, "Here's what I'm facing," and you say, "Well, this is what I think you should do or could do," and somehow, it's got a moral taint to it or a moral twist. What you're doing is you're giving them your theology at that moment.
A friend comes to you and says, "You know what? I'm not in love with my husband anymore, and I believe that God wants me to be happy so I can't stay in this relationship. There's somebody else who's caught my attention." What you say at that moment is your theology back to that person. If you have a friend who says to you something along the lines of, "I know I look at pictures online that are of women, but God created women and they're beautiful, and since God created beauty for me to look at it, it isn't wrong," What you say at that moment, reveals your theology. Do you see where I'm going with this? You have a theology, whoever you are, wherever you're coming from. What I think is equally obvious is that not everyone's theology is right. I don't think I should even have to spend a lot of time on that, just some of the examples I just used.
Adolf Hitler, somebody blowing something up, you can go, "Okay. Not everybody who says that I believe that this represents God is right." So, here's the question. How do you know that you're right? How do you know that your theology is correct and is rooted in something real? We started a few weeks ago, a series that we've called What God Has Against the Church, and we're working through the letter from the Apostle Paul to the First Corinthians to the church at Corinth. And Corinth was a very cosmopolitan city, very similar to the culture in which we live. The reason we've called it, What God Has Against the Church is because it's a corrective to some things that the church and Corinth had wrong, and he's nudging the church to say, "This is the way you should think about it."
But we've also called it that because in our day and age, there's real push from a lot of people to say, "I'm spiritual, but I don't need the church. I'm not religious. I believe in God, but I just don't do religion because of how jacked up religion is." Certainly, there's a lot in religion that is jacked up, but what you see when you study Corinthians is that it's not that abnormal. So, what we've done is we've looked at the first chapter of First Corinthians and today, we come to chapter 2. What we see in chapter 2 is this issue of knowing or having a mind that is rooted in reality, a mind of Christ. Here's what we see. This is verses 15 and 16. Actually, I'll just read 16. So, verse 16 quotes Isaiah 40, and he says this.
He says, "Who has known the mind of the Lord as so is to instruct him?" If you just take that out of context, without knowing Isaiah 40, you may say, "Oh, I'm not sure what that's about." Isaiah 40 is a statement about the greatness of God, and when this question is asked in Isaiah 40, it's asked in a way as if to say, "God's so great, no one can instruct him. Nobody has his mind," and if the people in the synagogue, the Jewish people of that day would've known Isaiah 40 they would've known that that's what this meant. Here's what Paul says right after that. He says this verse 16, "But we have the mind of Christ." This is a little bit of a shocking statement from Paul because he quotes this Old Testament passage and he says, "Who has the mind of God?" Where they all would've gone, "Nobody has the mind of God." Then he says, "But wait a second. We have the mind of Christ."
This is shocking. It's a little arrogant in a sense, not truly arrogant in the sense of, I don't think he's wrong, but it would have felt arrogant to the people of that day because they would've said, "How dare you say that you have the mind of Christ," and yet he had the audacity to say, "We have the mind of Christ." So, here's my question, on what basis do you cultivate, develop your own theology? If you have a theology, what do you base it on? Now, there are some who will base it on personal sensibilities or intuitions, and what I mean is, for many people, what they do is they say, "Well, I just kind of think God is like this. I just kind of think this is how God works." But you know, as well as I do that if that's how somebody orients their thinking about God, that they can be wrong. I remember a friend years ago who met somebody and when he met somebody, he's like, "God told me she's the one," and she wasn't.
When you have this idea that says that this is just my sensibility, you can be wrong. Another thing that people do is tradition, where they say, "This is what I've always believed, therefore, it's what I believe." But my guess is almost all of us can say there's something that we were taught, or we believed when we were young about God or what God is like, maybe intentionally, maybe unintentionally, that now we've come to say, "I'm not sure that that's right. I'm not sure I believe that." Tradition can be wrong. Some of us will lean toward group identity, and what I mean by group identity is what we'll do is we'll find a group that we like. We like their outcome. We'll identify what they believe and will adopt most of those beliefs as our own. This happens certainly in the church world, that happens beyond the church world.
So much of what people believe and have a moral sense about today is about the group that they identify with because we want to signal to other people in the group that we're most closely associated with that we believe the orthodoxy. In fact, I have come to believe that there's been a real shift in our culture over about the last five years, especially toward the church, and here's what I mean. It used to be that the church, the beliefs that the church had, people of faith had been seen as, "Oh, that's what you believe. You believe what you believe. You do you, I'll do me. I believe us. You believe that. It's all good. You don't tell me what to believe. I won't tell you what to believe. We all live out our lives happily."
What's happened in the last few years is there's a narrative that's coming from culture that's saying, "No, we know what's right, and you better believe it. If you don't, you're dangerous to the rest of us." Do you know what that is? That's theology. It may not have God attached to it, but as soon as you say, "I believe that everyone should do this, believe this," what is it? It's theology. It's morality. It's a type of belief system, and so when you allow a group to identify or direct your thinking, what you're doing at least in part is you are choosing a group identity. There's a book that was written years ago called The Critical Journey. In the book, the authors talk about the journey of spirituality. It starts in stage one, they call it, which is an awareness of God when you first say, "Maybe there's a divine being. Maybe I can connect to this being." Stage 2, they call the life of faith or discipleship.
Again, it's written across the faith spectrum, but what they talk about in stage 2 is this idea that in stage 2 people have a sense of belonging as one of their values, a sense in which their answers are found in a leader or in a movement that they have a sense of rightness and a sense of security. The premise of the book is basically that stage 2 and then stage three, which they call an outward life where you start to say, "I can serve," is followed by what they call "the wall," where you hit a season of disorientation around your understanding of God, and then there are three other stages after this. They say that the stages are cyclical, so you don't just move through them. But the idea of stage 2, and they talk about being caged at a stage, is what happens is you start to say, "It's all of about what this group feels, and I don't want to be outside the group." So, you either, if you get caught there, end up saying, "We're right, everybody else is wrong, and I'm secure in that."
That's the person who then switches groups from time to time because they say, "Well, now there's another group that's more right on something that's important." But your group identity can lead you to a place where maybe you say, "I think I have this right", but you don't. Then there's what I call the favorite teacher category, and this is easy to fall into because what happens is you start to say, "There is somebody who I like how they interpret things. I like how they live, and so I will always look to my favorite teacher to get my understanding." Again, in The Critical Journey here's how the authors write about it, "We look to leaders of causes to shape us. We sense some charisma, some special enlightenment, an emotional, spiritual, or intellectual depth that we attribute to the leader or cause that we follow. The person may be a pastor, a priest, a writer, a lay leader, a parent, a singer, a prophet, or a muse. We are entranced by their qualities, usually feeling deep inside that we would like to be more like them; therefore, we listen to and follow what they say. We are learning a way of discipleship, learning to follow and heed the advice and instruction of others."
So, there are these ways and I'm sure there are many others that we try to say, "I'm discerning what it is that is about God that's true for how I see the world." What happens in I Corinthians 2, I believe is that we get a different way and I'm going to say this is the way of revelation and illumination, and if you've been following in this series, we've had paradoxical ideas that we've talked about in each message. In this one, it's studying the revelation and being illumining. So being illuminated and studied is what we're talking about.
Here's where we see this. In verse 10, he uses the word "revelation." Here's what it says. It says, "These are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit," and here's why this is important, and maybe what God has against the church. Again, when I use the word church here, you may think that I'm talking about the organization of the church, like ABC Church somewhere. The church is you, it's me, it's people who believe. So maybe you're here and you say, "I don't believe," then maybe you can say the church is others. But if you believe in Jesus, if you say that Jesus is my Lord and Savior, then you are the church. So, when we talk about what God has against the church, I think part of what's happening here is that he's saying, "You are propagating the mind of Christ without rooting it in the revelation that I've already given." That means that you don't actually have the mind of Christ.
In fact, one of the things that the whole reformation was about was this idea that you and I can interpret the Bible for ourselves because it's based on revelation that God has given, and there's not a private interpretation. You don't need a pastor or a priest or a writer or a scholar to interpret the scriptures. You have the capacity to do that. But what sometimes happens is we say, "Okay, I can discern the spirit," and so then we just start with a blank slate and say, "Well, I think this," and we end up almost like the idea of divination in the Old Testament trying to discern the mind of God from all kinds of things, rather than rooting it in revelation. Here's why I say revelation is at the core of this. In verses 12 and 13, now we read this idea of "we." Let me start again.
In verse 10, he says, "These are the things God has revealed to us by his Spirit." Now, who's us here? Some of us will hear that and we'll say, "Well, it's us," right? That wouldn't be unfair, but I believe that when we come into these next verses, the "we" are actually the apostles who received the revelation of God. So, this is pointing to revelation that has been recorded for us. Here's what we see. "The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God," verse 11, "For who knows a person's thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God." Verse 12, "What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual realities with Spirit-taught words."
So, if you read the "we" there, and this is how I read it as the apostles, what he's talking about here is the revelation that God has given. So, the air of the church, just like the air in the culture can be to say, "We have the mind of God without studying the word of God," without actually saying, "I've put myself in a place to understand and know what this book actually says." I mentioned the reformation a moment ago, here are two figures from the reformation affirming this. Martin Luther said, "The Bible cannot be understood simply by study or talent. You must count on the influence of the Holy Spirit." That's the illumined idea, verses 14 and 15. We'll come to that in just a moment.
John Calvin said, "The testimony of the Spirit is superior to reason, for words to obtain full credit in the hearts of men until they are sealed by the inward testimony of the Spirit." So how do you or I live in a place where we actually have the mind of Christ? Let me show you what I believe are three keys in this text. The first, I'm just going to say is humility, verse 14. The NIV puts it this way, "The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they're discerned only through the Spirit." The ESV puts it this way. It says, "The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God." Now, if you're wondering why I quote both the NIV and ESV, we typically use the NIV here, and we do that.
It's a more thought-for-thought translation, a little easier to understand on first reading. I like how it handles gender better than the ESV. The ESV is a little more of a structured translation, a little more of a straight equivalent, and so sometimes it's more wooden, harder to read, but it sometimes helps bring out nuance. So, the idea here of the natural person, and this is the difference, the one says the person without the spirit, the ESV says, "The natural person." In the original language, it's a word that means the person who's basically of the flesh. So, what this is saying is that our natural person doesn't accept the things of the Spirit, and what that indicates, and then when it says, "Doesn't accept," is a lack of humility. Now, certainly, there's an ultimate sense in which accepting the things of the spirit means coming to a point where we've acknowledged Jesus as our Lord and Savior, or we don't have spiritual discernment at all.
But there's also a sense in which if we don't accept spiritual things, if we say, "I know the Bible says this, but... " or, "I think the Bible might say this, but... " what we're doing is we're not accepting the scriptures, but we're putting ourselves over the scriptures. When we put ourselves over the scriptures, what's happening is we're not accepting the word of God with humility. I believe that the more times that you or I negate what the scripture says about something because we don't like it, the harder it is to be spiritually discerning. So let me give you just an example, and this one might get a little close to home, but I actually believe that if you don't get irritated once in a while coming into this space, that you're not actually in encountering the Spirit of God.
There are times when you should walk out of here saying, "I don't know if I like what he said. I don't know if I agree with him." Now, if you disagree all the time, then maybe there's a time for another church. But what I'm saying is there's a work of conviction that happens sometimes that is uncomfortable, and sometimes our natural self says, "I don't like that. I don't agree with it. I'm not going to submit to it." If you never get there, then there's a sense in which either you're not receiving, you're not entering in, or something is amiss here. So let me just give you an example of this. So, one of the things that the scripture teaches is this idea of not slandering, not talking against people, okay? It's simple. It's in the text. Google it. You'll find it. It's several places. It's so obvious, I don't even need to point to it, okay?
So, what happens? You go, "Oh yeah. I ascend to that. My theology says that's right." Then, you go home, and you get a text from somebody, and it says, "Can you believe what so and so did?" You go, "Oh yeah." Then, you get on the phone, and all of a sudden you start to talk, and you say, "Yeah, not only that, but they did all of this other... " Now, what have you done? What you've done is you've said, "I don't accept the things of God. I am choosing to say, 'I know the Bible says, but..." and you've gone down a path. What happens is it makes you less sensitive to the Spirit and the future so that you have less receptivity to the things of God. If you start this all the way back at the beginning, some of us struggle with the whole notion and what happens is every time we hear something that's true, we argue with it. We debate with it, and it makes it so that it seems foolish to us.
This is the whole point of the end of chapter one, the beginning of chapter 2, where he says, "The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God." In chapter 2, the beginning of chapter 2 verses one through five, he says, "I determined I'm not going to know anything among you, except Christ in him crucified because of the power of God, not human wisdom. So, there's a humility of saying, "I will let God cross my will. I will let God challenge me and change my thinking on issues," but that's not it. That's not the only key. The second one I'm going to say is study. So, if verse 14 shows us this idea of the natural person, doesn't accept the things of the Spirit of God, study is seen in verses 12 and 13.
I read them already, but this is the idea of receiving revelation through the scriptures, and here's why I say this. There are people who will say, in essence, that you can receive revelation apart from scripture. Certainly, I believe that God can impress and work in our lives, but I don't like the word revelation or even prophecy tied to it. Part of the reason is because what it does for some people is it raises to an equal footing this idea that I can have an impression from God, that's the same as scripture, and here's what we read. This is 2 Peter 1:21. It says, "For prophecy," again, from the apostles, what they spoke, "never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." If you go up just a little earlier in this passage, verse 20, it says that "Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of scripture," so prophecy of scripture, what is recorded, "came about by the prophet's own interpretation of things."
Now, why is that important? Because the revelation of God comes to us in a book, and therefore, when the church or the culture starts saying, "I know that the book says this, but... " or "The book says this, but I say... " What we're doing is we're adding to scripture and we're treading on ground that isn't solid at that point. And as a result, sometimes we don't take seriously or study or say, "Let me consider what the scripture actually says." Now certainly, there are some unanswerable questions, and I say this because Deuteronomy 29:29 says that there are some mysteries that are known only to God, but he's revealed things to us, that word again, he's revealed. So, this doesn't mean that you can study and answer every question, but it means as you and I thoughtfully, prayerfully, relentlessly apply ourselves to the understanding of scripture, we can know the mind of Christ about the very things that matter in this world and our lives.
So, we have humility, we have study, and then I'm just going to say we have sensitivity. Here, what I'm referring to is sensitivity to the Spirit of God and this is in verse 15. It says, "The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things," and this again is the NIV, "but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments." In the ESV, it says it this way and that is, it says at the end of verse 15, "The spiritual person judges all things, but is himself to be judged by no one." Now you may say, "Okay, again, Kurt, what's the difference?" Well, when it's talking about the spiritual person judges all things, what it's talking about is when you have humility, study the scriptures, and then let the Spirit of God impact your thinking, you will be able to discern what the mind of God is. Spiritual sensitivity is something that we get by obeying and being open to God showing us the application of what it is that we're studying.
Here's why I read the ESV where it says, "And they're judged by no one," here's one of the places where this is most clearly seen. Religion, including secular moralism, if you grant me that, so secular moralism, the idea that says, "Everyone should, whether I have it from a Bible or anywhere, this is what everyone should do." That's secular moralism. Religion is often concerned with self-improvement in making ourselves better so that we feel good in the eyes of people. But what does he say? That the spiritual person discerns spiritual things and is what? Judged by no one. One of the things that happen when you have spiritual discernment is you begin to see that your standing with God is not based on your goodness, your behavior, how other people see you, how right you are, it is based solely on what Jesus Christ has done for you.
So, you live with a new sense of freedom, that is a spiritually discerned state, where you're able to say "It isn't about what I've done or not done, what I've contributed or not contributed. It's about what Jesus Christ has done on my behalf," and you live with an enlightened sense of wellbeing because of what you take from it. But so often, we slide back into a moralism that says, "This is what I need to do." Right in this passage, you see this idea that the mind of Christ leads you to understand the cross and celebrate the cross, and it impacts how you speak. Again, back to the first few verses of chapter 2, where you say, "I don't need to be persuasive, because I know I have the mind of Christ."
There's a football team in California, a high school football team. It was from the Riverside School for the Deaf, so all the players were deaf on the football team, and they lost games year after year for seven years. They got a new coach, and when the new coach came in, what he did is he decided that he was going to try and take the lack of hearing and use it to an advantage for the players. So, what he did is he installed a fast offense where the players who knew sign language in a way the other team didn't, would signal to each other what their play was. They'd come up to the line of scrimmage very quickly and signal and then go. They ended up turning the tide and having a very successful season this last year because they ended up getting on the same page with one another. What sensitivity is, is it's having an awareness of what God is about, what he's doing, that isn't always seen or understood by the unspiritual person. That is what God is saying is possible. Now, some of you may have seen that this was sitting behind here and wondered, "Why do you have a little fuzzy stool?"
I have a fuzzy stool as an object lesson. This has three legs, very simple. The idea is if we talk about humility, study, and sensitivity, if you took any of those three out, the stool doesn't support your weight. So, you can study without humility, and you're not going to have the mind of Christ. You can have humility without study, and you're not going to have the mind of Christ. You can have humility and study, but not be sensitive to the Spirit by following and obeying what you've already heard or come to understand, and you won't have the mind of Christ. The mind of Christ in I Corinthians 2 comes when you bring these three things together. Here's what, again, I believe I Corinthians 2 is really pointing to and that is today, so many people who would call themselves followers of Jesus are spreading things that are not the mind of Christ, in our culture, online, in churches, all over the place, because they are listening to their own intuition, their group identity, other things.
The message in the culture, for many people, isn't about Jesus Christ and him crucified, it's about all kinds of other things. But if you read through all of I Corinthians 2, what you see is that he says what? He says at the beginning, again, he says, "I determined, I'd know nothing among you, except Jesus Christ and him crucified, because I didn't want it to be about my arguments, but it was the words of God, the very ideas of God." This is absolutely amazing that you and I can, in what feels arrogant in our culture say, "No, we actually have the mind of Christ, because we're tied to the revelation of God that is available to everyone in the scripture. It's not some private interpretation," II Peter 2 or chapter one, verse 20, but it is something that's available to anybody who will apply themselves to this text.
It points us to who Jesus is and to the freedom that we can have in Him. So, my question now is just very simple, and that is, if this is available to you, if it's available to me, are you availing yourself of the opportunity to actually have the mind of Christ? Or are you settling for easier answers because they're easier or you like them better? I think that I Corinthians 2 shows us that a healthy group of people who named Jesus Christ say, "We are willing to be challenged to study, and to be sensitive to, and respond to the Spirit in a way that we will make course corrections and changes rather than digging in on false pretense about what God actually says." That's hard. It's hard because we all like to be right. I like to be right, and sometimes I need to humbly hear from the Word where my attitudes, my actions, my beliefs, my behaviors are not in line with the things of God and make an adjustment.
As soon as I lose that, you lose that, we're no longer in a place where we are saying, "I am submitting to the God of the universe, but now we're using the God of the universe for our ends." So, the church has called you, me, to be illuminated and studied with the things of God. God, I ask today that you would keep me, keep each person who calls Orchard Hill their church home, from settling for trite or quick or easy answers, or you would keep us from leaning so far into an identity or tradition or preferences that we don't actually get your mind, and that in getting your mind that we would reflect you in the world in a way that makes sense and is compelling to people around us. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Thanks for being here. Have a great week.
