Latest / Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive / July 2, 2023 | Reconstructing Faith - Immoral Leaders

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July 2, 2023 | Reconstructing Faith - Immoral Leaders · Topeka Bible Church Audio Archive

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning, everybody.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the first time we run the video, I'm never sure when to pop in, so lights coming on is always a great indication.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: Before we get started, I just wanted to give another thanks to all of those Camp Catapult volunteers.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: That is, I think that the Bible is very clear that ministry to children is something that the Lord cares deeply about.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: And especially for those who the junior high and high school volunteers were fantastic, but especially for the adult volunteers who took off work, thank you for doing that.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: That was an amazing ministry.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I hope that you recognize the eternal impact that you were making in the lives of kids.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we are starting a new series this morning.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: It's called Reconstructing Faith.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we need to kind of uh actually address a vocab word before we begin anything because it's kind of central to understanding the whole thing.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it's this idea of deconstruction.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so if you've ever been to a fine dining restaurant before, you've probably seen a dish that looks like this, which they are saying is called lemon meringue pie.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: So deconstruction is uh in this situation, the chef has taken all these normal ingredients, right, and they've recombined them according to their own design.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Uh they might cook them differently, they might uh plate them differently than a normal dish.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: And to be honest, deconstruction, it is not um inherently a bad thing.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of beautiful ways that it can be done, and it can show a lot of creativity.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: There are many good things that come from it, but it can be taken too far.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is, no kidding, a real recipe on Sarah Lee's website for a deconstructed corn dog, okay?
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: And their tagline says, fire up the grill and surprise the kiddos with this fun twist on the corndog.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: Pretty sure your kids would not think it's a very fun twist if you told them this was a corndog, right?
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, deconstruction um is also something, though, that is being used uh to describe the Christian faith.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: And there are a lot of people right now who are um deconstructing what they have believed for their entire lives.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Another word that is often thrown around with this is they are moving from evangelical to exvangelical.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but deconstruction, as we're going to be talking about it this week and four weeks following, can follow this definition: a critical dismantling of tradition and traditional modes of thought.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: So at its best, deconstruction can bring about good things.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: There are a lot of practices and traditions that have sprung up in the Christian world that are not as biblically aligned as we might like to think, or there are things going on that have been criticized, and we have become defensive when they are criticized.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: And those who are leaving the faith, those who are sort of jettisoning everything that they had believed when they were kids, right, that they might have some valid criticisms.
• 3:14
  SPEAKER_00: There are moral leaders, spiritual abuse, divisiveness, theological contradictions, dismissal of genuine questions, and oftentimes a church culture of shame.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: But deconstruction can definitely be taken too far.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And what has happened is that when some of these criticisms have been brought about, they have resulted, though, in a never-ending cascade, or you might say a nosedive into a realm of criticism, where that is the only thing that is being done, and the reconstruction process never takes place.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that is a very difficult place to be because ultimately it doesn't tell us anything about how we might grow closer to God or what to do with the questions that we have had.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so I wanted to talk about this as a church because this is what is happening in the Christian world right now.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't, if you weren't aware of it, then you have people around you who are either experiencing difficult questions and don't know what to do with them, or they have friends who are doing the same and most likely have stepped away from the church or even the Christian faith entirely because of it.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And that's not good.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: Over the last 14, 15 years or so, Christianity has continued to decline.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And the very relevant stat is that people are not moving from Christianity into another religion.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: People are moving from Christianity into a category that has exploded in growth over this period of time, which is often referred to as either religious nuns or pe and that's not N-U-N-S, okay?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: They're not like people going to monasteries, but N-O-N-E-S.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Religious nuns or those who would categorize themselves as spiritual but not religious.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so the question that we're going to be looking at today and over the next uh four weeks after this is we're gonna look at a criticism that people have levied against the church, and it's gonna be phrased from their perspective, and we're gonna say, what is the truth in this criticism and what should we reject?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: Right?
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: How can we build upon this and not immediately get defensive, but accept the fact that there might be ways in which the Christian tradition, which is built upon God's special revelation centered in Jesus Christ, has occasionally moved away from what God would have us practicing?
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_00: So our question this morning is a bit of a doozy, but it's one that, again, if you have not asked, I promise you somebody you know has asked.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Why would I be a Christian when all the leaders have moral failures?
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: Why would I follow a faith where news article after news article is showing those who are in positions of leadership or influence in the Christian world are hypocrites, are as if we're not all hypocrites, but are hypocrites and are unable to walk the walk.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Why would I believe in a faith where they have consistently shown that they are doing these sorts of things?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: And the problem is that there's a lot for them to latch on to, right?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the Christian world has sort of received a number of black eyes because there are so many scandals.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you can go institutionally and you can talk about the Catholic Church or the Baptist denomination and their cover-up of sexual abuse, all the way down to the individual level, and you see a celebrity pastor who has cheated on their wife and has stolen money from a church, right?
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: And beyond all of those things, right, it is now very much a part of our media that some of the most popular podcasts and TV shows are talking about uh basically Christian scandals.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: You might have seen uh the rise and fall of Mars Hill.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: That one's a little bit over a year old, but that was talking about Mark Driscoll and the uh his fall in the Mars Hill churches up in the Northwest and a pattern of spiritual and uh emotional abuse that was happening in his churches.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um you might have seen on FX, um, this is one about Carl Lentz, who was a he was the spiritual guru to Justin Bieber, right?
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: And uh he was a very popular pastor in New York City with Hillsong, and ultimately had an affair, was fired, and is now working at a megachurch in Oklahoma City.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: God forbid is a story about Jerry Falwell Jr.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: in a sex scandal that ruined both his personal ministry and severely damaged the ministry of Liberty University.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, Shiny Happy People, which how many have any of you watched that?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Some of some of you, some don't want to admit that they've watched it.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's fine.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that's about the Duggar family and Bill Gothard and the IBLP and a whole lot of difficult things that went on in that situation.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: But it was the most watched debut for any docuseries in Amazon Prime's history.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Lots of people are watching this, and a lot of people who aren't Christians are watching this.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so you look at these situations, and there are there's sex abuse, there's power trips, there's stuff theft, cover-ups, prosperity preachers lies, and it's hard to find a corner of Christianity that hasn't been affected by these things.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason why those who are deconstructing their faith are looking at these as examples is because they're wrestling with two very significant claims, which is one, why should I follow a faith, right, where these individuals are allowed to thrive?
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: And second, when these individuals have been exposed either as false teachers or disqualified for ministry, why do Christians continue to follow after them and be influenced by them?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: A lack of rejection of those who are not following after God as a broad statement when it comes to leadership is something that is very hard for people to accept.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: So the reason why, I'm not just going to keep talking about scandals, we'll get to the topic at hand.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_00: The reason why this is so significant, and the reason why these individuals have fallen, and the reason why their dust cloud that was created because of their fall was so dramatic is because they were idolized.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: There are certain Christian leaders and certain Christian teachers who have been lifted up upon a pedestal and have been given power without accountability, and have been given so much free reign that when they begin to reject the things of God or act in a way that is opposing to God, there is not the system to be able to come alongside them and reign them in.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: And furthermore, there is a group of people, it is not just the faults of those who have fallen and are pictured here on this slide, but it is also those who are following after them that have empowered them.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what this is doing is it is leading us very, very close, and I would say aligning with the biblical definition of what it means to worship a false idol.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: The psalmist in Psalm 115 says this their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: They have mouths but do not speak, eyes, but do not see.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: They have ears but do not hear, noses but do not smell, they have hands, but do not feel, feet, but do not walk, and they do not make a sound in their throat.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the Bible is very clear that idolatry is a sin.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: The Bible is very clear that idolatry is when we are placing something in the well, we are putting something in the place of God in terms of what we are worshiping, right?
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_00: But when the Bible describes idols, it is often cast images or things made of wood or stone.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: But the way that they describe the worship of these idols and the heart behind idolatry is very much something that we have to be careful with today.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you might have heard us talk before about idolatry in the sense of, you know, you can make idol a money or success, you can make money an idol, you can make success an idol, you can make um comfort an idol.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: But we can also very easily make other people an idol.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: And it's captivating.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: At the very beginning here, it says that their idols are silver and gold, right?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: They are made out of precious metals, they are made out of things that we value and we are drawn towards.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um, the idols that the psalmist is talking about, he says people are making these things that they worship out of the most valuable materials of the day.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: But they are drawn to them in part because they are made of valuable things.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: When we look at idols in our world today, and specifically Christian leaders at times, there is often something that is very alluring about them.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: They have an amazing charisma, they have power, they have influence, they have the ability to direct people, or maybe they have access to those that we don't have access to.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we even think that they have so much knowledge that we would be remiss if we did not know them or attach ourselves to them, and we would be missing out on the knowledge, the special knowledge that they can provide.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: But there is always something very attractive about those that we have lifted up far too high.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: And one of those things is that we have made them out of silver and gold, and we have ultimately created them.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: The work of human hands, there is no idol that has not been created by humans.
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: Romans 1 uses the language that we have exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and we have worshiped the created rather than the creator.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: But the same thing is going on here.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: We begin to, and I think it's very important to say, it is not like we say, I'm going to reject God, and then I am going to take him down, and I'm going to put up this other beautiful thing in his place.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: You look at the nation of Israel, and oftentimes what was going on is they had not rejected the God of their ancestors, Yahweh, the God of Israel, but they had decided to worship something else in addition to him.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't a one-for-one exchange, but they had added other things into their worship of God that made them this polytheistic society, which is what God did not want them to be doing.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: God does not want us to be doing that.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: But idols are things that we have placed up on a pedestal by our own creation.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then you have those next four lines where simply it is saying that the idol, specifically in contrast to God, is unable to do the things of God.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_00: It is a dead idol, it has no real power.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas the God of the universe has power.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: His ability to do the things that he says he will do is unmatched.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, when we look at false idols again in the Bible, we see that they are, and they will make fun of them, right?
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: That they are mute, they are nothing, they are pieces of wood.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, when we look at idols today, we find the same thing happening in that we recognize that they are unable to fulfill the things that they ultimately say they will do.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: Money is never satisfying ultimately.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: Success is never ultimately satisfying.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: And when we follow after Christian teachers and preachers and influencers who have distanced themselves from the faith and have exchanged the glory of God for self-glorification, what happens is that we are following after somebody else who we think will provide us with access.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: They are silver and gold, right?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: They are beautiful and we want to bask in their glow, yet they cannot satisfy.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: Those who make them become like them, so do all who trust in them.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: And this is the real condemning part of it, is that we see that those who follow after idols begin to transform into the image of the thing they are following.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is why we are to worship Jesus Christ, because as we sort of bathe ourselves in his light, we become to look, we begin to look more and more like him.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: But when we begin to follow after other people instead of God, and begin to value them more than we value the influence of God, and access to them more than access to God, and so on and so forth, we're in Dutch.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's a big problem.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a problem that people who are not Christians are criticizing us for.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: And they have a valid criticism.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: Storytime.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: I went to Southwestern Baptist Seminary.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's down in Fort Worth.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: And uh I went to Southwestern, not because I'm Baptist or grew up Baptist, but because I wanted a quality education.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: And I chose Southwestern for that reason.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: And when I was there, um when I first started going, uh the president of the institution was named Paige Patterson.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: Paige Patterson was an individual who had led um really this groundswell movement and the Baptist denomination back in the 80s called the Conservative Resurgents.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: To make a long story short, what that meant is that in an age where people were not um valuing the inerrancy or the truthfulness of the Bible, he was advocating for it.
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: Um whether you know it or not, you benefit today from the work of the conservative resurgents back in the 80s.
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_00: They did a lot of good work.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: It was not just him, there were a lot of people around him who were doing that good work.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: When I arrived at Southwestern, he and along with many of the people who had been involved with that were either on staff or were connected to Southwestern.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so we were immersed kind of in this pool, right, of understanding the work that had been done.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_00: But the first time that I went to chapel at Southwestern, right, because we would worship God on campus, um, I noticed that there were a number of figures in the stained glass windows surrounding the chapel.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: And as I looked at them, I began to realize that these were no figures of Jesus, these were not even figures of the disciples or other uh biblical individuals.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: These were people who had been involved in the conservative resurgence.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact, uh, this would be Page, this would be his wife, and that would be Page's dog that was included in this.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember walking into chapel, again, being a brand new student on campus, and already feeling unease over the fact that I was going to worship God in a place that was surrounded by 30-some individuals who had made great contributions to the faith, but there were no images or references to God other than maybe a single cross.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: It seemed disjointed to me, right?
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_00: So to fast forward, about halfway through my time at Southwestern, Paige was fired.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he was fired because of his improper handling of an allegation of sexual abuse on campus and his cultivating of a culture where that behavior was able to exist, amongst some other things.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: And when that happened, within about two weeks, all of the stained glass windows in the chapel were gone.
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because now we had somebody who was in a stained glass window that most assuredly was not in the, let's just say, the graces of the seminary.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: One of the alumni, though, of Southwestern and alumnus said this during that time because it sort of rocked the Baptist world when he fell.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: They said, perhaps some of the window subjects illustrate why institutions tend to memorialize those whom history has confirmed finished well.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Some would contend we are best served remaining focused on biblical heroes of faith and practice.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: Since that time, there have been a number of other individuals who were in the stained glass windows while I was going to school, even just however many years ago, five years ago, that have had allegations of sexual misconduct levied against them and other instances of abuse.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_00: And this provides great illustration to a problem that we have in the Christian world, which is that it is good to recognize people who are honoring and glorifying God.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: It is not good to lift them up to the place where they are receiving more recognition than God.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And when that happens, when we do that as Christians, when we lift people up, and obviously everybody who is lifted up at the very beginning was thought to be the great, right?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_00: The one, the truly influential who would never.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: But when we lift people up who are not God to the place of God or the influence of God or the trust of God and worship them, they effectively become idols.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: They are not cast images of gold, but we are still empowering them in a way that we should not.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so you show me somebody who had a scandal, and I will show you somebody who is given too much power without accountability.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: I will show you somebody who has exchanged the truth of God for a lie or lies, and I will show you somebody who is just as vulnerable as you and I, but was given a platform that they should have never had.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: They were given a level of influence that should have been checked.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the greatest problem, though, out of all of these things, to be honest with you, is not the fact that they messed up.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: We should monitor.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because that is terrible.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: And anytime somebody is falling, though, they are going to affect other people.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: And some of those individuals who have fallen have taken down a lot of wonderful people with them who loved Jesus but had aligned themselves so closely with the teaching or the influence of a specific person that when that person, when that star fell down to the ground, they were unable to continue because their faith in God was not predicated upon the Bible.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: It was not based entirely upon their relationship with Jesus and just benefiting from the teaching of other people.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: But they had placed somebody else in their line of sight as an influencer to the level that they were trusting in God.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, what is the solution?
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: The psalmist continues in 115.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_00: He says, O Israel, trust in the Lord.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: He is their help and their shield.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_00: He is their help and their shield.
• 23:03
  SPEAKER_00: You who fear the Lord, trust in the Lord, He is their help and their shield.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: The solution to all of these things is relatively simple yet difficult for us to execute, which is that we are to trust exclusively in the Lord.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: He is the only one that is deserving of praise.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: He is the only one that is deserving of our worship in all of the ways that we constitute that.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: It is not just who you sing songs to, but are you placing somebody else in your relationship with God that has outweighed their supposed level of importance?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_00: We are to trust in the Lord.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: It is the second line that is repeated three times.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_00: He is their help and their shield.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_00: Because the whole point about the beginning of Psalm 115 was that the idols that we construct are unable to do the things that we are asking them to do.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: They do not save us.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: These idols are powerless.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_00: From a biblical perspective, the idols of silver and gold are worthless.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_00: They are mute and they're unable to do the things that God can do.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_00: It is only God Himself who is the one that saves us.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: But oftentimes, like I have said, and I'm trying to emphasize, we attach other people, perhaps even unknowingly, into this role of helper in salvation.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: If they tell you something, you follow it just as closely as if the Bible tells you something.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that is dangerous, and that is a scary space to be, right?
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we trust in the Lord.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_00: He is our help and our shield.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: And if we pursue this, if we are able to trust in God alone, what will happen over time is that you recognize that God, by his grace and mercy, has done something almost unimaginable, which is given his perfect plan to be carried out by imperfect people.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: And you're going to realize that you and I and everybody else who says that they trust in Jesus has been asked to carry out a perfect plan, even though God knows that we are going to mess up.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_00: It is going to help you better align yourselves with everybody else who has fallen, knowing that there might be a scandal about you too if you had been given such a platform and had 400,000 Twitter followers, right?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_00: And that there might be people that would struggle with their faith if they knew the depth of your sin and my sin.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, God has still made this part of his plan.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so we should have a better understanding if we're able to lift God the highest above all and lower maybe the star of some of those other people that we have valued.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: We have a better understanding of the world that God has asked us to work within.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: Where we are loving and encouraging our Christian brothers and sisters, where we are finding mentors, where we are finding teachers that we value and good authors and distinguishing all of these things, having preferences even, but understanding that it is God that we worship and not man.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: So let's go back to the criticism.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: Why would I be a Christian when all of the leaders have moral failures?
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: Should I leave the faith because of that?
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: That is a bridge too far.
• 26:38
  SPEAKER_00: But there are two very valid criticisms.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_00: One, that as Christians, we love to lift people higher up than they should be and give them the power and lack of accountability that they do not deserve.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: And when those people fall, we sometimes have a problem distinguishing ourselves from them and distancing ourselves from their influence, even though to the watching world it looks very hypocritical.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: We must always be a people who are drawing ourselves back closer to Jesus.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: This is why in each of these lessons, my goal is to provide a simple corrective to the criticism that has been brought about.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the one this morning is that we worship God and not man.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_00: Luke 4.8 says, Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: I understand that is very simple.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_00: My point in today's message, though, is that you would understand that it is something we often struggle to carry out, even though we understand it up here.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so I think that we should sort of have a sober reflection.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_00: Who is it that we might be idolizing?
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: Who is it that we might have lifted above the platform that they should have?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Is there somebody, and again, is it a person we're listening to, an influencer, somebody we're reading, somebody we're seeing or talking to?
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_00: Who is it that we might have lifted up into that place where we have not exchanged them for God, but we have attached them to our worship of God?
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_00: Where is my praise going when you think about those people that you value so much in the Christian faith?
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: And they say something illuminating about the text.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: Where is your praise going?
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: Is it going to God or is it going to them?
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: Because God has placed them in a position where they can benefit you as long as they are honoring Him.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yet your praise should not be directed at the person, but to the Lord who is using that person for his kingdom.
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: But where is your praise going?
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_00: When you tell people about the things that you are hearing and learning and experiencing in the Christian faith, where are you directing them to?
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: Is it to a fantastic book and an author?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe even that is where you stop short.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: But or you do you say, look how God is using this author to teach me all of these things.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is what I'm learning about the Lord through this and why I am praising him even more than before.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_00: Or the last thing is, let us consider the leaders that we have lifted up, and are they worshiping God in a way that we would want to worship God?
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_00: I can think of some folks, and myself at my worst times, where the praise that we are directing towards God is sometimes 80%.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't mean 80% effort, but I mean 80% responsibility.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: Where they are recognizing, and perhaps you don't know it, that they might think a part of them is involved.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_00: And they should be ashamed for feeling that way.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_00: Because God is the one who has all power and might.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: God is the one who empowers us to do all of these things by the power of his Spirit.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_00: It is God alone who has saved the world, and there's not a single person that you know who has saved you or has the power to save you.
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yet we so often do these things.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so I have, it has been said of me, truthfully, my own criticism, that sometimes I end on a down note in sermons.
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so my encouragement to you, though, is that this does not have to be your experience where you are idolizing other people.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_00: And I want you to be better equipped to be able to engage those who have this criticism.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because there are people, many people.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: If the data is right, there are millions of people who are walking away from their Christian faith because they have this question, and when it was posed to those that they know, they were met with anger, defensiveness, and self-righteousness.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that is not supposed to be the posture of Christians when valid criticism has been leveled against us.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_00: But we might also find strength in the fact that Jesus is the only one that we should be worshiping, that it is God alone, and it is not anybody else attached.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_00: And you know what that does?
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: That frees you from a lot of burdens that you might have had, thinking that you need to live up to the expectations then of other people.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_00: It is God alone who we are following after, and that is where our faith is based.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Deconstruction has some value.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: It brings up criticisms like this.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_00: And so we should take it for what it's worth.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: We should throw, separate the wheat from the chaff, and we should say, Lord, please forgive us for those places where we have fallen short.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_00: Please help us to change it in the future, and please help us to worship you alone and not man.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: Heavenly Father, we come before you and we say that you are the only one worthy of worship.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_00: And Lord, we have placed other people, oftentimes in your place, or at least right next to you.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: And God, we ask for forgiveness because that is not what you have asked us to do.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, nor is it the wise thing to do because other people cannot save us.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_00: Other people do not have the power to do the things that they say they will do.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, other people are not you.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_00: And God, as you have consistently shown us, though, it is still alluring because there are many ways of this world in which we are attached and drawn to those who are in power or have success or access or knowledge.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: And so, God, I ask that by the power of your spirit you would help us to realign.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: But Lord, I would also pray that you would help us when we see those people who have these criticisms and maybe haven't engaged with this topic as much as they should, that we might have a loving and gracious answer to their claim.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, it is worthy to follow you, even when people have fallen short, even when people we have lifted up have fallen short.
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_00: Because God, it is you alone that is worthy of worship.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: And it's in Jesus' name we pray.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: As we gather together to take the Lord's table, I think a wonderful picture is presented of what we were discussing this morning.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because you have around the table, the Lord's table, a bunch of people who were idolized at various points in time because of their faith.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, you still have some denominations who pray to these people who were gathered around the Lord's table and taking in the Last Supper with Jesus.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yet the only one who was worthy of praise during the Last Supper was the one who was going to shed his blood and break his body the next day.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: This is why Jesus says, for I, or Paul says, For I received from the Lord what I also passed on to you.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: And the night when he was betrayed, the Lord Jesus took bread, and when he had given thanks, broke it, and said, This is my body which is for you.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_00: Do this in remembrance of me.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_00: In the same way also he took the cup after supper and said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_00: Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_00: For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, we come before you once more and we say thank you.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: Lord, we say thank you for your body and your blood that we remember as the sacrifice for our sins.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_00: The punishment, Lord, that you did not deserve, yet you willingly gave and endured so that we might be free.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: And God, this is why everything else falls short.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because you are the only one who could do this.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_00: You are the only one who did do this.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: And Lord, for that you are worthy of praise.
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_00: Not even counting all the under other wondrous acts that you have brought about.
• 35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Father, we ask that you would help us to recenter ourselves upon you alone, to value those that you might rise up, bring up for their ability to help us walk in your kingdom.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_00: But God, only insofar as they are glorifying you.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Father, please give us discernment as we are working through who to trust to a certain degree, and to make sure, Lord, that they do not ever take your place in worship.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: It is in Jesus' name we pray.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: Love you.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_00: Have a great week.