Latest / Wesley at FSU & TSC / "Get Wisdom" | Sunday Service | September 27th, 2026

Transcript

"Get Wisdom" | Sunday Service | September 27th, 2026 · Wesley at FSU & TSC

• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: In this way, I want to give a sermon this morning that I'm calling get wisdom.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: I want to turn you to turn to the person next to you, say get wisdom and turn to the other person you ignored and say, You need wisdom too.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: You need wisdom to get wisdom, get wisdom.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna be looking this morning in this the book of 2 Timothy, the third chapter.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you have a Bible, you can pull it out.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: That'd be awesome.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't, it'll be on the screen.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Um, hear now the reading of God's word.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: But you have paid attention to my teaching: conduct, purpose, faithfulness, patience, love, and endurance.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Anytime they go through a list like this, we should probably listen.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: So let's try that again.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: But you've paid attention to my teaching conduct, say conduct, purpose, faithfulness, patience, love, and endurance, and have seen me experience physical abuse and ordeals in places such as Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: I put up with all sorts of abuse, and the Lord rescued me from it all, exclamation point.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, anyone who wants to live a holy life in Christ Jesus will be harassed.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: But evil people and swindlers will grow even worse as they deceive others while being deceived themselves.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: But you must continue with the things you have learned and found convincing.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know who taught you.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Since childhood, you have known the holy scriptures that help you to be wise in a way that leads to salvation through faith that is in Christ Jesus.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: Every scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for showing mistakes, for correcting and for training, training character, so that the person who belongs to God can be equipped to do everything that is good.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: Let's pray over the preaching of God's word.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Oh God, your word is a lamp into our feet and into light into our path.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: May it speak to us and speak through us for the establishment of your kingdom on this earth.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Oh God, uh may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight and in your sight alone.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: Oh God, you are our rock and you are our redeemer, and we love you because you first loved us.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: We pray this in your holy and precious name.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: I have a friend who works in the tech sector.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: He makes, let's just say, a better living than I do, right?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: He works in the tech sector right out of college.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_00: He got a job at a group, a company that got bought by Dropbox.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: You've heard of Dropbox, yeah?
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: And so he l he lived and worked at Dropbox.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and that's very true about that world.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: He did live and work there.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: And he worked there long enough to change my account to the maximum.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And then he got he went to another organization that worked on AI.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Say, ooh.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: He worked an organization that was using AI.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then he came up with this idea for a startup, an AI startup, like everyone is doing these days.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: He got picked up by a group called Y Combinator, which is a big deal in the tech world.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: And now all of his all of his projects are funded, which is pretty cool.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: He now lives in Hawaii and flies back and forth between Hawaii and San Francisco.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: So a couple of weeks ago, when I turn on the Today Show and I see this doom and gloom about what's happening with AI, I, you know, I had to call him and be like, hey, Alex, are the robots gonna take over?
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: You know?
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, unequivocally, yes.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I thought, uh oh.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: He he literally said, Yeah, I'm a doomer, and I want you to read this article.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now it's very important that you understand that we had a beach retreat last weekend.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so the idea that I was gonna read some literal like 6,000-word article uh before the the weekend of beach retreat was zero, right?
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: I was never going to do that.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so he kept annoying me about it Monday, Tuesday.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And about Tuesday, I was like, okay, I gotta open this thing up and I added it to one of those things that reads it to you, you know, AI.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: And uh and I it's I said to listen to it, it said it was gonna take 65 minutes, and I thought, uh, I don't have time, 2x, right?
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm listening to it.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the very one of the very first things that was on it as I'm scrolling through it is this graphic.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And it is a brilliant graphic.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's a picture of a little man, that's you, uh, on the history of human progress and time.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: And he and he says that uh, what do you think it feels like to stand right there?
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: And then he kind of corrects himself.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: He says, actually, it's true that you can't actually see to the right of you on this graph, right?
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_00: And so he actually thinks it actually looks like this.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_00: And progress is starting to go up, and he says, There is something coming that we can't quite see.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Then he goes on in this article.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: He says, if you had a time machine from where you are right now, and you could go back to 1750, and you could find just some normal dude on the side of the road in 1750, put him in your time machine and bring him back here today.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: Just think about what the process would look like.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: You would put him into a car that has an engine in it that receives fossil fuels.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: He would not understand what you're talking about.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: He would then take you 70 miles an hour, the man's never been 70 miles an hour in his life, down a road, and maybe the car would start to drive itself or at least keep lanes, right?
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_00: Depending on how nice it is.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: None of the college cars are like that, but you know, you parents know what I'm talking about.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so you would he'd start to like be really, really, really overwhelmed.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say you took him to the grocery store, right?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you take him to the grocery store, you get out of the car, and an airplane flies over his head.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, there is a metal tube in the sky flying above you.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: He would not understand it.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: He might start to understand that people have played with the idea of flight before.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: He certainly has seen a bird, but he's never seen it with a jet engine before.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: It says a mind-blowing experience.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Then he goes into the grocery store and it's January, and strawberries are somehow there, right?
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make any sense, but we have made this kind of progress where we can grow things out of season.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: He would not understand going to the aisle of cereal.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we have an entire aisle that's just cereal, right?
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Like, how many different types of cereal are there, right?
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: Are there 42, 46 different types of cereal?
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_00: He would have never experienced cinnamon toast crunch, bro.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, like that's you know a thing.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Just wait, though, until you pull the rectangle out of your pocket and you tell him, I can call anybody anywhere in the world immediately and talk to them.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the author says it's at this point in which people would say his mind is blown.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: He goes, That's not dramatic enough.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's very possible that in that moment he might die.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is like an this is like an experience, right?
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: This is an overwhelming experience for him from 1750, 250-ish years ago.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: So let's say then, if you wanted, if that guy wanted to have the same kind of fun that you had with him, then he would go back another 250 years, right?
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: To 1500.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: So if you think about it, the ongoings of the day today from 1500 to 1750, not that different.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like they had basically the same forms of transportation.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: They had a basically the same sort of thing.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, in order to get to the place where he would like be so mind-blown that he like literally might die from this experience, he'd actually probably have to go back to 12,000 BC before he understood like agriculture and the agricultural revolution.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you take him back to a hunter-gatherer situation, they would be like, What?
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: We didn't know you could do this.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And if you think about that, if that 12,000 uh BC person had to go back and do that, would he go back to 24,000?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: No, probably not.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: He'd probably have to go back 100,000 years so that you could show them what fire was.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_00: Crazy.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Crazy how the technological innovation is going.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's funny in this article, he says, there will probably be a day in the next 20 to 30 years where you could actually talk to some sort of artificial intelligence that sits in your pocket.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: He wrote that in 2015.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's been 10 years, and now we have it, and we have competitors for it, and the one that comes on your iPhone is pretty bad, you know.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_00: But like we have these things.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people ask, what are Christians supposed to do about AI?
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_00: Neither do you.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Is it cool?
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, in a lot of ways it is really cool.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: Is it scary?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, in a lot of ways it is very scary.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: And the media is real scared of it.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: What are we supposed to do about AI?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I can tell you a couple things.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_00: As a Christian, as a pastor, AI, and I I will repeat this to anybody everywhere, that's why I'm saying a parents uh AI is not made in the image of God.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: Humans are, and AI is not made in the image of God.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Okay?
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: And so we should just understand that and know that.
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: The other thing I'll tell you is that AI has been informed by all of the knowledge in the world.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: You pull out your phone and you pull out an app that is free, and you then ask it a question and it scans a database of literally every word, phrase, story, book ever written.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And that's knowledge.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: But here's one of the things I've known is that AI, when you ask it about grief, it'll tell you about the five stages of grief.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: It'll tell you about what is a good practice to talk to somebody about grief.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: It'll actually get you some good resources.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's very helpful in that way.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: I can tell you one thing, it is never grieved itself.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's never sat there at the casket of a parent and had to sit as they lowered them into the ground and felt the grief.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: It hasn't done it.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_00: You could ask it, like, hey, I just want to have a better relationship with my significant other, my uh spouse, whatever.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it'll tell you about things like communication.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: It might even recommend you to a uh a marriage therapy.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_00: It might give you some some great options for you to start to rebuild this connection you have.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_00: But what it hasn't done is 20 years later, in your marriage, sat across the room from somebody who looks different and thinks different and talks different, and maybe even their spirit's a little different, and you say to them, I still choose you, even after all these days.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: AI can't do that, it's never done that.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: So, what we know is that knowledge does not equal wisdom.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: Knowledge does not equal wisdom.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: We have all the knowledge in the world, we have everything from the history of humankind.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: We have it all, then why is it that we're still at war?
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that we're still don't understand peace?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that we still really tie ourselves to hatred?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that we really are not very good at being good people?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: If we have all the knowledge in the world, if we have everything at our fingertips, why is it?
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's because some things cannot be downloaded, right?
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: You can download, this will be on the screen.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: You can download knowledge, but you have to walk with wisdom.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: If you're writing things down, that might be something you might write down.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: You can download knowledge, but you cannot, you have to walk with wisdom.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: I might say it this way: some things can be taught, but wisdom has to be caught.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_00: Has to be caught from somebody.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is not a new idea.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: This is uh something all of us who are older in age have learned the hard way, usually, you know.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: We've uh we figured this out in some way, shape, or form.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's actually how discipleship came about.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about it.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Conduct, purpose, faithfulness, patience, love, and endurance.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: You have seen me experience physical abuse and ordeals in places such as Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: I put all of it up with all of it, and the Lord rescued me from it.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: You got to see me walk through the hardest things.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it is true that you could learn how to be a Christian, you could learn about the scriptures, but until you have walked with somebody through it, you may have never been discipled.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that's an important thing for us to realize that things can be known, but you have to know them.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: I say all the time, you can get an A plus in Bible and an F in Christianity.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: And I see a lot of people on the internet do it all the time.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: You can understand it and know it, but you've got to be wise.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: So, how do we become wise?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we walk with people.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Jesus actually defines it this way, too.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: It'll be up here, Luke 6.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Disciples aren't greater than their teacher, but whoever is fully prepared will be like their teacher.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_00: See, this was actually well understood back in the olden uh days.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: The Jewish leaders would actually choose a new leader to follow behind them.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_00: They would go through a series of learnings.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: They would go through a series of learning the knowledge and heading through that, right?
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then eventually they would just start to follow behind their rabbi.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you've ever heard this story before, uh we we often refer to it as dusting, because you would follow behind the rabbi so closely that you would you would see the way they interact with each other.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_00: You would see the way they speak to one another.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: You would you would get to view them not just in their theology, but in their actions.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so you would follow so closely behind them that the dust that would be on the ground, the dirt, would kick up onto you.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_00: And you would want to be that close so that you could pick up the dust from your rabbi.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: The same thing's true of us.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: We have to pick up the dust from our rabbis.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: We have to pick up from those who are discipling ahead of events.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: When I was in seminary, I did often the same thing that you do while you're in school here.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: You're in school to learn, hopefully, and your parents were like, yes, really, about a profession that will make you money when you get out so that you can have a job and move out, right, parents?
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: So you are hopefully learning this sort of thing.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm in seminary and I'm learning.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: I had taken a class called Death and Dying, right?
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: I had taken the classes on theology and I understood the scriptures and I knew how to pray with people because I read it in a book.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: But then one of the things that they make you do is a pastoral internship.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: You many of your programs will require you to do an internship as well, and that's on purpose.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: So they require you to do a pastoral internship.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: So I went and did the pastoral internship at this church in Charlotte, North Carolina, big church, like four or five services on a Sunday, 5,000 member kind of church.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: And I got to be the lowly little intern on the staff of 100, you know, and I'm like trying to learn my way around.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, anyway, one Sunday morning I helped with a baptism of an infant.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: In our tradition, we baptize infants, and so we were helping with a baptism of an infant.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, we go outside because it's a gorgeous church.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: We go outside and take pictures afterward, and we're kind of walking around with them.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: And um the next day we get a phone call at the office, and uh, it's the parents of the baby that said that the photographer had gone home and taken the pictures and put them on their computer and noticed like a really weird um bruise-like thing on the kid's leg.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: So they took him to the doctor because they thought that's really strange.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: They looked at it, and yeah, it did look strange.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: Doctor did some blood tests and it came back leukemia.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: He was probably eight months old, somewhere in that range.
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: Young.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_00: So we spent the rest of that summer in the hospital talking with him.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: I had taken the death and dying class.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: How much good do you think the textbook did in that moment?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: Not very much.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's helpful to go back and refer to, not throwing it away.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_00: Chap, if it existed, probably would have helped a little bit, but it would not have sat in that room with me.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I'll never forget sitting there with Bill Roth.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now, Bill Roth was the pastoral care pastor when you're at a church of that size, you get a few different pastors, and and Bill Roth was the one who would go to the hospitals.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_00: Everybody warned me about Bill Roth.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because Bill Roth, he has, you know, he has some interesting beliefs, right?
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you know those people, and you're like, you're like, just be careful.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: He's he's a great guy, but just be careful.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I was like, okay, I'll I don't know how it's gonna take walking with him, driving with him to the to the hospital.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_00: We get there, and I sit down and I just observe, and I'm blown away.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's the way it's such an art with the way in which he talked, listened, heard.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: He did not just start quoting random scriptures or random things that pithy things that make you feel better.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_00: He just had this like togetherness in that space.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: We call it like incarnate ministry because that's how Jesus came to talk to us.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_00: I learned so much, not knowledge, wisdom, in that moment where I learned like to listen before I talk.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I learned to hear their story.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: How do you sit with a family who's about to lose a young child to something they can't control?
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I love about Wesley is that we do this as a community and as a family.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know how many of you have tried, all of us at some point.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: College is really hard to do by yourself.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: Darn near impossible.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: And as soon as you try it, you get about three months in and you're like, I can't do this.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: So college has to be done together.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: That's why this place exists.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, we might as well pack up shop and go home.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_00: College has to be done together.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: We have a lot of different ways that we try to do that around here.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: We have life groups that uh that we're building, we have uh different organizations and different groups that we are like like mission trips and retreats and awesome fun stuff, you know?
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: And we have all those things and it's great.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: But one of the best things you can do is walk in the dust of somebody else behind you.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Walk in the dust of somebody who's done this before.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so we have a program that we call dusting.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: And uh we're gonna we're gonna release it this morning, don't put it up there yet, but we're gonna talk about it this morning.
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a thing that you can sign up to either be a duster or a dustee.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you're a younger one, choose dustee.
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're a duster, even, as a way to say, hey, I I want to help mentor somebody, somebody who might be younger than me in Wesley.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm telling you that I've seen beautiful relationships.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: The pictures will be up there in a second.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_00: Don't go through yet.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, the beautiful pictures will be up there uh of dusting relationships that have been built out of this.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_00: This is uh boy, boy, girl, girl, by the way.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a dating service, okay?
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_00: So uh but dusting is this amazing thing where we get an opportunity just to meet with somebody on a weekly, monthly basis.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: We get to spend time with them, we get to hear about their life, and hopefully they teach us how we should behave.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: Can I tell you a little bit about somebody who dusted me?
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of you talked to about I tell you a lot about this, but it's my youth pastor.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: His name is Gary Carter.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_00: This picture is up here.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: This is me on the day of my baptism at 12 years old.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: Bowl cut Bryant.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_00: Gary was an amazing person.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: He passed away a few years ago, very unexpectedly.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: An amazing person who showed me how to be a better follower of Jesus.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: One instance comes to mind in particular.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: We were rock climbing, as you do in youth group, because in youth group you got to make something so attractive that people will want to go, right?
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: And so we were rock climbing, and Gary loved adventure.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: He was also a skydive instructor and a pilot.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: He at the end of his life, he was teaching for Embry Riddle.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, amazing human being.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_00: And also he, oh my gosh, I forgot about this.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: He proposed to his wife on CNN skydiving.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_00: How cool is that, right?
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_00: That that's this is who Gary was.
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_00: But I remember we were rock climbing.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, when you're rock climbing, and I don't, I'm not really much of a rock climber, but I was there that day, you know, give me credit.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: And uh what you have to have is somebody at the at the ground belaying you, right, as you're walking up so that they can hold you so that you don't fall to your death, right?
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_00: And so Gary at the end of the day was going up, and one of our more experienced students he was belaying them.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: And so he's belaying Gary as Gary's going up and coming down, and something happened.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know exactly what, but Michael, my friend, who was belaying him, let go of the rope.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And Gary started to fall very quickly.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: And Gary said some things you might say when you're falling very quickly, even as a youth pastor.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_00: And he screamed, Michael, catch me, catch me.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_00: And Michael's like, you know, we're trying to figure it out, trying to fix it.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_00: Fortunately, he survived.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_00: It's fine.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: But it was rough.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_00: You don't ever like to be yelled at by the pastor, right?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: Anybody that was there Saturday night.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: You don't ever they remember.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: You don't ever like to be yelled at by the pastor.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: I remember getting back in the church van that day.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_00: It actually happened to be the same day that the uh shuttle was coming back in and uh what do you call that?
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_00: Disintegrated.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um so he told us about that.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: And um, so we're all kind of in shock there.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then he said, I need to say something to the whole group.
• 24:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, When Michael let go of that rope, I messed up.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_00: I said some things I shouldn't have said, and I'm really sorry about it.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_00: Now, if you've ever been a leader in that sort of situation, that is really, really hard to do.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_00: Ego tends to get in the way.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: But the best leaders apologize.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_00: The best leaders see themselves as needing to emulate the grace and mercy and humble work of Jesus Christ.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_00: And he did that that day.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: I later asked him, I was like, why'd you do that?
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, Man, I was just trying to follow Jesus.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: Paul talks in 1 Corinthians about how we're not just aiming to get on the dust of anybody behind us.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're actually aiming to get on the dust of Jesus behind us.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: That's the calling for you who might consider dusting and dust, dusting, dustering, and dustying.
• 25:08
  SPEAKER_00: That's the call.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: The call might be God's place in my heart that I want to live so that this person who might be a first-year student, they might follow me in a better light and follow in the light of Jesus.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: And for you who's uh dusty, like you wanna you want to follow this person not because you're obsessed with them, not because they're on stage, not because you see them doing something else.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: For none of that, you're you want to follow them because you want to be more like them in the ways in which they are like Jesus.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because the whole goal is not to just get closer and make little mini-me's.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: The close, the whole goal is to find Jesus through each other.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: That Jesus might teach us who to be and how to be.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna put this graphic on the screen.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: You'll see a couple of the people who have become uh dusting partners.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um and then I encourage you to just take out your phone real quick and then scan that.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: It'll also be on the Instagram and Linktree and that sort of thing.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: It'd be really good for you just to sign up as a way to share with one another in this walk of ministry.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: Don't worry, we're gonna remind you six more times.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's a great way to follow in the light of Christ together.