Ordinary Christianity (part 5)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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Father in heaven, we come before you this morning just thankful for all that you are and all that you do and all that you have done for us.

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Father, we are amazed at your consistent care for us, for your church, and in particular for us as individuals, even as you provide for every need and our main need, that is for forgiveness of sins in the person and work of your

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Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. Father, as we look to your word this morning, I pray that you would encourage us to be faithful to that which you have called us,

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Lord, to be mindful of the truth that we are but slaves.

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We are to be obedient to the Lord Jesus Christ, but we are to do so with joy, knowing what you have done for us, all that you have promised us.

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Father, let us keep the cross in our vision, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

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We've been talking about the ordinary Christian life. Last week when we left off, we were talking about maturity, immaturity, and we're going to finish up talking about that.

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I do think there's some good stuff here, and I just thought we could finish talking about that with regard to maturity.

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I want to ask a couple questions to start with. And this is one that really grates on me.

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I don't know, maybe it's because of personal experience, but what is the problem with sort of letting our children, children, our young people, our teens, be raised with less of an influence from the local church and less of an influence from the parents and more from their peers at high school?

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Can you think of a problem with that? But it isn't, well, in effect, isn't that a lot of what we see, young people raising young people?

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Who's the biggest influence on teenagers today? What's that?

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The Kardashians. I mean, I think they are a big influence, right? Television. But I think the number one influence in their life is each other through social media.

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I mean, they're walking around like this all the time. There's a massive increase in the number of videos that you can go to online and watch people, you know, walking into ponds and pools and chasms.

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I mean, that'd be great, right? Set up some 200 -foot pits and you just set up a camera to watch people, you know.

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And I think some of those are staged. But I mean, the truth is people are tied to those things. They can't imagine life without it.

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And what are some of the problems with that? Well, some of the problems, let's put it this way. If you have a teenager in your home, who would you rather have them come to with significant issues, significant questions, want to know what's right or wrong to do in a given situation?

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Dear Facebook, you know, I know. I need some moral guidance. Twitter, Twitterverse, help me, throw me a line, you know, some other social media form.

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I don't know. It's like there's a new social platform every couple of weeks. So I can't even keep track of all of them, which is probably good.

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You know, Mike says, follow the Tuesday guy on Twitter. And I'm like, why? I'm only on there once a week. What is the, what's the outcome of something like that?

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What happens to young people when they are left to their peers? They're left to the internet and other things like that.

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What did you put in your coffee this morning? Anything at all? Need more sugar.

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What do you think the outcome is? Worldly wisdom. I think that's right.

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Okay, everything becomes relative, moral relativism. Here's the one thing you do know.

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If the goal of parenting, and I think this is, right, is to imprint as much good on them as you possibly can, given your own fallibility, and to try to steer them away from the mistakes that you made when you were younger.

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If that's the goal of parenting, and I think in many ways it is, right? You want them to be saved, but you also, along the way, you want to teach them the things that you've learned.

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That's what I used to tell my kids, and that's what I tell young people. Why do you have parents? And don't give me the biological reason why you have parents.

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Why do you have parents? And I'll look back at them and I'll say, because, in a nicer way, because you're stupid.

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You'll do stupid things. You need somebody who's been there and survived to tell you what to do.

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And instead, you're going to go to somebody else who's stupid and say, hey, help me. That's a bad idea.

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And I use stupid in the advised way. They're just immature.

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Immature, it's a nicer way of saying stupid. Immaturity doesn't help immature people.

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You don't want immature people coming alongside immature people and telling them what to do. But that's exactly what we've done in many ways.

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When you go to a lot of churches, what do they do right away? I watched this one commercial for this church here recently.

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What's the number one thing they do right away? They isolate the youth. They take them away.

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They say, your youth are really going to love our program. They're going to love the music. And we take them away and we don't waste their time with the boring messages that they're going to hear on the regular service.

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We treat them like they have to be entertained because that's what they're used to. I had this thought while I was reading over some of these things last night and this morning, and I just thought, when was the last time?

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And I did it for a while last night. And when was the last time your house was absolutely quiet? And if you have younger people in your home, the odds are, if it's quiet, why is that?

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Because they're sleeping or they're in trouble or they're gone or they've got their ears covered and they can't hear anything anyway.

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So I think it's just important to reestablish the whole family thing.

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And that's one of the things that we will talk about this morning as we get to that. But first, we have to finish this about churches.

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Let me kind of shift gears and I'll just put it this way. Can you imagine, what are some of the names of churches you hear?

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New churches. Next level. What are some other names?

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What's that? Victory. Okay, but that's almost like from the 60s, right?

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I mean, that doesn't, you know, like from the Jesus movement, Cory. The journey.

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I was joking one day with Mike and I said, you know what? I think every week they just exegete some old journey song.

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Week number one, don't stop believing. You know, number two, lights, you know, number three.

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And they just keep going. You say you want a revolution.

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What does that mean? Revolution, good. Liberty. The woo.

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I don't even understand that one. You know, I'm just like, I thought that was a yogurt place, right?

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I don't know. Yeah. Oh, a worship center. Okay. All right.

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Peter Wagner. Nice. Gonna cast out some demons. Yes. Connect.

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Now, does connect, I sort of, I think that's a great example. Because what does that sound like?

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Social media. So what's the message there? I mean, just from the name, the message is, it's horizontal.

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It's all about the people. And that's kind of the ordinary church experience.

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How many of you been to like a really kind of modern church service in the last? And I'm sorry,

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I mean, other than our hip and modern services here at Bethlehem Bible Church.

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How many of you have been to, you know, okay, a few hands. Because I have too.

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And I was struck and I, you know, your experiences may vary. But I was struck by the fact that it just basically felt like watching

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TV. And why would I say that? Anybody who, go ahead.

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What do you mean by they had commercials halfway through? What do you mean? So wait a minute, like the pastor would sit down or something and then they really.

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Oh, so it was only 15 minutes in and then they had halftime. Okay. Yeah, I mean,

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I thought, you know, when I, and I've talked about this before, I thought it was interesting because, you know, the,

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I don't know what to call him. He was a pastor. He was the youth pastor was preaching that Sunday.

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And he would sit down after like eight or 10 minutes and they would show a movie clip. Which, you know, anything else?

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Anybody else have any other experiences? Commercials. I like that. You know, I thought you were saying like Nestle's Crunch Bar.

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Product placement, you know? Yeah, Haley. They broke beer bottles and were making mosaics.

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That's unique. I'm not really sure what the spiritual purpose of that is.

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Okay. We're done with this demon beer. Other experiences?

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Why do they do that? Why are things, you know, why do they change things like that?

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Because the Bible's not enough. Let's look at,

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I just wrote in my notes. I'm like, worship, you know, they'll talk about their worship music and how great it is.

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What does that mean? Again, smoke machines, guitars, you know, they've got the best rappers in town.

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Somebody have a hand up? Okay. What's that? Now, now just imagine that, you know, the sermons on hell and all of a sudden, you know, there's smoke coming off them.

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You want to escape the fire of hell, you know? Yeah. The final countdown, right?

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Oh, sorry. I mean, they do everything except for, you know, preach the

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Bible. Let's look at Acts 2 .42. And would somebody read that please?

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Acts 2 .42. Going once. Yes, go ahead. Now, there's just, this is kind of a description of what, you know, an average service might look like.

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Ordinary church service, apostles teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread, meaning either a meal or communion, and praying.

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I think that's pretty, you know, what we wouldn't see. Well, you know, this is 2 ,000 years ago. Of course, they didn't have, you know, video breaks.

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Of course, they weren't doing commercials. I don't know why that would be, of course. But why, what are some of the reasons they give for the things that they do now in church?

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Why would they have a commercial? Why would they have movie clips?

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Why would they have smoke flames? Relevant to our culture.

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Other thoughts? Yeah, Lucille? They want to entertain.

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Okay, excellent. Other thoughts? People have shorter attention spans.

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Do we hear that fairly often? We hear that a lot, right? I mean, I remember the first time

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I was at Paddleback, Saddleback. Sorry, I always say they're paddling back from the gospel.

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And, you know, it was like 10 minutes and then music. 10 minutes and then music. 10 minutes and then music.

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And the idea was to set it up like a television show, so that you didn't have a chance to get bored or anything like that.

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And I'm like, well, what about the chance to just engage and be convicted by the Holy Spirit? But the idea is you don't have that kind of attention span.

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But, you know, like Pastor Mike says, you know, the same child that you say, well, can't pay attention, put them in front of Xbox and see how long they can pay attention to that.

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You ever see one of those stories, you know, some kid in Korea played video games for, and I don't know why it's always

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South Korea, but some kid plays video games for the three or four days without even going to the bathroom and dies.

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And you just go, somebody need to grab that kid and say, hey, maybe you should go get something to eat.

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Maybe you should go get some sleep. Maybe you should go to the restroom. I don't know. Crazy, crazy.

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Okay, let's skip down to here. And this is kind of where I was heading here this morning.

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How would our youth, young people, be treated differently if they were thought of as lambs to be fed, guarded and nurtured rather than markets to be exploited or people who had to be entertained?

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How would we treat them in the church if we really thought, you know, here's my main question.

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If you go to one of these church services where they're really worried about entertainment, everything else, here's the question. What about their souls?

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Someday, Hebrews 13, 17 says, the leaders of the church are going to have to give an account for the souls of the people they entertained.

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I don't want to be there on that day. Yeah, Scott. Bring in the numbers.

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You know, in a business sense, we could call that what? Market share. You know, we want to seize market share by having the best show in town.

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Yeah, I think that's a great... Numbers, people, money. Yep. Yep, I think that's great.

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And I mean, the care, the thought always needs to be about souls.

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You know, I mean, why preach the gospel so often? Because believers need to hear it.

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And unbelievers need to hear it. Then he asks, how can we cultivate a culture in our homes and churches in which

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God's children of all ages not only know what they believe, but why they believe it?

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How can we cultivate a culture in our homes and churches in which God's children of all ages know not only what they believe, but why they believe it?

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How do we do that? Making sure that they're properly entertained, that they don't get bored.

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That they're fixated on what's going on. That they can repeat all the key, I don't know, commercials that they saw.

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The video clips that they saw. That they can remember the funny things the pastor said.

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How do we do that? How do we make sure that people not only know what they believe, but why they believe it?

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How do we do that? There's a one word answer. Lean.

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Lean. How about teaching? If you teach people,

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I mean, it's like the old fishing example, right? You give a man a fish and he's fed for a day.

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If you give him, or if you teach him how to fish, then he can feed himself. And so if you teach people what the truth is, where it is, why they should believe it, then they can defend it themselves.

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I mean, Lord willing, the idea would be that someday when Mike gets hauled off to jail, and Steve gets hauled off to jail, and Harry gets hauled off to jail, and Scott gets hauled off to jail, and Pradeep gets hauled off to jail, that then somebody else will stand up and declare the truth.

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And one by one, you know, as we all get taken to jail, and hopefully eventually Mike will make bail. But now

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Horton in his book, he says that Christianity is inherently intergenerational. What does he mean by inherently generational?

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What does that mean? Why is Christianity inherently generational? That's exactly right.

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It has to get passed from one generation to another. It's passing the baton. It's a version of 2

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Timothy 2 .2, right? These things that you've heard, you need to pass them to faithful men. We need to inculcate our children with truth.

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And our children then will inculcate that truth to grandchildren. But each generation has to do that.

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And that's one of the problems with today's churches. If you go to a church that's into entertaining, then maybe some of the young people will learn the truth on their own, away from church.

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Maybe they won't. What happens to the next generation after that? It comes down to this, something else that Mike says a lot.

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You know, if you bring people in with the Bible, and you tell them this is all you're going to get, you know, you either like it or you don't.

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Or you bring them in with entertainment, in which case, what does the next generation want?

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More entertainment, better special effects. I mean, imagine this. If you went into a, you know, if the new

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Star Wars movie comes out here in a week or so, and if you went in there and you saw like cheesy

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Star Trek 1960 special effects, you know, like little carpet covered, you know, men moving around, and that was supposed to be a monster or something like that.

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Or the famous one, I don't know how many people have even watched Star Trek, and you're probably more sanctified than me.

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But where Captain Kirk is fighting this guy in this Gorn suit, and they're like, it's a horrific fight.

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The worst fight ever recorded on film. And if something like that was in the, yeah, if something like that was in the new

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Star Wars movie, people would be going, I want my money back, right? Because we expect bigger, better, you know, more immersive, more believable.

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And if that's how you pack people into a church, then you have to keep giving them that, and it has to get better all the time.

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You can't just do the same thing and expect people to come back. It's got to get better. But if we're passing on truth and people are coming to hear the truth, then generation after generation, you can survive with that.

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It's good enough. The Bible is sufficient. Let's look at 1

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Corinthians chapter 3. And if somebody would read the first nine verses, please.

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1 Corinthians chapter 3, 1 to 9. Yeah, go ahead,

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Luke. Okay, now we talk about Joel Osteen from time to time.

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Anybody know what his backstory is? How he came to be who he is today? His father, okay?

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His father was a TV teacher and fairly popular at that.

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Nothing like Joel is. And then his father died. And Joel stepped forward, started teaching, and now they went from being a pretty good -sized church to being this monster church.

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I mean, they bought the Astrodome in Houston. I mean, they've got this huge facility and, you know, he's this mega guy.

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And when we were reading that, when Luke was reading that, I couldn't help but think, this is like,

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I follow Joel Osteen. You know, I'm sorry. It's people follow people.

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They're into listening to, you know, different individuals or whatever.

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And you just have to wonder, what's the next generation going to do? Who's going to follow that? And the answer is probably something worse.

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But the author here asks about, you know, this really is about immaturity, this passage about immaturity, about a certain self -centeredness, if you will.

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What about self -centered spirituality? What about this idea that, you know, it's just about me?

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I don't need to worry about anybody else. Even those phrases there,

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I follow Paul, I follow Opolis, I follow

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Joel Osteen. I don't, but I don't even follow him on Twitter.

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The individuals are relevant, right? But what about even the idea of,

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I mean, we talk about people who say, you know what, I can worship God just as well in the forest or on the beach or, you know, in the mountains as I can at church.

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Is that really what it's about? Sometimes I think that is what people think Christianity is.

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It's kind of Lone Ranger, rugged American individualistic worship.

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But what about that idea that, you know, I could just follow an individual? I mean, we know that's wrong.

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How about the idea of, I can't even think.

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Well, what is a mark of maturity? Let's put it that way. Let's reverse it. What's a mark of maturity in a

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Christian? In terms of, okay, let's make it easy.

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Let's say you're in a place, a town, you've just moved there and you find out that the churches there aren't so great.

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And so you go to the best one you can find and you go there on Sunday after Sunday. And what do you do? Do you just kind of walk in there, walk out week after week?

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Or do you find a way to serve, to improve the church?

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Do you look at the weaknesses and say, you know what? I can help in this way. And that would be the right thing to do.

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Let's look again at 1 Corinthians 15, just over a few chapters.

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Maybe this will help a little bit more. Paul writes, what do I gain in verse 32?

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1 Corinthians 15, verse 32. What do I gain if, humanly speaking,

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I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

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What's he saying there? If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.

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What's his point? Okay. And if this life is all there is, then

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YOLO. You only live once. So, carpe diem, seize the day.

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Make the most of it you can. Have the most pleasure that you can. I mean, there's a, you know, it's hedonism.

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It's also narcissistic, right? Because it's all about me. And what if everybody just kind of adopted that sort of attitude?

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See, I'd say we'd be living in the United States of America. What's the problem with that idea, that philosophy?

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Okay. There's no teaching involved, because it's all about me, and it's all about what I can have right now, right?

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No concern for the next generation. And may

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I say, and I'm not pointing the finger at anybody, may I say that I think that's one of the main problems we have in the

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United States of America right now. There isn't that much concern for the next generation, you know, as a country.

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I think that is a national problem. I have a friend who's a lunatic, but he teaches in public school.

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And I remember I was talking to him a couple years ago, and he had his phone threat or stolen a couple times.

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He had his life threatened by a sixth grader. And he called the parent, and the parent said what?

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Thank you for bringing that to my attention. I'll talk to Johnny and make sure he receives the appropriate discipline. What do you suppose the parent said?

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Very close. What do you want me to do? What did you do to provoke him? It wasn't that bad.

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Well, I don't know. I'll tell you exactly what the parent said. The parent said, why are you calling me? Why are you calling me?

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I'm like, I heard that, and I was like, you have to be kidding me. Why are you calling me?

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It's not my problem. Sixth grade. They're cute, and they're cuddly.

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I mean, it's like people give puppies for Christmas, and then they take them back six months later. Didn't know it was going to be this much work.

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This kid, I mean, cute, nice, but now I'm done with him. Let's look at Ephesians 4.

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And verses 11 to 16. We'll see what the goal of the church is. What the goal of the church is.

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Verses 11 to 16. Who would read that in chapter 4 of Ephesians? Go ahead,

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Mark. Okay, now, if the goal of the church is maturity, and we're to get to where we're no longer children tossed by every wind of doctrine, how do we do that?

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And the passage tells us. The passage tells us that Christ has given us what?

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To accomplish this. What did he give us?

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All those things so that they would teach us, so that we would grow, so that we would mature.

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And so, if the approach a church takes is kind of a marketing thing, you know, they're more concerned about numbers, they're more concerned about entertaining people, then that maturing, that teaching, that really discipleship,

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I guess, is a good way to phrase it. None of those things are happening. Michael Horton writes this.

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He says, remember that the past and present are basically the same in at least one important respect.

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Now, this is incredible and true. 2 ,000 years ago, this is no less true and no more true than it is today.

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Both occupy the period identified in scripture as this present age.

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And he says that present age is passing away. It is the powers of the age to come that are breaking in on us now as they did on our forebears.

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If this is true, then neither the past nor the present is normative. In other words, neither one is the ideal.

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It is the canon of scripture that renders both relative and open to correction. Instead of allowing youthful passion for the new and revolutionary to dominate our families and our churches, let's begin to recover our role as adults who discover and then hand over hidden treasures that we've been stumbling over each day in our own flight from the ordinary.

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So here's what he's saying. We receive truths from men in the past.

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We discover new truths, not new truths, but things for the first time for us.

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We hand all these things on to our children. We want the church to grow in maturity. We want them to grow up into that mature man.

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We may not see it in our lifetime, but the goal is beyond us. That's why it's intergenerational.

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Our focus shouldn't be so much on us right now. It should be future generations. Now, Horton moves on to what he calls the next big thing, how church or culture rebranded

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Jesus every couple of decades. And I think this idea of he starts talking about cultural rebellion.

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If you think about cultural rebellion from the 60s, I mean, to me, that was a very rebellious phase because I was a child and I saw it.

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What do you think of when you think of the 1960s? I mean, well, let's back up for a second.

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When you think about the 1950s, what do you think about? What's that?

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Elementary school. Okay. But I mean, what's the image of the 1950s?

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American dream, baby boomers, do well.

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Yes, Charlie. Conservative, repressed. Okay. Ozzie and Harriet.

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I mean, for me, my image of the 50s is, you know, happy days. The 1970s version of the 1950s.

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1950s kind of, you know, it's mom, dad, house, job. Kids at home.

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Everybody's happy, right? Cold War. But there's just a genuine kind of lack of,

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I would say it seems like a rebellion -less decade. And then we go to the 60s and the pendulum swings back, right?

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I think you could say that if I was to think of a term to talk about the 1960s, well, how would you describe the 1960s?

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Tumultuous. I think that's a good one. Women's lib.

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I mean, it was a decade of rebellion, of breaking norms, of breaking away from those things.

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You know, if the 1950s were normal, then the 1960s were the rebellion.

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You know, it was women's lib, it was drugs, it was vast changes in music.

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A lot of things changed in our culture during that time. Now, I have to say that compared to the 1960s, though,

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I was trying to think of the most outrageous thing that could happen. I mean, does it shock you when you see anything these days?

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If you see some guy with, you know, ceramic plates coming out of his face, you know, does that shock you or you just go,

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I mean, I do, I just kind of go, nothing surprises me. Because people just keep coming up with new things, and so I don't really know if you could surprise me.

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I think, in fact, I would say rebellion has gone so far, if, you know, if the most rebellious thing you could do is conform, right?

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I mean, if you're just a nice kid and you, you know, you don't have a smartphone and you're not constantly on it and you engage people and you talk to people and everything, they're going to go, there's something different about that kid.

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Not really sure. Yeah, he's weird. Yeah. But on the other hand,

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I wouldn't be surprised if we had a president in the very near future, you know, who had a pierced face and, you know, just kind of like looked bizarre.

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And we just go, well, it's just our culture. That's just what, you know, it's, I mean, like, you know, some kind of really,

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I don't know, I don't know what people are going to do next. I sometimes hate to even think of some of those things just look painful, you know, that people do.

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Talks about C .S. Lewis's book, The Screwtape Letters and The Demon's Note that the same old thing is a valuable tool.

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People getting bored of the same old thing is a valuable tool. Why? Because when people look for change, they rebel against the old and they want to bring in something new.

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And that's exactly what's happened in a lot of our churches. The old is dead.

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We need something new. He talks about perpetual novelty.

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Perpetual novelty. Protestantism is being shaped by the cult of perpetual novelty.

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What does the author mean? Or what does it, what does perpetual novelty mean? It means, well, it's easy.

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We always need something new, some change, some tweak. In fact,

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Horton says that the next big thing is a tradition. In other words, it's normal.

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It's become normal to just kind of wait on the next big thing. That's what we do. We're a culture of anticipation.

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I mean, right now, the next big thing that's going on, I mean, there are people who are already waiting in line to see

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Star Wars. Even though they have their tickets, they're still waiting in line. It won't be out for, you know,

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I don't know, four or five days. Well, let's talk about, you know, in religious terms, what's the next big thing?

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The next big thing would be a revival. You know, you might hear

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Mike talk about, we want revival in New England. We would love to see churches coming back to life.

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We'd love to hear the gospel proclaimed all over the place. Well, this is the home of a spiritual awakening or two.

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New England is. But what typically, when we see a revival, what are we thinking about?

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Like the Great Awakening. We think about Jonathan Edwards and those people. How did that happen? How did this next big thing, the

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Great Awakening, how did that happen? Supernaturally and through the preaching of the word, which is exactly right.

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So here's how you could frame it. Well, I almost tripped on my shoes there. It's a supernatural work by ordinary means.

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It's preaching of the word and God just blesses it in a supernatural way. And people come to faith.

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So Horton says that there are two ways of understanding revival. He says, the first way is to see it as a surprising work of God, God's extraordinary blessing on his ordinary means of grace, meaning the preaching.

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The second way to see revival is as something within our control, something that can be started and managed with predictable results.

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Now, what do you suppose is the difference between those two? If I read them again, well,

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I will read them again. A surprising work of God, God's extraordinary blessing on ordinary preaching.

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The second way, something within our control, something that can be stated, or I guess started should be the word, started and managed with predictable results.

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Started and managed with predictable results. How would you approach one versus the other?

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Yes, Joni. Okay, good. The first one is you just go about doing your ordinary work, right?

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The preaching and teaching of the Bible, and you trust the Lord with the results, and sometimes you get amazed. The second one is

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God is important, yes, but what we're doing is a little bit more important.

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And certainly if the Lord wants to add to it, that'd be fine. But which one is more in keeping with the

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Bible? And I would say it is, you know, the first one. I mean, can you imagine on the day of Pentecost, Peter saying, you know, before the big sermon, gathering everybody together and go, okay, guys, here's what

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I'm going to do. And you guys be ready because people are going to come forward when I give that altar call, and you guys need to be ready to give them, you know, the four spiritual laws or whatever.

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That's not what happened at all. But in fact, what do we see now?

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People calling for revival, people trying to start it themselves. And it really is pretty remarkable.

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Why? Because they want to see the next big thing, but they want to do it their own way because, well,

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I think the main reason they want to do it is because it would be hard work to do it the other way. They want it easy. Now, let's talk about tradition.

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Let's talk about how God builds us, how he matures us.

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Is there anything wrong with tradition per se?

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Is there anything wrong with tradition within a church? I mean, we do certain things in certain ways.

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Well, why is that? We, you know, we open with the announcements, and then we do a song, and then we do another song, and then we have scripture.

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Is there any reason to have an order of service like we do? Any biblical reason to have an order of service like we do?

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Not really. I mean, you could have the sermon first. In fact, I've suggested that, have the sermon first.

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Why would I want to have the sermon first? No, because I'm mean is the reason

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I want to have the sermon first, because that way the people who show up 20 minutes late all the time would miss out the sermon. See, you're mean too.

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What was that? But I mean, that's just an example.

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That's a small example of a tradition. You know, why do I wear a tie when I preach? Because it's a tradition.

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It's just kind of what's expected. Is there any biblical command? I dare say, you know, the church back then did not wear ties.

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You won't see a single painting of Peter with a tie on. But I mean, this idea of, you know, revival kind of goes across or goes against all the traditions and all the things that we're used to.

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Okay, now this is a completely, it's not a completely different topic, but it's going to sound like a completely different topic. It has to do with ordinary church.

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And I thought about this question. I don't remember why it came to me, but I just wrote it down. I want to ask it anyway. When someone asks you when you say that you were at church this morning, for whatever reason, and you get home and they say, well, you know, how was church?

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I have this happen. Somebody from the other coast calls me and says, how was church today? How was your meeting this morning?

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What do you say? How do you answer that? Do you say, oh, it was ordinary?

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Oh, it was just regular. Oh, it was, it was fine.

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You ever think about that though? What is it really? Because I need to close here. But what is that? When somebody says, how was church today?

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You're walking around, your neighbor says, what did you do this morning? Oh, I went to church. Oh, how was church? What is that?

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It's a window of opportunity, right? You probably are not going to get a better chance to preach the gospel to somebody than that.

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You can say, it was great. I had the opportunity to go hear that I'm a sinner and that God can forgive all my sins through the finished work of his son, the

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Lord Jesus Christ. People are just like, what? Because I thought you just went to go to church, you know, to hear some message, sing a few songs, you know, eat communion or whatever and go home.

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I mean, you have a lot of people that just aren't used to that kind of idea. Why do you go to church?

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What is church all about? What was church like for you this morning? It was great. It was life -changing.

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There's an answer that you could give, yeah. Yeah, what a great point, right? You go to church and they say, how was it?

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You go, well, you know, I really had my eyes open to what a bad person I am this morning. You're not a bad person.

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There are all kinds of things that you could say, but you have to be sort of ready for that. But what do you get out of church?

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How do you think about it? If you go home and on the way home, all you can think about is what you need to do during the week, the bills you need to pay, the things that have to get done around the house, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

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When your neighbor says, how are things going or whatever? What's your response? Well, just same old, same old.

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How was church this morning? Same old, same old. If you go home and you're talking about the sermon and you get home and you take that walk around the neighborhood, isn't it nice to be able to walk around the neighborhood, by the way, right now, as opposed to trudging around?

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I took the dog for a walk yesterday. I was like, this is crazy. What's the difference?

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The difference is it's in your attitude and your approach and your readiness to hear. Your neighbor tee that thing up for you so you can give them the gospel.

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You need to be ready to do that. We need to close.

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But I mean, some things, let me just close with this idea. If you think about Hebrews 4 .12,

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and this is appropriate because we're about to hear the word preached here in a few minutes, what does it do?

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Hebrews 4 .12 says it's living and active and sharper than a two -edged sword. What does that mean?

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It means it shows us our sin. You know, how was church today? Great. I got a little more insight into how sinful

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I am. How was church today? Well, it also corrects error.

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So you know what? I was convicted of some things I need to change in my life. How was church today?

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Well, it builds up and matures us. You know, there are some wrong ideas

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I've had, and I've had to change those. We need to be thinking about how we can be impacted week by week and then how that impact can be handed on to others.

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Well, we need a closing prayer. Father, thank you for your word.

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Thank you for the gifts that you've given the church. Thank you for just the truth that transforms us, that shapes our mind and our thinking.

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Would you make us people who are not only ready and able to give an answer for the hope that is within us, but also to be purposeful about handing these truths on to our children, equipping them because they're going to have children one day,

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Lord willing. Father, we want to equip them that they might be able to teach their children the truth.

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And so pass the baton from generation to generation. Father, just encourage us in this way.

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Convict us in this way. Give us a greater desire to obey you in this way, we pray in Jesus name.