[SPEAKER_00]: You are listening to audio from Citizens Church located in Plano, Texas.
[SPEAKER_00]: For more information about this ministry or to give to this ministry, please visit citizenschurch.com.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're new here and visiting for the first time, welcome.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's good to have you with us today to receive God's Word and to respond in worship.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you call us as a church home, welcome back.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's good to see you all too.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you've got a Bible going to turn to Matthew chapter twelve, starting in verse twenty four, if you're using one of our Pew Bibles, that's going to page eight hundred forty eight.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are now in week four.
[SPEAKER_00]: of our new series called Becoming Like Jesus, where we are examining the command that was read to love the Lord of God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
[SPEAKER_00]: For those of you who don't know me, my name is Mike M, and I'm one of the ministers on staff here.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for the last three years, it's been my pleasure, and my privilege to serve our home groups.
[SPEAKER_00]: But very recently, I changed departments and roles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Moving forward, I will be serving our church as the theological training minister to develop and launch new classes for theological equipment, as well as overseeing our men's Bible classes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I will be, I made this joke at the nine.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll be serving alongside my partner in crime, but this is a church crimes not, that's not the right word, partner in virtue, Terran Mays, and it's gonna be awesome working with her, I love her with her.
[SPEAKER_00]: And our mission together
[SPEAKER_00]: will be to help you cultivate a deepening knowledge of God and His Word that leads to a deepening love of God and His Word.
[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, to help you think like Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's very appropriate that the topic of the message that I've been asked to preach today is exactly that, think like Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to help us do that, I'm going to give you just a quick word picture that I want you to hold onto because we're going to return to it again and again.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I was in youth ministry a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was leading a youth camp in the summer and at the end of that, we planned to build a huge bonfire.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if any of you have done anything like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Usually the wood was just cheap like pine or some palettes or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: But this year, one of the church members had chopped down a hardwood tree on his property.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't remember if it was walnut or cherry or hickory or, you know, it was one of those fragrant hardwoods.
[SPEAKER_00]: And not only that, he had chopped it into pieces and dried them properly so that they would catch quickly and burn beautifully with no smoke.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so like we were super, super hyped for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's exactly what happened.
[SPEAKER_00]: When we started the bonfire, the fire, when the fire was lit, it caught quickly and the smells were incredible.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you've ever been around a large bonfire, I want you to hold onto that image.
[SPEAKER_00]: And with that, let's dive in.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you first start off by saying, my goal this morning cannot be to try to tackle everything there's to say about thinking or the mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had like four or five different directions that I wanted to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, I had to pick one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Which is really hard to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, it's very likely that as I'm answering questions,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very likely that even my answers might provoke more questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: I expect that, you should too.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if something I say confuses you or distresses you, please come chat with me afterwards.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the deepest discussions are best had over coffee or a meal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, I also want to acknowledge that some of us might feel challenged or even called out as we go through this series.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I want to remind you and encourage you that our heart for you is one of invitation and not condemnation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our desire is to invite you deeper into deeper joy through deeper knowledge of Christ.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, so with that aside, I want to ask a couple of questions today and answer them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number one, what is the role of the mind in loving God?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do we love God with our mind?
[SPEAKER_00]: Number two, and how do Jesus model how we should use our minds to love God?
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, so number one, how do we use our minds to love God?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the role of the mind?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the deepest and the longest discussion.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'll just tell you the answer up front first.
[SPEAKER_00]: We use our minds to search God's word, to find beautiful truths for our hearts to burn as fuel for worship.
[SPEAKER_00]: to love God above all things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, we use our minds to search God's Word to find the beautifully true reasons for our hearts to burn as fuel for worship, to love God above all things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, you might have noticed I'm supposed to be talking about the mind today, but I snuck in the heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is because it is not possible to love God with your mind alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, the mind doesn't love anything by itself.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the heart that loves.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there are two things to think about as we go into this topic.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's two errors we can make.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one is that burning hearts cannot be fueled by empty heads.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called from RC Sproul.
[SPEAKER_00]: But conversely, full heads are dangerous with cold hearts.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that sounds kind of like a riddle or something, but I promise it should make sense in a minute.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when you define my terms here, the mind is the part of ourselves that determines truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mind deals with facts, and order, and logic.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the heart is the part of ourselves that determines importance.
[SPEAKER_00]: The heart is what treasures, savers, craves, wants, and desires.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mind is what understands and knows, but the heart is what prefers and prioritizes.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to love God, you need both your head and your heart, your mind and your heart to work together.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they work together like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mind brings the fuel and the heart is what burns it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thomas Goodwin and English pastor in the sixteen hundred's put it like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Indeed, thoughts and affections at his love.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thoughts and affections are the mutual causes of each other so that the thoughts or the bellows that kindle and inflame affections.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then if they are inflamed, they cause thoughts to boil therefore men newly converted to God having new and strong affections, can with more pleasure think of God than any.
[SPEAKER_00]: John Piper puts it like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mind is mainly the servant of the heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is, the mind serves to know the truth that fuels the fires of the heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: The apex of glorifying God is enjoying him with the heart, but this is empty emotionalism where that joy is not awakened and sustained by true views of God, for who he really is.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is mainly what the mind is for.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so in the image of the bonfire, again, the heart brings the fire of love and the mind supplies a fuel of truth and knowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: To understand how this works, again, we're going to look at these two extremes.
[SPEAKER_00]: on how that could break down.
[SPEAKER_00]: First, what's it like to try to know God without any love for God?
[SPEAKER_00]: That is, what does it like to have a full head, but an empty heart?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then next, we're gonna talk about the opposite.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does it like to try to love God without any knowledge of God?
[SPEAKER_00]: What does it like to have a full heart, but an empty head?
[SPEAKER_00]: So first, let's look at full head, empty heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, if you got your Bible, mark twelve, twenty-four, that's gonna be page eight, forty-eight, and the Pew Bibles.
[SPEAKER_00]: We read today, Mark's twelve thirty, the verse about loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that verse that famous verse is actually the tail end in the tail end of a longer conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I wanted you to give you the context for where that verse comes from.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you got your Bible's open, you can take a peek at Mark's twelve eighteen, which says, and sadgisees came to him who say that there is no resurrection, and they asked him a question saying,
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they go on to ask him a very, very long, complicated question.
[SPEAKER_00]: They basically say, you know, there's this woman, she married seven different men over her lifetime.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the question is, when they're all resurrected together, who will she be married to?
[SPEAKER_00]: Whose wife will she be?
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jesus' response to them is a little surprising.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look at verse twenty four.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus said to them, is this not the reason that you're wrong?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you know neither the Scriptures, nor the power of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't argue with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: He doesn't say, hmm, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's see if you're right.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's see if we're wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: He starts off with, no, no, no, you're definitely wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not the question.
[SPEAKER_00]: The question is, why are you so wrong?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why is it that you're so wrong?
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus, gentle, meek and mild comes out swinging.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he says there's two reasons why you are just so wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: And these two reasons would have been extremely embarrassing for these professional religionists.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said that you don't know the scriptures at all and you don't know the power of God at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: These people were paid to read the Bible and to know the Bible.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had their own scribes.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had their own secretaries.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Sadducees were the professional priestly class.
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew the scriptures.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, you don't know the power of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: These were the people that kept the culture and the history of Israel.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were the ones who told the stories.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what Jesus means by this is not that they didn't have information about God or know about the things of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's saying that they didn't, when they read the scriptures, they did not have access to the wisdom of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: When they read the scriptures, they had never experienced the transforming power of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: All of their study had not changed them at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jamen has warned us time and again that we don't want to be a church that loves to learn but hates to change.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so Jesus continues in verse twenty five.
[SPEAKER_00]: For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given a marriage, but are like angels in heaven.
[SPEAKER_00]: For as the for and as for the dead being raised, had you not read
[SPEAKER_00]: In the book of Moses, in the passage about the Bush, how God spoke to him, saying, I'm the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not the God of the dead, but it's a living.
[SPEAKER_00]: You are quite wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you ever heard of the compliment sandwich?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you're supposed to do this thing like when you give someone bad news, you start with something nice, then you give the bad news, and then you end with something nice.
[SPEAKER_00]: You ever heard that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus does not do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: He starts with, you're wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are you so wrong?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he explains, here's all the reasons that you're wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he ends with, and you are quite wrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what is happening here?
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to be really clear, because, you know, with our modern sensibilities, we can read this the wrong way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus is not being mean.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not being snarky.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a sick burn, okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: He's being protective.
[SPEAKER_00]: Mark reminds us at the very start of the story that Jesus Jewish leaders don't even believe in the resurrection in the first place.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not coming to Jesus with humility to gain wisdom.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not coming to learn from the rabbi.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're coming to basically ask him a riddle.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is essentially a first century meme.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is like when Homer Simpson asked Ned Flanders, like, if God can do anything, could God microwave a burrito so hot that he himself could not eat it?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a joke question.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's making fun of the idea.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Sadducees aren't asking because they want to learn something they're trying to humiliate Jesus in front of a whole crowd.
[SPEAKER_00]: Romans, one, twenty-one is an apt description of these men.
[SPEAKER_00]: For the although they knew God, they did not honor Him as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened.
[SPEAKER_00]: What Jesus was, the reason why Jesus speaks so strongly to these men is that these were the leaders of the people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And people looked up to them and depended on them to tell them the truths about God and they were misleading people and sending them astray.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were enriching themselves at the hands of these earnest people, telling them that there's no hope after death.
[SPEAKER_00]: They did not understand God's word when they read it and they did not recognize God's word when he met them on the road.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had dark hearts and futile thoughts.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thinking and study and intellect alone cannot reveal the truths of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Paul says that this way in Ephesians chapter four for seventeen to eighteen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now this I say and test to find the Lord that you must no longer walk as a gentiles do in the futility of their minds.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are darkened in their understanding, they're alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that's in them.
[SPEAKER_00]: All this is due to the hardness of their heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: Paul says, the thing that makes their minds futile, the things that darkens their understanding, preventing enlightenment, the thing that creates ignorance in them is not a lack of education, is due to the hardness of their heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thinking back to the analogy of fire and fuel, the sadacies have lots and lots of fuel, a lifetime of study, they had no fire.
[SPEAKER_00]: They had studied and studied and studied, but they had no love for Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like thinking back to a bonfire, you know, if you collect a lot of wood and a lot of flammable things and you pile it up with the intention of burning it, that's a campfire, that's a bonfire, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: What if you take that same stuff, you know, lumber and wood and pallets or whatever and you pile it up in a place with no intention to burn it?
[SPEAKER_00]: What's that called?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's called trash.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their empty hearts robbed their minds of both its purpose and its power.
[SPEAKER_00]: Their learning was like trash, then no purpose, no aim.
[SPEAKER_00]: So then are we supposed to surmise that, like studying itself as useless, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's look at the opposite end of that spectrum.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does it like to have a full heart, but an empty mind?
[SPEAKER_00]: What does it look like for someone to try to grow in their love for God without basing that love on the knowledge of God?
[SPEAKER_00]: Last week, Jamie quoted, Jen Wilkin, a good friend of this church, who said, the heart cannot love what the mind does not know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But is that actually true?
[SPEAKER_00]: To love Jesus, do we really need to study?
[SPEAKER_00]: That scene is very unrelated.
[SPEAKER_00]: What does love have to do with studying?
[SPEAKER_00]: What does love have to do with knowledge?
[SPEAKER_00]: Isn't love an emotion that you feel?
[SPEAKER_00]: To illustrate that, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the woman that I love the most in the world of my wife, Kathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was here at the nine.
[SPEAKER_00]: She went home.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I've got information to talk about her.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just love her so very much.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so maybe I telling you about how much I love this woman and so imagine, one of you comes up and asks me, all right, well, she sounds great.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you tell me a little bit something about Kathy?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, what color or her eyes?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, colors are hair.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that she has hair.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what does she look like?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are you asking me this nerdy stuff?
[SPEAKER_00]: What?
[SPEAKER_00]: It look all that matters is I just, I love her so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but like, what's your favorite restaurant?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, like, I was seeing my getting a birthday gift, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, when is her birthday?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know that stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Get off my case.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but like, what kind of music does she like?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, I'm sure there's things that, you know, she loves and things that annoy her.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't ever think about that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't get into that kind of nitpicky detail.
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing is, if I'm real honest, I don't know any of those things and I don't care about any of those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I talk to you like this, do you believe that I love my wife?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you believe that I have a wife?
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like one of those situations, like, oh, I've got a girlfriend.
[SPEAKER_00]: She goes to a different school, you don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, how can I love someone and not know anything about her?
[SPEAKER_00]: How can I say I love someone and not want to know anything about her?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I love my wife, my real wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to know what places her.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to know what makes her happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to know the ways that I make her unhappy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to know how I can grow to love her more.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I love her.
[SPEAKER_00]: I use my mind to learn more about my wife both because I love her already and because I want to learn her more.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the cycle that I quote in the beginning.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Thomas Goodwin cycle that love fuels our learning and learning fuels our love.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's absolutely true that the heart cannot love what the mind does not know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, cool, but like how much do you have to know?
[SPEAKER_00]: How correct do you have to be?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know everything about Kathy, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So let me illustrate, come back to you and I did some studying, I asked some questions, okay, you know, she's real.
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, this is my wife, Kathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's five-one, naturally wavy, hair, but it's black.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's afraid of heights, she loves arts and crafts, and she's Puerto Rican.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, some of you know my wife Kathy, she's Korean like me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's real good.
[SPEAKER_00]: I ran this by Kathy in the morning, because otherwise I'd be in real trouble right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you know me, yeah, she's Korean.
[SPEAKER_00]: She's not Puerto Rican.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm sure you could find a five-one Puerto Rican woman named Kathy with wavy black hair who loves arts and crafts, but that person would not be my wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, imagine you see me with my arm around a strange woman.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're like, who's this?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the love of my life, Kathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but that's not your wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, I know I've seen your wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but like, her name is Kathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I told you I love Kathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is Kathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love, I just, it's Kathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, the main thing is that this woman's name is Kathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I love a woman named Kathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, stop nitpicking me so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: The main thing is that I love her so much.
[SPEAKER_00]: I only kiss women named Kathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that's not a good policy, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: John Piper calls this mental adultery.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are people who say that they love Jesus, but when they describe the Jesus that they love, they describe a person that the Bible denies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me give you two descriptions of Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just want you to listen and see if there's anything off.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are two real descriptions of Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, person number one says this, I love Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me tell you about him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah, prophesied from a long time ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was sent by God to lead his people back to faith and obedience in the one true God.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was born of the Virgin Mary.
[SPEAKER_00]: He lived a sinless and perfect life.
[SPEAKER_00]: He healed many people and performed all kinds of miracles.
[SPEAKER_00]: He preached the gospel and gathered together as disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: And on the night that he was betrayed, Jesus switched places with one of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: And instead of being arrested, he escaped to heaven before any of his enemies could even touch him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in place, in his place, another person was made to resemble him, and that person was crucified.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all of his disciples were deceived into thinking that that was Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this Jesus, who is not God, but a prophet of God, will one day return to defeat the Antichrist and usher in God's justice upon the earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that the Jesus that we preach here at church?
[SPEAKER_00]: Don't, it's not.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's some similarities, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's another one.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can I tell you about him?
[SPEAKER_00]: All right.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Jesus that I love, he's the one and only begotten son of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is God.
[SPEAKER_00]: So far so good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Born of the Virgin Mary, he taught salvation by grace, he died on the cross, and was resurrected bodily as an atonement for all mankind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Originally from a distant planet near the Great Star System Colob, he was the elder brother of Lucifer, and who was sent to the planet Earth by his father Elohim to begin the mission of eternal progression.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus accomplished this mission and successfully progressed to his own Godhood through his perfect obedience.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just as his own father had once done when he was himself a man.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in this way, Jesus opened the pathway for all of his followers to also become gods.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that means if you believe in him and you pray enough and you work hard enough and are righteous enough, you too might earn the right to become a God and join the legacy of the millions of God you have come before you.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are some people who, probably, will say, it doesn't matter what you believe.
[SPEAKER_00]: As long as you earn his sleep, believe it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't even work for my human relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could never treat my wife this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are many women named Kathy.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are even many women named Kathy who are Korean and five-one with black weight, but there's only one Kathy who's actually my wife in the whole world.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are many false Jesuses described by all the different world religions.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's only one Jesus, the Savior of the world who is the Son of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second person of the Triune Godhead, fully God, fully man, one with the Father, uncreated, only begun.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first Jesus that I mentioned is the Jesus described in Islam.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second Jesus is the Jesus of Mormonism.
[SPEAKER_00]: And while they do share quite a bit of overlap, there are quite a few things that are familiar.
[SPEAKER_00]: Neither of them are the Jesus of the Bible, described in the Old and the New Testament.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, well, you know, we're not Muslims, we're not Mormons, like we're safe, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: In twenty-twenty lifeway in Ligonier did a joint survey of evangelical Christians.
[SPEAKER_00]: They only surveyed people who self-reported to be evangelical Christians.
[SPEAKER_00]: They found that fifty-two percent of self-professed evangelical Christians agreed with Muslims that Jesus was a great teacher but was not God at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fifty-two percent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fifty-five percent of self-professed evangelical Christians agree with Mormons that Jesus is the first and the greatest of all the created beings.
[SPEAKER_00]: Looking at your summarized by saying that there's a trend in America, the trend in America that they discovered was a profound unfamiliarity with the core teachings of Christian orthodoxy and a confusion about the objective nature of truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you remember the story about the bonfire that I mentioned earlier, let me go back there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have been hyping up this bonfire all weekend, how incredible it was going to be, how good it was going to smell, how all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it did smell incredible at first.
[SPEAKER_00]: And after a few minutes,
[SPEAKER_00]: This strange smoke started to come out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this putrid toxic smell started to just pour out of the campfire.
[SPEAKER_00]: And some people started getting light headed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of the students started getting nauseous.
[SPEAKER_00]: We had to evacuate them away and grab fire extinguishers and put it out.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now we put it out.
[SPEAKER_00]: We discovered that someone, not on our team, but someone else did not know what this
[SPEAKER_00]: Pile was four and they thought it was a trash pile and they had thrown their trash inside of it and we found pesticide containers and things like chemicals like bleach and things like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were thrown in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't do it militiously.
[SPEAKER_00]: They just thought it was trash.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mind feeds the fires of the heart and you'll either burn with truth where you will burn with lies.
[SPEAKER_00]: In Leviticus, ten were told the story of Nadad and Abahiyu, which are the sons of Aaron, some of the earliest priests, and it says that they offered strange fire before the Lord.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is not long after God had told exactly how he wanted to be worshiped, and they decided to change up the script, and it says that God killed them.
[SPEAKER_00]: God does not just accept any kind of fire just because it's strong, just because it's passionate, our hearts must burn with truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: We cannot do that without knowing God's truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: Strong faith in a false Jesus cannot save.
[SPEAKER_00]: But even weak faith in the true Jesus will absolutely save.
[SPEAKER_00]: You cannot love what you do not know.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no such thing as loving without knowing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, knowing is so essential.
[SPEAKER_00]: So essential that Jesus defines eternal life in a very particular way.
[SPEAKER_00]: John, seventeen, three.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is Jesus' definition of eternal life.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you ask Him, what is it?
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what He says.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is eternal life.
[SPEAKER_00]: That they know you.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only true God in Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus defines eternal life as knowing God and knowing Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that brings me to the second question.
[SPEAKER_00]: How did Jesus model how we're supposed to use our minds to do that?
[SPEAKER_00]: For the sake of time, let me just read a few verses in rapid succession.
[SPEAKER_00]: And let's see if you can catch Jesus' expectation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Matthew, twelve, five.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you not read in the law how on the Sabbath the priests and the temple profane the Sabbath and our guildess?
[SPEAKER_00]: Matthew, nineteen, four, he answered, have you not read?
[SPEAKER_00]: He who created them from the beginning made the male and female, Matthew, twenty, one, sixteen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus said to them, yes, have you never read out of the mouth of infants and nursing babies you have prepared praise, Mark, twelve, ten.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you not read this scripture?
[SPEAKER_00]: The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Luke, ten, twenty, five, twenty, six and behold, a lawyer stood up to him to put him to the test saying, teacher, what shall I do to inherit eternal life?"
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, what is written in the law?
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you read it?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the pattern?
[SPEAKER_00]: Reading.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you not read?
[SPEAKER_00]: Every time someone comes to argue with Jesus or ask him a question, Jesus could easily answer that question directly out of his own authority.
[SPEAKER_00]: as the living God, as the word of God made flesh.
[SPEAKER_00]: But instead, Jesus points to the authority of the written scriptures.
[SPEAKER_00]: He says, I don't speak of my own accord, but only with the Father speaks.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is modeled for us that using our minds to glorify God starts with reading the words of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thinking about God is definitely more than reading the Bible, but is definitely not any less.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me illustrate this way.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe you're like me, you've downloaded an application for Windows, or your Mac, or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the first thing pops up is that crazy long school thing, like the end user license agreement, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm sure all of you scroll down to the bottom, and where it says, I have read the terms and conditions.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm sure none of you ever lie when you click that.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one expects you to read that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so we all just clicked, I've read, yeah sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just give me past this thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when Jesus asks, have you read, he actually expects you to have read.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to remind you, the people he's talking to at this time, no one at this time pretty much owns their own copy of the whole Bible.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a copy of the whole Torah that was kept in the synagogues, the sadgesies who have access to the temple would have had copies that they could have access.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're very, very wealthy, you could hire a scribe to copy you portions of the Bible.
[SPEAKER_00]: We see the Ethiopian Unique has access to a part of Isaiah, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But no one just had the whole Bible to just look stuff up.
[SPEAKER_00]: And even at this era, Jesus expects people to have read.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have all of us have a devices in our pocket that have ten thousand bibles in every single language on earth.
[SPEAKER_00]: We need to have read.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when Jesus asks you, have you ever read, please don't scroll down to the bottom, say, I've read the terms and conditions of the Christian faith.
[SPEAKER_00]: that will not do.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is what the fifty-two and the fifty-five percent of people, that's what they were doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus said this in John eight, verse thirty-one, thirty-two.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in Him, if you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who wants to be set free?
[SPEAKER_00]: You cannot find freedom without knowing truth.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that truth, according to Jesus, is only found
[SPEAKER_00]: by abiding in His Word.
[SPEAKER_00]: We must read His Word.
[SPEAKER_00]: To love God with all our minds, we must begin by using our minds to search God's Word to find the beautifully true reasons for our hearts to love God above all things to treasure Him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our minds must be drawn to understanding God's truths from simple to complex.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our reflections on the things of God must be the fuel that ignite the affections for the things of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our doctrine is what must inform our devotion.
[SPEAKER_00]: Our minds must fuel our hearts to love God above all things, to treasure God above all things, to prioritize God above all things, to cherish God above all things, to prefer God above all things and to desire God above all things in other words to worship God.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the role of the mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the reverse is also true.
[SPEAKER_00]: If we say we love Jesus, then it should drive our hunger to know more of Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: What pleases him?
[SPEAKER_00]: What disappoints him?
[SPEAKER_00]: What brings me closer to him?
[SPEAKER_00]: What draws me away from him?
[SPEAKER_00]: I need to know those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the same way that I want to know that about my wife.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to know that about my friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is why Psalm one that we read a few weeks ago, it says the blessed man's delight is in the law of the Lord.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it is love for God that drives him to study the Bible day after day after day.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wants to know, how can I delight him?
[SPEAKER_00]: I love him and I want to love him more.
[SPEAKER_00]: The heart is what prefers and prioritizes.
[SPEAKER_00]: The heart is what treasures and desires.
[SPEAKER_00]: The heart is what aims the mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: The mind is the servant of the heart.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so where you spend your mind when we're veal where your heart is, what are the things that you meditate on day and night?
[SPEAKER_00]: The blessed man meditates on the scriptures day and night.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is it that you are meditating on day and night that take up all of your time?
[SPEAKER_00]: The thing that you might as hungry to know more of, the thing that you're memorizing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel very convicted as I was preparing this message because there are many times that I'm not using my time wisely.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, not condemnation.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is an invitation to all of us.
[SPEAKER_00]: We all follow Jesus imperfectly.
[SPEAKER_00]: He knew that when he bought us.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, there's no condemnation for those who want Christ Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can only know that by reading his word Romans eight, verse one.
[SPEAKER_00]: The purpose of my message today is not condemnation, but invitation to invite you and exhort you into a life that is shaped by Christ to look like Christ.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I want to close a three practical implications, practical invitations and exhortations.
[SPEAKER_00]: If your desire is to use your mind to see Christ more clearly so that your heart can savor him more deeply, then I want to invite you to do one of three things.
[SPEAKER_00]: As Lindsay mentioned in the announcements, number one, you can register for a Bible class.
[SPEAKER_00]: This semester, our Bible class will be saying the book of Hebrews as she mentioned.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the book of Hebrews, the book of Hebrews is primarily about the supremacy of Christ and the ultimate sea of Christ.
[SPEAKER_00]: That Christ is highest and Christ is last.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so if you want to answer the question of who is Jesus and who am I in Jesus, registered for Bible class?
[SPEAKER_00]: If you feel embarrassed, maybe you haven't done this in a long time or you've never done ever before.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bible class is a place where we are all co-learners.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are coming to study the Scriptures and be studied by them.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one will make fun of you come.
[SPEAKER_00]: Next, the mission of God is another class.
[SPEAKER_00]: This focuses on why Jesus came and what he's doing right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if the burning question of your life is why isn't the Jesus that God saves anyone?
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the purpose of my life in Christ?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why did God save me?
[SPEAKER_00]: Then register for the mission of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of our best teachers will be teaching this semester.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the aim of both of these classes is very similar.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just to highlight the beauty, the beautiful truths of Jesus that we might save our Him more, serve Him better, that we might grow in Christ's likeness.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, thirdly, I know some of you, you know, maybe you just had a baby or you've got like, you know, a bunch of kiddos running around, you just got a new job and you're like, man, I would love to do those things.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just don't have the margin right now and you're feeling a little down, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember, this is invitation, not condemnation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to do, I want to invite you to do something very simple.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want you to, I invite you to read the memory verse of the month on a daily basis.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you have kids, pick a time to read with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Read it in the morning, read it at night, pick the time to be consistent about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you can do it both times, even better.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if you don't have kids, read it with your roommates.
[SPEAKER_00]: These are Bible verses.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not kidd verses.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as you read the word and you hide it away in your heart, you will be training your mind and your heart to work together.
[SPEAKER_00]: This month, the memory verse of the month is Romans, three, twenty, three, four.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: The really cool thing is bleaker and the team have put together music to make it easier to memorize.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you search citizens' kids on Spotify, Apple, music, all the things, you can find it and you can listen to it and help you memorize it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Tim Keller said, if you ever want to hear God speaking to you, audibly, all you have to do is read the Bible out loud.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just want to encourage you to read and try to memorize this together as a family, as a household, to speak the very words of God as a family.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you read the words of God, you are thinking the very thoughts of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Have you ever thought about that?
[SPEAKER_00]: You are training your brain to think the very thoughts of God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do that as a family.
[SPEAKER_00]: Train your family to hide God's word away in your hearts.
[SPEAKER_00]: God is not asking us to be mighty or great.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is mighty.
[SPEAKER_00]: He is great.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's just asking us to be faithful.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if we do this, we will be using our full mind to store up this fuel for our hearts.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're meant to work together, our doctrine and our delight, our theology and our doxology, our reflection and our affection that we might see in Savior Jesus with all of our being.
[SPEAKER_00]: These things cannot be separated.
[SPEAKER_00]: They cannot be compartmentalized.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do not be misled.
[SPEAKER_00]: You will either love Jesus with all our being.
[SPEAKER_00]: We will either love Jesus with all our being or not at all.
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no other way.
[SPEAKER_00]: May God be glorified as we engage all of our minds to love Him with all of our hearts.
[SPEAKER_00]: May He give us the grace to do that and a hunger to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And a love to do that, let's pray.
[SPEAKER_00]: Gracious Heavenly Father,
[SPEAKER_00]: Lord, I just want to pray for your people who are here.
[SPEAKER_00]: God, I pray that you'll create eagerness in the mind to learn about the deep things of Jesus.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I pray that you will kindle a fire in the hearts of those who know much, Lord, that we might burn, Lord with zealous love for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lord, that we might not be compartmentalized, sliced apart people, but we would be whole person disciples who are giving our full self to you, engaging all of our being to love you with all of that we are.
[SPEAKER_00]: Lord, that we might be made more and more like Jesus Christ, for our joy and for your glory.
[SPEAKER_00]: We pray in Jesus name.
[SPEAKER_00]: Amen.