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Blessings Vs Birthrights, Discerning God's Will, & A Practical Guide to Surrender #SermonSlice
94 Plays2 years ago
In this episode, Ridley Barron and Dan Sanchez slice into a recent sermon that explored the life of Joseph in Genesis and the significance of Judah in the Bible. They delve into thought-provoking questions, discuss the importance of birthrights and blessings, discernment, and provide valuable insights on seeking reliable sources of biblical knowledge. Join us as we uncover the intricacies of Joseph and Judah's stories and explore practical ways to discern God's will in our own lives. So, grab a cup of coffee, settle in, and let's explore the Sermon Slice together.
Timestamps:
[00:02:58] Sermon explains why Judah not Joseph.
[00:05:01] Manasseh or Ephraim? Birthright vs. blessing. Judah gets birthright, Joseph gets blessing.
[00:08:34] Israel's decline, Judah rises with good kings.
[00:10:32] Joseph becomes shelter for his brother.
[00:14:11] Maintain dialogue with God, seek honest advice.
[00:19:35] Phone not a reliable substitute for Bible.
[00:21:08] Find reliable sources, like gotQuestions.org for information.
[00:24:27] Finally got software, overwhelmed but beneficial.
[00:29:04] Isolation can lead to strange beliefs.
[00:31:56] Submission to God's will, offering everything.
[00:34:47] Rearrange priorities, listen to God's voice.
[00:36:54] Discussion about chickens and Sunday sermon summaries.
Recommended
Transcript
The Lineage of Jesus through Judah
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to another episode of the sermon slice from Grove Hill church. I'm back with pastor Ridley Baron, um, to talk about this last week's sermon and it was a fun one, man. It was a fun one. I mean, you teased it like it was going to be this big reveal and uh,
00:00:16
Speaker
It kind of was. It kind of was. I mean, you were teasing it out the last week like, oh, wait until for the surprise ending. I'm like, I think most of us were kind of like hyping it up hype man over here. But it ended up being like, whoa, kind of moment. Because it was on a topic that I think if you've read the life of Joseph before, and you know, you're,
00:00:38
Speaker
You're a mature like you've read the Bible. You've read that passage maybe once twice three times like you end up do asking the question and because it was about the Kind of the point of the life of Joseph in Genesis And if you've paid attention to the Bible, you know that Jesus does not come through the line of Joseph. Mm-hmm
00:01:01
Speaker
And like me, and even a friend of mine commented when I talked about it on Facebook earlier, he's like, dude, we were just reading that. I always made my wife were wondering the same thing.
00:01:11
Speaker
Like why, why does David and then Jesus come through the line of Judah when Judah was a bad, like was kind of a bad guy. And Joseph seemed to be like, I don't know if you can call him sinless, but like compared to most characters in the Bible, like he's pretty close, like better David as far as like what is written track record. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And on the surface, it's almost,
00:01:37
Speaker
don't mean this to be disrespectful or whatever, but it's almost like a magic trick. It's almost like God saying, here, pay attention to this over here while I'm doing this over here. And so he holds up the life of Joseph while he actually is working on the life of Judah all the way through this process. Man. And that was, that was the thing. That was the big reveal at the end. It's not about Joseph. It's about Judah. And I think everybody reading, at least me in that moment, I'm like, yeah,
00:02:06
Speaker
The redemption of Judah is the whole point of this thing.
Judah's Redemption and Legacy
00:02:09
Speaker
I have to give credit where it's due. My friend Vody Balkham, I heard him speak on this as part of my preparation for this. And he threw some great cracker crumbs for me and said, here, follow this trail. And I started digging into it. And I'm like, you know what? This is exactly right.
00:02:24
Speaker
Because for me, it was the disconnect, and this is my own fault, the disconnect between Judah the person and Judah the tribe. And so when I would read Lion of the tribe of Judah in the description of David, I would think tribe, but I never connected it back to the person. And I'm like, okay, wait a minute. That's right. This is all about a guy who literally had a very sordid relationship with his daughter-in-law, not to mention that he was part of the killing off of an entire
00:02:52
Speaker
city because of the rape of his sister. I mean, he was no good dude. So if you haven't listened to that sermon, go back to the previous episode before this one and go listen to it because it was a doozy. It was a good one. It's worth listening to even more more than once. Um, but I will say after listening to it, it opened up because that was like a whole question that I had had before. Why Judah, not Joseph? I'm like, ah, finally answered clearly.
00:03:20
Speaker
But then it got me thinking about some other pieces that were like, if that's true, then what about this thing that happens over here? If it's not all about Joseph, then why did Jacob pass his blessing onto Ephraim and Manasseh, Joseph's children,
Blessings and Birthrights in the Old Testament
00:03:36
Speaker
right? Because you're like, well, why is that? Because that was the thing, the blessing, you know, coming down from Abraham to Isaac and then sneakily through Jacob, right? And that was the thing carrying, yet it didn't pass to Judah.
00:03:49
Speaker
So what happened? So one of the things we have to be very careful about reading the Old Testament is that we don't confuse the birthright with the blessing. The birthright, as we understand it, is more traditionally what we consider the inheritance. It is the promise in the Old Testament that typically the older child, unless otherwise designated, would receive two-thirds of the inheritance. He would carry on the family name. He would be considered the patriarch of the family moving forward when the patriarch
00:04:18
Speaker
passed away. So that's Judah. He gets the birthright. The blessing comes to Joseph. And so obviously, just like today, blessings are abundant. You can bless anybody you choose to bless.
00:04:30
Speaker
And if you get to the end of Genesis and we read that story where Jacob, as he's getting ready to pass away, he calls in Joseph's sons. He chooses to adopt them as his own because he's not required to give this blessing, so he adopts them as his own, and then he even crosses his hands over in a manner that's similar to what happened with Esau and Jacob. He blesses the younger child more
The Rise of Judah and the Northern Kingdom
00:04:57
Speaker
than he does the older child.
00:04:59
Speaker
So that raises another whole set of questions. Why Manasseh instead of Ephraim? So what we're seeing is a difference between a birthright and a blessing. So yeah, indeed the birthright goes to Judah and it is the lineage of the covenant promise that God had made with Abraham that's carried out through Judah through the generations. And we see it come obviously to fruition in Matthew chapter one with the birth of Jesus and that incredible genealogy that
00:05:24
Speaker
Not just Judah, but all those people. I mean, you've got prostitutes in Jesus's family line and all these different people. So that's really cool. But the blessing that went to Joseph, it's kind of easy to miss as you're reading forward in the story because we kind of lose Manasseh and Ephraim in the
00:05:48
Speaker
Exodus from Egypt to the occupation of the Promised Land. But if you follow it closely, and this is something I had to go back and do, primarily because of your really good questionnaire, Dan.
00:05:59
Speaker
I had to go back in and look at it, and what you see is during the time of the judges before David, well, even before Saul becomes king of the nation of Israel, when Israel was still being ruled by the judges, if you read those stories carefully, it's primarily Ephraim that is talked about in that time. It is Ephraim who gives direction to the nation. It is Ephraim who responds to the challenges of these opponents, even popular Bible stories like Gideon. Gideon was of the tribe of Ephraim. Interesting.
00:06:29
Speaker
So you see all that stuff unfold. And then even later on in some of the writings of the Old Testament, there is an Ephraim. They will reference Ephraim as the tribe and the son that's mentioned, Joseph's son. But Ephraim also is used to reference to the 10 tribes of Israel that were part of the northern kingdom. So even then, he was acknowledged as being blessed. And because of his blessing, those people existed. And because of that blessing, God's favor was on them, those kinds of things.
00:06:58
Speaker
And really, we don't see the rise of Judas, his part of the birthright, his part of the blessing until the time of the kings comes around in the nation of Israel.
Joseph's Role in God's Plan
00:07:09
Speaker
That's so interesting because it almost continues that narrative of what Jaseph was to Judah, right? It continues to be the blessing. Why? For the sake of the birthright, for the sake of the seed to come through. It's almost like the right hand helping the left hand. It's almost like this continuation of like Joseph's descendants being put in a certain place at a certain time. Why?
00:07:35
Speaker
so that Judah's descendants can be the one that carries the ultimate. It's like the ultimate goal. I mean, in football you have plays like that where you're trying to fool some, you're trying to like do something so you can just get that one guy through like the whole team doing everything they're doing just so that when somebody can sneak that ball through, it's almost like what's going on. And just to make sure that our, you know, those who are listening are up to date with what we're talking about. If you continue to read through the Old Testament stories, the narratives, Israel comes out of Egypt,
00:08:05
Speaker
They occupy the Promised Land. The 12 tribes are all given different portions of inheritance based on the size of their tribes. And where Joseph should have received an inheritance, he gets a double portion. So Ephraim and Manasseh both get a allotment there in that land. Well, then as the kings come along, Israel really only has three kings as a United Kingdom. It's Saul, David, and then Solomon. And after Solomon leaves the scene, Israel is split into two.
00:08:34
Speaker
Northern Kingdom, it remains Israel. The Southern Kingdom, which is made up of just the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, becomes the nation of Judah. And there's when we really start to see Judah rise to the top of the crop. Because Israel never has a good king. If you look at it, every king that Israel ever had after that point was evil.
00:08:54
Speaker
Israel immediately begins to follow after the practices, the rituals of other nations becomes very pagan, very evil. In fact, even many of the people who were part of Israel left Israel and moved to Judah because they said, we don't want to be a part of this compromise. And it's only in Judah that we see any hope of the story remaining because there are some good kings like Josiah who come along and try to keep things moving in the right direction.
00:09:22
Speaker
Eventually, ultimately, both of them would be carried off into captivity. So again, there's something really interesting, and I can't really put my finger on it, something interesting that Ephraim was supposed to be serving out some purpose as the northern tribes of Israel, maybe while Judah and Benjamin were growing roots strong enough to carry forward with what they were going to do. I don't know. It's an interesting topic.
00:09:48
Speaker
I mean, the Northern tribe was carried off by a separate Asian nation, right? And there was purposes that God used later on with that, right? I'm trying to remember which Ezra that ended up coming back, which was an important piece. So you had the story of Ezra and Nehemiah and those guys coming back, rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem, all that kind of stuff. But ultimately Assyria took off the Northern tribes and then Babylon came and took Judah and Benjamin and took them off.
00:10:15
Speaker
Yeah. For the 70 year period.
Discerning God's Will and Taking Action
00:10:17
Speaker
God had important purposes for each of those different groups of captives. Yep. So coming back to Joseph, if it's all about Judah, then why is so much time given to Joseph? Well, that's the one where I'm kind of like, I don't know, you know, sometimes you try to trace the hand of God and figure out what his purpose is, but primarily my thinking is, um,
00:10:45
Speaker
And this is the best analogy I can think of. You hear stories out in the nature of like when a small animal gets injured, how the mother comes along and deflects things away from that injured animal to give that animal time to heal, knowing that it can't protect itself, can't hunt for itself, those kinds of things. It's almost as if Joseph comes along and is given the assignment, you're gonna be the shelter for your big brother while we get his character in shape, because his character's not where it needs to be.
00:11:13
Speaker
That's why we get that little story in Genesis 38 that's inserted there. It's as if to say he's not capable of being a patriarch right now. So let's hand this off to Joseph. Let's let Joseph go be the one who goes into Egypt.
00:11:27
Speaker
Again, I think the part that's hard to understand is, you know, if you and I are God, we're going, okay, well, why don't we just go smack Judah upside the head and get him into shape and get this thing moving? But God has his timing. God has his purposes. God's writing a story. And sometimes while the main character may be off on the sideline, he's working on the character of other people as well. So I'm not a clear on that answer, but I feel like that might be a part of it.
00:11:55
Speaker
I must wonder, I mean, you think Moses wrote the story down. Yeah. I must wonder if that like, if like kids grew up asking like, so why are we down in Egypt instead of where Abraham came from? They're like, well, let me tell you this story of Joseph. Yeah. That was kind of probably an important story growing up in Egypt that was probably told, I guess Moses would have heard it eventually, even though he grew up in the Egyptian house somewhere. I guess his mom still took care of him. So I wonder what's the story.
00:12:21
Speaker
To be honest the Egyptians probably told this story too because to their kids they had to explain why are all these people over in the land of Goshen that aren't really our people and they're over how do we get these people you know.
00:12:33
Speaker
So there's a part where history just tells the story and to your point, it's a pretty fascinating story. I mean, how Joseph winds up there and turns out to become basically the second command of the greatest nation on earth at that point. So you can't really just dismiss it and be totally focused on Judah and miss that great part of the story.
00:12:56
Speaker
So on one fun part of the sermon, you mentioned that we often try to intervene in God's plan, like Abraham did in procuring a son. But inside, even while I was sitting there, I was wondering, I'm like, uh, but like, how do I know if me not doing something is part of God's will, right? Because I'm, I don't want to just be the person that just sits on my couch, hoping that God's provision will show up in the form of a job or a check in the mail.
00:13:22
Speaker
Without me maybe trying to go and you know send out some resumes or try to go drum up some business or something, right? We know how do we discern God will God's will from ours versus like waiting or trying to go and get it done ourselves Because while you said it I was like like I'm the kind of person who likes to take action and go do things But how would I know to wait right?
00:13:44
Speaker
And this is a great question. It's an age-old question. Every believer probably at some point has asked, how do I know it's my voice versus his voice that's speaking to me? And I usually tell people that there's several different things you got to do. Number one, you know that his will is never going to contradict his word. Funny how our conversations always come back to the word, right? The more you know the word, the more confident you're going to be when you hear his voice speaking to you through the pages of that word.
00:14:11
Speaker
So, His will is never going to contradict His word. Obviously, you've got to stay in prayer, so you have this ongoing dialogue with God where He is able to speak to you and confidently know you're going to listen and you're praying confidently, know that He has something to say to you. I always believe that the importance of other people in your life who can be sounding boards,
00:14:33
Speaker
You know, people who know your heart, who know your skills, who know your personality. When you feel like guys telling you something, go sit down with them and say, I want to run something by you and I want you to be honest with me. Tell me what you see and what you feel. And, you know, if I came and sat down with Dan Sanchez and said, hey, I think I want to be the next great tenor at the opera, Dan knows me off well enough to go, hey, dude, you might be able to introduce the tenor at the opera, but you're never going to be the tenor at the opera, you know? So there's those kind of people who speak truth in our life.
00:15:03
Speaker
And then I think the last part, and I like to use this analogy because it just struck on me when I was younger, of walking towards an automatic door like at the grocery store. There comes a point where if you're going to move forward and follow God's will, you get up and you kind of start moving. You just start moving towards what you think is the destination. And as you get there, then bit by bit, God opens the doors to affirm you're headed in the right direction.
00:15:29
Speaker
But if you get to the door and it's still closed, then that's probably a good sign. No, that was your voice, not mine that was speaking, you know? So I think it's a series of things. It's kind of like God gives us all these little checkpoints along the way. I think the thing that God really desires more than anything is that we're constantly checking in with Him. Yeah. God doesn't come along and say, here, this is what I want you to do. And He never comes back to us. He's sitting there waiting and wanting to guide us.
00:15:55
Speaker
So stay close to the word to grow your discernment. Yep stay That moving forward is probably better than just waiting passively move forward and like god direct you but check in with them actively because You might you have move forward a hundred yards, but then steer to the right, right? But you had to move forward a hundred yards in order to make that next choice, right? You had to take that job in order to find out about this next thing. You didn't even know was the thing right there is
00:16:22
Speaker
little breadcrumbs along the way. The old saying is really, really true. It's always easier to turn a moving ship than it is to turn one that's sitting still.
Faith and Avoiding Shortcuts
00:16:30
Speaker
And so the question sometimes is asked, well, how do I know what to try to do? Which direction to move? And I would encourage you keep doing the right things you know to do until God tells you the next right thing to
00:16:44
Speaker
But don't do the wrong things, even if they're quick and might get you to the right place sooner. Don't try to rush timing, kind of connecting back to the story. What we were referencing specifically was where Sarah and Abraham decide, hey, we're going to take a shortcut on this whole descendant thing, and I'm going to give Hagar to Abraham and see how that works. And obviously it's had long, long, long lasting consequences because they messed up the plan.
Understanding and Trusting the Bible
00:17:14
Speaker
So my next question is one, it's like a personal question, something I've actually wrestled with before, but in revealing like something that I've wondered about many times regarding Joseph and Judah, I was like, dang, you know, I've actually sat there and read my Bible enough times and seen this and wondered about it, but I know what to do about it.
00:17:31
Speaker
You know, there's oftentimes we're reading our Bible. We're reading something like this and we're scratching our heads about it. It might not be in the Old Testament. It might be in the New Testament. It could be anywhere in the Word. You know there's something you don't understand. It seems that there's something disconnected from your understanding or just doesn't make sense.
00:17:49
Speaker
What do people do when they get that? Because oftentimes we're talking about people getting in the word. So when they do get in the word, it's inevitable that they're going to run into things like this. Yeah. How do we go about resolving these questions when the Bible commentary and the footnotes of our Bible doesn't cover it? Right, right. I think I would encapsulate whatever answer I give you with the parentheses, and at the front of the parentheses and the back of the parentheses is this statement, trust the book. Trust the book, okay?
00:18:18
Speaker
What I mean by that is if you get to a place where you can't come up with an answer, don't think the book is wrong or there's something inadequate about the book. What's inadequate is your understanding of the book in that moment and in that season, which should encourage us, just like you, to continue to dig deeper, to continue to ask the questions, those kinds of things. I am a, today, 56 years old, have been a believer for 48 years, and I'm still learning things about the Bible.
00:18:44
Speaker
And like you and I over the last few weeks, as we've talked, how suddenly it's all of a sudden God connects dots and you're going, Oh, okay. So that makes sense. There's much about the Bible that causes confusion because it was written.
00:19:00
Speaker
primarily 2000 plus years ago by people from a culture in the mid east and most of us as Americans can't comprehend a lot of the cultural differences. It was written to a people who lived in that culture. It wasn't written to 21st century Americans. So we don't understand all of the traditions. We don't understand all of the
00:19:19
Speaker
the challenges of living in an agrarian society, you know, three and four thousand years ago. So there's a lot of questions that just legitimately are going to occur. I don't think it shakes or shatters the dependability of the book. I do. We literally, it seems like every time we've done this, Dan, I refer back to conversations we've had earlier in the day with the staff.
00:19:44
Speaker
This morning, we were talking and staff about the danger of using your phone as a Bible all the time instead of just pulling out the real book.
00:19:53
Speaker
And one of the staff members who has children said she realized how dangerous it was because her kid said, well, can't we just go Google it in the Bible? And she said, you know what, I, I, it made me realize that I could tell my kid to go Google a Bible verse, but you don't know what answer is going to come up on that device. It's going to be a wide array of opinions, a wide array of, uh,
00:20:16
Speaker
of material and just all kinds of stuff. And you can't guarantee that what they're going to get a solid Orthodox teaching regarding Scripture. So I would encourage people, you know, get back to reading the book, holding it in your hand, flipping the pages with your children. And I think it's okay to encourage people, really encourage people. It's all right sometimes to say, I don't know. Let's go. Let's go see if we can figure this out together.
00:20:41
Speaker
And then you go back to the traditional, the dependable, reliable sources. You've got pastors that you can talk to, that you trust. You've got Bible study leaders in your church. You've got members of your life group who maybe have some maturity or wisdom that you don't have. There are reliable sources today. And the beauty of the internet is you can find those dependable
00:21:05
Speaker
sources out there that you can go back to consistently. I would say don't pull up the latest thing on Google, but find those that are reliable. For instance, there's an organization, I don't know who sponsors or who does it, but there's a website called GotQuestions.org. It's a very reliable, at least in my experience, I've never come across anything that really was questionable in what he said. He tends to have a really good solid answers for a lot of difficult questions.
00:21:31
Speaker
There are good, reliable organizations out there that have websites that manage these things. And even some that have almost like a customer service line. Hey, if you've got a really tough question you're dealing with, send it in and we'll be happy to help answer that question for you. But at the end of the day, you know, if you do all your research, do all your homework, do all your study, and you go, you know what? It's bedtime. I need to lay down and I don't have an answer. Lay down with confidence that the Bible can be trusted. The book is reliable.
Reliable Sources for Christian Study
00:22:00
Speaker
It's a good place to start. I always assumed I'm like some, some PhD out there knows the answer or at least has interpretations for the answer or something. Somebody knows. I just got to go find it. I know Google is probably not the best, but that doesn't remind me of a story in a previous ministry I was working at. We were building a website because we figured out how to do SEO, search engine optimization. This is part of what I do as a marketer.
00:22:23
Speaker
Right. And we went and found that all of Christianity had bad answers all over the web, like really bad answers or underdeveloped answers. So we started writing articles for everything. Yeah. And he'd be surprised like what are the top things people search for.
00:22:38
Speaker
But some of the top searches regarding Christianity that people search for are, one, Bible verses for everything. Bible verses for birthdays, Bible verses for sickness, Bible verses for my first job interview, which was really hot in 2020 when people were getting laid off, is when we found out how many people were searching for that.
00:22:56
Speaker
But then even weird things of like is is smudging in the Bible, you know smudging is I do not burning incense to ward off which is a practice to ward off evil spirits and The answer is found on Google around whether smudging was okay. We're all over the place
00:23:16
Speaker
You know, I know I've seen some, some searches like tattoos, you know, what do you think about tattoos or can Christians eat pork? Yeah. Yeah. Are there clues in the Bible about whether or not there's alien life? You know, that's one people love to talk about. So yeah.
00:23:32
Speaker
Those are common questions. We hit all those too. I remember writing articles for all of these things. Got to take all of those. Search for these things. It's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So Google is a hit or miss. Be careful. Most people that I know are like my go-to sources for
00:23:49
Speaker
Bible answers usually are people that have access to really deep resources, like what is it, Logos, Logos, Logos, like the Bible software where you have access to like 50 million commentaries and all this stuff so you can pull it open to like split screen.
00:24:07
Speaker
Like, give me all the commentaries on this verse. I've always been kind of jealous because it's like a thousand dollar software. Yes. Like, well, like, okay, well, where would I start? Like, what do you, do you use the software and which commentaries do you pull up in it as reliable ones when you're doing research for the people who are nerds out there and are kind of like, I want to dig in myself, but where should I go?
00:24:27
Speaker
It's funny. You asked that for 10 years. I've had people telling me to get the software and I just couldn't convince myself to do it. And just about two months ago, I finally broke down and got it. And what I feared has actually come true. I'm like a deer in the headlight. I don't even know where to start looking for things, you know, cause it is, it is, I mean, and it can grow. I mean, they start off with like 400 books in your, in your library, but you can grow it every month. You can add new stuff to it. Um, I have used it.
00:24:54
Speaker
in some of this research for some of these sermons. So it's been very beneficial, but I probably haven't even begun to scrape the tip of the iceberg on what's available in this stuff. I have, I don't know if you see it over there. I have a shelf full of commentaries over there. They're some of my favorite. A lot of them take different, like one of them's more of a teaching commentary. Let's talk about themes that you can teach, things you can preach, outlines you can use.
00:25:22
Speaker
Others of them are much more scholarly and they get down into the weeds much deeper. So again, some of it is what's the purpose of your question? Are you trying to create a Bible study for your life group this week? Then you might want a different source than if you are digging in to try to find the explanation behind why Judah was the blessing and I mean the birthright rather than the blessing.
00:25:45
Speaker
I know a common one that I've used before. It's a little older though, uh, is the Matthew Henry commentary, which you can just go and find online for free. How would you say that is, I've actually wondered, I was like, is that a pretty reputable commentary? I've heard a lot of people mention it. Yes. Very reputable, a little bit hard to understand because it's an older English kind of thing. So it's one of those, you kind of have to read, reread to kind of process. Um, but yeah, I would put that up. There's one of the very reliable ones. Um,
00:26:13
Speaker
MacArthur has a good set of commentaries that he's done and he's somebody that I would trust a lot. If you read the NIV Bible, the NIV application commentary that was put out or is being put out currently as we speak, Lifeway, I think, carries those. It's a great commentary. Bible Expositors' commentary, another really good one.
00:26:36
Speaker
So there's just a ton of them out there. Ligonier Ministries, again, another website that has a lot of good stuff on it. And I think they carry some commentaries on their website. They do. They also have a chat function on their website, where I think it's manned by humans. And if you ask them a question, they will find you an answer. That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, you know, again,
00:27:01
Speaker
caution, use caution. If you look at something and you're going, this just sounds a little bit off, then that might be the Holy Spirit warning you that you're going down a trail that really isn't going to profit you very much. And I always, always encourage you to go back to your pastor of your church or your staff and say, hey, is this guy, is he reliable? Is this organization trustworthy? I mean, let me give you a perfect example of what's going on in our country today.
00:27:24
Speaker
I grew up reading Christianity today. It used to be one of my favorite magazines. Great stuff, great thought-provoking articles, editorials, those kinds of things. Got away from it for some reason. I don't remember why. And I just read recently that it's really gone very woke and progressive and it cannot be relied on anymore.
00:27:43
Speaker
Funny thing is i read that like two weeks ago and yesterday when i'm a box in a free copy comes in my email so of course i sat down last night started flipping through it and i'm like okay now i'm seeing where the problems are.
00:27:56
Speaker
Yeah, I have a lot of friends and we all know you can't trust Christianity today anymore. It's too bad. It's a Billy Graham publication, right? I think it was started by Billy Graham. Billy Graham and there's another famous guy behind the scenes. I can never remember his name though. There's great organizations all over the place though.
00:28:23
Speaker
It kind of borders most of the time pretty solid. The Gospel Coalition, they've got a lot of good stuff. They have had some articles recently, though, that concern me. Navigators Press, been around for years. It's a great discipleship organization, has good material. Again, probably if you search, you'll find some stuff and then just run it by a trusted friend who might be able to help you discern the wisdom of it.
00:28:47
Speaker
The good thing to know that you've just pointed out, though, is do it in community. Like, if you're starting to get that feeling that something's weird or is off, you don't have to wonder alone. Bring it in with your community group, bring it in with your Bible study leaders, bring it into pastors, and we'll get farther together if we just stay together.
00:29:04
Speaker
It's when people get isolated and I've noticed friends who stopped going to church and are reading all these commentaries by themselves and ended up in very strange, not dark, but weird, weird places and beliefs because they're studying in isolation, because they're studying and going down rabbit holes. They should have gone, shouldn't have gone down. Where if they stuck in the local community, somebody would have been like, Hey, like that's actually wrong because of this.
Surrendering Life to Christ
00:29:28
Speaker
And they didn't know. Then they just kept going.
00:29:30
Speaker
So here are three caution signs I'll throw out there for people who are listening. This will give you a good idea if you're headed off track in who you're reading. Number one, if somebody says, this is what the Bible says to me. It's not important what the Bible says to you. It's not your interpretation you're looking for. You're looking for God's interpretation for you. This is what the Bible says, period. This is not how you read it. It's how the Bible says it to you. Number two, if somebody says, I've come up with a new interpretation on something,
00:29:59
Speaker
The Bible's 2,000 years ago, men much smarter than you and I have been reading this. And then the third one kind of closely associated to it, somebody who starts off with saying, this passage has been misinterpreted for years, and we've got it figured out all of a sudden. That's what's happened with the whole conversation regarding homosexuality in the church.
00:30:17
Speaker
Uh, we've misinterpreted this verse or they've misinterpreted that word. Uh, one of the arguments they've used for years is that the word homosexual didn't appear in the Bible anywhere. And the reason is, is because we didn't speak English in the Bible. It was Hebrew in Greek. There was no word as homosexual in that time. Uh, so, you know, that you gotta be very caught because people who want to be slippery and compromise things, they word things just right.
00:30:44
Speaker
convince you. Yeah, even in the King James isn't called sodomy, or maybe it's even older than that, right? Yes. It's the old word, the things they did in Sodom and Gomorrah. Well, basically what happened when Paul put together the word to describe what was going on there is he took two Greek words and put them together to make his own word. And everybody who would have read it that day and age would have known exactly what he was talking about, but instead of trusting God's word to be God's word, people today are wanting to twist it to what they want it to be.
00:31:14
Speaker
So be careful because there's all kinds of missing or reinterpretations going on these days. Um, and then my final question, and this is, again, this has been a kind of a smorgasbord of a, of a talk here instead of going into one topic deep, we're kind of covering lots of topics, but in the final call to action of your sermon, what it was to surrender your life to Christ. And I love that term.
00:31:40
Speaker
But at the same time, I'm like, well, what does that mean? What does it look like as a member of Grove Hill Church to surrender your life? Because then I stopped doing the things that I'm currently doing. Like what is it? What do you think like surrendering looks like for a lot of us?
00:31:56
Speaker
I think, and I hope this answers your question for me as a man, just as a man, not as a pastor or anything, but as a man, what that means is that everything that describes the reality that is mine, my career, my family, my hobbies, my desires, my dreams, that all of those things are laid on the altar before God to say, do with them what you want. So what's going to happen is if you're really sincere about this, God's going to pick up your family and say,
00:32:25
Speaker
Love them, care for them, shepherd them, lead them well. He may pick up my career and say, this isn't where I want you, I want you to change your career. I want you to take a lesser job or I want you to take a different career altogether. Your home, he may say, you know what, the home you're in is too big, it's too showy, you need to downsize. Or you need to open your home to people more frequently and show hospitality in my name.
00:32:51
Speaker
One by one, all those little things have to be literally placed in the hand of God. So God can take them and go, Okay, this one's good. You're doing well with this or this one needs some readjustment or what's next on the plan for you isn't going to need this at all. So let's just scrape it from the plate. And that's painful. It really requires surgery of our hearts. So would you recommend for every person listening to this to sit down some time, maybe with a journal,
00:33:18
Speaker
and actually write, write a question to God, but maybe separate it out. Cause I think it's, it's intimidating to think through it. Just like, God, what do you want me to do with my life? It's kind of like so broad and sweeping. You're like, I don't know. Yeah. Right. Usually like men usually go back to careers. Maybe one for a mother is like, go back to what do you want me to do with my family? Yes. But you could separate out like, God, what do you want me to do with my marriage? What do you want me to do with my children? What do you want me to do with my current job? Right. What do you want me to do with my local church?
00:33:48
Speaker
If you start separating it out, you might start to find you get more specific answers instead of being stuck. Like I do sometimes if I just ask him the broad general question, what do you want me to do with my life? It's like, well, there's a lot, depends on which area of your life. Right. So here's a pretty cool exercise that just kind of popped in my head. I love the idea of journals. Journals are always incredibly helpful because there's something about putting it down on paper for you. But maybe, maybe instead of a journal, maybe you take a piece of poster board or a large piece of construction paper.
00:34:18
Speaker
and you write down all the things we just talked about. And then you cut them into individual pieces, not like a jigsaw puzzle, but just in little blocks, you know? And then you take them and you go, okay, priority-wise, for me, this is what's at the top of my life right now as it exists. Is my career the most important thing? Is my family the most important thing? Where does my church fit into this picture? Rearrange them from top to bottom and then start at the top
00:34:45
Speaker
Take them one by one and say, OK, God, what do you want to do with this? First of all, is it in the right place? Most likely, most of us are going to have to admit we've got the wrong pieces of the puzzle at the top and it's time to start rearranging our priorities. It may be that it's in the right place. It just hasn't been given the right emphasis.
00:35:05
Speaker
maybe we've dismissed God's voice in that area of our life. Because I believe, speaking, this is bringing it down a little bit to our Grove Hill listeners, I believe that God's called out many guys in our church for a season of ministry in their lives. I believe with all my heart, and I think some of them have taken that piece of the puzzle and kind of stuck it over here on the shelf and said, okay, if God ever says anything, I'll talk to him about that. But I'm encouraging them to take that piece off the shelf, lay it on the table and say, okay, God, let's have a serious conversation on what this might look like.
00:35:36
Speaker
Yeah. And when you say doing ministry, does that mean like volunteering in some one of the ministries within Grove Hill? It could be that it could be starting a Bible study at your workplace. It could be for women. Let's talk specifically about women. I know a lot of women who've done this with tremendous success. I think your wife has even done this, but starting a Bible study or a prayer group in your neighborhood.
00:35:57
Speaker
You know, just encouraging other stay-at-home moms. Let's get together and let's talk about biblical things. I think most of us will be astonished to know how much of the world really wants to talk about these things. They just don't know where to go to start. A place that's safe, secure, open, where their questions are gonna be heard, not ignored or dismissed. So yeah, big piece of construction paper. Write down, you'll be surprised how many different things vie for your attention in your life.
00:36:26
Speaker
I mean, even like in my house, I have to write down chickens, cats and dogs because they're part of my life. Well, what do we do with those? Does God honored by the fact that I have chickens or is that taking too much of my time away from things that are more important in my life? I would encourage you to get down to that level of detail because there's freedom when you find out that those things have aligned with where God wants you to go. Interesting.
00:36:50
Speaker
That's why the construction paper has lots of little things to write down on there. Absolutely. We're talking about chickens.
00:37:00
Speaker
Well, fantastic. Ridley, thank you for joining me again on another sermon slice. It's always helpful for me to be able to ask questions, go a little bit deeper and actually pull open the bigger parts of what you're talking about on Sunday, Sunday morning sermons and just generally what, how you're leading this, this congregation. So to pull it open and to make it more clear is the goal of this series. So thank you for taking some time. Awesome. Join us next week. We're getting into Philippians. It's going to be a good journey.
00:37:29
Speaker
All right. And again, at the point of this podcast is that we want to make an impact on the life of every person with the whole gospel by any means possible, which is why we do this podcast. And if you want to grow in your spiritual journey, make sure to tune in, make sure to even re-listen to the sermon from this last Sunday. And again, join us, join us live for this kickoff of the new series.