THE CHURCH | Week 1 | Sermon

Amen. I was thinking about it this week. It doesn't happen often, but I have been wrong once or twice in my life. Was this one time my wife and I were having this conversation as we were doing dishes and I had brought home a cup from church that day. And this was, I don't know, almost ten years ago now.

And she, I think, was washing them and I was either rinsing them or something. But I had this cup and I basically like tossed it back in the sink and my wife was like, Hey, be careful with that cup. And I was like, Why? It's just a plastic cup. Who cares? You can't break a plastic cup. And my wife then proceeds to go, It's not plastic. It's actually glass. I'm like, It's not glass. You know what I mean? And so we both dig our heels in a little bit and we now start having this argument over whether a cup is plastic or glass, right? Like the stupid arguments you end up in marriage. But I, to then prove to my wife that she was wrong and I was right,

I took the cup and I said, Look, it's plastic. And I went like this to flex it and show her that it was plastic and that it would bend. But instead of bending, it shattered in my hand and then a big piece of glass impaled my hand.

And I remember sitting there like, yeah, yeah, definitely glass. I wish I had just tapped it on the counter or something to figure it out, but we're here now, right? And so I've got this big old thing of glass impaled into my hand and you do the logical thing and you call your mom to come help you. And so my mom comes over and we take this big old shard of glass out and I told the story last night that I was a man and I didn't want to go get stitches and then my 10 year old son was like, it's not because you were a man, it's because you're cheap. You don't want to pay for stitches. And I was like, That is actually the accurate story. So I take the piece of glass out. We clean it. Was one of those ones where you can see the fat in your hand coming out. It was pretty gnarly.

And so we cleaned it up and kind of pressed it together. And true story, I went in my garage. It's always funny when pastors say true story, like most of our other stories aren't true. But like

I go into my garage and I literally get a thing of Gorilla Glue and my mom holds it together and then we just basically doused this thing with Gorilla Glue

and it burned like no other for about two minutes. But man, the amazing part is there's no scars from it. So, shout out Gorilla Glue if you're ever in a bind and need some stitches.

You can use it. It'll hurt for a little bit but it's pretty effective and you're like, why are we talking about this in church? Right? Because it illustrates something that's kind of funny about you and I as humans.

I don't know if you've ever had a conversation with somebody about something that's controversial. Take politics, for example, and you have a conversation with somebody that's on the other side of a political

aisle than you. I've never watched a conversation like that happen where then somebody goes, you know what? I am so convinced that your side is correct,

that I am actually going to leave my political party and my political affiliations and I'm now going to join yours. Like it never happens. If anything, what ends up happening is we all walk away from those conversations

more divided and more entrenched in the conclusion that we already showed up to that meeting arrived at. There's something about us, even with silly things about whether or not a cup is plastic or glass. Once our mind is made up, almost anything, it is really difficult to get us to change that preconceived conclusion,

that pre drawn conclusion of what we believe. Now again, if it's politics or whether a cup is glass or plastic, it might not matter that much. But what happens when it comes to what we believe about God? How do you know that the preconceived notions that you and I have about God, that they're not wrong?

How can we be so sure that what we believe about God is really actually true?

And then more importantly, once we're faced with the reality that maybe we've come to a conclusion that isn't actually true and real, how do we have the humility and the wisdom to gently move from that to the truth of who God really is as revealed in scripture?

What we're going to see today in Acts 14 is really the birth of the church. This is where the movement of God goes beyond Jerusalem, beyond just where the Jews gathered and it goes to the rest of the world. And Paul and Barnabas are going to come up against the greatest opposition of reaching humans for the gospel.

And it's convincing them to change their already made up mind of who God is. Trying to get them to move from what they already believe to be true about God to the truth of who he really is. And I'm telling you today, it is not something that people struggled with 2,000 ago. It is the plight of humanity

to be willing to have humble conversations, to walk through the reality of allowing God to reveal to us who he is even when it stands in contradiction

to who we believe God to be based on how we've gotten there. What I wanna show you today is that how we define God when I ask you the question right now, when you think about God, what do you think of? Who do you believe God to be? Sitting in this room, there are hundreds of us,

most of us who have given our life to follow Jesus. But what I believe is even when it comes to the idea of Jesus, we're probably not all on the same page. We all have been formed our own understanding of God. And I'm telling you right now how we define God is without a doubt one of the most important things

about us. Here's why. The big idea I want to spend the next few moments trying to unpackage with us is that how we define God, that thing, it's not just an intellectual conversation because how we define God, it really defines us.

How you define God, who you believe him to be or not be, I promise you, it will impact how you live and who you are and how you raise your kids and what you do on this earth. I would argue that there is not a more important question that we can answer than who do you believe God to be.

The question that we're gonna have to face this morning collectively is what do we do if we've come to a conclusion of God that isn't true and real? Will we have the humility and wisdom to move from it to the truth of who God shows Himself

to be? If you're just joining us, Acts 14 again is right in the middle of the book of Acts where the Holy Spirit's been moving. The church is being birthed. We left off last week in Acts 10 where the Gentiles, people who are not direct descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are now welcomed into the family of God. And that's good news for us because most of us in here were not born Jews.

And the message goes to the Gentiles and Acts 10 ends with Barnabas and Paul meeting in a city called Antioch and they're basically commissioned by that church to now go, okay, you guys go and it's Paul and Barnabas'

first missionary journey And what they do is I wanna show you a map to kinda show you the journey because we're gonna jump from chapter 10 to 14 this morning but chapters eleven, twelve and thirteen record a lot of the same stuff where it talks about Paul and Barnabas meeting at Antioch. They sail over here to Cyprus. They walk into the church. They go to the temple. They tell the cultural Jews about Jesus and some people receive it, some people reject it. And oftentimes they're forced out of the city because people are going to kill them. They eventually go from Cyprus up here to Pamphylia and then eventually over to a region called Galatia.

And what we're going to see today in Acts 14 is it starts They start in Iconium and the same thing happens to there where they're forced out of the city because people want to kill them. And they're now in a city called Lystra. And Lystra is a city that is as pagan as they come. Okay? These are Greeks

who have grown up worshiping a pantheon of gods. They've most likely never heard of the God of the Old Testament. So Paul and Barnabas can't go in and start talking about the Old Testament and connecting the dots to Jesus. They basically start

at a blank slate. But what we're going to see is a bunch of people who've already made up their mind about God. And when confronted with the reality of who God really is, they are unwilling to move. Acts chapter 14, here's how it starts in verse eight. It says, Meanwhile,

they were at Lystra. Paul and Barnabas came upon a man with crippled feet. And he had been that way from birth so he had never walked. He was sitting and listening as Paul preached.

Looking straight at him, Paul realized he had faith to be healed. So Paul called to him in a loud voice and said, Stand up. And the man jumped to his feet and started walking. Then the crowd saw what Paul had done. They shouted in their local dialect, These men are gods in human form.

Notice what happens when Paul and Barnabas show up in Lystra. They do what they do in every city. They show up and they start preaching about the reality of Jesus.

And it's interesting to me what happens when the message of Jesus is preached. It is very much a line drawn in the sand type of moment. And I don't know what it is, but even still today culturally, the messaging of Jesus brings out both the best in humanity, but also sometimes the worst in humanity.

They're forced out of a city because people want to kill them over their belief that Jesus is the Messiah that the old testament has spoken about.

Jews can disagree with that, but why do they have to kill these guys? Because they disagree with them. Because it's forcing them to move off of their preconceived notion of who they believe God to be. And we would rather kill somebody than wrestle through some of those preconceived notions.

So Paul and Barnabas get to Lystra. They start preaching. And there's one man specifically that everybody has known. He's been crippled since he was born. And it gives us the caveat. Luke, the author of the book of Acts records that everybody, not only was he crippled from birth but nobody's ever seen him walk. Like this is not like a televangelist miracle that's been pre planned where they tell the guy, hey, when I get to this thing and I say you're healed, now you stand up. But we all knew the whole time he could walk. Like this guy has never walked in his life. And as the gospel is being proclaimed,

all of a sudden Paul notices something on this guy's face. And what somebody's face looks like that's ready to be healed, I don't know. But Paul noticed something. And he says to this man, stand up and be healed. And in a room full of pagans, they watch the supernatural happen.

And what do they do? They do the exact same thing you and I will be tempted to do today as well, to filter any spiritual experience, any supernatural experience through the lens of our spiritual understanding. Let me explain a little bit. The the people of Lystra, the city of Lystra, there's a a common

myth. There's a a of Lystra that is an old wives tale that has been passed down for generations by this point. There was a story that was told hundreds of years ago that in Lystra, the Greek gods Zeus and Hermes actually showed up as humans

and they walked amongst the people in Lystra and they showed up house to house and they asked to be taken in and to be taken care of for a few days, but nobody would take them in. And Zeus and Hermes were rejected at every house until they got to the fringes

and this older couple brought them in, took care of them for a few days to which Zeus and Hermes were so angry that they brought a flood that wiped out all the city and everybody and it was killed except for this old couple.

So the legend of Lystra goes that the gods at some point will walk among us and we have to be really cognizant of them being here. And when we're here, you have to understand that they need us and we have to respond to them. So they sit there, the people of Lystra today

having been told that legend their whole life, they now watch the supernatural happen because of the good news of the gospel. And they immediately filter it through the lens of how they've been told God is and who they've been told God is. And they immediately go, these guys must be gods. It's happening again.

This must be look at the very next verse. These must be, they said in verse 12, they decided that Barnabas was the Greek god Zeus and that Paul was Hermes since he was the chief speaker. They go, okay, Barnabas, the old guy with the gray beard, I get it. He's Zeus, the guy doing the talking, Hermes, the God of language.

That's Paul. He's the chief speaker. And they filter their religious moment, their spiritual moment through their understanding of God up until this point. And friends, it can be a really dangerous thing because what happens when you're wrong? What happens when what you've been told isn't correct?

What happens when your understanding of God isn't the reality of who God really is?

It's why it is so paramount for us to wrestle through some of these things and to go, okay, how have I arrived at my understanding of God? Because you and I will be tempted today to do the exact same thing and just filter through all of our spiritual experience through the lens of our understanding of God

even when that understanding is incorrect. And Paul and Barnabas become

worshipped as gods even though that was never their intent, never their goal. Look at the next verse. It says in verse 13, now the Temple Of Zeus was located just outside the town. So the priests of the temple and the crowd brought bowls and wreaths of flowers to the town and they prepared to offer sacrifices to the apostles.

Right? They do exactly what we do. When it's time to party, you go get some meat. Let's have a barbecue. It's time to have some fun. Right? Verse 14, but when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard what was being what was happening,

they tore their clothing in dismay and they ran out among the people shouting, friends, why are you doing this? We are merely human beings just like you. Paul and Barnabas with the strongest language that they could, they tear their clothing, which is a cultural representation of absolute rejection.

This is wrong. This is bad. Don't worship us. We are just humans like you. And it's funny because I think we read stories like this and we go, Oh man, it's so silly. Like how would a group of people go and worship a person instead of the God that's clearly behind the person? And then I look at our culture today

and I go, Man, have we really made much progress in two thousand years? The hundreds of years that we've had to read the scriptures, to search it and understand the reality of who God has revealed himself to be? Because as I look at our culture, I go, man, we still worship people the same way they were then.

We might not bow and call them gods, but look at it, right? Like every single one of us sitting here, we all know that Taylor Swift was at a Kansas City Chiefs football game this week, right? Why? Because our culture is obsessed with celebrities.

Our culture is obsessed with people who have a gift that's been given to them by God. But instead of having it be something that lets us find and search out the gift giver behind the gift, we just worship the gift. And we unintentionally elevate people to a position higher than they should ever be.

Why do you think celebrities get so weird and it destroys so many of them because we weren't meant to be worshiped? This poor girl, Taylor Swift, I don't have anything against her. I think she's incredibly talented,

but I do think it's heartbreaking that she has to be brought to a football game in like a popcorn box. You know what I mean? Like they're poor they're wheeling this poor girl in and out of boxes because if they don't, there are so many people just itching to see her, to touch her, to interact with her, to be in her presence because there's something different about her

when the truth is is that Taylor Swift is just a human like us. Why do we have this propensity to make everyone a celebrity? Because I'm telling you inside of all of us was placed a desire from God to worship him. We were built to worship, the Bible says.

And if we don't know the proper channels to channel that worship through, we will unintentionally do the exact same thing and we will just worship the people who have gifts instead of finding the one who gives the good gifts.

It's interesting to me that the bible is very clear that we are not to have any idols and that God is supposed to be the only one that we worship. Yet in our culture, one of the most popular shows is American Idol, right? Like, no, we're not supposed to have idols, not create new ones. Right?

And I don't think that it's a conscious thing and that we go, you know what? I'm worshiping at the altar of Taylor Swift. But I wonder if we spend as much time memorizing the scriptures and we spend as much money going after the things of God as we do going after the concerts of Taylor Swift.

And I say this as somebody whose 13 year old is a self identified Swifty who has nothing but Taylor Swift albums all over her house and is trying to go to every concert that she has. I'm like, worship Jesus, not Taylor Swift. Okay? I don't know what it is, but there's this thing in us

that just wants to elevate people beyond what they're supposed to be. Paul and Barnabas says, guys, we're just humans. We're just people like you. But what will happen is that God will do the supernatural through us because of how good he is. But don't don't mistake the gifts that God produces through our lives

as we being the ones to worship. Look how it continues. Paul and Barnabas say, We've come to bring you good news. You should turn away from these worthless things and turn to the living God who made heaven and earth, the seas and everything in them. He said, Here's the good news.

You've built your life on a bunch of worthless things. I don't know if that's that good of news. He says, stop worshiping these worthless things that you've built your life on.

I don't know if you guys have seen the the the museum that's in Nashville that is to Johnny Cash. It's a really incredible thing. If you ever get an opportunity to go, I would encourage you to go. Johnny Cash did some amazing things as a recording artist.

The guy was a celebrity in our culture for over fifty years. And if you go through his museum, the very last room you'll enter into is him sitting with a guitar singing that song that he wrote called I think it's called Dust or, Hurt or something like that. And it's the song where he talks about all of this is this empire of dirt, right? As he looks as an old man, he looks back and he goes, everything that I've built achieved more than us will ever achieve collectively in this room probably.

And he says, And all I did on this earth was build an empire of dirt. Don't spend your whole life building an empire of dirt to get to the end and then realize, man, I wasted my time while I was here.

Paul and Barnabas says, stop wasting your life worshiping these worthless gods that can't do anything and instead turn to the one true God, the one who's made you, the one who has a plan and a purpose for your life. Continues in verse 16, he says, in the past,

he permitted all the nations to go their own ways, but he never left them without evidence of himself and his goodness. For instance, when he sends you rain and good crops and he gives you food and joyful hearts, notice what Paul and Barnabas do, how they start reaching a group of pagans.

Again, they can't go through the old testament and show how Jesus fulfilled the prophecies because they don't understand the old testament. They don't understand the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So they tell them, look around you. Look at the world that you live in.

God has left his breadcrumbs to himself all throughout his creation. And we now today, we have the book of Romans that explicitly tells us that God has revealed himself in creation. He's telling them, look at all of this.

There's no way that we're just here randomly based on all of this without any intelligent design behind it. Like think for a second, We exist in this thing called space, which is basically nothingness. And in that nothingness, there's a little rock that all of us live on that we call earth.

And now here's what's crazy about that thing called earth is it is right now traveling at thousands of miles an hour and it hovers perfectly. It orbits around

basically this thing that should terrify us. This big nuclear fusion bomb that we call the sun that we sing songs to and we talk about like its beauty when the truth is, is it's terrifying and more powerful than anything that we can comprehend. And somehow the thing that you would think would bring death brings life.

And all of this just happens in perfect harmony. If we were a degrees one way or another, if we were a foot closer or further away, what is held in perfect harmony would just go to complete chaos. And you think that's random. He says, God has left himself clues to who he is all around. You just have to look for him.

But the scary part is, is it doesn't matter what Paul and Barnabas say. Because these people have already made up their mind of how they define God and who they believe them to be. They say, Stop talking. You're Zeus. You're Hermes. We don't need any more information.

Look at the very next verse. It says, It doesn't matter what they say. It says in verse 18, But even with these words, Paul and Barnabas could scarcely restrain the people from sacrificing to them. It didn't matter what Paul and Barnabas said.

Sometimes getting people to move off of their preconceived notions of who they believe God to be to the truth of who he's revealed himself to be in scripture can be an impossible task for humans.

It is one that we have to just leave to the holy spirit. It doesn't matter what they say. They just keep worshipping them. They keep becoming convinced of what they already showed up convinced of. And what happens often to you and I, if we're not careful, is we enter into the cycle of confirmation bias.

Where we've already arrived at a conclusion then what we do is we look for information and that information confirms it and we see it through the lens of wanting it to confirm it. So we just see everything with confirmation bias.

And if it doesn't fill into, it doesn't fit into our preconceived notion, then we just reject it. We go, I don't know. I just push it out of the way.

And the danger is is it's not just for people out there. It's not just for non Christians that do this. It's not just for people who don't follow God and who don't find themselves in a church on Sunday that are tempted to do this. Because look at the very next verse.

It says, then some Jews, verse 19, arrived from Antioch in Iconium and they won the crowds to their side. They stoned Paul and dragged him out of the town thinking that he was dead. Some Jews, some chosen people, followers of God, devoted followers of God, have now come hundreds of miles

from the cities that they first encountered Paul and Barnabas. The cities they come from are some of the cities they stop at in their missionary journey on their way to Lystra.

They are so angry that Paul and Barnabas would have the audacity to say that Jesus is the Messiah. They are so convinced that they're wrong that they now walk hundreds of miles to Lystra to tell the people these men are liars. And in a moment, the crowd goes from worshiping Paul and Barnabas as gods to demonizing

them to the point that they're willing to kill them. Why? Because when our preconceived notion of God is challenged, it's a really, really difficult thing to wrestle through. And sometimes, sometimes it's just easier to remove the obstacle, to remove the obstruction, to remove the agitator

so that we can settle back into what we've already agreed we believe is true. The Jews and the Gentiles do it. But they're both faced with the same thing that maybe just maybe how you've come to arrive at your understanding of God isn't actually who God has revealed himself to be.

And it's interesting to me that they would stone him and kill him. There's some theologians who actually believe that Paul in this moment actually dies. He's drug out of the city. They at least think that he's dead. The believers come around him again. They pray. He goes back in the city and this is the point that he has to leave Lystra.

And this is one of those stories that just makes you scratch your head and go, first of all, what does any of this have to do with today? How does this impact how we live today? I think you and I haven't made that much progress

in how we've come to understand who God is as well. There's a couple of things that I know that I've been saying this whole time. Every single one of you in this room,

you have an image of who you believe God to be. You have some idea of who you think God is. Every single one of us. And this is now where I'll bring out my emotional support animal that some of you were like, when were you gonna get to this big weird gold thing out here? This is the moment. Okay?

This is this was our brilliant idea in sermon programming this week. This is an inflatable cow from Amazon that we have spray painted gold. So you're welcome. Same day delivery. Thank you, Amazon. All of us in this room have some image of God that we've arrived at.

Some picture that we think of when we think of God. Now arguably, most of us are probably not thinking of a golden calf.

But if you read the old testament throughout the scriptures, the people of God would often substitute worshiping the one true God that lives with them, that would show up and speak to them. Instead of worshiping God, they would build something like this

to worship instead of God because all of us want to form something that we can understand God with. And the danger of forming an image of God in our mind is because we are finite beings with a limited amount of understanding, it's really difficult to encapsulate

the totality of who God is in our minds and the truth is that oftentimes a lot of us will form an image of God that's not actually correct. I want you to write this down if you're taking notes. It's easy to have the wrong image of God.

It's really easy for us to sit here today and have the wrong image of God. I would say it's actually easy for us to sit in church and what a lot of times what happens, what we do in America is we take this idea of God, this concept of God that we've made up, And then what we do is we attach the name

of Jesus to it and we just Jesusify our preconceived notion of God. But the truth is, is if I forced you to flesh out what you believe and who you believe Jesus to be, maybe just maybe you would explain a Jesus that doesn't actually exist in the Bible.

Just because you use the name of Jesus for your understanding of God doesn't mean your understanding of God is correct. Friends, there are churches in our area that claim to follow Jesus, but when you scratch the surface, when you look behind the curtain, the version of Jesus that they explain is fundamentally,

paramountly different than the Jesus as revealed in scripture. He can't be both creator, which is what the Bible says that he is. He can't be eternal. He can't be always existent and also have been created by heavenly father. He can't also be the brother of Satan. One is true and one is not, but they use the same name.

Just because you use the name of Jesus doesn't mean that it's correct. And we have to be really careful when it comes to this understanding of how we view God and how we build these idols in our minds. This is why God was so adamant with the people of God in the old testament.

Do not build something like this to try to worship to understand me because you can't do it. Look at Leviticus chapter 19. It says, Don't put your trust in idols or make metal images of God for yourself. I am the Lord your God.

Why was God so adamantly opposed to the people of God trying to reduce him to an idol to worship? Because you and I can't do it. You cannot right now. I cannot right now articulate all of who God is because God is not somebody that I'm writing into my story. You and I have been written into God's story,

but He's the author of the story. He's creator. He's God. He's outside of our understanding. The Bible tells us that only the heavens can begin to even attempt to declare the goodness and the glory of who God is. You wanna know what the scriptures say about who God is? Look at Isaiah chapter 66.

It says, this is what the Lord says. Heaven is my throne. The earth is my footstool. Think about that. You wanna know who God is? He's a God that's so big and vast and different and other than us that he looks at earth and goes, Yeah, that's like a footstool. I rest my feet on that little tiny thing

that is bigger than anything we can understand. He says, could you build me a temple as good as that? Could you build me such a resting place? Look at how it continues in verse two. My hands have made both heaven and earth and they and everything in them are mine.

Do not try to just understand God through your limited experiences. You won't be able to do it. Here's how I believe that all of us in this room have arrived at where we sit today when it comes to how we answer the question, who do you believe God to be? I think there's some things that have informed

how we've gotten there. Here's the first one I want you to see. This is how you and I develop the image of God. Here's how we've come to our belief of God. How we were raised will speak really powerfully into our understanding of God.

I got the privilege of sitting with a guy this week in our churches on our elder board that was raised a cultural Jew. That will drastically impact how you view God. For him to give his life to Jesus, he felt like was a rejection of his Jewish faith.

I was raised Catholic. That informs how I view God. If you were raised Mormon, that will inform how you view God. If you were raised in a secular home with single parents, if you were raised with lesbian moms, like all of those things will shape and form how you view God, but it doesn't mean that it's true and it doesn't mean that it's accurate.

Here's the other part that gets a little bit more sinister. We develop an image of God and our understanding of him based on things that we've heard. We listen to pastors. We listen to culture. We listen to social media. We listen to our friends and we begin to inform those things sometimes ignorantly

into our understanding of God. And I want to prove it to you. Help me finish this sentence. Okay? You got to be loud. I know you're gonna be able to do it. We've heard a statement before that's often attributed as scripture. It says, God helps those who help themselves.

Right? You know, they asked a group of Christians if that was a verse taken from the Bible and over 80% of them said, yes, it's direct quote from scripture. How could we as a room all know and repeat that sentence? Because it's what we've heard. We go, yeah, that makes sense. God helps those who help themselves.

Then you read the Bible and the Bible says, no, no, God doesn't help those who help themselves. God helps everybody. It says that the sun rises on the evil and the non evil. The rain falls on the just and unjust. God helps all people.

But what happens is when we hear something that we go, that makes sense. I like that. We grab it and we mold it into our image of who we believe God to be. Whether it's accurate or not, it's up for interpretation. I like it.

And this is where it starts to get even more sinister when our understanding of God becomes formed on who and how we want God to be. I believe that a loving God wouldn't do X. There's no way that a loving God would allow this to happen.

And what happens is sometimes we come to a conclusion of who we believe God to be that's based solely on how we feel and what we believe. And friends, there are times that we just have to come to the reality and understanding that God is God and we are not.

And there are things that happen in this world that we will never be able to fully articulate. There are times people ask me questions like I'm the author of all things, truth and knowledge. And I just go, I've gotten comfortable in not knowing certain things and not completely having my mind wrapped around who God is

because he's other than us. He's outside of us. He's bigger than us. But I trust that God is good. And we have to be really careful not to go, this is who I hope God is, who I want God to be and begin to inform that and use that as something to shape our view of God. This is how we say

things like, well, I just don't think God would give me these feelings if I then can't act on them. Based on what? How do you get there biblically? Because the scriptures tell us that we're actually supposed to wage war with our flesh, that our heart is actually above all things deceitful

and that how you feel isn't always true and real and it will and it can change. So don't worship at the altar of your feelings. Worship at the altar of something that's true and immutable, unchangeable. Not the changing movements of how you feel today that will be different than tomorrow.

Friends, we gotta be really careful to not just begin to put onto God who we hope and how we believe that he's supposed to be. Because what we'll end up doing is we'll have an image and an idea of Jesus that is nothing actually like he is when he reveals himself in scripture. Why is this so dangerous for us?

Paul warns us of taking attributes and attributing them to God that aren't real. This is what happens in Romans. Paul tells us this whole idea of attributing things to God that aren't true. He says, yes, the people, they knew God but they wouldn't worship Him as God or even give him thanks.

They began to think up foolish ideas of what God was like. They made up their own mind of who Jesus was. They made up their own mind of this is who I believe God to be. And what is the result? The result is their minds became dark and confused. You wanna know why our culture is where it is today?

I think sometimes it's because the church, we have actually taken what we hope God to be like. And we've wrapped that into who we've presented to the world as Jesus when the truth is that's not who Jesus is revealed in scripture. And then we present that to the world and we can go, I hope you take it.

And it seems like there's utter rejection of all of it. Friends, we have to allow God to speak and reveal who he is to us, not come to him in our preconceived notions and hope that that's what God is like. He says this is how a world becomes really dark and confused.

Here's the like, so what? What's the practical? How do we have the proper? If we were to wipe clean all of our images, all of our understanding of God, how do we start afresh and go, okay, what does a proper image of God look like? How do we take a God that seems so distant, so far away, that is faceless? How do we begin to,

see him for who he is? This is the beauty of why the person of Jesus is so important. Why the scriptures that record his life are so paramount to our faith because only Jesus is the exact image of God. Don't miss this. What happens in the person of Jesus is

becomes knowable. The unseeable becomes seeable. The untouchable becomes touchable. The unreachable becomes reachable in the person of Jesus. Only Jesus is the image of God. Look at what Paul says in Colossians chapter one. He says, The Christ, he is the visible image of the invisible God. He existed before anything.

He was not created. He was created in supreme over all creation. Look at verse 19. He says, for God in all of his fullness was pleased to live in Christ. If you wanna know who God is, get to know Jesus. If you want to be personal with God, become personal with the person of Jesus. But this is important.

It's not Jesus as you've come to understand him. It's not Jesus as pastors have said that he is.

There should even be a healthy level of skepticism that you walk into church with and go, look, I'm not going to just blindly listen to what somebody says. I'm going to take it and I'm going to analyze it through the lens and the filter of scripture. And if it aligns with that, awesome. I'm in. But if not,

I'm gonna go with scripture. I'm gonna go with the word of God because otherwise what we do is we take our idea of Jesus and we go, that's who Jesus is. But friends, the only way that we can really come to a healthy understanding of allowing God to be the exact image of Jesus is through the lens and filter of the bible.

I want you to know that all of scripture, all 66 books, as you sit and read it, it's not the old testament that was before Jesus. It's all a foreshadowing

of Jesus. It's all, an inkling of who this messiah is going to be. As you read the old testament, see these stories of Esther and the kinsman redeemer. It had nothing to do with Esther. It was a foreshadowing of Jesus being our kinsman redeemer that all of the Bible points to the majesty and the glory of our king in Jesus.

But we have to allow the scriptures to show us who he is. Not culture. Not society. Not social media. Here's what Hebrews

chapter one says about Jesus. It says, Long ago, God spoke many times and in many ways to our ancestors through the prophets. And now in these final days that we live, friends, he has spoken to us through his son. The son radiates God's own glory and expresses the very character of God.

Look what Paul says in second Corinthians chapter four. This is where this gets really interesting. It says that Satan, who is the God of this world, he's blinded the minds of those who don't believe.

They are unable to see the glorious light of the good news. They don't understand this message about the glory of Jesus Christ who is the exact likeness of God. Why is it so hard to see the exact likeness of Jesus? Because the enemy, Satan, has blinded our minds. That's a really scary verse

that says that maybe just maybe the lack of faith, it's much more than just a lack of a belief in some higher power. That a lack of faith is actually evidence of darkness in this world. That we're not in an intellectual

debate about whether the idea of a holy power or a higher power exists or not, that we're in a spiritual battle between light and darkness. This is why Jesus in Matthew chapter eight told his disciples, you're either with me and fighting for me or you're against me.

There is no neutral ground where we go, I like a little bit of this Jesus. I like these parts. I just don't like these parts. It's like, no, you're either in light or you're in darkness.

But Jesus is the image of God. He is the fullness of God. If you wanna know God, know Jesus. But friends, don't miss this next part. If you write nothing else down, write this. Only scripture reveals the exact nature of Jesus.

If you want to have a proper understanding of God, you can do it. You can find it in the person of Jesus as explicitly revealed in the Bible and nothing else. The Bible is complete. We don't need new revelation. We don't need new prophecies.

If somebody says something that is against what scripture says, we are called to reject it and to push back against it. We now have 2,000 or fifteen hundred years of people interpreting the Bible. We have the church orthodoxy that we can align to. That we know the nature of who Jesus is because of his holy revealed word.

The question then becomes, why don't we read it? Why at a time where access to the bible is higher than it's ever been in the history of the world is bible literacy at the lowest it's ever been?

Because the truth is, is as you read scripture, it will force you to come to grips with some of the things that are in your life.

The reason that we don't fight back as hard about other things that we disagree with as we do with the Bible is because the Bible actually pierces our heart and it challenges the way that we live. It says that you and I, the sin that's in us, it is the problem that plagues humanity.

But Jesus has made a way to deal with that.

I want to show you what scriptures say about the word of God and how he connects the word of God to the person of Jesus. And again, I wish I had six hours to walk through all of this with us, but here's what it says in John one. Last couple of verses, I'll get you out of here. It says, in the beginning, the word already existed.

The word was with God and the word was God. He existed in the beginning with God. God created everything through him and nothing was created except through him. The word gave life to everything that was created and his life brought light to everyone.

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness can never extinguish it. Here's what Hebrews four says will happen to you and I as we sit with this word of God and allow it to transform us. It says the word of God, it is alive and powerful. It is sharper than the sharpest two edged sword. It will cut between soul and spirit, joint and marrow. It exposes our innermost thoughts and

desires. Friends, I believe that in this room, all of us have places where we've arrived at a definition of God that isn't completely accurate. My so what, my kind of take home for this thing is for all of us to sit and wrestle with what I again, I know is a big question and a big concept of how do we define God.

But I would argue that there's not a more important question that we could answer. In how we answer that question, it will begin to define us. It will begin to define how we live and how we reach this world. And the world right now is desperate for the church to remember who we are.

Who the Jesus as revealed in scripture is. And I'm telling you, as you search the word of God, as you spend time in prayer with him, God will do things in your heart and in your life that you could never imagine.

He's more glorious than we realize, friends. My hope and my prayers that you would have community to wrestle through some of these big questions

with. But all of us in certain areas, I promise you, with humility, we can see the places that we've arrived at a definition of God that isn't true. Let's have the courage to walk through those. So, Father, I ask, God, right right

now in the power of the Holy Spirit, that God, you would even, in this moment, reveal to us, speak to us and show us the things where our our cultural upbringing, our family, our heritage, our ideas, how those things have informed who we believe you to be.

And God, would we start with almost a blank slate and allow you to speak to us and show us who you are as revealed in scripture? God, would we not be the same people who hear the the good news that's available to them through Jesus

and just filter it through our already preconceived notion of who you are? Because God, if we do that, we'll miss you. But God, I know that scriptures are clear that if we knock, you'll open. If we seek you, we will find you. You are not a mystery. God, you want to reveal yourself to us.

So God, this week, would you speak to our hearts to reveal us, reveal to us who you really actually are. It is in the mighty name of Jesus all God's people said. Amen and amen. Thanks

for joining us online this weekend. Let us know if we can help you in any way. Make sure to follow us on social media and connect with us on the We Are Rock Point app for prayer and everything happening here at Rock Point.