Before we get started.. I am really excited about our upcoming STAND UP SUNDAY.. We’ve taken a few years off our partnership cycle, and we are BACK ON AGAIN in 2022!
Partnership is very different from church membership. It is a concrete, one-year investment into building your house! Nobody (except church elders) are permanent partners… Everybody re-partners every year, as they decide to continue to make this important investment. Lots more details right here:
Of course, we make a really big deal of all of this on Stand Up Sunday, which is coming up really soon. All lifegroups will have their own custom display tables, and there WILL be prizes! Do you have your plan ready? Maybe your group should talk about your plan right now!
Lifegroup Discussion
Have you ever skipped out on a class, an article, or a book because you perceived it to be “over your head?”
Steve Jobs, famously said: “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.“
Do you agree with this statement? Do you think the average person (me and you) has the intellectual capacity beyond what we typically use?
Jesus famously quoted the Old Testament when he was asked to summarize all the teachings of the Law:
‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment.
-Jesus, Matthew 22:37-38 NLT
On Sunday, we broke this command down to just one aspect… Loving God with all your mind, and I talked about the mind as the critical component in building your house.
How are we doing on cultivating our mind these days?
This recent study shows that, as our culture shifts, our language is rapidly shifting away from intellectual terms to more emotional terms. In other words, our language is sort of being “dumbed down.”
Here is an interesting quote about this very phenomenon, written before the study.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to recognize that our entire culture is in trouble. We are staring down the barrel of a loaded gun, and we can no longer afford to act like it’s loaded with blanks. The guidance counselor at a public high school near my home confessed to a parents’ group that the teenagers who have attended the school during the last ten years are the most dysfunctional, illiterate group he has witnessed in close to forty years at the same school. Our society has replaced heroes with celebrities, the quest for a well-informed character with the search for flat abs, substance and depth with image and personality. In the political process, the makeup man is more important than the speech writer, and we approach the voting booth, not on the basis of a well-developed philosophy of what the state should be, but with a heart full of images, emotions, and slogans all packed into thirty-second sound bites. The mind-numbing, irrational tripe that fills TV talk shows is digested by millions of bored, lonely Americans hungry for that sort of stuff. What is going on here? What has happened to us?
– Love Your God With All Your Mind: The Role of Reason In The Life of the Soul, J.P. Moreland
This isn’t just the world in general, actually Moreland cites the rise of Christian “anti-intellectualism” in his book. He writes that the Puritans, migrating to the New World from England were known for their intellectual rigor, but that for the last 100 years Christianity has seen a major shift in the other direction.
Have you seen this? Do you think it is true?
What about us, and feeling like a lot of intellectual material is “over our heads?”
Is that the attitude we should have? Some argue FOR Christian anti-intellectualism, citing verses that might seem to support it…
Don’t let anyone capture you with empty philosophies and high-sounding nonsense that come from human thinking and from the spiritual powers of this world, rather than from Christ.
Colossians 2:8 NLT
Do you think this verse is encouraging turning off your brain, and just trusting Jesus blindly? Why or why not?
Jesus tells a parable about different kinds of soils. You know this story. The Word of God is sown, but three out of four fail to let the seed grow to produce fruit. Why? We get a little glimpse into the problem with the hard soil on the footpath:
The seed that fell on the footpath represents those who hear the message about the Kingdom and don’t understand it. Then the evil one comes and snatches away the seed that was planted in their hearts.
Matthew 13:19 NLT
Jesus focuses in on a lack of understanding. A lack of intellectual capacity.
He summarizes how to have success:
The seed that fell on good soil represents those who truly hear and understand God’s word and produce a harvest of thirty, sixty, or even a hundred times as much as had been planted!”
Matthew 13:23 NLT
In view of this, what should our response be? How should we prioritize cultivation of our intellect? How does that relate to loving God with all our mind?
(let me just invite you to the Know God Crash Course… It is a great head-start on letting that seed grow in you. Sure, it already started, but you can always join in with us this coming week!)