[00:00:03] Speaker A: Welcome to the Erickson Covenant Podcast. We're so glad that you've joined us today.
We confess that we don't have all the answers, but as a community, we seek to find and follow Jesus and to discover daily the life he has always wanted for us.
We hope this message will be encouraging and will inspire you to take the next steps on your spiritual journey.
If we can help you in any way, please connect with us. The easiest way is through our
[email protected] let's get started.
[00:00:39] Speaker B: Well, welcome to our teaching series Catchphrase Conundrums, where we are decoding four common
[00:00:47] Speaker C: cultural catchphrases in order to discern what's
[00:00:50] Speaker B: true and what's not.
We're doing this so we can better understand a lot of the cultural messaging that we receive these days, as well as better engage others with the good news.
Last week we started with personal identity and the catchphrase conundrum.
[00:01:07] Speaker C: You be you.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Were you here for that?
[00:01:16] Speaker C: And we decoded what was amazingly true about that catchphrase, that God created you to be your unique, one of a kind self, reflective of his glory and grace.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: No one else can fit your design.
[00:01:31] Speaker C: You need to be the you that
[00:01:32] Speaker B: God created you to be.
And the conundrum, of course, is that we're not perfect the way we are. Sadly, as sinful, broken people, we need
[00:01:43] Speaker C: God to rescue us from our sins so that we can actually become the
[00:01:47] Speaker B: truest versions of ourselves in Christ. And if you missed it, I encourage you to catch up on the platforms YouTube and Apple Podcasts and Spotify and our website, wherever you want to find it, because these series are building on
[00:02:00] Speaker C: each other well onto our next catchphrase. Follow your heart.
[00:02:04] Speaker B: Have you heard this one?
Follow your heart.
It pops up in a variety of ways. Maybe follow your heart, maybe go with your gut, follow your feelings, listen to your heart.
[00:02:15] Speaker C: But however it works out, it boils down to this.
[00:02:18] Speaker B: You need to do what feels right for you.
[00:02:23] Speaker C: So what feels right for you?
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Well, let me ask this. Have you ever done something dumb? Following your heart.
Ha ha.
[00:02:31] Speaker C: I bet you have.
[00:02:33] Speaker B: I bet you have. I have.
I one time followed my heart and I went hang gliding tied to the back of a pickup truck driven by a bunch of whooping college boys.
I followed my heart that day.
Or maybe my guts. My guts followed me, I'll tell you.
First in a quick ascent, then a
[00:02:59] Speaker C: swoop to the left and then a sharp bank to the right and then hard piled right into the hayfield.
[00:03:06] Speaker B: I wish I hadn't followed my heart that day.
But have you ever done something smart, following your heart?
I'm willing to bet you have, too.
[00:03:19] Speaker C: Maybe there's just. You can think of times where it just felt right.
You just knew you were compelled to do it, this thing you knew in your guts to be true, and you're glad you did afterwards. And I can think of times when I followed my heart and I overcame my fears and I maybe showed up in a situation I wasn't sure I was going to be welcome in. And I found that God was there and this was the right thing to do. And I'm so glad I followed my
[00:03:43] Speaker B: heart on that day.
[00:03:46] Speaker C: Because we all get these gut feelings
[00:03:47] Speaker B: right about what's right, about what's wrong,
[00:03:50] Speaker C: what's good, what's bad, what's false, what's true, what we should do or not do, say or not say, believe or not believe. And those gut feelings can be very good.
They provide key information and compelling motivation to do the right thing or at times, to not do the wrong thing.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: But not always.
[00:04:11] Speaker C: Not always.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: Sometimes our guts can lead us astray.
[00:04:16] Speaker C: Sometimes we're convinced that something is right and true.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: And let's be honest, hey, it's wrong and stupid.
Hindsight being 2020 and all, as we
[00:04:26] Speaker C: read in the Book of Proverbs, there is a way that seems right to
[00:04:29] Speaker B: a man, but its end is the way of death.
[00:04:34] Speaker C: Our inner feelings can be guided by. By the Holy Spirit. And they can be beguiled by pride
[00:04:42] Speaker B: and delusion and sin.
But we live in a world that
[00:04:47] Speaker C: tells us every day, follow our hearts.
The question I want to ask is, on what day?
And how do I know today's the day when my feelings are accurate?
[00:04:59] Speaker B: What if it's the day when they're?
[00:05:03] Speaker C: How do I know if my inner compass is God's voice or just my will?
How much authority do I grant to my inner psychological self? Considering how prone humans are to self deception,
[00:05:19] Speaker B: can you feel the conundrum?
It's there.
We do have this inner sense of right and wrong.
[00:05:25] Speaker C: We do have gut instincts that we should follow. We do need to listen to the inner voice, that personal knower, the nudging of the Holy Spirit upon our spirit. We need to follow our hearts.
And yet we can be so very wrong, so profoundly mistaken, so deeply deceived, that making decisions based on our inner feelings can and will and do lead us and others into dehumanizing destruction.
We need to follow our hearts.
[00:05:55] Speaker B: It's a conundrum.
[00:05:58] Speaker C: And what makes Follow youw Heart Such a cultural conundrum is that we now live in a world where our inner psychological states have been granted ultimate authority
[00:06:08] Speaker B: over our identity and our actions.
[00:06:12] Speaker C: What we feel determines what is good.
Our inner authentic selves are the most real thing about us, the most real thing going on. And they have to be given outer expression because personal authenticity is paramount.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: And inauthenticity, oh, no.
[00:06:32] Speaker C: I mean, denying yourself in any way, denying who you might truly be, as
[00:06:38] Speaker B: at least determined by how you feel inside on that day, that's the most egregious contemporary sin.
I don't know if you've seen it, but I've seen people make terrible decisions in an attempt to be their authentic selves.
Well, at the risk, and I'm going
[00:06:55] Speaker C: to risk it, of going too far
[00:06:57] Speaker B: into the weeds this morning, I'd like to drill down a little further on this to help us engage and discern
[00:07:05] Speaker C: our cultural moment so that we can actually decode more of the cultural messages that we receive, in particular about our
[00:07:13] Speaker B: inner feelings, our inner psychological states.
[00:07:16] Speaker C: It's widely accepted and culturally reinforced that the primary way may be the only way to determine what is good, what's bad, what's best for you.
[00:07:24] Speaker B: What's bad for you is found within you, not somewhere outside external rules, outside
[00:07:31] Speaker C: regulations, traditions or teachings, any sense of God's law or a moral order that exists outside of us. That sense of higher authority has largely
[00:07:42] Speaker B: faded from contemporary society.
[00:07:45] Speaker C: And as a result, we're left to figure out what's right and what's wrong on our own.
Because of that, many people now believe
[00:07:54] Speaker B: that the outer world, whether that be institutions, whether that be the way things
[00:08:02] Speaker C: are said, whether that be bodies, whether that be churches. The outside world must conform to my inner desires. It needs to bend to my authentic
[00:08:13] Speaker B: self, not the other way around.
[00:08:15] Speaker C: Carl Truman puts it this way. The modern self assumes the authority of inner feelings and sees authenticity as defined by the ability to give social expression to the same.
And this represents a massive societal shift. And it's the world we now live
[00:08:34] Speaker B: in, where the only way to determine what is right is to go with your gut, to express your authentic self, to obey your inner feelings.
[00:08:43] Speaker C: And so today's catchphrase, Follow youw Heart is more than just a cute saying.
[00:08:49] Speaker B: It represents a huge shift in society.
Carl Truman, he's this English historian, theologian I've been learning from.
[00:08:59] Speaker C: He goes on to help us discern
[00:09:01] Speaker B: what he calls this strange new world that we live in.
It's this world that no longer roots
[00:09:06] Speaker C: what's right and Wrong anything outside of ourselves.
And that means rather than rooting
[00:09:14] Speaker A: human
[00:09:15] Speaker C: identity in action in the fact that we're created in the image of God, which we explored at length last week.
[00:09:20] Speaker B: And then we're going to be held
[00:09:21] Speaker C: accountable to God for how we have lived as his images in the strange new world we live in now.
It elevates the psycho, what Carl Truman calls the psychologized, sexualized, politicized self as the truly fulfilled human person and the only one who gets to determine who
[00:09:42] Speaker B: what is truly good.
And this is actually new historically.
This is not the way it's always been.
[00:09:47] Speaker C: It's not the way humans have understood themselves.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: Most people in history have not thought this way about themselves or about the world.
Well, how did we get here?
[00:09:58] Speaker C: Through a review of some key social developments over the last 300 years, Carl Truman traces how the human self first became psychologized through the influence of Romantic
[00:10:11] Speaker B: writers like Rousseau and others.
[00:10:14] Speaker C: So much so that inner feelings and personal expression becomes the highest order of human fulfillment.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: That's what it means to be a
[00:10:23] Speaker C: fully realized human being, is that you
[00:10:25] Speaker B: express your inner self.
[00:10:28] Speaker C: And this is, of course, the world we live in. It's just the way things are. We accept that now each one of us holds high. We hold it high, the value of the inner life of the human person, the importance that each one express who they are.
And hear me clearly, there's good value in there. We should hold some of that high.
[00:10:49] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:10:49] Speaker C: It's not as though it's all bad.
We're thankful for many aspects of this. But what's important to understand is that in this romantic era, there's a seismic shift in where real authority lies.
A seismic shift away from God, who is above us and beyond us, to
[00:11:06] Speaker B: our gut, personal, inner me.
[00:11:10] Speaker C: A shift away from what is ordained and external and unchanging to what is
[00:11:15] Speaker B: imagined and innate and inside.
[00:11:18] Speaker C: And that shift in authority to the inner life worked its way out in how we understand life.
[00:11:24] Speaker B: And it became just the way things are.
[00:11:27] Speaker C: And every one of us grew up
[00:11:28] Speaker B: swimming in these cultural waters, assuming much of what we inherited.
[00:11:35] Speaker C: Well, based on that new way of
[00:11:37] Speaker B: understanding the psychologized self, with inner feelings as the central determiner of what's real, what's right.
[00:11:44] Speaker C: Truman then shows how psychology then became
[00:11:47] Speaker B: sexualized primarily through the influence of Sigmund Freud, but others as well.
[00:11:52] Speaker C: And even though much of Freud's work has been disregarded, the idea that sexuality is central to selfhood, that sexual repression is all bad, that in order to be fully human, we must Express our authentic sexual selves. That idea reigns utterly supreme in our world.
[00:12:11] Speaker B: Have you seen that?
[00:12:13] Speaker C: It's difficult to imagine our culture without this bedrock assumption.
Psychologized self has become so thoroughly sexualized that people demand actually to be identified as sexualized selves before we actually know anything else about them.
Framing a sexualized identity that has little to do with relationships or history or family or vocation or personality or procreation,
[00:12:37] Speaker B: not even sometimes sexual activity itself.
[00:12:41] Speaker C: The final turn that Truman then explores
[00:12:43] Speaker B: is how the sexual self then became politicized.
Due to thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse and as well as, of course, Marxist ideology. We now live in a world where
[00:12:54] Speaker C: being your authentic self isn't just bound
[00:12:57] Speaker B: up with sexual identity.
[00:13:00] Speaker C: It's front and center, and it's placed on society as a whole and the state in particular to support and celebrate
[00:13:07] Speaker B: and penalize around it.
[00:13:10] Speaker C: The psychologized sexualized self has been so politicized that it's deemed unacceptable for someone to just simply tolerate somebody else's sexual behaviors or maybe just support all the broad protections that people are given under the law.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: That is not deemed good enough.
[00:13:27] Speaker C: We must now actively affirm, promote, and actually center sexual identities or face censure,
[00:13:35] Speaker B: condemnation, and even cancellation.
The fail to promote or worse, to
[00:13:40] Speaker C: deny the centrality of the sexualized politicized self or to challenge certain practices or identities as being outside of God's creation intent, outside of his design for the human image bearer. That is considered a harmful existential denial
[00:13:59] Speaker B: of who people actually are at their very essence.
It threatens their personhood. It's considered violence upon their very being.
The sexual self has been thoroughly politicized. Detractors beware.
[00:14:15] Speaker C: Well, Carl helpfully traces the cultural shifts here so that we can better understand what where we are today, why the things are happening that are happening. Why we hear the things that seem so odd.
Why. Why are these things being said? And it helps us effectively engage them and then be able to respond with grace and truth to our neighbor, to our friends, to show them that there is a God who loves them, a God who's created them in his image, a God who desires them to be
[00:14:40] Speaker B: their full selves in Christ.
[00:14:43] Speaker C: Why am I telling you all this historical, cultural stuff?
[00:14:46] Speaker B: You can wake up now, those of you who dozed off.
[00:14:49] Speaker C: Okay, why am I telling you all this stuff in a inner feelings?
Well, because when you hear phrases today
[00:14:57] Speaker B: like follow your heart or go with your gut, I want you to understand
[00:15:01] Speaker C: that that's rooted in this fundamental shift of truth away from external authority to
[00:15:08] Speaker B: truth that is derived from within.
[00:15:11] Speaker C: We now live in a world where my happiness is connected to the way
[00:15:16] Speaker B: I express my inner feelings, full stop.
One more quote from Carl Truman.
[00:15:24] Speaker C: Happiness for me, satisfaction for me is a sort of internal sense of psychological well being at the heart of expressive individualism.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: That's the title of this kind of
[00:15:33] Speaker C: thinking, is the idea that I am most fundamentally who I am relative to my internal feelings. It's my internal feelings, it's my psychological
[00:15:43] Speaker B: states that determine who I am. See how this quite nicely onto UBU from last week and therefore Carl goes on.
[00:15:51] Speaker C: The most authentic me is the me who's able to act outwardly according to
[00:15:55] Speaker B: those inner desires and impulses.
Now, I took some time to set all this up because it's important how we understand this catchphrase is so embedded
[00:16:05] Speaker C: in our cultural framework. This is the way people see, it's
[00:16:09] Speaker B: the way we often see.
[00:16:12] Speaker C: And it will help us discern when
[00:16:13] Speaker B: we hear it or even find ourselves saying it, help us discern more of what's going on.
[00:16:21] Speaker C: But the advice to follow our hearts, as I've already said, is not all wrong. Following your feeling is not without merit.
[00:16:28] Speaker B: We do have an inner life that matters.
[00:16:31] Speaker C: And as we're doing all throughout this series, we want to discern what's true
[00:16:35] Speaker B: and what's false about these catchphrases. And today, follow your heart. So let's start drill down on what's true about it.
Here it is.
[00:16:45] Speaker C: As people created in the image of
[00:16:47] Speaker B: God, we all have a moral conscience
[00:16:49] Speaker C: which helps us determine what is right and what is wrong. And while that conscience can be seared
[00:16:56] Speaker B: and cracked, and in the case of psychopaths, it might be missing altogether, it
[00:17:01] Speaker C: still functions as an important compass for our behavior. Thank God for the moral conscience.
And how our conscience often functions is
[00:17:11] Speaker B: that we feel wrong about something or
[00:17:14] Speaker C: we feel guilt or shame.
We feel unsettled inside.
And our guts can tell us that certain people are dangerous.
They might even be deviants or sexual predators.
That particular people can't be trusted.
Something within us says run and hide.
You ever had that feeling?
How many times have young girls or boys known inside that there's something wrong about how they're being touched or treated?
And they need to listen to that voice, listen to their guts and get out of that dangerous situation. Go tell their parents, go cry foul to someone. I wish more of them would.
[00:17:55] Speaker B: God gave us those certain sensitivities and that's a gift in the guts that we're all very thankful for.
It's also Important for us to remember
[00:18:04] Speaker C: that human feelings are validated in the Scriptures.
Feelings really do matter.
All throughout the Psalms, in particular, the whole range of human emotions, from anger to sadness, joy to thanksgiving, despair, anxiety, hate, love, vengeance, worship. The depth, the range of full emotional inner life is expressed in relation to
[00:18:30] Speaker B: the living God about the life that we're in.
[00:18:32] Speaker C: And we're invited through the Scriptures to bring our whole selves, all of our
[00:18:38] Speaker B: emotions, into honest worship before God.
[00:18:43] Speaker C: Throughout the whole of Scripture, we're called
[00:18:45] Speaker B: to grow up emotionally, grow up in Jesus, with our emotions growing in him,
[00:18:52] Speaker C: so that all of our ways of feeling and expressing and thinking and acting aligns with the new self that God
[00:19:00] Speaker B: has created us to be in Christ.
[00:19:02] Speaker C: There's just so much in the New Testament where we're told, stop doing those things, even stop feeling that way. Put off hate, put off bitterness, put off anger, put on love, put on
[00:19:14] Speaker B: compassion, put on gentleness.
[00:19:17] Speaker C: There's this call to have our emotional selves realigned with the new self that
[00:19:22] Speaker B: God has created us to be in Christ.
[00:19:24] Speaker C: It's not a denigration of our emotions,
[00:19:26] Speaker B: it's actually an elevation of them.
[00:19:30] Speaker C: The more that I work with people, the more that I understand myself and my own struggles.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: It becomes obvious that we cannot be
[00:19:37] Speaker C: healthy and mature as followers of Jesus if we're not growing more healthy and
[00:19:41] Speaker B: mature in our emotional lives.
[00:19:43] Speaker C: And so whatever critique we need to bring to our culture that has made our inner lives the central way that truth is determined, our critique is not because the emotional life does not matter.
[00:19:57] Speaker B: It's because our emotional lives can be wrong and they cannot have ultimate authority over our lives. They must be brought. We must be brought into alignment with the God who has made us in his image. Rather than demanding that God or these external realities somehow be brought into alignment with us, here's what else is true.
[00:20:20] Speaker C: God does speak to us personally.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: Within our own hearts and minds and guts, we are able to hear God's
[00:20:29] Speaker C: voice, to discern his will, to understand what it is that he's telling us to do. And hearing can at times be experienced
[00:20:37] Speaker B: as kind of a voice within the heart or a feeling in our guts.
[00:20:42] Speaker C: We may find that there's a kind of urging within our spirits or a moving in our stomachs that wasn't just
[00:20:48] Speaker B: the pizza or an ache in our
[00:20:51] Speaker C: heart that we need to listen to.
As we heard already in John 10, Jesus calls Himself the good shepherd of the sheep. And he extends this metaphor by saying, his sheep listen to his voice.
He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. His sheep follow him because they know his voice.
[00:21:10] Speaker B: What does this mean?
[00:21:11] Speaker C: It's always struck me here how Jesus seems remarkably confident that his sheep, his followers are able to discern his voice accurately.
Because I read that and I think, do I?
[00:21:24] Speaker B: Am I the only one who reads
[00:21:25] Speaker C: that and think I do?
But Jesus says they know what his voice sounds like. They're able to distinguish his life giving voice from all the other voices out there. That's that discernment piece, especially the voice of the dangerous stranger or the destructive thief.
Jesus says that his sheep will never follow a stranger. In fact, they will run away from him. Run away because they do not recognize the stranger's voice.
[00:21:54] Speaker B: Couldn't resist.
[00:21:56] Speaker C: He then extends the metaphor again by saying, I am the gate for the sheep. All who come before me are thieves and robbers. But the sheep have not listened to them. I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved. That will come in and go out and find pasture.
[00:22:10] Speaker B: The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.
[00:22:13] Speaker C: I have come that they may have life and life to the full.
[00:22:17] Speaker B: I am the good shepherd.
[00:22:18] Speaker C: Jesus says in this passage.
[00:22:21] Speaker B: Jesus says that Jesus followers know Jesus voice.
[00:22:26] Speaker C: What's more, if you needed more, what's more, the Holy Spirit comes to live inside of us when we have placed our trust in Jesus Christ, filling us with God's love, adopting us as one of God's children. And one of the signs that we're
[00:22:40] Speaker B: God's kids is that we're led.
We can discern the Spirit's will. For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. And how does the Holy Spirit of God lead us?
[00:22:54] Speaker C: Well, primarily God leads us by the Holy Spirit through His inspired word, the Bible.
God reveals himself through those 66 books. God communicates through those pages his perfect will for our lives.
But it's only by the Holy Spirit's work in us that we're able to
[00:23:13] Speaker B: perceive it, receive it and apply it to our lives without the aid of the Holy Spirit.
[00:23:19] Speaker C: That book just bounces off hard hearts and dull foreheads. Makes no difference at all.
So the most profound and primary way that we hear the voice of God is in a sense, through our eyes
[00:23:32] Speaker B: as we read and our ears as we hear this God breathed inspired word. Inspired means Spirit breathed word of God, the Bible.
[00:23:43] Speaker C: But the Holy Spirit also speaks to us from within. We're told the Holy Spirit testifies with our own spirits that we're God's children, even enabling us to cry out to God to pray and call him our Father, just as Jesus did.
He's that voice within you confirming God's love for you, convicting you of sin, while all the while reminding you that you're loved. He's the voice within you that is calling to repent, calling you to follow, applying God's forgiveness to you, reframing your experiences so that you see his presence even in suffering and experience joy, even in trials, reminding you and teaching you every step of the way who you truly are in Christ, that you're created in the image of God, that you've been created for relationship with him.
[00:24:28] Speaker B: And he's growing you up into maturity in Christ.
[00:24:30] Speaker C: That's the Holy Spirit's job.
[00:24:32] Speaker B: That's his work within us. And he leads us by speaking to us both through his written word, which
[00:24:39] Speaker C: has primary authority, but also through this
[00:24:41] Speaker B: inner witness as we receive direction and wisdom for life situations and decisions. And here's where we land on the truth of our catchphrase today. Follow your heart.
[00:24:53] Speaker C: God will use your heart.
He will use our gut feelings.
He will speak to you through your
[00:25:01] Speaker B: discernment feelers, your sensitive consciences, that inner sense of right and wrong. He will do that to help you discern the right way from the wrong one. Our gut feelings matter, and the Holy Spirit uses them.
And what's more, we can grow in our ability to hear his voice and recognize his leading.
[00:25:21] Speaker C: We can never claim to have complete and perfect discernment. But the more obediently we respond, the more wisely we discern, the more actively we obey.
The more we take delight in the Lord Jesus himself and meditate on His Word, the more confident we will become
[00:25:39] Speaker B: that we're hearing the voice of our good Shepherd. Even from within his sheep know his voice.
The Holy Spirit testifies with our spirits that we are the children of God and we feel it to be true.
[00:25:54] Speaker C: But as a safeguard, we're not left to just figure this out on our own. That's the other challenge of this whole shift to the inner self is that it becomes we just become the locus of truth. And we often are so atomized and individualized that we're left on our own.
[00:26:08] Speaker B: But the Holy Spirit doesn't leave us on our own.
[00:26:11] Speaker C: The Father also gives us two additional helps. We have the Scripture as our first line of defense and discernment.
But then within the church itself, God
[00:26:21] Speaker B: gives us the godly counsel of wise saints and people who are gifted with spiritual discernment. Let me go over these quickly.
[00:26:30] Speaker C: First, the godly counsel of wise saints too.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Many of us rely on our own
[00:26:36] Speaker C: selves, our own feelings, our own thoughts, even our own understanding. Even as we're reading scriptures we're working through, we rely only on our own
[00:26:43] Speaker B: selves to determine what is right, what to do, what to think, how to process conflict that's going on, how to
[00:26:48] Speaker C: respond to rejection, how to. How to root out or process theological
[00:26:52] Speaker B: error, what to buy, where to go,
[00:26:54] Speaker C: when to make a change.
[00:26:55] Speaker B: We do it all on our own.
But wise counsel is crucial. The Proverbs covers this a lot, over and over again, reminding us that the
[00:27:04] Speaker C: way of a fool is right in his own eyes. But a wise man listens to counsel because he who trusts in his own heart is a fool.
[00:27:18] Speaker B: Do you have to be so blunt?
[00:27:20] Speaker C: But the one who walks in wisdom will be safe.
[00:27:24] Speaker B: Let the wise listen and gain instruction, and the discerning acquire wise counsel.
[00:27:30] Speaker C: Seeking the wise counsel of others is just smart, friends.
[00:27:33] Speaker B: It's just smart.
[00:27:34] Speaker C: It protects you from your own blind
[00:27:36] Speaker B: spots, from your own misguided feelings, your own skewed perspectives.
[00:27:41] Speaker C: And you've got a few of them. Do you know that?
I do too.
[00:27:46] Speaker B: And if you're wise and humble enough to listen, you can receive it, as the Proverbs constantly remind us, Fools aren't that way, and they pay for it.
[00:27:58] Speaker C: But we have godly people around us right here in this room, within the larger body of Christ. People who have hard won wisdom, who have garnered from good experience, people who will listen to you and share with
[00:28:12] Speaker B: you what they've learned, who will open
[00:28:14] Speaker C: the Scriptures with you and pray with you as you discern, what you should
[00:28:19] Speaker B: do, as you process, how you should
[00:28:21] Speaker C: grapple with sensitive theological or family issues,
[00:28:24] Speaker B: or cultural issues, or kid stuff.
[00:28:27] Speaker C: And you know what? As you seek godly counsel, what you feel inside might be confirmed, or it
[00:28:34] Speaker B: might be challenged, or it may begin even to shift as you align yourself more with biblical counsel and wise saints.
And why?
[00:28:44] Speaker C: Because as important as your feelings are, they are not the central authority in your life.
[00:28:49] Speaker B: And you acknowledge that God is the central authority. His scriptures have the ultimate say, and wise counsel and wisdom needs to purvey.
And so we seek to listen to our hearts as we pursue godly counsel of wise saints.
[00:29:06] Speaker C: But then within the church, there's an even smaller subset of people who are spiritually gifted in discernment. The Bible tells us that the Holy
[00:29:15] Speaker B: Spirit gives gifts to everybody.
[00:29:17] Speaker C: Everyone in this room has spiritual gifts that were designed for you to use
[00:29:21] Speaker B: to build up and serve the church.
[00:29:23] Speaker C: I don't know if you know that
[00:29:24] Speaker B: just heads up, you're going to be held accountable for how you use it. So I would figure it out.
Okay, for those of you who are new to church, not been in church for a while, just ignore that comment. That was for others.
Sorry, where was I?
[00:29:42] Speaker C: Each one of you has been given responsibility to use the spiritual gifts that you've been given by God to build the church to serve one another. The Apostle Paul wrote in First Corinthians 12, he said, A spiritual gift is given to each of us so we
[00:29:56] Speaker B: can help each other.
[00:29:58] Speaker C: And then he goes on to list a whole bunch of spiritual gifts and they're all given out in order to build the church.
[00:30:03] Speaker B: That's the whole purpose of the spiritual gifts. Everyone's got them and that's their purpose. So he starts with this one.
It's literally the next thing that said to one person, the Spirit gives the ability to give wise advice.
Other translations might say, a word of wisdom, wisdom from the Spirit. But the spiritual gift in action boils
[00:30:24] Speaker C: down to the same point.
[00:30:25] Speaker B: There are people among us who have
[00:30:28] Speaker C: been specially gifted by the Holy Spirit to offer you wise counsel. Can you imagine it?
[00:30:33] Speaker B: They're sitting right here.
[00:30:37] Speaker C: People who, in order to serve the Lord in the way that he's gifted them and has held them responsible for, they walk with others who are in need of spiritual counsel, are in need
[00:30:48] Speaker B: of wise counsel, they help others by offering spiritual wisdom.
[00:30:52] Speaker C: And so if you're wrestling with something
[00:30:54] Speaker B: that's going on in your life with
[00:30:56] Speaker C: your kid, at school, at work, you're wrestling with what to do, what to say, where to go, how to respond to a situation. Do you wanna really keep just doing it on your own, just going with your gut and hoping for the best?
[00:31:08] Speaker B: Or do you want to avail yourself of the resources that God has provided among us?
And yet very few of us ever seek godly counsel. Very few of us seek out those with spiritual discernment. Just this past week, I was discussing with some of our disciple makers here in this church.
[00:31:28] Speaker C: We were discussing the importance of wise
[00:31:30] Speaker B: counsel and how many of us have
[00:31:33] Speaker C: accessed that or haven't.
[00:31:35] Speaker B: And we shared that situations in our
[00:31:37] Speaker C: lives where we have sought counsel and
[00:31:39] Speaker B: other times we haven't.
[00:31:40] Speaker C: And, and what we notice is we can make huge life decisions based on a whim, making massive moves, instigating sweeping changes, some of them in relationships and life and vocation, some of them theologically. I've seen people make sweeping changes because they felt different.
And we do that without any recourse to the wisdom that God has provided
[00:32:02] Speaker B: through his word, through his people, and
[00:32:05] Speaker C: within this group of disciple makers, we talked about how we can seek that
[00:32:08] Speaker B: ourselves, but also help others seek that too. And I'm glad that we have people here at the Erickson Covenant Church that are particularly gifted with discernment for the sake of the church to help us know what's good, know what's right, know what's true.
[00:32:22] Speaker C: And I just want to say, for those of you who have that spiritual
[00:32:25] Speaker B: gift, friends, learn to use it well. We need you.
[00:32:28] Speaker C: And for those who have never sought wise counsel from someone gifted in spiritual discernment, what you'll find will be amazing. What you'll find will be people who
[00:32:37] Speaker B: love God's Word, who know God's Word,
[00:32:39] Speaker C: who listen well, ask great questions. They're not blowhards. They're not there to hear themselves talk. They're humble. They're going to ask good questions to draw out what's going on. You're going to discover a person who's also listening to the Holy Spirit within
[00:32:51] Speaker B: their guts and in their conscience. They're rooting what they're saying and they're responding to in Scripture with a sensitivity to the Holy Spirit.
I went a little fast there, Cameron. I skipped over some stuff. Friends, just so you know.
So let's look at what's false. What's false?
Well, I've already gone over a lot of territory already, but I want to make it abundantly clear, just in case you missed it. The real problem with the catchphrase, follow your heart is your heart.
It's the human condition and it forgets it.
[00:33:25] Speaker C: The prophet Jeremiah nailed it when he said, the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure.
Who can understand it?
[00:33:37] Speaker B: We might not like to believe it, but our hearts are idle, making truth warping and sick, which is why it is so dangerous and destructive to make our hearts and our inner lives the central authority over our lives, the primary way that we determine truth. That's just stupid, friends.
[00:33:56] Speaker C: The apostle Paul, then, gathering together a vast array of scriptures, rattles off this biblical litany of our sinful state. We heard it in the scripture reading,
[00:34:07] Speaker B: but let me read it for you again.
[00:34:09] Speaker C: He says, we're all under the power of sin, referring to Jews and Gentiles covering everybody. And then he just grabs a whole bunch of biblical quotes from all over the Bible when he says, as it is written, there is no unrighteous, not even one. There is no one who understands. There is no one who seeks God. And I know two of you Back there.
[00:34:28] Speaker B: Go.
[00:34:28] Speaker C: But I seek God. There is no one who seeks God. All have turned astray. They have together become worthless. There is no one who does good.
[00:34:36] Speaker B: Not even one who wants to be the exception today.
[00:34:39] Speaker C: No, you don't.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: Not today. Just keep your hands down.
[00:34:41] Speaker C: There is no one who does good. Not even one. Their throats are open graves. Their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood. Ruin and misery mark their ways. Are you tired of this and the way of peace? They do not know there's no fear
[00:34:58] Speaker B: of God before their eyes. You want to trust the guts of these people?
[00:35:06] Speaker C: You think the feelings of that crew can be relied upon?
Lips of poison, tongues of deceit. Non righteous.
[00:35:15] Speaker B: Not even one.
[00:35:16] Speaker C: And of course, the they isn't just someone else.
The they in Romans 3 is all of us. He already established that. The they is you, the they is me.
We feel what we feel, but we must accept that our hearts are tainted,
[00:35:33] Speaker B: our guts are flawed, our sensitivities are sinful.
[00:35:37] Speaker C: We are finite individuals who are apt
[00:35:40] Speaker B: to miss what is true and to believe what is false. One of my counselor friends frequently tells
[00:35:45] Speaker C: his patients, don't believe everything you think.
Well, we can add to that.
[00:35:53] Speaker B: We shouldn't believe everything we feel either.
[00:35:57] Speaker C: The reality is, as sinful, foolish people, we are so very capable of convincing
[00:36:01] Speaker B: ourselves that we are objective, that we
[00:36:04] Speaker C: are right, that our guts never lie,
[00:36:06] Speaker B: that we see clearly when we really, really don't.
We can be profoundly self deceived and deceived by others, usually because what we're hearing is what we want to hear, what we've been trained to hear, what we've always heard.
And what's more, we can be so
[00:36:24] Speaker C: thoroughly enculturated to ideas and practices and values that actually stand in complete contradiction to what God says is true, to what God says is right.
This is so true of us that we can come along and hear something
[00:36:41] Speaker B: that God tells us in his written word and we can feel like it's wrong.
[00:36:46] Speaker C: We can reject key areas of teaching in Scripture, teachings that are clear as a bell, consistent through Christian history, upheld by the Christian church. Why? Because those are areas that now contradict
[00:36:58] Speaker B: the reigning cultural wisdom of today, such as the way we use or view our finances, the way we understand marriage and singleness, what we believe, of course, about sexuality and gender, but also about war and violence, about death and dying,
[00:37:17] Speaker C: and about how we understand the centrality
[00:37:20] Speaker B: of the church to God's Plan for the world.
[00:37:25] Speaker C: Whenever we hit on something in the Bible that turns our guts source or makes us want to push back because
[00:37:32] Speaker B: we feel wrong inside about it, it's
[00:37:35] Speaker C: a good time to start asking some
[00:37:37] Speaker B: hard questions about what's wrong inside us.
Our feelings are contaminated.
And when brought into contact with the objective truth of God's word, we can find that our feelings are turning, that our hearts are resistant, that our minds need to repent and be resilient, renewed, in order to actually start feeling right and true.
On the whole, we should be more deeply suspicious of ourselves and what we feel than we usually are. Following our sinful hearts can be the most destructive things that we do.
So where does this leave us today? Can we follow our hearts or not?
Should we go with our guts or no?
Let's finish with some practical steps.
First, I want to challenge you today to decide how you will discern what is good and true as well as what is false and wrong.
[00:38:34] Speaker C: Will your discernment be based on your
[00:38:37] Speaker B: own inner sense of feeling, your own
[00:38:40] Speaker C: inner sense of rightness? Or will it be grounded in the eternally trustworthy Word of God? This is probably one of the most important decisions that you will ever make because it will determine the foundation on which you stand. It will determine the lenses through which you see everything else. It'll determine how you think, what you
[00:38:59] Speaker B: do, what you say and how you feel.
And yet many of us never actually make that decision. And as a result, we just make our decisions by default, by defeelings.
We just go with the guts.
But I challenge you today to think it through and ask yourself, how am I going to make decisions, little decisions, big decisions? What will be my guide?
[00:39:25] Speaker C: Second, learn to recognize the ways that
[00:39:27] Speaker B: inner feelings or inner psychological state have been elevated to the ultimate authority in our culture.
[00:39:34] Speaker C: Learn to recognize it when you see
[00:39:35] Speaker B: it in a movie.
[00:39:38] Speaker C: Learn to pick it up in a
[00:39:39] Speaker B: conversation that you have. You don't have to shout it out in the coffee shop or anything.
[00:39:42] Speaker A: Aha.
[00:39:43] Speaker C: I heard that.
[00:39:44] Speaker B: Don't do that.
[00:39:47] Speaker C: But notice it when you scroll past online.
See it in the ways that people assume how you should think, assume what has authority, assume that things are just true, even the ways you think about
[00:40:02] Speaker B: situations in your own life.
[00:40:05] Speaker C: Being able to point out the ways in which this authentic inner self has become the dominant means of truth and goodness. It'll help you more readily evaluate what you're hearing to determine can I accept that or not? Or should I reject that on the
[00:40:20] Speaker B: basis of God's word?
It'll also Help you guide others. It'll help you as fathers guide your kids.
People you're discipling, people you're offering wisdom to.
Third, let the Scriptures teach you what's true so that your feelings are aligned with God's will.
Make the Scripture your lens through which you view the world, your thinking, your feelings, what others say, what others do.
[00:40:46] Speaker C: Acknowledge the need for your heart to
[00:40:48] Speaker B: be recalibrated by the Word of God.
[00:40:51] Speaker C: And don't let your mind and heart
[00:40:53] Speaker B: be shaped by godless chatter or a
[00:40:55] Speaker C: psychologized, sexualized, politicized self that is so preeminent today. Let your mind and heart be shaped by God's living word. Practically speaking, this means making Bible reading, Bible study and the teaching of the church a pronounced priority in your life.
[00:41:14] Speaker B: Our gut feelings can be realigned.
In Psalm 37.
[00:41:18] Speaker C: 4, it says, Take delight in the Lord and He will give you the
[00:41:23] Speaker B: desires of your heart. Imagine that God giving us the desires of our hearts. It's only possible when the desires of our hearts are aligned fully with Him. And that happens when when the Spirit of God takes the word of God and realigns us. Fourth, start seeking godly counsel.
[00:41:40] Speaker C: Humble yourself and initiate discernment conversations. Stop relying on your own thinking and feelings, or maybe just the thinking and feelings of one other person in your household. Expand your circle of sensitivity and let those with gifts of discernment use their gifts to support and help you, just as you then use your gifts to
[00:41:58] Speaker B: help and support them.
Find some older look for people with
[00:42:03] Speaker C: gray hair than I have,
[00:42:07] Speaker B: which is
[00:42:07] Speaker C: increasingly less and less, but I know. Find some older godly people and start talking to them about what you're wrestling with, what you're thinking about, what you're trying to understand.
And this doesn't just need to be
[00:42:19] Speaker B: the big stuff like a move or you know, whether your kids should change schools or whatever.
[00:42:25] Speaker C: Start with also those important life questions, like how to navigate technology with your
[00:42:30] Speaker B: kids, how to grow in your marriage,
[00:42:34] Speaker C: how to talk about sexuality in a
[00:42:37] Speaker B: God honoring, body affirming way, how to deal with anger, whatever it might be.
[00:42:41] Speaker C: And for those of you among us with discernment gifts, for the church's sake,
[00:42:45] Speaker B: please stop hiding your gift under your humble bushel.
[00:42:49] Speaker C: Please come out from hiding.
[00:42:51] Speaker B: Help us.
We need you.
And then fifth, do learn to listen to your heart as you are instructed by God's word and guided by the Holy Spirit.
[00:43:04] Speaker C: Ask God to guide you from your guts, through your mind, through your heart. Ask him to make you sensitive to the things he cares about. Ask him to place a burden on you with his burdens, to urge you from within where you need to respond to others in need.
Ask him to make you feel what he feels as he looks out on
[00:43:24] Speaker B: a hurting, confused world.
[00:43:27] Speaker C: Ask Jesus to show you where your
[00:43:28] Speaker B: heart is wrong, where your heart is misplaced and warped. But be careful with that one, because
[00:43:36] Speaker C: I just want to put a little caveat, little warning.
[00:43:39] Speaker B: Jesus is the one who said that where our heart, where our treasure is, is where our heart is, right?
[00:43:46] Speaker C: So if you really want your heart
[00:43:47] Speaker B: realigned, he might start in your pocketbook. I'm just warning you, he has a habit of going after your money.
Not me. I don't want your money. Talking about Jesus, he goes after that
[00:43:59] Speaker C: because he knows how easily our hearts
[00:44:02] Speaker B: are warped and twisted through it.
Jesus is confident though, that you can hear his voice of life and follow him in the full life that he's done giving.
He's also confident that his people can identify the voice of destructive thieves who are seeking in to break and kill and destroy. So we can pray for that.
Let's wrap it up from Proverbs 3.
Take these words to heart.
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways, submit to him and he will make your paths straight.
Do not be wise in your own eyes.
Fear the Lord and shun evil.
This will bring health to your body and nourishment to your bones.
How's that for a promise?
[00:44:56] Speaker C: So maybe rather than following your heart,
[00:44:58] Speaker B: we can say to each other, may your heart follow the spirit.
And maybe instead of telling each other, go with your guts, we can say, let your guts go with God.
I dare you to say that at coffee time today.
[00:45:14] Speaker C: Because maybe it's not so much that
[00:45:15] Speaker B: we just do what feels right, but rather because of the Holy Spirit's work within us, we actually will begin to feel more right about what it is that God is calling us to do. Let's pray.
Jesus, thank you for speaking to us from within through your Word.
We ask that we would become sensitive to the voice of your spirit and the truth of your word.
May we be people who do follow the Holy Spirit through our hearts, through our heads, through who you've called us to be.
We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:45:53] Speaker C: Well, that was the second of our catchphrase conundrums. I challenge you to join us next
[00:45:56] Speaker B: week as as we continue with Speak youk Truth.
[00:46:02] Speaker A: Thanks for listening in today.
We hope you feel encouraged and challenged.
If you know someone who would benefit from what you have heard today. Please share this podcast for more information or if you have questions, you can connect with us through our website, Erickson Covenant ca.
You can also find us on Facebook by searching for Erickson Covenant Church.
