Collide - Get Truth

Proverbs 23:23

Sermon Slide

Good morning and welcome to worship. I don’t know if you realize it, but this is the first time since I’ve been here that I preached on the final Sunday of the month of July. I usually have taken this week to be gone so that no one can do anything on my Birthday. But, this year the Scouts I helped planned their trip for earlier in the month, so here I am, preaching on my Birthday. Now, you might be shocked to know that the early church did not celebrate Birthdays… Jewish, early Christian, and even Muslims saw the celebration of one’s birth as a pagan practice. When you read in scripture, you will not find anything about the celebration of ones birth – except an acknowledgement of the celebration of the Pharoah’s Birth date in Exodus 40. It wasn’t until the Middle Ages that the church began to accept Birthday’s as a common practice among followers of Christ.

Why am I talking about all this? Well, we are in our 3rd week of our sermon series on how our culture and our faith collide. Something as simple as the celebration of our Birthday has its remnants in the collision of faith and culture. Don’t worry, I’m not telling you not to celebrate birthdays… and if you wanted to give me a birthday gift, I’ll reluctantly accept it… I’m kidding.

I do want to acknowledge how blessed we are to have Shaefer preaching each week in Common Ground – you got a glimpse of him here in the Sanctuary a couple of weeks ago. What a blessing!

Then, last week you had the blessing of hearing Rev. Dr. Vicki Vaughn sharing from the Old Testament. I know, I heard about the tech issues… It’s kinda tough when one tech person gets married and is on their honeymoon and the other one is home with COVID. But, God’s Word was still shared and lives were still touched with the power of the Gospel.

Before all that, we saw in week 1 of the Collide series that our foundation is the power of Jesus Christ and His Word. God’s Holy Word is where we can find our foundation. In week 2 we continued that theme as we remembered that Jesus is our solid rock, Jesus is who we need to stand firm upon, not the shifting sands of societal influence. We are to let God’s word renew us and transform us from who we are into who God created us to be.

Today, we are going to take another step in this journey as we look at the truth of God’s Word. It is that truth that transforms us. It is the power of the Gospel as revealed in Jesus Christ that transforms us.

You know, it’s nothing new… people have questioned the legitimacy of Jesus and the power of his life, message, death, and resurrection for nearly 2000 years… and yet, here is an undeniable truth. Jesus is the most written about person in human history. There is no one individual that has impacted as many people in the history of humanity. You can question his existence, but you are ignoring 2000 years of literature and the transformed lives of billions of people since Jesus walked the face of this earth. Jesus is the truth and his words are powerful and effective. Reza Safa tells the story of just such a transformation in his book Inside Islam.

“One day a shoemaker in Meshed, a very religious city in Northeastern Iran, brought home for his lunch some cheese which the grocer had wrapped in a page of the New Testament, which he was using as wrapping paper. After eating his lunch he picked up a piece of paper and read the story of the man who hired laborers for his vineyard, and at the end of the day paid all the laborers the same wage, whether they had worked twelve hours or one.

The shoemaker liked the story, and the next day went again to the grocery store and bought cheese, asking that it be wrapped ‘in another page of that book.’ Finally, on the third day he bought what remained of the New Testament and showed it to his brother. The two of them then went to a missionary, who gave them a complete copy, and also gave them regular instruction in the Word of God. Both men were later baptized and were among the first believers in that city. ”

Our Gideon brothers and sisters can relate story after story of the transforming power of God’s Word left in hotel rooms. Stories of people coming to a room to take their life, finding the power of God. People cheating on spouses, and finding God’s Word that saved their marriage. People slowly dying because of the life of drugs and alcohol who found the redemptive power of the words of Jesus that saved their life. These aren’t isolated stories… there are hundreds of these stories.

Even when the words of God, even when scripture has been discarded as a piece of wrapping paper or trash, it still has the power to redeem… it still transforms lives.

We need to take the truth of God’s word into our lives daily… not just on Sundays or every now and then. We need to hide God’s word in our heart… we need to meditate on it day and night.

The jumping off verse today comes from Proverbs 23:23. It’s where the title comes from as well.

Solomon reminds us in his book of wisdom that

Proverbs 23:23

Get the truth and never sell it;

also get wisdom, discipline, and good judgment.

How do you “Get the Truth?” Through the word of God! Scripture is Truth and the Truth is revealed through Scripture! OK, we know how to get it – through the Word of God… but how do we keep it?

Solomon tells us we keep it by not selling it.

Don’t Sell It

I don’t mean to not be a door to door Bible salesman… that actually might be an effective evangelism tool… it’s not talking about selling in that sense… it’s more like don’t sell out.

We all know people that seemed to be close to God, then for some reason walked away from their faith. Maybe they started doubting. Maybe some tragedy happened and they didn’t “feel” God’s presence. Maybe they started spending more time with non-believers without investing in the Word of God on their own… for whatever reason, they let the seductive nature of the world around them sway them from God. It is so easy for the “truth” of the world to convince us that the “truth” of God isn’t relevant to our lives.

The problem with many that face these times of doubting and searching of their faith is that they walk away from the source of truth, the Word of God, and instead spend all their time searching outside of the truth that has been revealed in Scripture and through Jesus Christ.

I know I keep saying ‘they’, ‘they’, ‘they’ but you may be sitting there thinking ‘me’, ‘me’, ‘me.’ You may realize that you are being pulled by the seductive nature of the culture around us to examine something other than the Word of God… yes, the ways of the world seem good… they give us a temporary satisfaction that we can see and feel… even though it is temporary.

I love the story of the woman at the well… and I thought about reading it, but maybe seeing it and hearing it can help us even more…

Chosen Woman at Well Clip

Scripture tells us that what she actually says is “Sir, give me this water, so I will not be thirsty nor come all the way here to draw.”

Jesus offers this woman true life, the source of life… that which will satisfy her longing and complete her. All that she has been missing… all that she has been striving for… all that she has been searching for in her broken life is found in the truth of Jesus Christ.

There are a couple of other passages in John that talk about the truth. Jesus has been tried by the religious leaders and he’s standing before Pilate and they have this exchange:

John 18:33-38

Pilate asks that question… What is truth? It is the question so many of us ask over and over again… what is truth?

In the world of ambiguity.

In the world of relativity.

In the world of the shifting sands of society… what is truth.

Well, Jesus answered that in John 14.

John 14:6-7

Jesus is truth incarnate. John 1:14 reminds us that Jesus is the Word made Flesh, that the living God became flesh and dwelt, lived, made his dwelling, among us.

When we get Jesus… when we accept and live by Jesus, we are getting the truth… we are living by the truth!

And when that happens, there is only one thing left to do… that is to go share it!

Go Share It

We see this truth all through scripture, but nowhere is it more clear than the words of Jesus recorded at the end of the Book of Matthew.

Matthew 28:18-20

I’m not an English major or anything like that… that’s obvious by the way I talk half the time…

But when we see a sentence like this, we need to look for the imperative word to fully understand. For so many years we have emphasized the word “GO”

But that is the word that is emphasized in scripture. No, Jesus emphasized the word “MAKE.” It is as though Jesus was saying, “as you go about your everyday life, make it a habit of introducing people to me and helping them to understand what I have taught, and bring them into the fellowship with other believers.”

Here’s the best part about this… the more we share about Jesus with others, the stronger it makes our faith!

I have intentionally put myself out in the community in a way that is outside of my normal job here. For some people in the community, I’m not the preacher at First Methodist… I’m the SCUBA guy. Why is that important?

People expect the preacher to talk to them about God… They almost don’t listen to it… it’s like a Car Salesman is supposed to sell cars, a preacher is supposed to sell church. Right.

But when I am SCUBA Jay, and I talk about the beauty of God’s creation… or I mention the importance of Church… or talk about the difference Jesus makes in my life, it has a different impact.

You know what? I believe you can be a more effective witness to Jesus Christ than I can. I believe you can have an impact on those around you that I will never be able to have.

The great commission we just read isn’t just about what preachers get paid to do… It is about what all of us as followers of Jesus are called to do… to share the good news of Jesus Christ and the difference he has made in our lives!

You have the truth. Let that truth, let the Word of God, Let Jesus dwell in you richly to the point that you overflow and that truth is poured out on all that you see.

I hope that this week you will take time to stop and pray for God to give you the opportunity to share the truth of Christ, the difference Jesus has made in your life with someone new…

After all, what good is it to get the truth if we don’t give it away!