Empty Your Cup
Notes
Transcript
Wisdom
Wisdom
Just look at some of the verses here.
18 For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
19 For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?
21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.
22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom,
23 but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles,
24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
25 For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
and in the next verse--- Paul calls us to consider our calling.
26 For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.
Isn’t that what we’re talking about here?
Walking in Wisdom, Walking Worthy
Walking in Wisdom, Walking Worthy
Your your life.
your bank of knowledge and wisdom.
needs to be changed.
instead of having drips of 1000 things in your life.
Which muddy your cup -— We need to continue moving to focus on God alone
We must fight the NOW issue and see the LONG GAME of ETERNITY
We must DELIGHT IN THE LORD
4 Delight yourself in the Lord,
and he will give you the desires of your heart.
These things that were meant to satisfy us or meet a need are often mis focused
we must learn to seek emptiness.
The Wise WALK IN WISDOM
and therefore the WISE can
WALK WORTHY of their CALLING.
Wisdom
One of the major problems in our world is that the
WORLD WORSHIPS CREATED THINGS
and WE MUST WORSHIP THE CREATOR
All creation worships God; we humans are called to worship him with mind as well as heart, recognizing that he is worthy of all praise as the creator of all things.
N. T. Wright
Look at verse 18- 19 again
1 Corinthians 1:18–19
18 For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing,
but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
19 For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.””
this is from the Book of Isaiah 29:14
Come on you have all heard the NON BELIEVERS TALK
they seek to rationalize the WORD,
But they seek to Understand
You cannot microwave GOD’s WORD
“If i just memorize John 3:16 then i will be good”
NO my friends,
we must seek GOD’s WORD — and GODLY WISDOM ALONE
To walk in Wisdom, to WALK worthy
We need to understand the WORD of God
You need to have people in your LIFE to teach it to YOU
God wants to give in PLENTY
You must open your self to RECEIVING
Yet here is an inerrant truth
You can not pour more in to a FULL CUP
we live in a OVER SATURATED WORLD
and must seek to ............
Empty your Cup
Empty your Cup
Go brought to my mind. that.
our search for wisdom.
can truly be like pouring into a full cup.
There was once a professor who held a seminar with his students.
He filled his cup to the brim with water and began pouring it into an already full cup that a student brought.
Water spilled everywhere!
When asked why he did that,
he said, 'Your mind is like this full cup; if you want to learn, you first need to empty it.'
Just like this illustrates,
if we want to receive God’s wisdom,
we sometimes need to first empty our cup of preconceptions and distractions!
We’re born into this world with an empty cup
We have our. parents and loved ones,
hopefully pouring into us,
teaching us ways to do things -— to DO LIFE in this world
As we go through our life, this wisdom of the world has been dripped into our cup.
We come to a place in our life where. a cup has. become full.
But the truth is, it’s full of earthly wisdom.
and if we drop GOD in there and try to mix it it will simply not work
If you pour oil into water it will not Mix
This is a great illustration of our struggle
Have you ever tried to mix oil and water? No matter how hard you shake it, they just won’t blend.
It’s a perfect picture of trying to force two opposite things together.
Just like our spiritual lives, if we mix in the wrong things, they can separate us from God’s purpose.
The good news is that through Christ, we can align our lives, creating a smooth flow instead of separation!
We find ourselves reaching out,
trying to understand and keep pouring more and more things into that cup
that doesn’t have any room in it.
We get frustrated because the OIL of life and the Water of Life will not blend to our liking.
We start to make a mess of our life Cup is overflowing with things of this world.
Then for most of us, we’ve come to a point in our life.
where we see the meaninglessness and the frustration in our lives
we see that we have this cup
It sustains us in the world
in its missing something of true value.
We know the feeling of emptiness
The world filled cup is....
just dirty oily ugly gross liquid in our cup
1000s of things simply blending together
we pour some Jesus in their to help and it will not mix
and we risk getting frustrated or surrendering
That is our lesson of the Corinthians
They were seeking to BLEND the WORLD and the WORLD
There’s no pureness to it.
It’s so mixed up with things that we can’t even see the truth anymore.
I believe fully that one of the solutions in life to solve this
we need to be poured out.
We need to empty that cup.
And then with discernment, as as Paul is talking about here,
we need to change our standards, change our goals, change what allows us to refill that cup.
With the PURE WATER OF GOD.
God will clean up the mess -— God will wipe away the OLD and the GROSS
and make it all new
instead of seeking more and more things.
WE NEED TO SEEK THE RIGHT THINGS
we need to focus more on the thing and that thing is the gospel That thing is scripture.
What does your CUP look like today?
just like I said earlier, having John 3:16 in your life is wonderful.
But if you just leave it there,
then you believe that all you need to do is believe in Jesus
to be saved
It’s a beautiful, wonderful thing. It’s true.
But that’s part of the truth, not the whole truth.
The whole truth is that we need to become more like Jesus.
We need to be poured out EMPTIED of the World
and poured into from Scripture
We need to become like Jesus.
Poured into from the Holy Spirit
and leaking Jesus — the water of life into the world
THIS IS WISDOM -— to learn to get your KNOWLEDGE
and DIRECTION from the ONLY TRUE SOURCE
NOT our Wants, Desires, or Opinions
But the TRUTH of GOD
So in order to create Unity -— We must be UNITED
Not Blending or taking a Worldly CULTURAL SIDE
NOT A DENOMINATIONAL Directive
BUT FOCUSED and LISTENING FOR GOD’S TRUTH
TAKING a SIDE will ONLY DIVIDE
We must LEARN TO LISTEN
Helping our ......
Our Church
Our Community
Our Culture
ALIGN
Glorify God by Growing Others
United in
One Truth - One Lord - One Mind
Spurgeon said this:
The church would be one with itself if it were one with the truth.
The Message From The Lord’s Mouth, Volume 24, Sermon #1431 - Ezekiel 3:17
Charles Spurgeon
My prayer is this
Jesus empty me, Cleanse me,
Make me a receptacle
for YOU
Pour YOU in to me,
and give me opportunity to POUR you out to OTHERS
Father this is your Commission and Your COMMAND
to GO
TO LOVE
and TO POUR OUT to OTHERS
