SPEAKER_00: Lord, thank you for today.
SPEAKER_00: We do thank you while we're talking about it, just for the technology that creates so much more access for us to biblical preaching, heritage, you know, like J.
SPEAKER_00: Harold Smith and Brother Dale, and hearing people like that, and just the opportunity to follow up from Sundays as we do with that new podcast.
SPEAKER_00: Just there's so many ways that you have created opportunities for us to study your word, for you to speak to us, for us to encourage each other.
SPEAKER_00: And I just thank you for that.
SPEAKER_00: I pray you'll bless the time we have together today.
SPEAKER_00: Bless the guys that are here.
SPEAKER_00: We thank you for the food.
SPEAKER_00: And we thank you especially for the folks that serve us each week.
SPEAKER_00: What a blessing they are to make this a time of encouragement as we come together and spend time together, build each other up, encourage each other.
SPEAKER_00: We thank you most of all for the gift of salvation.
SPEAKER_00: That is the thing for which all of our gratitude flows is our gratefulness for salvation in Jesus' name and what that means to us today.
SPEAKER_00: In His name we pray, and everybody sit.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Well, we have a lot of cultural things going on, and uh, on occasion in here we talk about those, and uh actually had some uh responses.
SPEAKER_00: I do want to remind you, week of Thanksgiving, no lunch that week.
SPEAKER_00: Y'all got it?
SPEAKER_00: Write it down.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody got it?
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: So I actually had some uh folks who were listening to the podcast uh of our Tuesdays, and a couple of times when we talked about AI, we talked about some heritage of our country, some of those things, and they were telling me how much they appreciated the setting to discuss some of those different things, and so I just that led me to this thought process.
SPEAKER_00: It's been on my heart for a while.
SPEAKER_00: Um there's so much going on in our culture, and it's moving so fast.
SPEAKER_00: It just seems like almost it's been a year since the an event like the Charlie Kirk assassination.
SPEAKER_00: And you know, following that, there was so much conversation about Jesus and the church and the gospel and the apologetics part of his discussion and the church moving and all these people going to church again and all that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And and now all of a sudden, the algorithms on social media and everything has shifted to all these people who are attacking people of faith and they're doing all the deconstructionist stuff we've talked about, and it's just amazing how the cycle of information changes so incredibly quickly.
SPEAKER_00: And so the culture changes so incredibly quickly in all of that, and uh and I just think it's important that we take time to think through how do we process and then minister in this culture.
SPEAKER_00: It's important to understand that, and so in praying through that, this verse keeps coming to mind, and if you've been in church any amount of time, it is a familiar verse, but we don't spend a lot of time with the context of the verse and the depth of what it really means.
SPEAKER_00: So if you've been around church, you know, you guys have heard this verse probably, right?
SPEAKER_00: It says, uh, from the Issacharites who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.
SPEAKER_00: Two hundred chiefs with all their relatives under their command.
SPEAKER_00: And so we hear that.
SPEAKER_00: I think there's also a verse in the New Testament that I'm probably going to talk about next week that describes the Bereans, and it says that they're constantly testing things against the Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: If you get on Google and you type one of those phrases in, you get a lot of times where they mash them together and they act like it's the same statement.
SPEAKER_00: And you'll read something like, You understood the times and tested against the scriptures or whatever.
SPEAKER_00: That's literally not what the verse is, and that's not what Scripture says.
SPEAKER_00: And so I think it's kind of ironic that a verse that says they understood the times gets misquoted and mashed up with something else, right?
SPEAKER_00: So let's stop and sort of break those apart.
SPEAKER_00: And I think this is an incredible passage of Scripture if you stop and you think and process your way through it.
SPEAKER_00: So it's interesting this verse.
SPEAKER_00: You see from the structure of it, it's important to understand its context.
SPEAKER_00: So it says, from the Issacharites, and then you get this colon and 200 chiefs with all their relatives under their command.
SPEAKER_00: No, nobody quotes that part.
SPEAKER_00: They just like the part that it says, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do.
SPEAKER_00: But you get the sense of that that this is in the flow of something else.
SPEAKER_00: So, what is the context in which this statement was made?
SPEAKER_00: The overall historical context is Saul has been the king of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: We've been so advanced in this time now that he and David have been at loggerheads and in battles and all that other kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And then right before this happens, Saul goes to battle with the Philistines and he is killed in battle, in essence.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, he killed himself, but basically because he was trapped and he didn't want to be held up to ridicule and tortured and all this other kind of stuff by the Philistines.
SPEAKER_00: So he basically falls on his own sword.
SPEAKER_00: And so what you find yourself is this is at the end of Saul's regime.
SPEAKER_00: There was already chaos because of his poor leadership, because of God's judgment on him for his ungodly decisions and leadership.
SPEAKER_00: The struggle with David had already happened, and now the Israelites are without a king, and they begin to turn towards David.
SPEAKER_00: And many leaders and many people from tribes across Israel turn to David and they begin to respond to him to be the king.
SPEAKER_00: So it's a time of political upheaval, it's a time of political intrigue, it's a time of transition in leadership, it's the opening of a new period of Israel history because David is becoming king and these people are responding to David.
SPEAKER_00: There's even some pagan nations around there that have such a respect for David and who he is that they begin to send people and they pledge their loyalty to David as the king of Israel and become Israelites.
SPEAKER_00: And what you find in 1 Chronicles chapter 12, it begins this way.
SPEAKER_00: Now these are the men who came to David at the place called Ziklag.
SPEAKER_00: While he could not move about freely because the son of Saul, another one of his sons, and they're having this battle for it.
SPEAKER_00: And then you get to verse 22, and it says, These are the numbers of the divisions of the armed troops who came to David.
SPEAKER_00: He's now moved to this area, Hebron, who came to David and Hebron to turn the kingdom of Saul over to him according to the word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: So you get David, you get this battle, then he settles in, and then all these people start to come, and now Scripture gives us a list of the people who are coming to David to pledge loyalty to him as the king because they feel like that's what God has told them to do.
SPEAKER_00: In this list, now you get to verse 32.
SPEAKER_00: The Issacharites are one of the tribes of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: This is the ninth son of Jacob.
SPEAKER_00: Leah, if you remember the battles between Leah and Rachel and all that, she is, he is Leah's last son.
SPEAKER_00: This is one of the northern tribes of Israel, and they come to present themselves to David, and they are described as bringing 200 chiefs with all of their relatives as the commitment of the tribe of Issachar to David as king.
SPEAKER_00: And it's significant that they are sending leaders and chiefs to lead in this time, and God describes them this way.
SPEAKER_00: So it's a fascinating deal when you start thinking about the times, what's literally going on in the culture of Israel right then.
SPEAKER_00: You're also in a time that there is a scientific revolution going on as David becomes the king, and you have an explosion of scientific development and knowledge as he is stepping into his role of king at some of the things that are going on in the culture right here, and it's a huge statement when you begin to put it in context.
SPEAKER_00: So I think it's particularly advantageous for us to think about how did they become that way?
SPEAKER_00: Who are they that that's how they are described, and how do we become that in the time that we live?
SPEAKER_00: And so here's three concepts I want to give you out of this passage of scripture.
SPEAKER_00: The first concept is the difference between understanding and knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: Understanding and knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: It does not say that they were smart.
SPEAKER_00: It does not say in a description of their understanding of all these, I mean their knowledge of all these things.
SPEAKER_00: It says they understood the times.
SPEAKER_00: In our culture today, this is a huge concept.
SPEAKER_00: We have an explosive amount of knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: Our knowledge of things literally doubles in a matter of months around the world.
SPEAKER_00: It's incredible how fast it moves.
SPEAKER_00: If you think about the incredible changes just since COVID that have happened around the world, if you just think about the explosion of AI in the last two years, how has it advanced?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, now they're literally talking about the and calculating the number of jobs that are lost because of the increased efficiency of AI and its replacing workers are dramatically moving forward their capacity to do more and do more efficiently, so they're not hiring more people.
SPEAKER_00: In just a matter of a couple of years.
SPEAKER_00: It's incredible what's happening.
SPEAKER_00: We have so much knowledge, and yet we're dumber and less wise as a culture than we've probably been.
SPEAKER_00: It is incredible how we have so much knowledge, but we have no framework to process it and turn it into wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: The word understanding is a very specific and powerful word.
SPEAKER_00: It is also a word that is repeated often through scripture.
SPEAKER_00: So I've kind of put together a biblical definition of what this word means.
SPEAKER_00: It means it is developed by studying, by learning, but even beyond that, it's searching the scriptures themselves as the foundation of how we're processing information and viewing matters through a biblical worldview.
SPEAKER_00: You think about what happens, you're connecting the two dots in this passage of Scripture, understanding the times, and knew what Israel should do.
SPEAKER_00: It is producing an understanding of what God is doing in their culture and how they're going to respond to be obedient in that culture.
SPEAKER_00: And so it's an incredibly powerful and important word what this means.
SPEAKER_00: It means that they are functioning with a biblical integrity and understanding.
SPEAKER_00: And so understanding is a powerful concept.
SPEAKER_00: So in our minds, do we have understanding?
SPEAKER_00: We may have knowledge, we may have access to knowledge, but do we have understanding?
SPEAKER_00: Where does understanding come from?
SPEAKER_00: Because it's a biblical concept we have to understand, we have to learn, we have to focus on, we have to develop our knowledge of Scripture and how Scripture becomes a filter through which we evaluate what's happening around us.
SPEAKER_00: It is automatically built on an understanding of Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: That's where true understanding comes from.
SPEAKER_00: If you look at the book of Proverbs, you can count how many times the word understanding is used in the book of Proverbs.
SPEAKER_00: And in the vast majority of those times, it always falls or surfaces around the concept of the fear of the Lord, the knowledge of the Lord, instruction from the Lord, instruction from godly mentors, that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_00: So it has a very powerful concept that it goes beyond just knowing things to having a knowledge that is filtered through biblical understanding, biblical wisdom that then comes out in a filtered process where our biblical worldview defines how we appreciate moments and circumstances that are happening.
SPEAKER_00: Again, I want to give you the context of this passage of scripture, 1 Corinthians chapter 12, verse 25.
SPEAKER_00: Listen to what it says.
SPEAKER_00: These are the numbers of the divisions of the armed troops who came to David in Hebron to turn the kingdom of Saul over to him according to the word of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: They are able to recognize and to discern that this is God's plan for Israel and this is what God is doing.
SPEAKER_00: They can understand the times that Saul had begun to walk away from godly leadership characters, characteristics, and godly leadership instruction and begin to do things wrong.
SPEAKER_00: They could understand God's blessing and God's cursing for obedience and for lack of obedience.
SPEAKER_00: They could see God's hand on David and character that was coming out of David's life.
SPEAKER_00: And as they're processing how all of this is unfolding, they are recognizing that God is at work.
SPEAKER_00: And this is not a time for politics.
SPEAKER_00: This is a time for us to turn to the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: It's a time for revival.
SPEAKER_00: And so they are processing from a biblical understanding the facts of what are happening, and they are recognizing what to do based on their cognition, recognition that God is at work and that there is a godly process of what should happen now.
SPEAKER_00: And in our lives, we have a lot of people who have Bible knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: We have a lot of people with political opinions.
SPEAKER_00: We have a lot of people with this is how it ought to work.
SPEAKER_00: We have a lot of people who are getting on the internet and they're finding somebody that speaks to them the way they emotionally think something ought to happen, and then they kind of invest their thought process in that.
SPEAKER_00: And none of that is understanding.
SPEAKER_00: And it's certainly not understanding the moment and what the response of Christians in the church should be.
SPEAKER_00: I had uh some of you know my son is involved in uh, he's uh on the editorial staff of a conservative political magazine in in Washington, DC, and he will at times send me something, and he's frustrated with this is going on in the culture.
SPEAKER_00: And uh so we had a conversation recently about how the younger generation of politically conservative people who claim an evangelical biblical worldview how they're against the nation of Israel.
SPEAKER_00: And there's an anti-Semitism vein in some of that.
SPEAKER_00: And he's like, where does that?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, how can you possibly create that as a thought?
SPEAKER_00: Well, you can't if you have understanding, right?
SPEAKER_00: There's nothing in us in Christians that would be disrespectful of the people that God used to bring our Savior into the world.
SPEAKER_00: Like, who would come up with that as an idea?
SPEAKER_00: I remember when I was practicing law in my first career, and I worked for a firm, and we had a number of, I was in Memphis, and we have a large Jewish community in Memphis, and a lot of the lawyers are Jewish, and I worked for a couple of Jewish lawyers, and I was trying to witness to one of them.
SPEAKER_00: We were talking through that.
SPEAKER_00: We kind of laughed because they were like, you know, it's kind of funny that here we are, we're having this conversation, and and and our heritage views Jesus as a heretic, and your heritage celebrates us because Jesus was Jewish and the Jewish Messiah's thing are like trying to put that together.
SPEAKER_00: Well, it is that's how it works, it's how it exists.
SPEAKER_00: That's where we are, right?
SPEAKER_00: And you have this culture out there where people, I got this thought, and I got this thought, and I got this thought, and I'm putting them together the way I think.
SPEAKER_00: That's not what biblical understanding is.
SPEAKER_00: Biblical understanding is being able to check my own opinions at the door of Scripture and sublimate my ideas and my thoughts about how things ought to happen to the way Scripture teaches us this is truth, this is how life functions, this is how people are, this is what God's plan is in these moments.
SPEAKER_00: And so when you look at these men, you under you look at it from the perspective of understanding versus knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: And in our world today, that is a critical concept.
SPEAKER_00: We have a ton of knowledge that is not being filtered through the truth of Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: Second critical concept is their understanding led to, and they knew what Israel should do.
SPEAKER_00: True understanding, biblical understanding, should lead to a biblical decision-making process.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what happens: these men come and they present themselves as leaders to David's new leadership and kingdom authority based on their understanding of what God was doing, and it says they knew what Israel should do.
SPEAKER_00: Their understanding led to a thought process that this is what God is doing, and we need to be obedient to that.
SPEAKER_00: And so that's the next thing is that we need to understand discernment versus opinion.
SPEAKER_00: They understood what to do because of what God was doing, not because of what they thought.
SPEAKER_00: They're not presented as experts flinging all their stuff out there.
SPEAKER_00: These dudes would not have been on CNN or Fox News.
SPEAKER_00: That's not what this was.
SPEAKER_00: These were leaders who had been before the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: They had seen God work, they had seen the positive and the negative, they'd seen the decisions that these are godly decisions and these are not.
SPEAKER_00: They'd seen the fruit of those, the result of those, and they're processing that through searching Scripture and following the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And when they see a clear sense that God has placed his hand on David and He is becoming the leader, then they step into that and they understood and therefore knew what to do.
SPEAKER_00: In our lives, we still have people are searching everywhere.
SPEAKER_00: We're searching for all kinds of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: We're trying this, we're trying that.
SPEAKER_00: God warned us that what it would be like.
SPEAKER_00: For example, in Ephesians chapter 4, the Bible says that we're to equip the saints for the work of ministry to the building of the body of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: That is going from knowledge to understanding to knowing what to do.
SPEAKER_00: Because when people go from this is how church works, to this is what your spiritual gift is, to this is how to serve, and then they begin putting it into practice, they have moved from opinion to discernment and to action.
SPEAKER_00: And it says we're to equip the saints for the work of the ministry of the building body of Christ until we all grow to be the full measure stature of Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And then he says, that's important, so that we're no longer tossed about to and fro by changing winds of doctrine and trickery of men.
SPEAKER_00: Serving the Lord, growing in our understanding of how God works and what he's doing in our lives, and stepping into ministry changes our discernment patterns and gives us a biblical discernment.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes I'll have conversations with young pastors, and so you get these young guys, and they're all wound up about, you know, alcohol, for example.
SPEAKER_00: And in the church, in the younger generations, there's this whole thing about they've got this academic approach where they are bent to prove they have the freedom to drink and the freedom in Christ and all of that.
SPEAKER_00: Only thing that I can deal with is because I've been doing ministry for so many decades, I can still run you the list by name of almost every person I've lost to alcohol.
SPEAKER_00: I can tell you the funerals where I've been where people were killed by alcoholic drivers or they crashed their car.
SPEAKER_00: I can tell you marriages that came together because of drunken procreation and then the marriages struggled and it created all kinds of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: I can tell you the stories of the abortions that happened because of alcohol, bad-driven, bad decisions.
SPEAKER_00: I can run list after list after list of marriages that fell apart because of the scourge of alcoholism and all that.
SPEAKER_00: And I can tell those guys, listen, you have an opinion about it, but I have discernment because I've been in tears and on my knees with person after person after person after person after person that has destroyed their life.
SPEAKER_00: I don't want to hear about somebody's opinion.
SPEAKER_00: What I want to hear about is someone who has a discernment that when you come to the lives of people and you evaluate that from a biblical worldview, you make decisions that are godly decisions from a place of understanding.
SPEAKER_00: It's incredible what knowledge does.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible talks about knowledge puffs up.
SPEAKER_00: If you take this argument, for example, I get all this nonsense about Ephesians and don't be drunk with mine, be filled with the Holy Spirit, and that means not drunk, and Jesus turned water again.
SPEAKER_00: I get all that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00: When did we write the Old Testament out of Scripture?
SPEAKER_00: The Bible clearly states in the book of Proverbs, which is the book of wisdom and understanding in Scripture, which we're talking about.
SPEAKER_00: It says literally, when it is fermented, you do not look on it because it will destroy you.
SPEAKER_00: It steals your brain.
SPEAKER_00: It makes you say stupid things and make terrible, unwise decisions.
SPEAKER_00: It is like a snake is like handling a poisonous snake.
SPEAKER_00: That's what it says.
SPEAKER_00: When did we write the Old Testament out of Scripture?
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's incredible.
SPEAKER_00: And so it is that ideal that we get, we've got to move to discernment.
SPEAKER_00: The Scripture was not given to us as an encyclopedia or to create our knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: It was given to teach us how to understand what God is doing and discern the things that would damage people around us and pull them away from the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: And it would help us discern the decisions that we make to follow the plans of God so that people come to Him.
SPEAKER_00: That's what it's for.
SPEAKER_00: Discernment.
SPEAKER_00: And when we come to it, we should be submitted to the Word, not, this is what I think, and I'm looking for something to justify it.
SPEAKER_00: And then finally, that leads to the last point, which I've already made: involvement versus inaction.
SPEAKER_00: Again, I want to tell you this is who those men are, and it's important to understand the concept.
SPEAKER_00: They are listed because they showed up and got involved and got obedient to do what God was doing.
SPEAKER_00: They showed up in David's camp.
SPEAKER_00: They showed up and joined the army.
SPEAKER_00: These guys showed up as chiefs and leaders, and they involved and invested themselves in what God was doing in their culture at that time.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't sit back with opinion.
SPEAKER_00: Understanding, which creates discernment, creates involvement and obedient action in what God is doing.
SPEAKER_00: And it's almost a powerful picture when you look at these guys.
SPEAKER_00: They understood the times.
SPEAKER_00: It led them to know what Israel ought to do.
SPEAKER_00: And then it tells us in detail, man, they showed up and presented themselves to the work of the Lord.
SPEAKER_00: Let me pray for us.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, we thank you for today, and I thank you for your word.
SPEAKER_00: And I thank you that it is so much more powerful than a book of philosophy or a book of information or a book of history.
SPEAKER_00: It has all those in it, but it is so much more.
SPEAKER_00: It is living and powerful.
SPEAKER_00: It speaks to our hearts.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says in Romans about itself, it generates our faith.
SPEAKER_00: It says that it is profitable for reproof and correction and instruction in righteousness and thoroughly equipping us for everything you've called us to do.
SPEAKER_00: And so we thank you for the power and the richness of your word.
SPEAKER_00: And I pray, Father, that you'll encourage us to be men of understanding and discernment and involvement.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, I pray as our church goes through our brew studies and we're handing out these books and encouraging people to be in the word each day.
SPEAKER_00: Father, I pray that you'll use that to build understanding and discernment.
SPEAKER_00: And you'll grow our involvement in your work.
SPEAKER_00: Lord, thank you for these men.
SPEAKER_00: I pray it's been an encouraging, informational, helpful time for them to think through this verse.
SPEAKER_00: And I pray, Father, that even if it's familiar to us, it becomes a little richer as we think through it in more detail.
SPEAKER_00: Bless them, keep them, use them for your glory, give them great understanding and discernment as they go about the things you put in their path.
SPEAKER_00: We thank you again for Jesus' salvation in his name and all God's men said.
unknown: Amen.