Episode 46 - Standards That Shape A Life

We explore how standards shape a church and a life, contrasting cultural comfort with Christ-centered conviction. Romans 12, the Sermon on the Mount, and six core teachings—holiness, sexual purity, integrity, forgiveness, servanthood, and self-denial—frame a practical path forward.

• Why Christ’s standard, not culture, defines discipleship
• Romans 12 as a rule of life and renewal
• Holiness and sexual purity as countercultural practices
• Integrity of speech and truthful witness
• Radical forgiveness over cancel reflex
• Servanthood and self-denial as daily habits
• Dangers of comfort-first church growth
• How algorithms and media form beliefs
• Returning to Scripture, prayer, and community
• Local invite to gather and grow together

If you're in Rockdale, you're more than welcome to join us. We meet at 10 o'clock for coffee and donuts and fellowship, and then worship starts at 10:30.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Let's Connect, the official podcast of Connect Church in Rockdale, Texas, where we want to help you to live a life that matters. One that is both on mission and has a purpose to follow Jesus and make disciples. So let's get started.

SPEAKER_02 0:28

All right, welcome into Let's Connect, the official podcast of Connect Church here in Rockdale, Texas. This is episode 46. We're fast approaching the one-year mark. We've had to skip a few weeks, and we skipped a week because uh yours truly was extremely ill. Like, don't get out of bed, don't pass go, don't collect$200 and go back to bed. So, um, but it's all better now, and we feel better, and we're back on track, and that's what's important. I'm your host, Bill Whitmire, and I've got, as always, with me our pastor, Ken Ansel. Ken, how are you doing today? I'm great. I'm glad you're back in the saddle. Well, it was rough for a few days there. You were under the saddle. I mean, thankfully, I'm married to the finest nurse practitioner in all the land, and so nothing like having the doctor right there.

SPEAKER_03 1:22

Oh, I can imagine, yeah. That's great.

SPEAKER_02 1:24

Sometimes it's uh sometimes it's iffy though when she catches me drinking or eating something. Uh you know, it's got too many carbs in it. But weather looks nice. We're getting into that springtime back where you like it. Awesome. It's almost too warm for me today. I actually had to turn the air conditioner on in my truck. That's uh that's a frightful time of the year for me. So yeah, it's great. I love spring. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

Well, you like the either better when spring is like teasing me, so it's good. I'm thinking about fly fishing and getting out, yeah. Oh, yeah. Coming out of hibernation.

Church Invite And Service Details

The Recruiter Story And Standards

SPEAKER_02 1:57

We did go fishing a few weeks ago. Took the took our oldest daughter and and our youngest daughter and our oldest daughter's husband and their two kids and went out fishing. And uh man, that five-year-old, I bought him some fishing rods that you can play with in the house and then you can put a rig on it. And she's learned to cast. She cast, she reeled it in and caught two big old catfish. I mean, 12 inches or longer. And I she looked at it first and she she asked it, she asked her youngest daughter to help her, and and her aunt said, No, you got to do this on your own. And she looked at me with those big eyes and said, Papa, I need your help. I said, No, you you threw it out there, you reel it in. And and she reeled it in, so good for her. So um, this is uh we're with Rockdale, we're with Connect Church here in Rockdale. Uh we meet every Sunday. If you're in Rockdale, you're more than welcome to join us. We meet at uh 10 o'clock for coffee and donuts and fellowship, and then uh worship starts at 10:30. We do have a nursery, do we do have children's church also? So uh you're welcome to join us if you're in town. Um this week, uh I've had a few weeks to think about this, and this week I've been writing down a bunch of little notes, and um it just occurred to me, I heard this story a while back, and um I'd actually heard it a long time ago, and then I heard it again recently from someone else, and it reminded me of something, and and and it's kind of what we want to look at today is you know, there's this uh story during the Vietnam War where four recruiters came to a high school, a local high school, and the Army recruiter says, if you join the Army, we'll teach you this, this, and this, and you'll be able to do this, and you'll get the GI Bill, and you can take some college and then you'll be set for life. And then the Air Force recruiter got up and said, Well, if you come join us, you can do all those things too, but we'll teach you to learn how to work on airplanes or maybe even fly in them. And then the Navy guy got up there and said, Well, we go to sea, we'll do all those things, plus we go to sea, and we have more aircraft than the Air Force does. And uh all the students were listening, and then the Marine recruiter got up there and just looked at everybody. Didn't really say a word, and then he f finally, after about a minute or two, he finally said, You know what? I'm not really gonna waste my time or your time. We're looking for a certain standard in the Marine Corps. And as I look out here right now, I just you know, I'm not we're not like the other forces where we'll lower our standards to get more people in. Um and so I just don't see anybody that fits our standards here. And uh and and he walked off the stage. And the reality of the situation was when everybody got to go look at the different recruiters, there was a line of people waiting to go talk to that Marine recruiter. But um the the the story transposes into our lives because there was a time when all of those forces, all of the armed forces, had relatively the same requirements to get in. And while the others have changed theirs over the years, maybe made them less stringent, some are less stringent than others, the Marine Corps stayed pretty much the same. Now I'm a Navy guy, I had one brother that went in the Marines, and the rest of us were in the Navy. Um, and I give them a hard time about it, but it's the truth. But when we look at when we look at ourselves and when we look at our churches out here, what standards are we keeping? Are are are we keeping the standards that the world dictates or are we keeping the standards that Christ dictates? And I just think as we go more and more, um we find ourselves comparing ourselves more to our neighbors and to our friends and to our family and to towards the other people that we go to church with and not really comparing ourselves to Christ, like like it, you know, like the Bible says to. It says I think in Philippians, you know, we should, you know, Christ should be that person that we aspire to be like, not our neighbors. And I think not only us, and and I'm not picking on anybody, I don't want to get down on anybody, because we all struggle with this. But but our churches do too. You know, they're they're they're so worried. There was something I told you before we started that um, you know, we're going to you know, as a church, and we've we've said this many times, that we're going to love people dearly, but we're not going to adjust God's standards or the church's standards just to watch the church grow. And that should be the way we are in our daily lives, too. That we that we're not going to give in to those world standards and everything just to be more popular, just to have more friends, just to not have any of that controversy in our lives that is is gonna come up when you when you decide to walk with God rather than walking with the world.

Christ As The Benchmark

SPEAKER_03 6:57

Yeah, Christ is our standard and and yeah, we don't see what you're talking about in scripture, like Jesus is like, get them in, you know, as many as you can. And I think we've seen it's it's cyclical, but we saw the standard lowered even to get into the kingdom, right? What does it mean to even be a Christian? Say a prayer, raise your hand, you know, say this prayer with me. Uh not uh you know, earlier you talked to me about self-denial and sacrifice, and yeah, so we've replaced commitment with compromise uh within the church. I mean, just oh man, I drove by Yeah, I'm not gonna say that.

SPEAKER_02 7:40

Well, uh the self-denial to me, you know, I I I told you before that there were like six things over the course of this week that I've written down, you know, of what Christ taught. And there's even more, you know, if you go to Romans 12 between um I think it's 10. Well, Romans 12 honestly is is is just a good read all the way down. But if you go from uh nine Romans 12, nine through thirteen, it it it's called the marks of a true Christian. I've seen it written as the 12 rules for everyday life. And and it is a it is a tough read because you will be convicted to a certain extent if you read all the way through all of those. Um and and in d just Romans 12 is itself is just a huge chapter to read. It it it really jumps out at you, you know. Everybody here knows Ephesians 2, 1 through 10 is that one I tell people to go to first, but if there was a second one, it would be Romans 12. And Romans 12, 2 says, do not be confirmed, conformed to this world, be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. The first part of that, do not be conformed to this world. I mean, that just jumps out at you. And when we talk about the things Christ taught, the one to six, when I just wrote them down, you know, is holiness, sexual purity, integrity of your speech, radical forgiveness, servanthood, and then that self-denial. You know, that forgiveness is the one that I think forgiveness and self-denial to me are the two that if you can do those two, you can meet everything else.

SPEAKER_03 9:30

Yeah. You know. I I what I see, and I said it a couple weeks ago, is people when people have the opportunity to stand with Christ, stand for Christ, they don't, they don't forgive. They don't love. They just they cancel and they move on. And that's what Romans 12, you know, talks about. Don't I think there's a paraphrase that says, don't be squeezed into the world's mold. Yeah. Like we're just we're just looking more and you know, when in Rome, you know, do as Romans do. I mean, that's become this the social norm in in in in our time. And it's hard to understand how we can we're really denying Christ with our lives. Uh we may show up on Sunday and sing the songs and go through the motions, but the way we live, you know, Monday through Saturday denies Christ, denies the fact that we know Christ.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

And and and I I think the important thing that sometimes maybe we don't even make the big distinction on is if you do these things, you become that example. But you don't do these things to become the example. It's just you know, being the example is just a side effect of doing these things.

Romans 12 And Marks Of A True Christian

SPEAKER_01 10:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 10:40

You do these things because it's what Christ, it's what God has asked us to do. And and and and guess what? It's not easy. I know it's not easy. It's not easy for me. There are times in my daily life where I'm surrounded by certain people that I know are are are for me to for me to act the way I'm supposed to act, do what I'm supposed to do, I'm probably gonna take some chastisement from those people over it. And so those human feelings are in us, you know. Even even Christ had those human feelings in him at times. And that's the thing. We need to emulate Christ because he was human. I mean, he was as human as as we are. Well, you know. Yeah you know what I mean. And he had those feelings, he had those human feelings, he understood those human feelings, but he did not let those human feelings interfere with the job he was sent here to do. Now we are only human, and so you know, there's there's some pastors and some churches that'll play up the little g you're the little g God, and and you're not. You're a human being formed in the you know in in in in in the uh what's the word I'm looking for? I can't think of what I'm looking for right now, but you're you're only human, and the important thing is is to to emulate and try to be like Christ, we'll never be Christ. We'll never actually be a little God. We're not a little god. We are human beings. But what we should do is try to emulate that, and when you try to emulate that and you're somewhat successful with it, because nobody's gonna be a hundred percent successful, but if you're successful most of the time, you will be that role model, you will be that person that i it is is that mentor figure. Um, but I think a lot of folks feel like they have to do this so people will see them in that light.

SPEAKER_03 12:35

Does that make sense? Yeah, and it's just it's not a lifestyle, it's it's kind of a go-through-the-motion thing. Dogs don't bark to be a dog, they bark because they are dogs, and so we do these things because they're na they're really natural. We could call them supernatural, but they're things, it's organic, spiritually organic, that we we do the things that you mentioned. We strive to live a set-apart life. We uh sexual purity. You know, I had a guy tell me yesterday, his daughter's in high school, and she said, Dad, I don't think I'm gonna find a a man to marry that's a virgin. And I'm like, wow, I mean that that would, you know, that would bum you out. And and then we've we you know, and that speaks to the fact that we've got so many sins that are even that are just acceptable, acceptable by our culture, but then that your point is it's creeping into the church, and that's what we see. That's what these letters we read that that Paul's writing is like church, you're you're becoming more like the culture. You know, we are salt. I love what Jesus said. We are salt, we are light, we're not becoming those things, we are those things, and we're to be flavor enhancers and and we're to be uh spoil retardants, right? And uh, but but we have to but if salt's not salty, what did Jesus say? He said it goes out in the street and and animals go to the bathroom on it, you know, it's not good for anything, and uh you're just out in the street with you know donkey urine and camels or whatever went down the roads back in the day. That's a that's pretty pretty ugly talk from Christ, you know. We think he's real nice, but you know, he says it like it is, and I think what you're doing is you're you're you're issuing a call to holiness. Yeah, live a setup art life, be different.

Forgiveness, Self-Denial, And Witness

SPEAKER_02 14:20

Be different, you know. Be weird is what you say a lot. I say it. If that's what they think of us, you're all weird because you're like that. Okay, I'm good with that. I'll be weird. Uh when we compromise that stuff and when we let it go over time, and and uh, you know, I had I I had a conversation with somebody the other day, and they said, Well, I just where do you think all this comes from? And and so I started writing down and then I added a couple uh yesterday and today, but you know what do we have to guard ourselves from? And we've talked about things, you know, entertainment, the TV we watch. Yeah, you know, I I make that joke to you all the time. TV-MA on the rating stands for TV mature audiences. What it ought to stand for is TV must avoid because it's it's terrible. But that's the norm now. That's the you know, when we were kids, you didn't hear people cuss on just regular TV, and now every third or fourth word is you know one of those vulgar seven. Uh, you know, redefined truth. We've seen churches, we've seen society redefine what it truly means in life, whether that means, you know, you know, God created men and women, that's it. That's all. And so we've redefined various truths like that. We've redefined marriage and personal identity in this world. And you know, marriage is what marriage says it is in the Bible, it's not anything else, it's a union between one man and one woman. We've uh we've uh chosen comfort over conviction. We want to go to that church that makes us feel comfortable that we don't feel uh it's funny. I I I had a cousin of mine who's in the ministry. He says, People go to church because they want to be comfortable, they don't want to be preached to. Because we've made preach such an ugly verb. Preach is an ugly word, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

Don't preach to me.

SPEAKER_02 16:16

And I, you know, because I said, you know, we want comfort over conviction. And I said this to him a long time ago, and he said, Well, what they want is comfort over preaching. They don't want they don't want to be preached to. And I was like, Wow, that's and and and that falls into that what we've talked about easy, that easy Christianity or casual Christianity. And and the the point is, I guess, when you compromise on these things, it it separates us from God. It it it dulls our conviction. Yeah, it's sin. It it weakens our witness, it compute it confuse the it replaces power with popularity. It is sin. And the one thing that worries me the most is it it confuses the next generation. It makes the make next generation feel like oh, this is this is norm.

SPEAKER_03 16:59

Yeah. Yeah, it it it church is a train wreck. I mean, Psalm 1 talks about this. Don't don't stand, sit, and walk with sinners, mockers, scoffers, people that don't fear the Lord. There's no future for those people, and yet we, whoever we are, are starting to look more like them than we do Christ. And you know, I had lunch with a local pastor on Monday. He said, Ken, do we even know what a Christian is anymore? And uh yeah, and I and he's got a pretty uptight church, and I thought, wow, dude, if your people, if you're struggling if you're looking at your flock and and you're going, man, do y'all even know? I mean, what what about some of these others?

Comfort Over Conviction In Church Culture

SPEAKER_02 17:40

But I think that's a question everybody has to ask themselves, you know, and and and and be honest with yourselves. You know, a lot of times there are some folks, and I have had some feedback sometimes on this podcast that we're we're too tough. We talk about things that are too tough. And the fact of the matter is, it it's what's in the Bible, you know, and and and so you know, I'm not I don't ever want to anybody to feel like I'm pointing my finger directly at them because I'm pointing it at me more than anybody else because there are times in my life when I struggle with this too, and we all do, but we have to realize there's this certain set of standards that Christ set for us.

SPEAKER_03 18:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:22

And you can read the Sermon on the Mount, and most of it's right there in plain English, and like we've talked about many times. I doubt there was anybody that left that sermon on the mount feeling like, oh, I got this. Yeah. Every one of them was, oh man, I gotta work on that, or I don't know what he's talking about. That doesn't sound right, you know.

SPEAKER_03 18:40

Yeah. Yeah, I'm tripping out at how everybody wants the Ten Commandments on the walls of the school, and it's some of the people on social media that are paying for it. I'm like, yeah. Do you even know what they say? And and and you know, I know that, yeah, that sounds critical, but you know, you talk about how are we being um I forget how you put it, but we're all being influenced or discipled by something. And we make that choice and and we do it through uh television or YouTube or the podcast or the social uh media, you know. I man, it's just Facebook is is killing the church, I think, in a lot of ways. It's not positive or healthy.

SPEAKER_02 19:20

I think people look at social media far too often and get all their news, get all their information, get their lifestyle choices from it, and none of them really, you know, realize that there are certain algorithms in the programming that once you look at something, once you like something, there are algorithms that shift in that thing, and the next thing you know, I hear people say it all the time oh, I was on Amazon and I was looking at shoes that are pink, and then the next thing I know, I go to Facebook and there's a bunch of pink pictures of you know advertisements for pink shoes. Well, yeah, um that's not an accident or coincidence. Yeah, that that's an algorithm that's programmed into your phone, programmed into Facebook, programmed into Amazon. They all work together. So when you look at something that tells you, for instance, that abortion is not as bad as what you think it is, and you watch that whole thing, and you're like, hmm, guess what? You're gonna get 47 more videos that that are pro-abortion. Uh, if you have something in there where you like Donald Trump and you click on it and you watch that whole thing, guess what? You're gonna get 50 more videos that are pro-Trump. If you watch one that's anti-Trump, you're gonna get 50 more.

SPEAKER_03 20:38

And unfortunately, you know, we talk about Next thing you know, you're signing up for a free MAGA hat.

SPEAKER_02 20:44

But anyway, keep going. Yeah, I mean last week they had uh uh oh what's his name, who's the founder of Facebook was in in Congress. Yeah, yeah. And it was a big deal because a uh a teenager had killed themselves over something that happened on Facebook, and that's tragic. But what's really tragic to me is the number of people who look through social media, be it Facebook, Instagram, yeah, uh, Snapchat, X, X, I don't know them all. Yeah, TikTok. TikTok. Yeah. Let's keep going.

SPEAKER_03 21:15

And and they think my truth or whatever. That's it.

SPEAKER_02 21:18

Well, yeah, true social, yeah, true social. But I mean they look at it and they think that is their truth. Oh, this is truth. You know, the nobody would take the time to put this together. But the fact of the matter is with AI, and I'm this is the last bit of my social media tangent, but with AI, people can make videos. I made I I I did not meet my wife until we were in our 30s.

SPEAKER_03 21:41

Last the last year, yeah, a few years ago.

Media, Algorithms, And Redefining Truth

SPEAKER_02 21:44

Put a decade in front of them. So but uh I w I was cleaning up a picture of her from her freshman year in college, and I cleaned it up, and then I said, Hey, I could put my freshman year in college picture up there next to each other. And then I made one and said, What if they went to prom together? And there was a picture of us in an 80s time. No, I did not post it. Because I didn't see it. And then and then I said, Well, what if these two kids were at the beach and it you know in the 80s and it put us in the 80s clothing at the beach? And I said, Now make them walk down the beach. And I had a video of us that looks exactly like we would have looked at back then. Yeah. Walking down the beach. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:19

And that crazy.

SPEAKER_02 22:21

And that's what social media does. You don't know what's real. You don't know what's what's not real. No. And I I worry that that we focus too much on that as a society and we don't focus enough on this. We did a podcast a long time ago talking about you know how people get on their phone and they'll sp what if they you you spend an hour or two death scrolling every day on your phone. What if you spend an hour or two in your Bible and you got truth? You know, that's where you're prepared for things. That's the standard. That's where you learn those standards. When you learn those standards, death scrolling on your cell phone, you're getting the wrong standards.

SPEAKER_03 23:02

Yeah. Well, that's Psalm 1, too, right? We meditate. Happy is the the guy that meditates. Yeah, we're I mean, uh you know, you bring up what truth is, and I know we need to go, but uh you know, actor uh Robert Carradine just died, he was in the Cowboys. And I was reading that on the news, and and it said he the family issued a statement that he'd lost his uh 20-year battle to bipolar disorder. And I'm just thinking bipolar? Like how did that kill him? Well, today I'm I'm this I'm this many days old this morning somebody was paying a tribute to him, which I stopped and read the article. Now I'm getting threads of stuff, you know. Yeah like I'm not a people magazine subscriber, but uh how he'd killed himself. Yeah. And I'm like, well, I get I get what the family was doing. I don't want to seem insensitive. Like they were just trying to say it in a nice way, right? But I'm scratching my head, but because I'm not consumed with celebrities, uh, you know, I didn't think much about it. But then today, you know, the guy's like, Oh yeah, he killed himself. I'm like, oh, that's you know, but that's kind of that's not a great example, and I don't mean to seem not sensitive, but that's redefining the truth too, in a way, like be you're not being honest, you know, and we used to we we say that we're our brains are being rewired through social media. We used to call that brainwashing. Yeah. And it's pretty serious, and that's I'll get off my box, too.

SPEAKER_02 24:26

That's that's it, that's exactly what it is. And you know, we we we've we've dulled everything, um, we've brought those standards down, and I think it's imperative upon each of us to get back into the Bible.

SPEAKER_03 24:39

Amen.

SPEAKER_02 24:40

Go find the Sermon on the Mount. It's in a couple of places in the Bible. Just go to the back, you can look it up. It'll say Sermon on the Mount. You can go to that page and look at I don't know what your Bible says. Read that. Read read Romans 12 the whole way through. Read it a couple of times. And and use those as your standards. Uh, not what you read on TikTok. I don't have TikTok. I don't even think I know how to spell it right, but um, you know, or what you find on Facebook or anything else, what you find from your friends um down at the local, you know, pub or or whatever. Use that book first. Find you a good church with some good believers. Be around other people that are Christians, that have your same beliefs that are based in the biblical truth, yeah, and do yourself a favor and and seek that out. Uh Eric Dane was another actor that just died last week, and I didn't watch it. There's a special on him already out. Wow. But the thing that I felt sad about, he was on Gray's Anatomy and a couple other things, and and and uh the thing, and I didn't even really know who he was, but I I know who he is now because the thing that they asked him was, uh, do you believe in God? And he said, No, I don't I don't I don't have any w when we die, we just go away. Wow. And that's tough. Those are the things that uh I don't want anybody I know to not know or not have had the chance to know God. All right, it's my turn this week to pray. Right. So I'm gonna take care of that right now. Dear Lord, we thank you for this wonderful day. We thank you for all that you do with us, and we just praise your name, Father. We thank you so much for giving us this opportunity to to spread your word. And Father, we just ask that you would help folks to begin to get into your word, to really dig into your word, to really find those standards that you've set for us, that you demonstrated to us when you walk this earth, and that you demonstrate to us on a daily basis. Father, I I I love you with all my heart, and I just pray for everybody that they would be able to feel that, get out there and strengthen their resolve to be more like you, to emulate you, Father. I thank you for all that you do, for it's in Christ's name I pray. Amen.

unknown 26:58

Amen.

SPEAKER_02 26:59

All right. Well, that is it for episode, I believe, 46. And uh we'll be back next week with another edition. And until then, like I said, if you're here in Rockdale on the weekend, you're here on Sunday, come by. We're at the American Legion Hall north of Rockdale. We uh have coffee and cookies and fellowship. Ah, coffee and cookies, coffee and donuts and fellowship at 10, and then we'll start worship at 10:30. Everybody's welcome to join us, and I look forward to seeing you. And if not, then listen again next week. God bless everybody.