SPEAKER_00: Be careful, Mike.
SPEAKER_00: I've only got one good eye right now.
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
SPEAKER_00: So many of you have questions right now, and you're wondering why.
SPEAKER_00: The reason is because I have preacher friends.
SPEAKER_00: And if I said to them, I once had an opportunity to preach from a pirate costume, but I didn't do it, it just wouldn't go well for me.
SPEAKER_00: Man.
SPEAKER_00: Listen, we had a great time last week, uh, this last week, uh Saturday, it felt like a week, uh, with the kids.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, yeah, like Mike said, 26 young boys and girls whose lives we believe were impacted.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, we know they were because they heard the word.
SPEAKER_00: And whenever you hear the word impact occurs, I believe that.
SPEAKER_00: And uh so in the in the course of that, we had three young boys and girls who raised their hands during the gospel presentation time that we're going to be following up with, who whenever we prayed, uh they they they apparently prayed as well, and I believe made a move towards God.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, does that translate into salvation?
SPEAKER_00: That's God's business right there.
SPEAKER_00: And the truth is, uh, whenever God calls us, he calls us from eternity past, and so we get this incredible opportunity to be some small part of their move towards God.
SPEAKER_00: And so thank you so much for those of you who served in various ways, either yesterday or before, uh, praying, uh giving, uh partnering, decorating.
SPEAKER_00: It was such a fantastic event.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you so very much.
SPEAKER_00: So, listen, uh, I'm gonna ask if you will to take your copy of God's word and turn with me to the book of Colossians, chapter two.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna join you there in a moment, but what I want to do for starters is I want to talk to you about what we discussed this past Saturday, and then we want to do a deeper dive into what Paul is teaching here in this text.
SPEAKER_00: So the theme that we dealt with that we focused on yesterday was this Jesus is the treasure we seek.
SPEAKER_00: Now, in a culture where there are so many distractions and so many uh alternative treasures, if you will, uh I think this is a great message.
SPEAKER_00: This is our opportunity to instill in young kids, and by the way, remind ourselves that at the end of the day, Jesus is the treasure that we should really be after because he is the only lasting thing, the only lasting treasure that there is.
SPEAKER_00: This is why Jesus tells us that when we, as you and I, as adults, as we work and serve and do all that we do, that we do not store up for ourselves treasures down here because they're going to erode, they're going to fall apart, they're going to be taxed, they're going to be stolen, they're going to go away.
SPEAKER_00: But if we put our hope in heaven, if we put our, that's where we're putting our treasure, then it's going to last.
SPEAKER_00: It's going to be eternal.
SPEAKER_00: It's going to be an investment that that makes it.
SPEAKER_00: Not every investment you make last.
SPEAKER_00: Many of you realize that as you've been watching the stock market, not every investment you make lasts, but this one does.
SPEAKER_00: So why don't we just do this here this morning?
SPEAKER_00: Why don't you just say this motto with me on the count of three?
SPEAKER_00: One, two, three.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the treasure we seek.
SPEAKER_00: The kids were a whole lot louder than you.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm going to give you one more chance to do this.
SPEAKER_00: Here we go.
SPEAKER_00: One, two, three.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the treasure we seek.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, he is.
SPEAKER_00: And this was taken out of the book of Colossians, chapter two, verse three.
SPEAKER_00: This was our focal verse where Paul is talking about Christ is the word he uses, but he's talking about Jesus because Jesus is the Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And he tells the Colossian church that in him, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: The idea here being that whatever you're seeking in the line of wisdom and knowledge, whatever you're pursuing and wanting to learn something or be more intelligent with how to exercise life in this world, your family, your friends, your job, your career, uh, your health, like there's a lot of voices providentially right that come to us that are wise, good things that we should listen to, but none of that matters without the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Now that's what we're going to be talking about today, is the fact that without Jesus in our life, all of the wisdom of this world, as great as it is, and all of the knowledge of this world, as much as it is brought to us, leads to nothing.
SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, Paul didn't have what you and I have in terms of wisdom and knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, we know a lot more than he knew about certain things, but in other ways, he knew a lot more than we did.
SPEAKER_00: You cannot for a moment think and be authentic, be reasonable.
SPEAKER_00: You can't for a moment think that we are more intelligent than they were whenever they could take into their mind entire sections of a story, memorize it, and then regurgitate it with almost perfect accuracy.
SPEAKER_00: How many of you could do that with your phone number, let alone a story?
SPEAKER_00: They were incredibly intelligent.
SPEAKER_00: And so when Paul says wisdom and knowledge, he's not talking about wisdom and knowledge of an ancient, archaic, backwards people.
SPEAKER_00: These were highly evolved, highly intelligent people who asked the exact same questions that we ask today about our universe and our reality.
SPEAKER_00: And they wrestled with those same answers that you and I wrestle with.
SPEAKER_00: They thought through it.
SPEAKER_00: They thought through it deeply.
SPEAKER_00: And so Paul is writing to the church at Colosse, this very developed, uh, very progressive thinking city, and he is telling them about his work for the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Because Paul is doing something that seems antithetical to what a human would normally do.
SPEAKER_00: Usually, as humans, we try to protect ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: We try to prosper ourselves.
SPEAKER_00: And in the middle of that sea of everyone wrestling around, trying to get theirs, is this one guy who has quietly made his way from Jerusalem all the way through onto the other side of the Mediterranean Sea to Rome, where he is trying to get the highest offices of the land to present this message.
SPEAKER_00: And he's done it at great cost to himself.
SPEAKER_00: And he's talking to the Colossian Church about the struggles that he's faced along the way and the fact that he's not faced these struggles by himself, that these struggles that he's faced have have been faced because he has the power of Christ living within him.
SPEAKER_00: Now that's a good place to stop and just preach a sermon.
SPEAKER_00: The fact that you and I, the stuff that we're facing with our kids, with our family, with our neighbors, in our community, in our government, inside our own personal heart, those as followers of Christ, those are not struggles that you are facing by yourself.
SPEAKER_00: You have the strength of the Spirit of the living God living inside of you.
SPEAKER_00: The same spirit that hovered over the face of the deep in Genesis 1 now abides in your heart, in your soul.
SPEAKER_00: That's huge.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul says, this is what he says in chapter 2.
SPEAKER_00: He says, I've I've been able to do this because of the mighty power of Christ working in and through me.
SPEAKER_00: And then in verse number one of chapter 3, chapter 2, he says to the Colossian church, he says, Look, I want you to know, I want you to be aware how great a struggle I have for you and for those who are in Laodicea.
SPEAKER_00: In the Lycos Valley, there were a stream of cities that followed the rivers there.
SPEAKER_00: Colossae, we know, Laodicea, we know from the book of Revelation.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul says, I'm concerned about that entire valley there, and that's why I'm here trying to get the gospel out.
SPEAKER_00: He says, I've this concern for you and for all who have seen the faith, who have not seen me face to face.
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's it's easy to love those who we see every day.
SPEAKER_00: That's not true at all, is it?
SPEAKER_00: It's it's easier to love and to have emotional connections with those who we see every single day.
SPEAKER_00: It's very difficult to have concern, deep concern about those who whose face we have never seen.
SPEAKER_00: See, Paul didn't have Facebook, he didn't have Twitter, uh, he didn't have FaceTime, he couldn't, he couldn't like, you know, do a FaceTime call with these individuals.
SPEAKER_00: He is sacrificing and struggling for people whose faces he has never seen.
SPEAKER_00: And he's pouring himself out because of this message and the impact that it would have.
SPEAKER_00: He says in verse number two, here's what he really wants.
SPEAKER_00: He says that their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love to reach all the riches of the fullness, of assurance, of understanding, and the knowledge of God, God's mystery, which is Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Boy, there's a lot in that verse.
SPEAKER_00: But let me tell you what he's doing here essentially.
SPEAKER_00: He is saying, he's saying, What I really want to see happen is for the community of faith to be knit together in love.
SPEAKER_00: Now, why is that important when we're talking about knowledge and wisdom?
SPEAKER_00: It is because knowledge and wisdom is not an individualized pursuit.
SPEAKER_00: Here in the West, we believe, like when we think about education, when we think about knowledge, when we think about wisdom, we think of a person who is by themselves in a library working quietly.
SPEAKER_00: But they knew better.
SPEAKER_00: These folks knew better that true knowledge, to with true wisdom came from the exchange of the exchange of ideas and encouragement inside community.
SPEAKER_00: That's why church is so essential.
SPEAKER_00: It's because yeah, you can learn a lot from the internet.
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot of information out there, but you can't be mentored by an AI agent.
SPEAKER_00: Now, let me just tell you, this is uh I'm gonna get onto a hobby horse just for a minute.
SPEAKER_00: I promise I won't stay on it long.
SPEAKER_00: I'm in a pirate costume.
SPEAKER_00: What are you gonna do, right?
SPEAKER_00: Here's the truth.
SPEAKER_00: Whenever I grew up, I grew up, uh, you know, I became a, you know, I entered ministry and I'm into my older teenage years right about the time the internet became a thing.
SPEAKER_00: So I'm I'm like really, really old.
SPEAKER_00: And and Google was like the source.
SPEAKER_00: Like if I needed to know something, my my fathers, the father, the ministers before me, if they needed to know something, they would pick up the phone and they would call someone who was much, much older than them, like Carrie, and they would call them up and they would say, Hey, I know you've seen this before.
SPEAKER_00: What do you think about this?
SPEAKER_00: And that would develop a mentorship relationship between the older and the younger because they had to call and ask.
SPEAKER_00: Well, by the time I entered the ministry, I'd Google.
SPEAKER_00: So I mean, I just would just Google it because it was easier, and I didn't want to be an imposition on anybody.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't want to be a bother on the older ministers.
SPEAKER_00: I didn't realize that.
SPEAKER_00: Like they would have loved to have sat down and answered my crazy questions.
SPEAKER_00: But I didn't.
SPEAKER_00: And that, I mean, like I can feel it in my ministry.
SPEAKER_00: There's this disconnect of mentorship.
SPEAKER_00: And that's not just a ministry thing, that's also a you thing.
SPEAKER_00: Because like now with AI, it's so much easier rather than calling, you know, some older mother or some older wife, some older sister up or brother up and say, hey, listen, this is what you've, I mean, have you seen this?
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what to do about this.
SPEAKER_00: And instead of having those kinds of important mentorship and partnership conversation, we just outsource that, we just outsource that to the internet.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm just telling you, like, I appreciate wisdom and knowledge that comes so easily, but it has come at a high cost.
SPEAKER_00: We need community.
SPEAKER_00: If you hear nothing else this morning, let me encourage you the next time you have a serious life question, don't Google it.
SPEAKER_00: Pick up the phone and call someone and say, hey, listen, I need to talk.
SPEAKER_00: That's the kind of world Paul is trying to set up here.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying, in love, reach out to people.
SPEAKER_00: And this is what you're supposed to be doing.
SPEAKER_00: You're reaching for the riches of the assurance that you know what you believe concerning true wisdom and true knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: Everything's caught into question today.
SPEAKER_00: Except for the things that are most crazy.
SPEAKER_00: Everything else is caught into question.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul is saying we can have assurance about the source and end of wisdom and knowledge here in verse number two.
SPEAKER_00: He says that.
SPEAKER_00: Now let's talk for a second about wisdom and knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: You know what knowledge is.
SPEAKER_00: Knowledge is this awareness of facts.
SPEAKER_00: It's basically like the subject of the sentence.
SPEAKER_00: It's just truths and facts and realities and numbers.
SPEAKER_00: Very important.
SPEAKER_00: It's just information.
SPEAKER_00: And we have a lot of information today, don't we?
SPEAKER_00: Um, I did a little research to find out how much information we have in this world.
SPEAKER_00: You can compare, apparently, condense the entirety of the internet, all the information on the internet down to 178 zetabytes.
SPEAKER_00: Now, uh uh 178 zetabytes translates to around 200 billion terabytes.
SPEAKER_00: That's a lot.
SPEAKER_00: That's that's uh what is that, nearly three terabytes, three billion terabytes for every person living on the planet right now.
SPEAKER_00: That's a tremendous amount of information, and it sounds like there's a lot of knowledge, there's a lot of facts, a lot of wisdom mixed up in that 178 terabytes.
SPEAKER_00: But how many of you know?
SPEAKER_00: Now come in real close because I want to share this with you.
SPEAKER_00: For some of you, this is going to be a real jaw-dropping moment.
SPEAKER_00: Not everything on the internet can be considered knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: 178 zettabytes.
SPEAKER_00: It sounds like a lot, but here's here's a compelling truth for you.
SPEAKER_00: You can fit, like if you wanted to download the internet, you can fit the entirety of the internet on 20 million one hundred and twenty-eight terabyte hard drives.
SPEAKER_00: So the largest hard drive you can go down to Best Buy and buy it right now.
SPEAKER_00: Just go down there, place an order for 20 million of those.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure they'll be happy to fill it for you.
SPEAKER_00: You could download the entire internet, and that entirety of the internet then could be stacked together in the amount of space that is occupied by the buildings at Virginia Tech.
SPEAKER_00: We think we have all of this vast knowledge and wisdom, but you can comprise the entirety of human experience into the space where your grandchildren or children are getting a bachelor's degree.
SPEAKER_00: There's a lot we don't know.
SPEAKER_00: Our knowledge is very limited.
SPEAKER_00: It's it's limited because you know there's a the universe is, well, it's it's quite large.
SPEAKER_00: And then there are aspects of the universe that we can't even reach.
SPEAKER_00: This um particular passage here throughout the book of Colossians, like if you read it, you you notice that Paul is talking a lot about wisdom and knowledge and where it comes from.
SPEAKER_00: And then he talks about these other celestial beings out there, and it all seems kind of like really weird.
SPEAKER_00: It's not something that we as Westerners, especially as Southern Baptists, like to get into that like there's this whole supernatural realm out there of angels and demons and and and layers of entities that God has created that are behind the veil that we can't see.
SPEAKER_00: It seems very kind of like you know, supernaturalist uh for us.
SPEAKER_00: But the truth is uh that there's a whole world, like we've talked about many times, that we can't get to.
SPEAKER_00: Like science, cosmologists, physicists know like there's parts of this universe that exist out there that we can't touch, like we know it's out there.
SPEAKER_00: The fact that you and I want to call that heaven is is not, I mean, it's it's it's not insignificant.
SPEAKER_00: And here's the point that I'm getting to here.
SPEAKER_00: So what Enoch does, Enoch tells us about the coming age.
SPEAKER_00: Enoch is not a canonized book in the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: He wrote during the intertestamental period, but he is referred to many times by James uh as well as Peter.
SPEAKER_00: So he was well read at this point in time.
SPEAKER_00: And essentially, what Enoch says, don't miss this, what Enoch says is that when Messiah comes, he is going to reveal what was hidden in wisdom and knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: That is probably what Paul is appealing to here.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying, look, man, there's a whole nother layer of reality behind what you can see.
SPEAKER_00: God has not revealed to you everything.
SPEAKER_00: And so that's the other reason why our knowledge is limited, is first off, because there's so much of the universe that we have not seen.
SPEAKER_00: And secondly, because there's so much of the hidden world.
SPEAKER_00: Whatever's down there at the subatomic level or the transdimensional level, whatever word you want to use, man, there's stuff out there that we can't possibly know.
SPEAKER_00: And so our knowledge is going to be limited.
SPEAKER_00: And if our knowledge is limited, then I think we can all agree that our wisdom is also limited.
SPEAKER_00: You don't have to read too many Facebook posts to know that people do not necessarily do the wisest thing.
SPEAKER_00: So we're not going to spend a lot of time on that, other than to say our world needs true wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: True wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: And Paul tells us that knowledge, that the treasures, the true treasure of knowledge, look at verse number three, in whom, in him, that the treasures of knowledge and wisdom are hidden inside Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: Now I've grappled with that because this is one of those verses that would be easy to read and just sort of walk past and be like, oh yeah, Jesus is is it, man.
SPEAKER_00: Like he's he's the he's the treasure of all, he's the you know, the revealed treasure of all wisdom and knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: But what does that mean?
SPEAKER_00: What does it mean that Jesus is the treasure?
SPEAKER_00: Now, for us, you know, when we think treasure, you you probably think to yourself, sort of the images that were around VBS this week, you know, big box chest full of silver and gold and that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00: And and if if you're thinking in those terms, you're thinking on the right terms because that's exactly what they would have thought.
SPEAKER_00: In a world where there were so many empires that had risen and fallen and rumors of treasure that were left behind.
SPEAKER_00: Man, it was every little boy's dream, every little girl's dream to find themselves into a cave somewhere and discover more gold than you could possibly ever spend in a lifetime.
SPEAKER_00: It was a treasure.
SPEAKER_00: That's the image that Paul is laying down here.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying that image in Jesus, all of the wealth, all of the prosperity, all of the progress that you are pursuing in wisdom and knowledge is found in Jesus.
SPEAKER_00: And what's he saying there?
SPEAKER_00: He is saying essentially that Jesus is both the source and the end of all knowledge and wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the source and the end of all knowledge and wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the source.
SPEAKER_00: Paul's already touched on this in Colossians.
SPEAKER_00: He says that Jesus, that it was, that this universe that was created was created by him and for him and through him, all things consist.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the source.
SPEAKER_00: In fact, in in New Testament literature, Jesus is referred to as the Lagos.
SPEAKER_00: He's referred to as the Word.
SPEAKER_00: It's the idea of the truth.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, if it maybe if John was writing today in John chapter 1, instead of saying in the beginning was the word, maybe John would say, in the beginning was the fact.
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning was the truth.
SPEAKER_00: In the beginning was the reality.
SPEAKER_00: These truths, these realities that you and I sometimes skip over as Christians are so deep and meaningful to how we live life here.
SPEAKER_00: So, anyway, so here's what I want to do is I just want to show you what that looks like today.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the treasure, which means he is the, for us, he is the source and the end of all wisdom and knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: With him, with him, all knowledge is dangerous and all wisdom is empty.
SPEAKER_00: Here's some examples of this.
SPEAKER_00: Think about the wisdom of our age.
SPEAKER_00: Peter Berger, who was a sociologist of the mid previous century in 1960, wrote a book called The Social Construct of Reality.
SPEAKER_00: Sounds like an engaging read, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_00: The Social Construct of Reality.
SPEAKER_00: He makes this argument.
SPEAKER_00: He says that every society, like the one that you and I live in, is full of truths, of ideas that are just accepted.
SPEAKER_00: Nobody questions them.
SPEAKER_00: They just assume that it's true.
SPEAKER_00: And in some other uh writings, Tim Keller refers to these as untruths.
SPEAKER_00: Peter Berger referred to them as plausibility structures.
SPEAKER_00: Things that as a culture we just assume are true, but nobody stops to ask is this really how the world works?
SPEAKER_00: Does this does this does this really leave?
SPEAKER_00: Lead to the progress and prosperity that we assume that we're teaching our kids it's going to lead to.
SPEAKER_00: I've got three of these.
SPEAKER_00: We're going to cover them, and I promise you very quickly plausibility structures of our world.
SPEAKER_00: The first one is the progress wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: The progress wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: The idea if it's new, it's better.
SPEAKER_00: Somehow, every single new thing that we've created is an improvement on the old way of doing things.
SPEAKER_00: We don't have to look around very long to realize that most of the time when we create new technologies, we're creating new work for ourselves, things that have to be maintained, reformatted, restarted.
SPEAKER_00: Some of you, like you're spending, you know, we spend half of our day trying to make the technology work.
SPEAKER_00: Progress doesn't always lead to the places that we want it to lead.
SPEAKER_00: This is especially true whenever you think about progress as it leads to human flourishing as a society.
SPEAKER_00: The idea is that all progress is good and it leads, like the technology is one day going to lead to some transhumanistic uh way of existence, and we're all just going to be better.
SPEAKER_00: How many of y'all remember the Jetsons, right?
SPEAKER_00: That that that was supposed to be now, by the way.
SPEAKER_00: How many of you all, how many of y'all work three three hours a week and get tired when you have to push the button three times?
SPEAKER_00: Like it it the world has not has not manifested itself.
SPEAKER_00: You know what has manifested itself with every new layer of progress and technology, we find new ways to hate and kill each other.
SPEAKER_00: Prove me wrong.
SPEAKER_00: Show me a technology that hasn't, if not first, then very early in its development, been used by one human to hurt another human.
SPEAKER_00: The progress wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: When you apply the gospel to the progress wisdom, you walk away realizing that progress is not going to be enough, that with the gospel, we're told that no matter how much progress we make, we still bring into that new technological error the seed of sin and destruction.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the wisdom that tells us that.
SPEAKER_00: He's the treasure that tells us that of all wisdom and knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: Secondly, the therapeutic wisdom of our age.
SPEAKER_00: The therapeutic wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: The therapeutic wisdom tells us that you can be better, and all you have to do is just find the right life coach, find the right truth, and you're going to be able to sort all of this out because your real problem is there's this one missing tick, there's this one missing medication, there's this one thought process, there's this one holdback from your past.
SPEAKER_00: And like all of that has its place.
SPEAKER_00: But whenever you reach my age and you've gone through enough therapy, and by the way, I'm just gonna say I don't call it therapy, I call it life coaches, okay?
SPEAKER_00: Whenever you have enough coaches, when you have enough people who are instructing you, you begin to realize that to observe a pattern in the wisdom of therapy.
SPEAKER_00: Now I'm gonna I'm gonna travel gently into this next area because like I don't want to dismiss the value of therapy in in your life if if you're going through it.
SPEAKER_00: Others of you, you you you desperately need some therapy, and we could talk about that.
SPEAKER_00: But one person laughed at that.
SPEAKER_00: That's good.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so but but here's the truth with with therapy.
SPEAKER_00: If you're not careful, if you're not careful, your therapist will tell you how that it was it was it was all your dad's fault.
SPEAKER_00: And it was probably like he was probably involved.
SPEAKER_00: Like no doubt some of you had some horrific experiences with your parents.
SPEAKER_00: No doubt that's a factor.
SPEAKER_00: They'll tell you that it's you know that that that it's all your boss's fault, that it's all your husband's fault, that it's just, you know, it just and and and the the blame always goes somewhere else.
SPEAKER_00: And let me tell you, whenever you live with sinners, sinners are going to be painful.
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, they have to bear some of that burden.
SPEAKER_00: But the truth is eventually we have to look at ourselves and realize that, hey, uh they're not, they got problems, they got big issues, and they have wounded me.
SPEAKER_00: But some of this, like what part of this do I need to own?
SPEAKER_00: Like, what a part of this is connected to my fallen nature because of the way that I'm processing this.
SPEAKER_00: And let me tell you, man, I've had to ask those deep questions.
SPEAKER_00: They are not easy to ask.
SPEAKER_00: They are tough, they are painful to ask.
SPEAKER_00: Whenever, whenever I have to stop thinking through how am I impacted by all of the stimuli outside of me, all the people outside of me.
SPEAKER_00: And I sit in a room by myself and I think about not the toxicity that I'm swimming in, but the toxicity that that is pumping through my blood.
SPEAKER_00: That is tough.
SPEAKER_00: Therapy wisdom, the wisdom of this age is what's all about.
SPEAKER_00: Well, we we talked about this a couple of months ago a couple of months ago, where we went looking, like I went Googling for the phrase how to deal with or or uh uh um uh how to uh process uh psychopathy, I think is what it was.
SPEAKER_00: And all of the all of the articles, the top 10 articles, dealt with how to handle the psychopathic people in your world.
SPEAKER_00: None of it had to deal with the struggles of emotional and cognitive struggles that we have.
SPEAKER_00: And I just think that, you know, maybe some of the articles that we read should deal with the fact that I've got my own issues.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, enough on that.
SPEAKER_00: So, therapeutic wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus, the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, informs us how to live with the therapeutic wisdom of this age.
SPEAKER_00: Because whenever you go to the gospel, the gospel tells us we are broken.
SPEAKER_00: And the gospel tells us that your friends, your neighbors, your parents, the people who have hurt you, they are broken too.
SPEAKER_00: And that, yeah, your relationship may change in that difficult circumstance, but the reality is Jesus wants to redeem them as well as you from our brokenness.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the treasure of wisdom and knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: Finally, the justice wisdom of our age, the justice wisdom of our age.
SPEAKER_00: These are just three examples.
SPEAKER_00: The justice wisdom of our age tells us that equality should be pursued at all costs.
SPEAKER_00: And I think, and I think that's great.
SPEAKER_00: I think life should be fair, except for whenever I'm dealing with the justice of God.
SPEAKER_00: I don't want fairness there.
SPEAKER_00: I want grace and mercy, but like we should treat one another well.
SPEAKER_00: And the Bible has more to say about how we treat each other, how we treat people who are not like us, who don't think like us, who are not from this country.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible has so much to say about that.
SPEAKER_00: And so justice wisdom has its place.
SPEAKER_00: But the problem with justice wisdom of this age is the justice wisdom of this age very quickly becomes tribal.
SPEAKER_00: And by that I mean you get a group of people together who believe a certain thing is important, and you watch it happen over and over again.
SPEAKER_00: And studies have been done that show that whenever that group is left to itself, it stops trying to help the problem that brought it together and it starts hating the people that it thinks are enemies.
SPEAKER_00: Because tribally, collectively, our impulse is to find the enemy and to blame them and to attack them.
SPEAKER_00: That's why you find so many people in this country who are concerned about justice.
SPEAKER_00: But whenever you see what they're posting, when you see what their podcast is about, when you see how they're responding on the news, what you begin to learn is they're not about justice.
SPEAKER_00: They're about hating people who aren't pursuing the justice.
SPEAKER_00: And that's a totally different thing.
SPEAKER_00: Pursuing justice, pursuing what is right, is not the same thing as hating what is wrong.
SPEAKER_00: The justice wisdom of this age, hopefully you're with me, justice wisdom of this age is all about tribalism and hating the wrong thing.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus comes to us, the treasure of wisdom and knowledge, and says, no, true justice requires that we love those who aren't loving, that we demonstrate for them the way that it should be, that no one is outside the the sphere of redemption, and we pursue them in grace and mercy.
SPEAKER_00: And that's the difference.
SPEAKER_00: Can you see hopefully out of this what you glimpse is this difference between the world's knowledge and wisdom, which is limited and failing, and our knowledge and wisdom in Jesus Christ?
SPEAKER_00: He is the treasure of knowledge and wisdom.
SPEAKER_00: See, without Jesus, wisdom and knowledge has no authoritative source.
SPEAKER_00: Who's to argue that your fact is more important than my fact?
SPEAKER_00: That your truth is more important than my truth, it has no authoritative source.
SPEAKER_00: And without Jesus, wisdom and knowledge has no hopeful ends.
SPEAKER_00: There's no place, like we've seen it over and over again.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, our life is easier, and we've got air conditioning, and we can Google and stream and entertain ourselves at the at a moment's notice.
SPEAKER_00: But where is that guidance?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I mean, authentically, are we happier?
SPEAKER_00: Or are we are we truly are we do we truly have more peace about where we're heading to?
SPEAKER_00: Well, the studies would tell us that we do not.
SPEAKER_00: And the reason is I'm going to suggest to you, as followers of Christ, hopefully you believe this.
SPEAKER_00: If you're not a follower of Christ, hopefully you consider the possibility that maybe this is where it lies.
SPEAKER_00: The truth is, Jesus is the treasure that we seek.
SPEAKER_00: He's the source.
SPEAKER_00: This is why Paul says in in the final verse we're going to look at this morning, verse 4.
SPEAKER_00: He says, I say this in order that no one may uh delude you with, and and I love his choice of this word here, plausible arguments.
SPEAKER_00: See, Paul doesn't say concerning the wisdom of this world, it has no basis.
SPEAKER_00: He he doesn't look at these alternative viewpoints in life and just totally dismiss them outright.
SPEAKER_00: He's saying that they sound really good.
SPEAKER_00: They're very plausible.
SPEAKER_00: He gives the devil its do, in other words.
SPEAKER_00: By the way, your kids aren't gonna buy it whenever you go to them and say that makes no sense at all.
SPEAKER_00: Why do you you're just such a you're just such an idiot for believing that?
SPEAKER_00: Only an idiot would believe that.
SPEAKER_00: Like that, that's not that's not that's not how to win friends and influence people, okay?
SPEAKER_00: I'm just gonna tell you.
SPEAKER_00: It's plausible.
SPEAKER_00: It sounds reasonable, it sounds truthful, but it's a lie.
SPEAKER_00: And you have to deal with the truthful part of it.
SPEAKER_00: Let me give you one more, one example of this.
SPEAKER_00: There is um, because you know, dealing with the kids this past Saturday, you know, you're walking around and you're trying to pick out, okay, what are they?
SPEAKER_00: Hmm.
SPEAKER_00: I wonder what I wonder what they're gonna be when they grow up.
SPEAKER_00: You ever do that with with young folks?
SPEAKER_00: Like, he's so intelligent, he could probably be a teacher.
SPEAKER_00: She's such a menace, she's gonna have a felony on her.
SPEAKER_00: You know, what I'm just kidding.
SPEAKER_00: None of your kids were like that.
SPEAKER_00: But I'm just saying, like, you're just trying to pick out, okay, what's, you know, what what's going on, you know, what what's what's their fear?
SPEAKER_00: And so sometimes we'll even ask them, like, what do you want to be when you grow up?
SPEAKER_00: Man, I'm 50 years old.
SPEAKER_00: I'm still trying to figure out what I'm gonna be when I grow up.
SPEAKER_00: I can't imagine for an eight-year-old, a 12-year-old, the kind of pressure that brings.
SPEAKER_00: Uh Steve Jobs popularized this idea uh at a commencement speech given years ago.
SPEAKER_00: He he encouraged, he encouraged the students to follow their passion.
SPEAKER_00: That if they would just follow their passion, they would never work a day in their life.
SPEAKER_00: Man, I'm passionate about what I do.
SPEAKER_00: I have followed my passion all the way up to this very moment right here.
SPEAKER_00: Because I am passionate about showing and teaching the word of God.
SPEAKER_00: I'm passionate.
SPEAKER_00: It feels like work sometimes.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes following your passion doesn't mean you're not going to have to work a single day in your life.
SPEAKER_00: And the other problem with that, and by the way, this came out in a Forbes article just a few years ago where the Forbes article said this idea has done more damage to careers than any other idea.
SPEAKER_00: But it sounds so plausible.
SPEAKER_00: Just follow your passions.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I've given that advice, I've received that advice.
SPEAKER_00: There's probably a place for that advice, but there's also a place to understand that sometimes people have, as the Forbes article points out, have multiple passions.
SPEAKER_00: Or their passions change.
SPEAKER_00: They wake up one day and realize that their former passions were selfish and leading to dead ends, and they needed passions that led to deeper places.
SPEAKER_00: See, it sounds plausible.
SPEAKER_00: It's a plausible argument.
SPEAKER_00: But whenever you get in and you begin to turn it around and lift it up and examine it a little bit, it quickly falls apart in your hand.
SPEAKER_00: Our culture is full of those plausible arguments.
SPEAKER_00: What's the solution for those plausible arguments?
SPEAKER_00: Those arguments that you hear and you know, like they don't they don't taste well, like you may even say them, and you're like, but man, I just don't know that that's that's the way the world works.
SPEAKER_00: What's the solution for all of those arguments?
SPEAKER_00: To take a course to learn all of the plausible arguments, all of the false tellings, all the lies that are spread in our culture?
SPEAKER_00: But by the time you finish with that course, there are going to be 13 more that are out there.
SPEAKER_00: No, no, no, it's much easier to learn the truth, to seek the treasure.
SPEAKER_00: Without Jesus, knowledge is pointless and wisdom is empty.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the treasure we seek.
SPEAKER_00: Can I just pause for a moment and ask you, like, what's your impulse whenever you address these plausibility structures that Berger talked about, these untruths, these things that we all just assume to be true, and they come and they they hit you and they just don't feel exactly right because they it seems like the gospel doesn't line up with that.
SPEAKER_00: What's your impulse?
SPEAKER_00: Is your impulse to attempt to warp the gospel to these truths because of some emotional commitment or some idea of love or some political connection?
SPEAKER_00: And I'm talking to I'm talking to the entire spectrum of people.
SPEAKER_00: We we all are guilty of this on both sides of the aisle, this temptation to warp and to contort and bend the gospel to make it fit our plausibility structure.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it, in fact, we know it would be, it would be better to take that paw that plausibility structure and simply to let alongside the gospel truth and to say, okay, what what part of this is redeemable?
SPEAKER_00: What part of this is true, and what part of this needs to be cut off because it doesn't tell us the truth about human, about who humans really are.
SPEAKER_00: Or it doesn't tell us the truth about who God really is.
SPEAKER_00: Where do we go for that?
SPEAKER_00: I mean, let me encourage you the next time you run across one of these untruths that jumps out at you, the place you go is to the treasure.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the treasure we seek.
SPEAKER_00: If you're here in this room or online, and maybe for you, like you've been wrestling with all of these narratives that you're supposed to follow and things you're supposed to believe.
SPEAKER_00: It's mandated that you believe them, it's mandated that you act this way, it's mandated that you think this way.
SPEAKER_00: And yet there's something inside of you that says, man, this just just this isn't going to lead to me experiencing the true hope and happiness.
SPEAKER_00: Like I'm and you're like you know, like you've tried that, you've come to a place where you realize this isn't it for me.
SPEAKER_00: I've tried it and it doesn't work.
SPEAKER_00: And I just encourage you, maybe here today, to seek Jesus as the treasurer you need.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the treasurer we seek because He is the He is the treasure, He is the essence, He is the source and end of all the wisdom and knowledge, true wisdom and true knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: He's the one who gives it, and He's the one that it's pointing to.
SPEAKER_00: And the more we get to know Him and what He's doing in the world around us, the more some of these untruths, the more some of these plausibility structures will they begin to erode and conform themselves to reality, to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you'll say it with me one more time, just as a commitment.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the treasure we seek.
SPEAKER_00: One more time.
SPEAKER_00: One, two, three.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus is the treasure we seek.