Wirksworth | 02/08/26 | Lean Not On Your Own Understanding | Vicki Mottram

Wirksworth 

Podcast: https://www.buzzsprout.com/354059/episodes/19593343-wirksworth-02-08-26-lean-not-on-your-own-understanding-vicki-mottram.mp3

Vicki spoke about how we need to lean on God rather than ourselves.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello, good morning. This is my first time speaking here, so it's really lovely to be here. So you've been we've been talking through the kind of fundamentals of the faith, haven't we? And things that that we absolutely believe and why. Now I'm stepping slightly away from that because when Neil asked me to speak, he said, I said, what do you want me to do? And he said, Do what you like. So I'm afraid you've got that freedom. However, as it's panned out, I think that what I'm going to say is is actually quite, I hope, quite a useful approach to take for all of these things, really. And I hope it will fit in nicely with the ongoing theme. You can let me know at the end. So let me start off with a little story. When I went to university in Newcastle, the first year I was there, I kind of wandered round a whole load of churches and I didn't really feel like I fitted in anywhere. And then the second year I moved into a different block of student flats, and I will admit my motivation was possibly not the most holy, because literally opposite the my residence, there was a little tiny church. And I and I did I may have had the thought of well, if I can't find a church, at least I'll get longer in bed. So I took myself off to that little it was a little um apostolic chapel. There were about, I think, probably 20 people there on a good day, and I went there, and that first morning I stepped in and thought I had gone back in time by approximately 30 years. All the ladies had little like triangles of neck curtain pinned on their heads. Um but nobody gave me one, so I just sat there. Um and actually, and they were lovely. Do you know what? They were lovely. God led me to that place, even though I was thinking more about it'll take me two minutes to walk there and I can have more of a lion. Um, and I mean they became my family. Uh they became the family that as a lonely 18-year-old, I didn't, well, 19-year-old, I didn't know I needed. Um and and I'm still in touch with lots of them today. One of the elders there was called Bill. Bill was an awesome guy. He would give you the shirt off his back, quite literally, and the shirt would say Jesus saves on it. Um, Bill had been in the army, and then he was a bus driver, so everything was black and white. There were no shades of grey whatsoever. He was a Geordie through and through. There was just Bill's way and there was the wrong way. Now, those of you who know me will know that possibly Bill and I occasionally would have rubbed each other up the wrong way. And um and that came to a head one day fairly early on when I'd not been going there very long. I was a vegetarian at that point. I had been for years. Uh, and and they this was like nothing they had ever heard of. Bless them, they all did cook, bring and bring vegetarian food for me. And I, whenever we had food, I would leave with like three bags of food and it would keep me fed for the rest of the week. Um, but Bill was particularly upset about the concept of not eating meat because to his mind I was rejecting half of God's creation, that God had intended us to eat meat, uh, and that this was just the way it was. And I said to him, but we didn't eat meat before the fall. Which went down like a lead balloon. And at that point he said to me, Vicki, there's an important scripture. Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. Proverbs 3.5. Now I heard that scripture quite a lot in that church. It was preached on, it was quoted to me on more than a few occasions. I did think at this point about asking you to put your hands up if anybody else has ever had it quoted to them, but I will confess I am a little bit chickenly about that, and I feel like there's a risk that I might be the only person who's ever had that experience. So I'm not, oh thank you. I'm not alone. And it also quite often got shortened, and the bit about trusting in the Lord sort of got skipped because that was a given, and people would just quote the lean not on your own understanding, and they sort of used it, Bill particularly used it, um, to mean stop thinking, turn off your brain, and take what I am telling you as given. And this went on for a little while, but they were lovely and I loved them, and I also got an extra hour in bed on a Sunday morning. The Apostolic Church is a Pentecostal-based church, and they believe in the Apostolic ministries, as in Corinthians, and so they had within the area an ordained prophet, a full-time in ministry. Uh, he was a pastor as well, but his ministry was he is he was a prophet, and he came to our church one day, um, and it was the most awesome service. It was like a little prayer meeting. Um, his name was Howard, and he went round the whole room and sort of walked around our prayer circle, laid hands on everybody, and had a word for everybody. Uh, it was so powerful. And he got to me, and we were all, you know, as he was getting closer, people were bracing. You could see they were like, What is he going to say? He got to me, and again, I'm just this, this was I'm just I'm not sure I actually want to tell you what, but I'm going to. He got to me and he said, Lord, we thank you for Vicky. You've ordained her as a holy troublemaker in this place. Now, that was quite the mandate. I didn't actually try and cause trouble. But I just, my presence in that church just seemed to kind of give them a nobody else had joined the church for I don't know how long. Um they were clinging on teeth and toenails. And and it just, I don't know whether I just gave them an extra pair of eyes, gave them the ability to step back and look at themselves and and question things. I don't know. But what what I brought away from there and what I have always stood by is that God gave us brains for a reason. The human brain is the most complex structure in the known universe. Why would he give us that and not intend us to use it? It's nonsense. And actually, when you that that one verse in Proverbs 3, 5, trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. It's great. There is a whole load of truth in there. Absolutely, and we're going to unpick that a bit more. But there's also a whole load of other verses in Proverbs and elsewhere, at least 50 of them, that say, seek after understanding. Ask the Lord for understanding and wisdom. Seek after it like treasure. And I think sometimes we can get the balance wrong. And sometimes, not in this church obviously, but sometimes that can lay Christians open to becoming vulnerable to things being passed off as truth, things being assumed to be truth, to be assumed to be in the Bible when it maybe doesn't actually say that. So having thought about that, I th I I thought there are a number of traps. We can fall off the right balance of using our brains in a loving relationship with God, and we can fall off in any number of ways and go too far and stumble. So we're going to look at four particular traps that I think we are we're vulnerable to in different circumstances, and then we're going to hopefully bring it all back together and think, well, what do we do to try and avoid that? Trap one, I think, is not trusting anything. It's being overly sceptical. It's you know kind of sitting back there and thinking that anything you hear from the front is nonsense, anything that you read in the Bible is outdated and mistranslated, and humans are inherently flawed, so how can we know that that's what God meant anyway? And just being so utterly skeptical that nothing will get through. That is leaning too much on your own understanding, it's because you're not actually allowing anything else to get in. Trap two is the other end of that. The second trap is trusting everything, it's the other extreme. So anybody who stands at the front of church and says something, you're like, absolutely. Anybody who says something on Facebook with with a little cross next to it, uh, absolutely, yes. Gospel truth. Um, but that's not right either. That is that's dangerous. Both of those positions are dangerous. One Thessalonians tells us to test everything and hold fast to what is good. It doesn't say your church needs to test everything for you, it says you, you know, it's is Paul's talking to us as individuals. We are to test everything. So when you're joining a new church, when you're watching something on TV, when you're reading something, um inwardly you have a responsibility, you are instructed to be testing that and to be seeing if it holds fast, if it stands up to what you already know of God. Trap three is not quite as easy to understand, and it's a bit more of a sort of long-term one, but it's expecting that our interpretation of the living and active word of God, as it's described in Hebrews, remains static. Let me unpack that for you a little bit. Um I'll start off the example that leapt to my mind was the triangular-shaped bits of neck curtain that everybody at my old church, all the ladies wore. So it was triangle of neck curtain, pinned, and then two hair grips holding it on the top of your head. And I remember when I became an official member of that church, we had a service for me to become a member, and I invited some of my friends from the University Christian Union, and so we all trooped in and they sat down, and I could see the friends from CU looking around, going, what is this place? And one of them said afterwards, I thought they were going to bring you one of those net curtain things out on like a special cushion and then present it to you. But it was just that nobody ever told me I needed to cover my head. I didn't grow up in a Christian house. I came to my own faith when I was about when I was James's age, mid-teens. Um and and it had just I'd never encountered it before. So, and nobody in that church said, Vicky, you need to be covering your head, so I just didn't. And interestingly, over well, I was at university for a further five years at that point, so um, over the next three to four years, gradually the the net curtain started to disappear. And I never said anything. I didn't I didn't do anything. I you know, if you want to cover your head, that's great. I don't I've never felt the need to cover my head, that's also great. Um but they just started to disappear, and the the the two younger women who were there stopped covering their heads, and then somebody else stopped. Nothing was ever said, it wasn't a problem, until at the by the time um I graduated, I think there were two old ladies, awesome ladies. One of them um my daughter Emily is named after, uh, such a warrior for Christ. So and she would turn up each week with her hair twisted round and with her little sort of I don't know, round hat on top. Um Auntie Emily and Auntie Alice, there was no way they were not covering their heads, and that again, it was all fine, but that was a little example of people prayerfully went away and looked at what they had assumed was a command, and looked at how it had been interpreted in their lives and in the church, and and they re-evaluated it and and decided that for them it wasn't actually necessary, and that's again it was fine. The other situation that I I've been thinking about this week is and it's a bit on a bigger scale, um the Old Testament and the New Testament both accept slavery as an absolute given, don't they? They accept it as a way of life. Uh it's it's the the way that society is. Even within the New Testament, slavery is legal, acceptable, you need to be a responsible slave owner, you need to be a trustworthy slave, but then in nowhere, nowhere in the New Testament does it say it's wrong to have slaves. And for hundreds of years after that, we carried on, didn't we, as a church, with you need to be responsible and you need to be a decent person, but slavery is owning slaves, absolutely fine. And you can look back on that interpretation of what is written in the Bible and say, yeah, I can see where it came from. But if I came in today and said, Well, on that strength, on the strength of the Bible, um, and lots of verses that I can quote for you if you want, um, I've decided I'm going to buy a slave. Then all of you would have, there would be some sharp intakes of breath, all of you would not be very approving of that decision, and it would be illegal. The word of God, the word of God that we have written down in printed form, the actual true word of God is living and active. We can't pin it down and expect the way that we understand it to stay the same forever. And at some point, William Wilberforce and all the other people around in the liberal um uh abolitionist groups um had to sit down and go, do you know what? It's just not right. And they and the and the living and active word of God intervened at that point and convicted them that they needed to interpret what they had always taken to mean one way to actually mean something else and to act on it, and to act in a way that put them at risk to make brave decisions. Now I'm not going to you know start waving a placard and give you whatever is my issue of choice and say, come on, this is wrong, we need to go and do something. I'm not, I'm just saying there is a principle here that, and it may never happen in our lifetime, but it may equally, that the word of God is living and active, and therefore, given that we are finite and fragile and cannot comprehend the vastness of God's mind, the way that we understand His word may change over time, and it may change in a small way, like whether you put a net curtain on your head, and it may change in a big way, like how your life is set up and where your money comes from. Trap three. Trap four took me a while to get to. I knew there were four of them when I was writing this. I knew there were four. I could not think of what the fourth one was. It felt like it was just kind of sitting at the back of my head, slightly out of reach, and so I prayed and prayed about it, and I got the answer yesterday on Facebook. So, how awesome is that! Trap four is failing to recognise and question something that some clever person on Facebook called stowaway doctrine, and by that they mean things that you have taken for granted all of your life as being actually what God says or what it says in the Bible or what is right and proper, and you've never questioned them, they've just been completely, you know, subconsciously things buttresses that your life is built on. They've stowed away those funny little bits of belief, have stowed away your whole life, and they might not actually be there at all. They might not actually be in here at all. Um and I found that a really interesting concept. Um I am kind of terrified about what's happening in the evangelical church, in parts of the evangelical church in America at the moment. Um from the outside, I think these bits of stowaway doctrine are easier to see. It's much easier to bring up somebody else's children than your own, isn't it? And to see all the problems. So, you know, the the fundamental belief over there that women shouldn't speak in church, that women that at home that women shouldn't should just do whatever is is ordered of them, that not ever clearly not everybody has, but there is a vocal minority within, I don't know, minority portion within the American Evangelical Church that firmly believes in male headship to the extent that women have no authority, and that women who are approaching church leaders to say, I am in an abusive relationship, are being told you are not it's not right that you speak out, you need to go home and pray for your husband. And that feels to me like a massive piece of stowaway doctrine. It's been taken as an assumption and it's been built on, but it's not right. Now we might not have anything quite that big, but there will be, I can guarantee there'll be things that you've sort of taken on from beliefs from childhood that have lodged in your head. There are certainly some in mine. Um mine probably are much more around being independent and being self-sufficient and relying on myself, uh, and I've had to unlearn quite a lot of that in walking with God. I don't know what yours are. It is a useful concept to think about. So those are our four traps. So here I am, standing hopefully in the right place, getting the balance right with God, but I can fall off in so many ways. I can fall off by not trusting anything. I can fall off by trusting everything and not testing it. I can fall off by expecting that my interpretation of the Bible will always be the same, and I can fall off by failing to recognise assumptions that I've made about what is in the Bible in the first place and never questioned. Okay, so what? That mandate that I had in Newcastle Apostolic Church to be a holy troublemaker. I was still a teenager at that point, and I could have got quite silly with it. Possibly I did at times, hopefully not. Um we are not called to be this is not a license to be divisive. We're not meant to cause trouble, are we? We're the body of Christ. We're meant to love each other. We're meant to serve each other. We're meant to not lead others astray. So all of the things that I'm saying about what to do when you disagree, it's all in the context of that that we're doing all of this, we're doing all of our Christian life built on that sense of love and love and care and service to each other. But at the same time, we are commanded in the Bible over 50 times to seek wisdom and understanding. Using that, you know, lean not on your own understanding as a shut-up verse. That is not biblical. There's a whole load of other stuff in Proverbs. Well, let me give you a couple of examples. Proverbs 3 13. Blessed is the one who finds wisdom and the one who gets understanding. Proverbs 4 7. The beginning of wisdom is this. Get wisdom, and whatever else you get, get insight. I love that. Get insight so that you can see your own stowaway doctrine. Psalm 119, 34, give me understanding that I may keep your law and observe it with my whole heart. There's loads, when you look for them, there's loads and loads and loads of examples through Scripture, through the Old and New Testament, where God says, Come to me, let's reason it out. Come and talk to me, let's argue this together. Ask me for understanding and I'll give it to you. Ask me for wisdom and I'll teach you. So then I thought, well, okay, to bring this to a close, it's all been a bit esoteric, so let's try and do a sort of worked example together. So let's say that you fundamentally disagree with something that's been said at the front. Let's say you fundamentally disagree with something that I've just said. Because I've got broad shoulders, you know, I can cope, bring it on. So, how is the best way to go about this? And you might disagree, and that's okay, but I just thought I'd I'd lay out the steps that I would hope I would go through if I was in that sort of that situation. So, I say I'm sitting on the sofa next to James and he's still awake and all is well. Um and something is said that kind of goes in me, and I start to internally question, is that the right do really? That feels wrong. And at that point, that is not the time to stand up and go, no, that's wrong. I disagree. Objection. I think at that point the response, unless there is somebody in danger, um, at that point the thing to do is to go away and to pray about it and to think about it prayerfully, invite the Holy Spirit in and to have a conversation with you. Um Lord, what what do you think about this? What is the right way? What what scriptures are relevant here? What else have I read from trusted sources that has a bearing here? And really have a good reflect on why did this bump up so sort of in such a jangling way against something inside me? It might be right at that point to go and discuss it with someone who's trusted, but it's not right at that point to go away and kind of do a bit of a survey, so like go to everybody else in the church. What did you think of what they said? I thought it was really quite tricky, and then go to the next person. What did you think? So and so thinks that it was all right, but I thought I found it a bit challenging. That's not right because that's stirring up dissension, isn't it? That's making trouble. So after all of that reflecting and thinking and working through it, if you're still convinced, if I'm still convinced that there's an issue, then at that point I'm gonna go and talk to the person in leadership who, or the person who said it, or someone in trusted leadership, um, and have a conversation with them about you know, I this this felt wrong for me. What do we think? What have we got a sort of church doctrinal opinion on this? What do we think? Depends what the issue is, and so then you'll get from that conversation you get an answer, and then you have to go off again and prayerfully consider that answer. And then at that point, I think it's really helpful to ask a couple of questions. Firstly, is this a salvation issue? Now, Philip, I'm going to pick on you now. Philip and I disagree on quite a few things. Um, like sort of mechanics of creation versus evolution and things like that. Were there dinosaurs, stuff like that? How old is the earth? It really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter in the slightest. We're friends, you know, there's there's a love there. Um it's not a salvation issue. Doesn't matter. We can agree to disagree. Um I've spoken about this before at Buxton as well, so you're famous. So that's my first question. Is it a salvation issue? Because if it's not a salvation issue, does it actually, you know, when it comes down to it, does it matter? And secondly, are vulnerable people at risk? It are in this whatever we're disagreeing about, do either of the outcomes put people at risk? And particularly, does it put people at risk who aren't able to speak up for themselves or are less likely to speak up for themselves? Now, if I feel that I need to speak out on behalf of someone else who feels to me like they're in a vulnerable situation, then that's really important to me. And it's and it would be wrong if I if we've gone through all of this process responsibly and prayerfully, it would be wrong at the end of the day then to keep quiet and to not speak out. But if the answer to both of those questions is no, so it's not a salvation issue, and there aren't any vulnerable people at risk, then actually my last question is: well, that's okay, can we agree to disagree? Is what are the consequences of us disagreeing on this? Because it might be that there aren't any, and it might be that Philip and I can get on really not well and just you know, just kind of raise an eyebrow and have a bit of a smirk if somebody mentions how old the earth is or something like that. Does that help as a worked example? Yeah. So as I draw this to a close, summary points. I do not believe that God gave us brains and meant for us to switch them off, particularly when we come into church and and also for the rest of life. It's bonkers to think that he gave us this utterly complex, beautiful, continually learning structure, this gift, and then said, But actually, what I want you to do is turn it off and just take it, take it for granted, accept everything that is being told to you and full stop the end, uh, don't ask questions, lean not on your own understanding. On the other hand, the other extreme of the uh flying solo, I am the only person who knows the truth, uh, and everybody else is wrong, is probably also wrong. I mean, I agree, sometimes there are people like Martin Luther, there will be people in history who stand up and and do some kind of massive recalibration of things. Statistically, it's unlikely that every single one of us is one of those people. I'm not saying you definitely aren't. I suppose the other thing to think about in all of this is if you are looking at a traditional interpretation of scripture and and thinking, I'm not sure that's what I actually think. The other question to step back and look at is my reinterpretation actually benefiting me? You know, is is this am I sort of wanting to read this in a more favourable light because it lets me do something that I want to do? Again, I don't know. I throw that out there as a thing to think about. But there we are. We've been given such tremendous gifts. Um God's told us in in the New Testament in the letters to seek spiritual gifts, and we know that wisdom is a gift, and we know that discernment is a gift, the ability to actually recognize when God is speaking and what he's saying. And so we are we're commanded to seek those things, and we're commanded to question and to work things out for ourselves in partnership with God. Um I don't know whether that's helped anyone else in the room, but it certainly helped me by going through the process of putting this together. Um, let's let's pray. Father God, thank you so much for the tremendous gift of our brains, of our minds. Um thank you that we're created in your image. Thank you that you are a wonderful, curious, wise, loving God with with a sense of humour, um, and that you delight in your children. Lord God, we love. We're so thankful that you invite us to enter into a dialogue with you when you are so much greater than us, you are infinitely greater than us, and you would be entirely within your rights to just say, This is how it's being done, do it. But you don't. You ask us to sit and reason it out with you. We know it's circumstantial and we know that sometimes you just command us. But Lord God, we we are so grateful for this relationship with you, for this, for doing life as as a discussion, as a dialogue, as a relationship together. Lord God, I pray that you will um release anybody in here from that I don't know, bondage chain restriction of being told to not lean on your own understanding and being and not being used as a shut-up verse. Lord, I pray against that right now in the name of Jesus that you will remove any lasting restraint from that and replace it with freedom in you. And holy God, I pray also that you will help us to not fall off the other side of that and to not step out into what is actually a false freedom and see ourselves as the ultimate source of authority. And so, Lord God, please will you help us to walk in a healthy relationship with you, accepting and acknowledging and blessing you as the senior partner, and yet reveling in the fact that you want us to not only obey but to understand and to delight in you and your ways. So thank you, God, for our time together this morning, and I pray that you'll bless everybody here and and bless the week to come. Amen. I love that. But you weren't ready for a challenge this morning like that. That was so good, Vicky. Thank you so much.