[SERMON] Stop Picking and Choosing | Spiritual Mutts wk1

In the opening message of the "Spiritual Mutts" series, Pastor Cyle uses the analogy of dog breeds—purebreds, designer dogs, and mutts—to explore how Christians engage with denominational traditions. Drawing from his own diverse church background (Pentecostal, Nazarene, Baptist, non-denominational, and more), he argues that believers who draw strengths from multiple traditions develop "spiritual vigor"—the theological equivalent of a mutt's hybrid vigor. He highlights what each tradition contributes: Baptists' love for the Word, Pentecostals' expectation of the Spirit, Wesleyans' call to holiness, the Reformed emphasis on God's sovereignty, and liturgical traditions' historical continuity. But he also warns against "selective theology"—the tendency to keep the parts of Scripture we like and discard the parts that challenge us. Citing 1 Corinthians 1, 2 Timothy 4, 1 Thessalonians 5, and Acts 17, the message calls the church to test everything against Scripture, submit to the whole counsel of God, and resist the temptation to create a customized Christianity that suits our own passions. The sermon closes with a pastoral challenge to let God's Word shape our character, forsake sin, and live out an authentic faith in community.

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SPEAKER_00 0:06

Well, good morning. I'm Kyle. I'm with you this morning, and we are talking about a news series. And I'm very excited about this spirit series because I love dogs. Uh so yeah, who who has a dog? Who's a has a dog? This might be the first time somebody raise your hands ever at church because some of you like, I don't know, I raised my hand. I love my dog. So uh where are my cat people at? I'm sorry, yeah. Obviously right there. Uh I I like cats. I don't I don't have I mean I have a cat, outdoor cat. So I don't have indoor cats because I'm allergic to them. So if I come over to your house, I don't touch your cat just because uh it'll be a rough night for me if I do. But I do love cats, but I I have dogs, so I'm not allergic to dogs, and so uh and if you have seen my dog, uh my dog and I have a special relationship. So she she comes to church with me. She comes here and hangs out when you guys aren't here, and she's uh she and I are uh I we we say that I am her emotional support human. Um she has some severe separation anxiety, and uh we are we are usually attached at the hip. She's highly medicated right now, so uh so I can go to church. So we drug her so I can leave the house and go to church. So while you're here, she's on drugs. But um, it's good. But we're doing a series called Spiritual Mutts, and you may not know this, but uh you some of you know I play football and I wrestle and do all these things, but I also have done dog shows. So uh yeah, who here who are my dog show people? Who's ever done a dog show? Okay, we've had one in each service. Wow. So uh like that's not a very popular thing. It may judge me because of it, but uh I love dog shows, and I don't know if you know what a dog show is. You take a dog, and you have to have a dog that's prettier than every other dog, and then you take the dog, you put it on a leash, and you just kind of go around the ring like this. What's your dog, right? And uh that's pretty much a dog show. And so we uh when I first got married, we didn't have kids, so we're like, let's get a dog. So we went to the store back in the day when you could buy them at the store. We picked up a dog at the store, and there's this beautiful purebred wine rod, this little gray dog, and we I named her Holly, and so we bought Holly. And Holly, uh, you I learned you don't buy them at the pet store. Um, they come with problems, but but Holly, uh, this dog and I we we we hit it off, and so I thought, let's put her in dog shows. She's so pretty, everybody needs to see her. And so I put her in dog shows, and then we wanted to upgrade, so we got we flew in a male whey runner from Iowa who was like purebred stock show dog, so that we could breed them and then have our own show dog fleet of dogs. So, and so we did the show dog thing is the reason we don't do dog shows anymore because they're all on Sundays, and my dog was nuts, and so uh that made it really hard for me to not be around her and to do dog shows. And so I currently have a very similar dog now with the same separation anxiety problems. So that's my last one. But there's different types of dogs. Who here, um, you have a dog which you have a mutt? A mutt, right? It's a mixed brig dog. Who's got like a purebred dog like mine? Like you've got a purebred, you love that beautiful trait, you know. You got it, uh, you know, you get all the good things and all the problems, but you get a beautiful looking dog. What about those of you who've done some selective breeding and you got those designer dogs, the ones that like you make look like a teddy bear? Anybody have those ones that you like make them look like a teddy bear? Of course, right over here, right? Yeah. Don. Don't got a pure. They're the ones you see in like handbags and like Dr. Evil, we're like petting them. They're like pretty dogs look like a little teddy bear. Um, and so we have designer dogs. My wife actually has a designer dog, it's called a Morky. They usually have a name where they take two breeds and they mix them together. And what they're doing with designer dogs, they're trying to take the best traits, the prettiest traits, and breed uh a dog. So you look at a dog and say, if I took that dog and that dog and mixed them together, a teddy bear will come out on the other side of it, and that'll be how you make a designer dog. So that's how they they do them. So there are different types of dogs. Pure breads are formed by staying inside one bloodline, though. So if I want to have a Wyimaroner, Weimaroners can only have Wimaroners in the bloodline. So when I had my Weimaroner, we flew in the Wyimaroner, which we named him Brody, and Brody was flown in from Iowa because he was champion stock and all of his offspring, or his ancestry was Wymaroners. And so we wanted to make sure we had just Wyimaroners. And there's some good things about that. You make the dog look exactly like it's supposed to look like. The problem is you get all the bad stuff too. And so purebred dogs are formed by staying inside one bloodline. Though we are like dogs, that's where we're getting to this morning. We are a lot like dogs. We have people who are denominational purebreds, Christians, who become more loyal to their tradition than the truth. Some people have spent their whole life in one denomination, one vein of Christianity, their whole life. And so they've just been learning. So I grew up for a long time, I spent 14 years in a Nazarene church. And so we would say things like, Oh, you know, where do you go to church? Well, I'm a Nazarene. Maybe because I go to Nazarene church. Not, I'm a Christian, I'm a Nazarene. So people say, like, well, I know I'm Baptist. I'm Baptist, or I'm Pentecostal. Or we have these labels that we throw around because we get in that vein where we're purebred in one direction or the other. I stay with my people. I don't want to go hang out with you because you're not Nazarenes. You might drink. Nazarenes don't drink, so we can't be stay over there in your vein of Christianity, and I'll stay in my vein of Christianity. And the problem is you get a lot of good with the Nazarene church. I was in like kids' club, as a thing called Club Naz. They taught us Bible, uh like Bible stories, we memorized Bible verses. It was a great experience for me to understand God's word. I learned God's word. But I also learned a lot of things that weren't in God's word. Like you weren't allowed to play cards, you weren't allowed to go to movies, you weren't allowed to dance, you weren't allowed to drink, you weren't allowed to do any of these things. Everything was off limits because we added all kinds of extra things to the truth. And so with the good, you also got some of the bad. And so that's the problem with staying in one line your whole life, is it's not bad to go to one church your whole life. It is bad to stay in that one singular mindset your whole life. And that's the difference being open to what God's word said versus what men and women stack on top of it and change it. And so some of us, although, are mixed breed mutts. So I am a spiritual mutt. Um, I grew up, my first church was the Assemblies of God Church, which is Pentecostal. That was when I was a little kid. Then we went to Nazarene church for a long time. Then I went to college. In college, I went to a Korean church. So they did not speak Korean, because I don't speak Korean. Um, but I was the tallest person at church every week. That's why I liked going. I was like, I would stand there, we'd be singing, and I would look over the entire crowd, and I would look, I could see straight wall all the way around, like nobody else. Until Jason Kapsner, who was another quarterback from my football team, came and he was 6'4, so he was taller than me, and I didn't like when he came to church. So um didn't really like he shouldn't come. So it was my my church, my people. But I went to Korean church for a while, and then I started a church plant, which is Churches of God General Conference, which is out of Finley, Ohio. So I worked there for a while, planted a church with him. Then I went to another church, which is Fellowship of Grace Brethren churches, did that for a while, went to a Baptist church, then to a non-denominational and here. So I am a spiritual mutt. I have been in different denominations, and now I've landed here. And so the thing about being mixed breed is that you've got a lot of these extra influences, and then they come in. And a mixed breed dog, here's the thing about going, like if you go to the pound and you buy a dog, you're most likely buying a mutt. Two dogs in the neighborhood found each other and they have a mixed breed dog. And then nobody wants it, so it goes to the pound and you adopt it. But the thing about having these different breeds come together, when you want to have a wimer on her and it's all wimerers, you get these dominant traits that make it look like a wimer. But you also get these other dominant traits that are bad that make it nuts. So, like my dog, completely insane, but she's beautiful. I love to look at her, but I know she's cuckoo upstairs sometimes. It's fine. Some of you married somebody like that, right? Uh, that's just the way it works. Yeah. Like, oh, yep, I'm married mixed breed. I know I married purebred. All right, like it's just the way it is. But when it comes down to it, like mixed breed dogs allow you to dominate traits that are healthy to combine into another dog to make a dog with what science says is high has hybrid vigor, which means you come together, these two different breeds come together and they actually make it better. And so hybrid vigor means you have greater genetic diversity that produces increased biological fitness and resilience. I don't know if you know this, but generally muts live longer than purebred dogs. Muts are healthier than purebred dogs, and so they often make better pets and better animals. So I'm encouraging you, go you may decide and get you a dog after church if you want. So get you a mutt, it'll live longer. But so ultimately for us as Christians, we want to be spiritual mutts. Where all of the influences that we have in our faith walk from these different traditions, they come together to give us spiritual vigor to allow us to be better, more resilient Christians that follow the Lord. Now I want to look at scripture in 1 Corinthians 1, verses 12 to 13. Remember to read your part, yellow part out loud. It says, uh verse 12. It says, What I mean is that each of you, uh each one of you says, I follow Paul, or I follow Apollos, or I follow Cephas, or I follow Christ. Ready? Is Christ divided? Was Paul crucified for you? Were you baptized in the name of Paul? The conversation that was going on 2,000 years ago is who do you follow? What faith tradition are you in? There were different teachers who had different traditions. We have disagreements in scripture between Peter, Paul, we got James, we got these early uh Christians who were doing different church, different places, and they had some disagreements. We see that in scripture. We still have that today. We just call them denominations. And they have their own kind of variety of the things that they espouse with Christianity. And so not all of them are wrong, they're just different. And so they're having this conversation 2,000 years ago about a lot of the same stuff we're talking about today. Who are you following? What line of tradition are you in? And mutts, spiritual mutts, well, mutts carry more uh traits for more than one bloodline. That's that's the reality of what a dog is. And so for spiritual mutts, we want to as well. Now, look at look at some of the traditions, some of the big ones. Baptists. Baptists teach us to love the word. People who go to Baptist church, the emphasis is on God's word. Let's get to the let's get to this. Let's go to God's word, let's read this, let's apply this in our life. That's what Baptists ultimately try to believe. Pentecostals remind us, who's been to Pentecostal church? Who's been to Baptist church? Let's go there. Who's been to Baptist church? Okay. All right, who's been to Pentecostal church before? Okay. Pentecostals remind us to expect the Spirit to move. There is a Spirit of God and it does move. Pentecostals tend to focus more on that and less on other things. But it's important to understand God does have a spirit. It lives inside of us, and that spirit moves. But Pentecostals remind us to expect that. Wesleans, which we are, this church is in a Wesleyan tradition. Wesleans call us to holiness. Holiness means you are set apart and you are called out from the world. You're not living like the world, you're living like the word. And you're applying that in your life and how you live, and your life reflects that. So you don't live like the world. Reformed traditions, which are popular right now, emphasize the greatness and sovereignty of God. The problem is with reformed traditions, they emphasize that God is big and awesome and amazing, and you should have all of God, but they also then tend to be really judgmental on the other side of that towards people who don't follow God and his sovereignty. Anglicans and liturgical traditions remind us that we didn't invent Christianity yesterday, right? For these denominations like Lutheran, uh, other denominations, Anglican, they have been doing church for thousands of years since Christ. And they have been recognizing Christ. They've created creeds and things that they respond to prayers and ceremonies, and they do them, and they've been doing them for years, and there's a beauty to that. Some of you you love the beauty in those traditions. And that reminds us that, hey, we're not, just because we got some new title of our denomination, we didn't create this thing. We've been doing this for a long time. And spiritual mutts benefit from a deeper gene pool of those Christian traditions. You take the little bit of the Baptists, a little bit of the Pentecostals, and a little bit of the Wesleyan's, and you kind of mix it all together. And I don't know if you guys have been paying attention the last few months, but we recognize here that all of those different um denominations, they all, we're all based on the same thing, right? We just there's a variety of ways that we carry it out. Some good, some bad. Not every church does everything right, according to the word. Some have man-made things that they throw on top of it. Um, some kind of kowtow to culture, and so they don't always focus on keeping God's word to be the word, the truth, and what they do. And so, as a church, with the last few months, we've been trying to tie some of those more traditional things into our services because we know people come to our church from Catholic backgrounds, Lutheran backgrounds, other backgrounds, Pentecostal backgrounds. And so we've been trying to make our services match. That's why some weeks we just ended service and you left for a while, and then some weeks we've done responsive readings, and we're gonna keep doing that because we want to be a church of people who, no matter what their background church is, you feel like there's some fit for you somewhere here. And we recognize that all of those influences are good in different ways. There can also be bad influences because some of you have church where you have gone to the church and those traditions have hurt you and they've wounded you. And when I went to that list, some of you read that list like, oh, I remember that Baptist church, it was awful. I never wanted anything to do with Christians anymore. And some of you you you go to that list like, oh, I've had bad experiences. And guess what? I have had too. I've worked in ministry over 28 years, I've had some really bad experiences. The people who've hurt me worst in my life, guess what? They are Christians, they're not non-Christians. Non-Christians are a breeze for me, right? It's the Christians like, oh, here we here we go again. Another Christian that thinks to know everything. Like, that's just the way it is, right? As a spiritual mutts, we can benefit by understanding there's a deeper gene pool of Christian tradition which we which we can draw from to live for Christ. But 1 Thessalonians 5 tells us this. This is important. But test everything, hold fast to what is good. Not all those things are good. Not all those things should we hold on to. There are a lot of human-made things that have influenced the modern church in all those different traditions. And we gotta recognize when to cast those things out and when not to. And that's what God's word helps us to. We have to understand some of those things are not good. Some of those things are wrong. Like I love playing cards. I have done it all weekend, I love to compete at it. Um, if a service gets done in time, I'm gonna do it today. So it's just the way it works. But ultimately, I grew up in a church for 14 years and said you can't play cards at all. That's the that's of the devil, and that's gonna send you straight to hell. So that's not good for someone who loves board games, right? That's one of my favorite things. I love cards and board games, and so when I looked in God's word, it doesn't say that at all. I didn't find that anywhere. I didn't say anywhere. I didn't, I never found we weren't allowed to go to dances or prom or any of that stuff at the church. David danced before the Lord. That was last week's sermon in his undergarments. Now we don't do that at prom, so right, like so. So when it comes down to it, like a lot of these human traditions are not good. And we need to let those things go and fall away and focus on. There was still so much amazing stuff that I gained from growing up in a Nazarene church. But it wasn't all good. I think I went to college the first time and I believed if you said a swear word and then you got hit by a car and you died, you're going straight to hell. I believe you took a sip of alcohol, going straight to hell. That's what I was taught. So I got to college where everybody was drinking around me, and I'm sorry reading the Bible. I'm like, it doesn't say you can't drink, Jesus drink. They skipped those, uh they skipped those. They never taught us about Jesus turning the water into wine growing up in Nazarene. Never. And I got to wait a second, Jesus did that. So we have to learn what is right and what is good, and we've got to focus on that as followers of Jesus. Because there is nothing wrong with learning from multiple Christian traditions. You don't need to bounce from church to church to church to do that, though. Like you can, I believe, I fully believe you can go to one church, you can go there your whole life. We have some people who you united brethren, and they're united brethren to the core, and they all have at this church, they all have the last day, maybe. So, like um, they have the last name, maybe they've been united a brethren for a long time. Um, you can stay at one church the rest of your life. I really truly believe this because you choose that. Like you can be in community, you can get over drama, you can love people, you can forgive, you can grow, because a lot of that has to do with you get in this thing and you find the core of your faith from this, not from a man, not from a teacher, not from a woman, but from God's word. That's how you do it. But we all come from different experiences, and we can share those experiences with each other, the good and the bad. We can share the hurt. Some of you come out of traditions where you were hurt by a church by a pastor, but it actually may not have been the pastor. You might have got butt hurt because they said something you didn't like, and so you're just like, well, next Sunday I'm going to a different church because I didn't like what that pastor said. Because they said something against your own theology, not God's theology. So we have to be careful. And the problem for us begins when we start selectively breeding our own Christianity. That's what a lot of us do. Now you're gonna be like, well, I don't do that. I think most Christians selectively breed their own version of Christianity. We take what we like in God's word, and then we we don't like something, we just skip it. Uh nope, don't agree with that. I don't agree with that. I don't like what that no, I know it says no cohabitation, but nope, not me. Umpe, it says don't it says don't drink, oh, don't get drunk. Nope, not that one. Um so this is the kind of things that we do, and we we flip through the Bible and we just say, I don't care about that. That's not for me. And I we create our own selective Christianity. We do, and that's the problem. That's the problem. We keep the bad and not the good. 2 Timothy 4 says this for a time is coming when people uh will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions. This is this is modern Christianity. This is us. When we don't like something, oh nope, I don't like that. I got itching ears. Because I can itch in ears, I'm gonna go somewhere where they tell me exactly what I want, but they just tickle my ears, scratch my ears for me, right? Now I've got like if you think about this with dogs, right? My dog, sometimes she just loves behind her ear, just scratched me, love it, she'll start kicking that leg, you know. She loves it. She's got itching ears. And somebody's gotta scratch it, and she's gonna go to whoever scratches her ear. Maybe me, maybe somebody else, but she's gonna find somebody to do it to resolve that. That's what we do as Christians. We get this itching ears. We want to hear what we want to hear and make ourselves feel better. And it's like to find the right teaching that we want for ourselves, not God's word, and we go find somebody to suit our own passions. That's why we have so many denominations just popping up. Because, well, I don't like something, let's create my own denomination and make it make it okay. Let's preach that it's okay so I feel better about what culture says. But we are not a church of culture, we're a church of tradition based on God's word. This is what matters. We're not trying to fulfill our own passions, we're trying to live for the Lord. And the danger is, I would say for the majority of us in this room, we've got itching ears. And the reason people hop from church to church is because they're trying to find someone to suit their own passions. There's gonna be times in a sermon I'm gonna tell you things you don't like. I'm sorry. There's times in a sermon that I'm prepping it that I have I learned things I don't like. There's times I'm preaching to you, like getting ready to preach for Sunday, I'm like, oh, I gotta do better this week, right? So uh this one's for me. So like I'm not a perfect person, I'm a flawed human being just like you. I just get an extra few days ahead of time to work on it before I have to tell you to get better, right? Yeah. So by the time I get up here, I feel pretty good, right? So I'm three days ahead. So uh, but the truth is you don't need to go find somewhere to fulfill your passion. I need to find it in God's Word. That's why we have so many Bible studies and life groups and opportunities. You can find whatever you need from the Lord here if you're happy enough. You can do it in any church. You just have to choose it. See, selective breeding keeps the traits we want and eliminates the ones we don't. That's that's what we do in dogs. We try to selectively read a dog to make it look the way we want. And the problem is, selective theology keeps the truths we like and eliminates the ones that challenge us. That's the hard part about selective theology. I I want to be a follower of Jesus, but I don't want to change. I don't want to change. I want to just be me, and I want Jesus to be okay with me being the way I want to be. And that is not, that's not ever in God's word. It's not. And I mean I've had to wrestle with this too. As someone who enjoys life and fun and all this stuff, just like everybody else, we we want to go through life, but that's where the the culture is always pulling us in one direction away from the direction of the Lord, and we have to always pull back. I mean, I'll be honest with you. If I could be anywhere in the world right now, I'd be in Barcelona playing cards this morning. Right? That's what I have been. I did all like 5 o'clock in the morning. I've been watching guys playing card games. I woke up at 5 30. I've been watching them play cards up until I got here today. Because that's what I enjoy. That's where I would go. But guess what? That's pulling me away from what God wants. Focusing on what really matters and his word, his theology. 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17 says this All scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. This is what we need. This is what we need to go through life. To encourage us, to build us up, to challenge us, to make us better. This is what we need. That's what we need. We're not trying to create our own Christianity. We just need to live out Christianity. And the problem is sometimes we don't agree with this. Guess what? We're all sinners. I had this fun thing. I was um, so I it was me and some of the boys, well, not boys, Jackie went too, but we were playing cards Friday night. We had like an hour, we had like an hour drive uh back after or yeah, Friday night. Jackie wasn't it? Uh but we were we were just talking. And one of the things we started ranking sins. This was fun. So I got three middle school boys, myself in the car, and we're ranking sins. This is great. Which sins worse, right? Is this sin worse than this sin? Is this sin worse than this sin? And it was fun to hear their opinions about which sins were worse and which sins were not bad. Because it's what we do in life, right? We kind of rank them. Well, you know, on a scale one to ten, this is a lot, this is a minor sin, right? God doesn't care as much about this one, but this one's a bigger sin because people can see it. And it was just a fun conversation, but the reality is we all do it. It's not just middle school boys, we do it. All right? And then we start talking about is anger equal to alcoholism? Which one's a bigger sin? Then we started walking through them and saying, what does the world equate? Well, one of the big questions was was homosexuality and alcoholism, which one's a worse sin? Which one? Because they're sins. All right? Sin is sin. Right? Now the Bible does say some sins are against your own body, some sins are against others, but sin is sin. What about lying? Where does that fall in alcoholism? Lying, which one's worse?

unknown 24:31

Sin is sin.

SPEAKER_00 24:32

Sin is sin. That's hard because when we have scripture, it's God brief, it's profitable. We have to understand. What about this one? What about not being in community with other Christians and alcoholism? Right? Laying in bed on Sunday morning versus overindulgence in alcohol. Like it's a hard one because we equate, well, it's not a big deal. I missed church today. Like, oh, I'm just tired. I worked hard this week. Right? Where's the sin? And so middle school boys can have these conversations because they're wrestling with faith, trying to figure out life. But what about us as adults? Do we wrestle with these kind of sin questions and issues? Do we go back to God's word for correction and training? Or we just say, well, I don't like to be corrected by that one. So I'll just like, I just forget that was in there. Right? See, you don't get a breed correction out of Christianity. You don't. Like, it's part of it. And I've had I've had to go through my own correction in my life. Like, I am not a perfect person. And I've had to understand if I want to live for the Lord, I gotta, I gotta make hard decisions about who I am, right? The big one is like what matters to me? What do I value? Because all sin is sin. And so, you know, students, this is a big one for students. Well, you can just cheat in a test. That's not big of deal. That's not a big deal. Nobody cares. Nobody cares if I use Chat GPT, right? Nobody cares. Nobody can see. And that's the hard problem, is once you start making an exception that just because nobody can see that it's an okay, acceptable sin versus something that is public, people can see, that's you just start creating your own selective theology, your own version of Christianity that's not in God's word. And we do it all the time. When we want to be more like Jesus, we have to accept his word. We got allowed change of life. Guess what? You're all sinners. Every single one of you, you're sinners. You know, I look out and see a room of sinners, and I'm one too. We are. And we're just trying to be the best version of ourselves with the least amount of sin. And for me, I want to take the kind of the traditions that I've been part of, and I want to figure out how to be the best version of Kyle for Jesus with his character using his word. So some people they want they want the Baptist Bible mindset, they want the power of the Pentecostals, they want like the security of the reformers, they want Wesleyan holiness until one of them costs them something. We all like Christianity until we have to give something up, until it costs us something. And I here's here's a big one. I know I harper on this a lot, so don't get mad at me if you want. But um I'm a I'm a guy that I have achieved at a very high level at sports. It was great, it was fun. I went to Michigan, played all this other, did really well as a wrestler as well. I had a lot of fun. But now when I see what sports is doing to the to the church and to the world and how it's on Sundays and it's taking people away and travel ball, we I say it a lot against it because I'm trying to get help get in the mindset of parents and grandparents. It is not okay to sacrifice God for sports or arts or culture or whatever else is going on in the world. It just is. And this is somebody who benefited from being very involved in sports, but I never had to give up time with God to do so. And when we believe in the power, if you want Pentecostal power, you want God to move, then you've got to trust that God has a plan for your child, your grandchild, no matter what. But you don't have to go to every event, every activity, waste all this money, all this stuff. If God wants your kid to be famous at sports and get scholarship, God's gonna make it happen. I am six foot one, and I went to Michigan, and everybody around me was six foot four, six foot seven. God had a plan for me, and it worked out. I wasn't even the greatest football player, I was a better wrestler. But God made it happen because it was his plan. And because my family was faithful, and because I was faithful. I really believe the reason that all happened for me is because I was faithful. And my family were faithful, and God had a plan and rewarded that. What we do when we try to force God's hand is we actually take God out of it. Like, well, God, I don't want you to tell me this, I want you to tell me this. But that's not what God does. God has a plan for us. We need to follow His plan. Acts 17 tells us this. Now, these Jews were more noble than those in Thessalonica. They received the word with all eagerness, examining the scriptures daily to see if these things were so. Would you be guilty of examining the scriptures daily for guidance in your life, for guidance in your kids' life, for developing your theology by looking at his word to see what's important? Or not? I think that's a hard reality. I've been guilty of that, not being in it daily. You know, I had to make a decision, and I think people they always think this is funny, but I read the Bible on the toilet. Here's why. I do. Uh it's toilet time with the Lord. It is my thing. Um I'm an odd person, I know. Um it's okay. I'm married, I'm good. Uh so I don't have to try to impress anybody else in life. Um, but here's why. I recognized as a pastor that one of my sins, it wasn't an outward sin of commission, it was the omission of God's word in my life. And so I made a decision a long time ago that when I'm on the toilet, thanks to the phones, I can read God's word. It's an easy time to do it. I'm gonna be there at least once a day. And if I've had lettuce, 30 times a day. But um, no, it's good. Um but I want it to be important in my life that I'm in God's word. Because that's how we we go to to see, is my life okay? Am I living right? Am I dealing with this? Because some of us, we have a propensity to the same sins over and over and over and over again. If we're not going back to God's word over and over and over and over again, those sins are gonna catch us and trap us. And so we gotta go there. See, the question isn't where a teaching came from, the question is whether scripture supports it. Like you might come out of a background and it might have been a great thing for you. And you might have got some teaching that you like have in your theology, but is it in God's word? Isn't God's word? There's a lot of times I sit with Christians in counseling and they're like telling me things, I'm like, that just does not line up with anything I've ever seen in the Bible. But it's what they believe, it's what cultures told them to believe. It's what a TikTok video said. I can't tell you how much TikTok theology I hear it, but it's a lot. Well, you know, people usually start with like, you know, I was on TikTok the other day, and somebody said this. I'm like, that is not in the Bible, right? So so when it comes down to it, how do you navigate going back to the Bible? Right? How do you how do you embrace that, understand that? Because we're all called to love each other, to treat each other with love and respect and mercy and grace and kindness and all those things. Yet Christians can be some of the worst, meanest, most judgmental people. That doesn't align with God's word. Scripture doesn't support that. And so for us, if we want to be a healthy spiritual mutt, we have to inherit the strengths from many of the traditions without inheriting every weakness. We gotta let the weaknesses go. Some of us we've had some flawed theology because of our flawed instruction. Because humans are flawed, and they're the ones that stand up on stage and the ones in our classrooms that are teaching it. We have to go back to God's word. I I hope every Sunday you don't just go home and think, yep, Kyle was right in everything that he said. I hope you go back and check it. Because there's sometimes I mix up names. So you might think Mary and Martha were different people, because I sometimes, when I have names that are very similar, I'll go home and pass like you called Mary Martha five times in that message. And so it's just, yeah, well, it's what happened. Sorry. But call me, text me. Hey, Kyle, you got that wrong. Okay, I do get it wrong sometimes. Sometimes I just things come out of my mouth and they're wrong. Check it. Then text me, like, hey, dummy, you got it wrong. It's fine. I'm a flawed human. But what I'm not trying to do is teach you theology that's not from God's Word. Trying to teach you to embrace God's Word, to check it, because that's how we inherit true theology, not the false theology of the world. Acts 20, 27 says this. For I did not shrink from declaring to you the whole counsel of God. Listen, because we're all sinners, there's gonna be a Sunday when your sin's gonna get hit. It is. That thing that's your sin, your secret sin, your public sin, it's gonna get hit. And it's gonna be like, oh, that one hurt me. That one bruised me. But guess what? It happens to me too. I'm literally just days ahead of you sometimes on getting hit. Or if I know a sermon's coming and it's my problem, it's like, oh, I gotta, I gotta do better. I got a few months on this one. It's one of the great things that we tell you what we're and we have Hotlcon in January, and we tell you what we're gonna teach for the whole year. Sometimes I got like a whole year to work on that thing that I know I gotta preach about. I was like, I can get ahead on this one. But the reality is we all have sins, every single one of us. And all of our sins are equal in their sin. Sins that we commit, and sins the things that we omit that we know we're supposed to be doing for the Lord, and we're not. And they're equal. What we gotta stop doing is treating each other's sin as greater or lesser. You know, and in ranking the sins, it was fun, but the reality is all sin is sin. Because the word sin in the Old Testament is literally just it's a description of a measurement from the where an arrow hits on a target from the bullseye. The distance is called the sin. It's actually a mathematical distance now, called the sin distance. And so it's God has a mark, a bullseye, and wherever you hit that misses it, that's how far away you are, that's your sin. So everything when he says that this is the aim, this is where you're supposed to aim for, and you miss, you're just sinning. You're missing the mark. And so we can all do better. But we gotta not shrink back from the whole counsel of God. Some of you are liars, some of you are cheats, some of you are adulterers, some of you are alcoholics, some of you uh have anger problems. That was my big one. I had a huge anger problem, temper problem as a teenager and kid, college. I really had to work on it. I've preached on that before. That was a big one for me. We all got our own stuff. Some of you got a problem with pornography. Statistics say over 70% of every man, every 55% of women have a problem with pornography right now in the church. Y'all got sin. How are you gonna embrace God's word and say, I don't want to be that sinner anymore? I've been delivered. See, what does this mean for you? Why are we talking about it? I think we gotta stop selectively breeding a faith that looks like you. Some of you, you're creating your own theology, and it's wrong. And guess what? You're some of you, some of you, your sins, they're just gonna be there the rest of your life. Just gotta learn to navigate it. Stay away from it. One of the things I've been sharing with you, I've been sending more people to AA lately. Not me, I've been just telling them, encouraging them to go. Because they're stuck in that one. And that guess what that was the one, when you're in that one, it's that's gonna be with your whole life. It's not like, well, in three years I can go back to drinking alcohol a bunch again. No, it's pretty much you gotta cut off. I'm excited, we're gonna do the VISI series again in September. We're gonna have some testimonies come up from people who have had radical transformation in their life as they've gotten sober. Like radical transformation in their life. It's amazing. But what they had to do is stop selectively breeding a faith that looked like them, and they just had to start living out what this says. And then God transformed their life. That's amazing. Let God transform you. Let the whole word of God breed the character of Christ into you. We can all be better and do better. See, a spiritual mutt learns from every tradition but submits to the whole word of God. That's the thing. We can have the power of the Pentecostals, we can we can have the faith of the Baptists, we can have the holiness of the Westlands, we can have the traditions of the liturgical community. But it's all for not if we aren't following Jesus. We aren't living out his character. There's a there's a famous joke. I was share with us when it's essentially to say this united brother and guy goes to heaven, and he when he gets to heaven, uh, meets St. Peter, and St. Peter says, You want a tour? He's like, Yeah, give me a tour. And he's gonna show you, show you where you're gonna live. And he he goes uh uh takes you down the streets, and there's this there's this mansion, and it's uh there's no decorations of the mansion, there's nothing in the yard, it's just flat grass. And he's like, Well, who lives there? And he goes, Well, that's where the Nazarenes live. They don't they don't like any of that kind of stuff. All right, and so okay, he keeps walking. Uh, and he's walking a little bit further, and there's this big, beautiful, ornate decorated uh mansion, and they're just hooping and hollering in the in there. And he goes, Well, who lives there? And he goes, Well, that's where the Pentecostals live. And so, and then he keeps going, and it keeps going, and then they go to this mansion, this big mansion, but all the windows and the doors are boarded up. And he says, Well, what's that? Who lives there? He goes, Well, that's where the Baptists live. They're the they're the one they only they think they're the only ones up here. So, uh yeah. So when it comes down to it, we all have these different traditions, and it's funny, and every tradition has a version of that joke about the other traditions. But they all have really good pieces and parts, but they also have some negative ones. But what what unites all those ones that have the right parts is this where we keep focused on this, where we understand who Jesus is, who God is, how much he loves us, how much he has a plan for us, and how much he has a plan when he returns for us to have an eternity with him. But we've gotta we've got to forget trying to create our own theology and just live out his. And that means we gotta forsake some of the sin in our life, we've got to choose better, and we gotta live for Jesus. And we want to be a church, we give you so many opportunities to do be in community because we want you to go have conversations. I don't think you've got to go bounce from church to church to church. I think just go talk to people, hear their experiences, good and bad, and let that shape and change you and your mindset. Go discuss theology. And when appropriate, call out things that sound kind of weird. We were in Bible study this week, and someone said something, and the other person's like, no, I don't, I don't think that's right. So that you could have conversations, push each other on within your faith so that we can all grow and we can all be more like Jesus. We want to be a church of spiritual mutts where we take the best and we're better off for it. We have spiritual vigor in our life because of Jesus Christ. It changes us, it changes the way that we love each other and we encourage each other and we move forward in our relationship with the Lord. And so what I want to do is I just want to pray. I want to pray. Now I know some of you, if this is your morning, it's like I'll call it out my sin thing. Like, I'm mad. Don't be mad. Go read the Bible, right? Go read the Bible, but also recognize we're all broken and falled. We are. What are we gonna do to move forward? Some of you need to move forward and be better parents today, some of you need to be better spouses today, some of you be better friends, better children today. You need to have more integrity and character in life, and recognize I need to figure out what this means for my faith, my theology, and then live it. And it will change your life, it'll change your priorities. It'll mean that you can't go to Barcelona on a Sunday, you gotta be in Brooklyn. And so it's but it'll mean that you're living for the Lord, and that's what matters. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, Lord, we just thank you. Uh, we thank you for your son, we thank you for Jesus, we thank you for the word, Lord. Lord, we we just we just know we've all had experiences in church, good and bad, and that have let us hear today. Lord, we pray that moving forward from this moment we can we can retain what is good for our counsel, for our correction. And Lord, we can we can focus on living on our faith and our character that resembles the character of your son Jesus. Lord, we pray that we can be a church that does better, that is better, that builds each other up, and we take the we take the best of our experiences and come together and create an amazing place that loves people and allows them to feel like this can be a home that can teach them about Jesus and help them to live it out. Father, we just pray all this in Jesus' name. Amen.