Is knowing God wishful thinking or a genuine possibility?
WATCH
What We Believe, 1 of 11 from June 22nd, 2025
"God makes it possible for us to truly know Him."
Introduction by Michael Lockstampfor (@miklocks)
SUMMARY
This sermon introduces a series on theology, emphasizing that everyone is a theologian because we all have thoughts about God. Pastor Michael stresses the importance of accurate theology in fostering a genuine relationship with God and living a purposeful Christian life. He explains different approaches to theology and highlights that God makes it possible for us to truly know Him through His revelation.
REFLECTION & DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
💬 What is an area of thought about God you know you should grow in?
💬 How might our neighbors grow if our theology gets more healthy?
💬 Who has been shaping our theology?
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
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[The following transcript is automatically generated and may contain errors.]
Hey, good morning, church. Welcome to our neighbors. I'm glad to be with you. I want to talk about first dates. Can we start there? First dates. I'm not over here. When you go on a first date, what version of the person are you actually sitting down at the table with? The best version? allegedly the best version of the first date, like I don't know, like for you hoodlums, you youngsters, if like you haven't had a date yet, like what you should know before your first date is that whoever you're sitting at the table with on your first date is the best procured image that they could possibly generate on their own. Now, they probably have had some coaching. They've probably had some wingmen. Well, I say for the guys. Guys may have some wingmen that would be like, no, dude, you actually have to brush your teeth. The mouthwash alone is not going to cut it. You have to use and then comb the shower with the actual soap and the scrubbing of all the... You've got to clean yourself, son. We need... Guys usually need some kind of coaching on the first date, right? We need some outside help to help us be like the better version of ourselves. Okay. So, but for those of us who have been married for longer than 10 minutes, is that the version of the person that you married? No. Wow. That was, you guys didn't even hesitate. How long does it take a married person to get under the hood and figure out that maybe where I first met you, there was a little bit more polish and gleam and shine to how you actually present yourself? It doesn't take too long. I'm seeing Stephanie and John, and I feel like you guys are probably the exception to the rule because you guys are just who you are all the time, and I love that about you. Okay, we're clarifying, okay. So who's like, what's the real version of the person that you're dating? Is it the person on the first date who like, this is how they want to be? They're thoughtful and caring and they have put a lot of time and energy and maybe you're willing to spend a little bit of extra money just to make the first date feel special. But like when budget time comes, like it's harder to want to generate that kind of generosity, even for somebody that you care about, right? And so you get down and as you get to know people, like you get to know like where their values and their priorities actually lie and like what they actually do, right? But wouldn't it be like kind of nice if you could just take that first date version and apply it to the rest? of the relationship? Like wouldn't there be something that would be nice? Like you could just forget about all the hard things, forget about like their, I don't know, personal preferences, forget about their family and where they came from. You just leave all that behind and we can just marry that first date version of them. After 20 years though, how satisfactory would that relationship be? It'd be a pretty shallow experience, right? So you're like, Michael, why you started out the gate wanting to talk about dating? What's wrong with you? My question is, are we dating God? Do we come to God and we say, okay, God, like I'm cool with like being friends. I even want to like be exclusive friends with you. Like I'm not going to go talk to Buddha. I'm not going to talk to any of the Hindu gods. I'm just going to talk to Jesus. Like I'll be exclusive with you as long as you just keep picking up the tab for me. But I don't care like actually what you want. And I don't really care like your history or where you came from or like what you're about really, just as long as you still are kind of nice to me and you brush your teeth before you take me out and you pick up the bill. I don't know if God needs a shower. I'm gonna have to think about that for a minute. After the, I think the issue is like many of us like think like we come to faith and we're like, okay, I'm on board with Jesus. He's the only one. And that's as far as we go. We just kind of overlook the things that feel a little bit icky or a little bit difficult. Like, oh, I heard that he did that, but I don't know that I want to go read that for myself. Right? We just kind of keep that at an arm's distance because then we're not quite sure that we would like who it is that we're attaching ourself to. And so this, as we go through the summer, we're starting a series that's called What We Believe. And you can be like, oh, great, like a doctrine series. It's exactly what I wanted to do this summer. But the reason why we're doing a doctrine series is because it's not my desire as your pastor. It's not my desire as your friend for you to just live your life dating God. Like you should make a commitment and you should get to know him as he is. And I promise you, like the reason why I'm encouraging you or why I want that for you is because I think your life will be better if you do. And so we're taking apart, we're doing this series over the summer, and we're looking at, I printed out a couple of things for you, looking at, and I'll just show them to you now because I promise I'll probably forget later. These are actually the same document. The difference is this one's prettier, and it also has all the Bible references in it. So if you open this up on page two, a commitment to common identity, the evangelical core, these are all the same words here as what you have on your paper. But there are a bunch of Bible verses that are actually attached to these. And so this paper actually gives you the Bible verses so you can go and look them up. But this is the doctrinal statement for our church. This is the doctrinal statement for our fellowship of churches. And we're going to take it... paragraph by paragraph and talk through what is it that we believe and where do we get those ideas from and why do they matter? Like that really is the goal of this series. And what I love about this series and how it's set up for us this year is you'll actually get to hear from a number of different voices. It's not just going to be me. Pastor Ryan will be sharing. Tyler's going to be sharing. And so we're going to have different voices that are kind of carrying us through. What are these things that we believe? But the goal of it isn't just so that we can like have a textbook definition, a fact sheet of who God is, but so that we can actually like grow in our relationship with him, that there can be some depth of to how we relate to God. Because I could fill out maybe a pretty decent fact sheet about the things that my spouse cares about. But being able to fill out the fact sheet doesn't really matter if I just continue to do the things that she doesn't like. Right? So that's where we are and kind of what we're doing. Our preferred approach as we're preaching is to like find a passage of scripture and work through it like one piece at a time. And this series will not be like that at all. I'll explain to you why today. My purpose is to kind of introduce the series and let you know where we're going to generate some desire for you to like continue to work together with us on it. But as we get started, I'll ask you if you'd pray together with me. And my clicker's off. That's a me problem. Man. Going great. Let's pray together. The words are on the screen if you'd like to pray with me. I'm going to read off the screen today just to make sure I say the same things that you are saying. But really, like, the heart of this prayer, the attitudes that are underneath it are what Jesus is after instilling in us. And so I think you start with the words, you go with the meaning. So let's pray together. Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen. So I want you to be transparent because I know you're going to be honest, but be transparent. When I say the word theology, like what are the things that come to mind? What are the other words associated with theology? Seminary, church, God, spiritualism. Okay. Birds, words. Okay. Classes, birds. Curiosity. Doctrine. Old white guys. All right. Christian college. Wings. You guys are being quiet. You guys good? Anybody think like a little bit boring? Kind of stale? Like, I don't know. Why are we doing this? Yeah. Okay, cool. I got some kid nation representatives that are like, I picked the wrong week to jump ship. I've got three questions for us to look at. The first is what is theology? When we talk about theology, when we talk about doctrine, we need a definition of that. Why does theology matter? And then how do we actually like do theology, right? So first, what is theology? This one's actually really easy. Theology is made up of two Greek words, theos and logos. And theos is the Greek word for God. And logos is the Greek word for words. And so theology is words about God. Ah, maybe this isn't so boring. We tend to make things really, really complicated. Maybe you've read like theology and you're like, oh, well, I know ology is like the study of something. And so it's like the study of God. Yeah, it could be that too. But like you break it down into its base components, it's words about God. How many of us here today, I realize that our audience may be skewed in one direction or the other, but how many of us today by show of hands have ever said any words about God? Ooh, interesting. All right. So there's two quotes I want to show you. The first one is one that I started off with and I loved a lot until I read the second one. And then I was a little bit confused. First is what comes to into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. A.W. Tozer writes, and I think that's beautiful. What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us. What is it that we picture when someone says God? What are the words or the imageries, what are the stories that come to mind? That says a lot about who you are and what you care about. C.S. Lewis says, sure, but how God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important. God doesn't care what you think about him. What's more important to like your actual lived experience is what God thinks about you. I think... I don't think that's wrong either. That makes a lot of sense. I think it's two sides of the same coin. But theology is words about God or thinking about God. And both of these are questions of theology. No, A.W. Tozer was about 50 years before C.S. Lewis. So C.S. Lewis was actually commenting on the A.W. Tozer quote. I don't know if he was still alive. I'm not sure. That's good. I don't know that they talked about it, but I do know that C.S. Lewis specifically in his quote was quoting the A.W. Tozer quote and saying, I don't think that that's quite right. So he was giving a critique, which is one of the things that theology does. Both of these are questions of theology. And here's the baseline assumption that I'm going to make today is that everyone does theology, right? Everyone has thoughts about God. Everyone, many people speak words about God, right? Everyone has thoughts about who God is and what he's like, what he wants and what he's supposed to do and why. Paul David Tripp says it this way. If you are human, you think, although some of us show it better than others. You may think improperly or inconsistently, but you think. None of us has ever had a thoughtless day. All of us have constructed a superstructure of life assumptions that functions as the instrument we use to make sense out of life. So all of us are theologians, all of us are philosophers, all of us are counselors, and all of us are archaeologists who dig through the past to understand what was. He says, everybody who's alive is a thinking person. And when we think, we connect ideas together. And by connecting the ideas that we've had over our lives together, we make a framework that we make other thoughts and other decisions and perceive other outside forces. Have you ever seen, like watched two people see the exact same event and interpret it incredibly differently? Yeah, because each of us has a pattern of thinking and a way of thought that we're filtering all of our life through. If I were going to use big words, I would call these your worldview and your presuppositions. They're the things that you presuppose, the things that you assume are true about the world that you're living in. It's not wrong to have them. Everybody has them. It's just the issue comes when we assume we don't have assumptions and act as though our assumptions are already true without asking whether they are or not. Right? Maybe. That might have been too many words. Anyway, congratulations. I don't know if you woke up this morning thinking this, but I want you to think it today. Congratulations. You are a theologian. Look at your neighbor and look him dead in the eye. Give him a serious look and say, you are a theologian. Now, close your eyes. Close your eyes and say to yourself, I am a theologian. All right, beautiful. Here's the deal. But so is your mail person. And so is your hairstylist. And so is the principal at your school. And so is the terrorist. And so is the farmer. All of us have thoughts about God and maybe not all of our thoughts about God align. Maybe we don't all think the same things about God. In fact, I would be so bold as to say, in fact, we do not all agree about how we think about God. And that's a problem. There is a book, just so you know, I stole a lot of stuff, not a lot of stuff, but there's a book called You Are a Theologian, and the authors there write, all of us have words to say about God, but here's the hope. We can grow in our ability to make those words accurate and good, edifying others and glorifying to the one they describe. Not only are we all theologians, but we are so by design. We were created to think and speak words about God and represent him rightly. So friends, just as we're starting, what's an area of thought about God that you kind of know you should probably grow in? Love? Forgiveness? Compassion? Holiness? Did I hear graciousness? Patience. What's an area of thought about God that you should grow in? Well, if you're not quite sure, I would say then perhaps our study through this summer will be helpful to you because I don't think you can be responsible to know the things you don't know. You shouldn't have questions about things you don't know anything about. And I think the purpose of education is not necessarily to give us more information about things we kind of already know about. The purpose of education is to give us questions about things we don't know we don't know. The more I have learned, the better questions I have, and the more humility I've approached things with because I've learned there's a lot of things about the things that I know that I know that I don't know. So what's the point? Why are you doing this to us, Michael? God makes it possible for us to truly know him. Just imagine, just imagine for a second that you don't have the book. Just imagine for a second that you're just kind of conked on the head. You wake up on a deserted island and you have nobody to talk to. How would you begin? You have no memory of your life in the past. You don't know where you came from. You somehow have language in your head. But how would you begin to know who God is? All by yourself. If there were no God, how would we have ever understood that idea? And if there is a God, how could I, in my limited capacity, ever begin to understand and comprehend who he is and what he's like all by myself? So my friends, the reason why I want to make sure we take a slow walk through this is because I want you to be clear the fact that God makes it possible for us to truly know him. If you're like me, you're like, yeah, but there's some things that we can't know. And I'm like, yes, yes, sure. There are things that we can't know. The hidden things of God belong to him. However, he has revealed everything that we need to know in order to truly know him. There are relationships that I have in my life that are just a mystery to me. There are people that I do not understand whatsoever. And some of them I have a great relationship with, and some of them I don't have a great relationship with. But the mystery of who they are as a person does not mean that I don't actually know who they are. And God makes it possible for us to know him in a way that is actually meaningful and helpful, and in fact is a purpose of why he made us. God makes it possible for us to truly know him. That's a big point. The whole thing. If you get nothing else, it's like, we can know God. All right? So why does theology matter? Because what you think shapes how you live. What you think shapes how you live. The rest of that Paul David Tripp quote, where he says, like, congratulations, you think, and so you are a theologian. He says, here's what's vital to understand. Your thoughts always precede and determine your activity. You don't do what you do because of what you are experiencing at the moment. No, you do what you do because of the way you have thought about and interpreted what you are experiencing. Even your gut reactions, even your instincts are shaped by what you have thought in the past. If you grew up in a dangerous environment, you've learned, like, I cannot trust people, and when they stand up, I should probably move out of their way. But those instincts were formed by experience, and experience gave us thoughts as we tried to interpret what our experience was, and now I've trained our thoughts to where now we have instincts that move us out of the way before we even have the ability to think about it. And likewise, if you grew up in a good environment, when somebody comes and they give you a hug, you interpret that as like love, like affection. But if somebody grew up in a bad environment, they may think they must want something from me. Your experience of the world has shaped your thoughts and now your instincts to the world that you're experiencing today. What you think shapes how you live. And I think in each of us, just as a matter of human nature, we have an innate desire to live life for a purpose. How many of us really want to get to the end of their life and say, well, I guess that was a waste of time. Didn't get anything done. Hope nobody remembers me. I'm out. I truly hope I made no impact on the world and that nobody misses me when I'm gone. We would be very concerned about the mental capacity of somebody who's like saying those things. Each of us knows that we want for our life to have some kind of purpose. And if we isolate ourselves from understanding our maker's purpose for us, we lock ourselves away from the most satisfying purpose that we can ever live our lives for. So why does theology matter? Because what you think shapes how you live. Next is that accurate information fosters relationship. Accurate information fosters relationship. You guys know Jessie pretty well. And if you don't know, she's the brunette here on the second row. And so if I were to get up and say, man, I just love Jessie. She's so beautiful. Her long flowing red hair is just so like beautiful to me. And I love the way it's curls and like, it's just like crazy. And I've never met somebody who looks quite like her. You'd be like, Michael, did you get hit on the head today? Because I can see clearly she doesn't have red hair. Like, are your eyes in backwards? Like, what's the problem? You would say, perhaps you don't know whom it is you think you know, right? But accurate information fosters relationship. If I were to stand here, and she would not let me, but if I were to stand here and describe the way that I see my wife and all of the wonderful attributes, I'd be like, man, you guys have a good relationship. But we've been through a lot. We have experienced a lot of each other, good and bad. And having accurate information of who the person is is going to foster that relationship. How many times have you been mad at somebody because you had a piece of information that wasn't true about them? Like, I can't believe anybody would act like that. Then you talk to the person and they're like, oh, either I never did that or B, here was the other side of what was happening in that situation. Like, oh, that makes sense. Maybe they're not such an awful person after all. So accurate information fosters relationship. And if you continue and persist in having inaccurate pictures and inaccurate understandings of who God is, your relationship with God is going to suffer. You're not going to be able to talk to him the way that you were designed to talk to him. You're not going to be able to walk with him through the way that he designed you to experience life. Accurate information fosters relationship. To love God, we should know who he is and what he does accurately. This is going to form the foundation for worship. It's going to form the foundation for godly living and living on mission. My, uh, oh, I didn't give you that, but there's words if you like to read the words. Um, my, my like life verse of, of all of the, of all the verses in scripture, like, I don't know why really, to be honest, but like people are always like, Hey pastor, what's your life verse? And I'm like, I don't know all of them. Like, what do I, how do I, my life verse? I don't know. Um, I could think of some funny ones, but this is the one that I actually like kind of fall back on is this one. And we sang it this, or we're going to sing it together this morning by the leading of the Holy Spirit through Carlos's song selection. This is Jeremiah chapter nine, verse 23 through 24. Thus says the Lord, let not the wise man boast in his wisdom. Let not the mighty man boast in his might. Let not the rich man boast in his riches. Let him who boasts, boast in this. that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast love, justice, and righteousness in the earth, for in these things I delight, declares the Lord. God says, if you want something to boast about in your life, the thing that you should boast about is whether or not you actually know who I am. Do you know my name? Do you know the stuff that I do? And if you can like wrap your head around that, if you can wrap your arms around who God is, like that's something boast-worthy. in God's sight. And he's talking to people that like have done a lot. He said, I don't care about your stuff. I don't care about your influence. I don't care about your wealth. I don't care about how many pounds you can bench press. I don't care about what you know. I care about whether or not you know me. Accurate information fosters relationship and bad theology hurts people. I don't know how to pick through the stories that back up this point. I cannot, I don't think time would allow me to kind of articulate all the different ways that I have seen this play out, where broken people in crises have leaned on a lie or have been told a lie about themselves or about their suffering, and it has done all the more damage. Bad theology hurts people. There are all kinds of people, many of them you know, many of them maybe in your household or on your street. There are all kinds of people who are mad at God for things he didn't do and things he didn't say. But somebody said that God said X, and they've lived it. The lie, or this is like a principle to remember, a lie has the force of truth for those who believe it. A lie has the force of truth for those who believe it. If I believe a lie and begin to act as though that lie is true, that lie has the force of truth. It has the strength that I endow it with. And so bad theology hurts people. when I think that I've got to perform in a certain way in order to make God happy with me, and that bar just keeps getting cranked higher and higher and higher and higher, and I try harder and harder and harder and harder, and it just keeps lifting higher and higher and higher, and I just cannot reach it, and I give up, and I walk away, God can't be pleased. And it's all a waste of time. That hurts. That hurts. And it matters. So friends, how might our neighbors grow? How might our neighbors grow if our theology gets more healthy? What benefit could we offer to the communities that we find ourselves if we have a right understanding of God? what encouragement could we give? Or how could people live in a more healthy way if we understood what's true about our maker? Because I think there's a benefit if we do. I think it's really clear anywhere you look that bad theology hurts people. But the good news is that God makes it possible for us to truly know him. So how do we actually do it? How do we do theology? There's a couple of formal schools of theological training that maybe you've heard of, maybe you haven't. And so I'm going to tell you what the formal schools of theology are, because oftentimes the way that we actually function as we're doing theologies, we're thinking thoughts about God, it falls along within some of these categories, right? And here's another good news. If you're like, oh, I want to learn more about that, there are books. There are big books, and these are like not the biggest, but these are the ones that I had on my shelf ready for this morning. So the first one is historical theology, and this one is the one that I dislike the most, just transparently, because historical theology... Historical theology is what people have said over time. I actually wrote words down. I should read those to you. Historical theology is comparing and contrasting how theological thoughts have been described over time. So what a historical theology is going to do is it's going to take an idea, a theological idea, and it's going to say, well... In the early church, this is how they talked about it. And then in the 5th century, this is a new idea. And then in the 10th century, there was somebody who came up and said the opposite, and we had an argument about that. And then in the Reformation, this is how it changed. So it's going to trace and compare and contrast how we've talked about theological ideas over history. The Bible is under there somewhere, but mostly in historical theology, what you're reading is how people have talked about the Bible. Right? You're like, that sounds awful. That's not what I want to do. I know. But this is actually the place where I think a lot of people think theology lives. They say, I don't need theology because theology is just the words of men about the words of God. And if guys can't figure it out, if they're going to argue about all the nitpicky little tidbits, then I don't want to do anything with it. Now, they have. Men mess things up all the time. And they mess theology up real, real good on occasion. But that doesn't mean that there isn't truth in it. And that doesn't mean that knowing how thoughts have changed over time isn't helpful. I think this is helpful. Not my favorite. The second is this. Biblical theology, you're like, oh, that's what I want to do. I want to do the Bible. Now that I don't know that it means necessarily what you mean, what you think it means on the surface. In a biblical theology, you're tracing threads of thought and imagery as they develop through the biblical storyline. So what a biblical, can you see, can you see the lines that are kind of going through? They're like threads interwoven. It's not great. That didn't show up as good on your screen as it did on mine. But they're like different threads of scripture. So like if I wanted to talk about a biblical theology of the Messiah, I would probably start in Genesis chapter 3, where God says that there's going to be a seed of the woman who's going to crush the head of the serpent. Like there's a promise that something's going to come from a woman, and then it's going to crush the enemy, right? And then I'm going to read the next chapter or in chapter 5 and learn that the Messiah is going to come through the line of Seth. And then I'm going to read on Genesis chapter 12 where the Messiah is going to come through the line of Abraham. And then I'm going to read later on in Genesis 30-something-odd where we learn that the Messiah is probably going to come through the line of Judah. Right? So, like, there's going to be a human that's born from one of these families, right? So, like, but I'm going to trace that line all the way through to Samuel, where in Samuel we learn that the Judean line goes down to David, and there's going to be a king who's the Messiah, right? And then I'm going to follow that thread all the way through. You're taking literally all of the verses that talk about Messiah and lining them up and tracing the thread all the way through. Biblical theologies are thick, and I've got two here. They usually divide them up in between Old and New Testament. And so I've got an Old Testament theology and a New Testament theology. And these can be really, really dense. I think these are really helpful. And this was not an exercise that I grew up doing very often, but I really find it to be helpful because it helps you see the ways that things change and develop over as Scripture is kind of talking about things. So historical theology, about the conversations, biblical theology, tracing things throughout the Bible. What this series is, is what we call a systematic theology. And what a systematic theology tries to do is take all the verses that we've identified in a biblical theology about a certain topic, and then put them into a filter to distill them down into one concise statement. Right? Right? So we're going to take all the verses, a big quantity of all different kinds of statements, and kind of distill them down, and how would we summarize what the Bible says about Messiah? Consider all those, and then one statement, like what does the Bible say about Messiah? And that's a systematic theology. Synthesizing or distilling all of the biblical text about a theological idea into a summarized framework. Wayne Grudem, who wrote this one and many, many others, says systematic theology is in any area, answers the question, what does the whole Bible teach us today about any given topic? So what does the Bible say? And you're like, okay, that sounds like a lot. I don't know that I could do that. Here's the deal. You do that. Michael, how dare you? You've accused me of being a theologian. Now you're saying I'm a systematic theologian. I didn't even know that was a thing until right now. What do you mean I do systematic theology? Have you ever said or thought, well, the Bible says... Now, unless you were quoting verbatim a verse of what the Bible says, you were doing systematic theology. You were taking a bunch of what you have heard, a lot of data, and synthesizing it down into a summary statement. So, for instance, the Bible says that Jesus is the only way to God and everyone who trusts in him will be saved. I think that that's true, but that verse isn't in the text. I took a number of different verses and kind of put them together. I thought about it, and then I tried to put it into a language that I thought you would understand when I said the words. The Bible says that Jesus is the only way to God, and everyone who trusts in him will be saved. Okay, got it. That phrase isn't in the Scripture, but I think it conveys the heart of the Scripture. And so if that's news to you today, then I think you should believe in Jesus. Like... Side note, the Bible says that Jesus is the only way to God and everyone who trusts in him will be saved. And so if you have not trusted Jesus to be saved, he's the only way to God and you should do that today before you leave. So, overview. This is what the series is going to look like. We're going to talk about the one true God, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Bible, humanity, salvation, church, Christian life, angels, Satan, demons, future life over the next 10 weeks or so. And those are the categories that you have on your sheet. However, caveat, they will not be in this order. Because of scheduling and a number of other things, we're going to shuffle some things around. But also because of purpose, we're going to shuffle some things around. On purpose, I'm moving the Bible to be the first thing that we talk about because... Because as we approach God, what tools do we have at our disposal to know who God is like? Infinite, almighty creator of the universe. I can know him about this much all by myself. And the only thing I can know is he's big, he's powerful, and I ought to get out of his way. And if I'm going to do anything more than that, I'm going to need somebody to tell me what it is. And so I need to know what the scriptures teach. And so we're going to start with bibliology. We're going to start about the Bible, but then we're going to cover these things. There's one other point as we are moving towards closing is somebody, I can't remember which professor it is. It's a funny picture, but you won't forget it. Theology doesn't happen in a vacuum. A vacuum? Michael, like, What do you mean, a vacuum? How did I get inside this Dyson? This is not a problem. Theology doesn't happen in a vacuum. So when he says vacuum, he was talking about the idea that we could be in a laboratory environment where there are no external forces that are shaping our thought. Theology doesn't happen in a vacuum. We can't just like put the Bible into a lab setting and have it distilled down in a way that is completely isolated from our humanity or the problems that we have or the ways that we talk about things or even the limits and the confines of our language. Theology doesn't happen in a vacuum. And often the questions that we're looking for or the questions that we're asking and the answers that we're looking for are related to our experiences. How many of us have ever thought like, would it be appropriate to feed my little brother to a shark? What does God say about that? Well, no, I never, no, I've never thought about that, right? Well, maybe you haven't had the experience of having an opportunity to push your little brother off a boat and know whether like you should feed him to a shark, right? Like your experiences inform the questions that you ask, right? And that's a very specific question. I'm trying to illustrate the fact that our personal thoughts are always shaped by our community. Our personal thoughts, your individual thoughts are always shaped by your community. Michael, you don't, I'm a diagonal thinker. I take nothing for granted. I'm opposition. I like to confront and I'm not taking anybody's word for anything. Like I think my own thoughts. I'm an individual. I understand. However, you thought all of those thoughts in English? and English is the community that you grew up in, and that's the language that you learned, and there are certain grammatical structures that frame the way that our English language works that reflects how your thoughts actually get put into order, or if you were learning a different language, those thoughts would not occur to you in the same way. Well, that's kind of minutiae. Right, but it's a baseline. Like even the language that we think in comes from our community. And often the questions that we're asking are shaped by our community. There are questions that are raging in the church right now, not because anybody in the church was confused about what the Bible taught, but because the news is just pushing agenda after agenda after agenda of things that we didn't even know existed. Theology doesn't happen in a vacuum. So let me tell you about kind of where we are at. We've got a doctrinal statement here from the Karis Fellowship. That's the fellowship of churches that our church belongs to. And it's a movement that was rooted in the Protestant Reformation. So you're like, I don't know what that is. Great. The big thing for us from that was sola scriptura, the Latin phrase which means the Bible alone, that the Bible is what determines how we approach God. But we also were influenced at that time by a movement of people called pietism. And pietists were people who said it doesn't matter what you think about God if you don't live in a way that honors God. So they were really, really concerned with practice. and an actual experience, a living faith with the living God. And so in all of that, I think it's important to note that for most of the history of our movement, we refuse to write down a doctrinal statement. So the thing that you're holding in your hand is a relatively modern invention for us as a fellowship because we said we don't need the words of man. We don't need a historical theology. We don't need the words of man to tell us how we live our life. We just believe the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible. And that served us really, really well up until around the 1950s, where we realized there's a lot of people who are saying that kind of thing, but also reading the Bible in a very different way. And so we should be clear about how it is that we're reading the Bible and what it is that we think the Bible is teaching. And so that's where the doctrinal statement comes from. They were non-creedal, so they wouldn't have subscribed to the creeds on purpose, not because they didn't think the creeds were accurate, but because they were concerned that their primary loyalty should be due only to the authority of the Bible. So you may be familiar with the Nicene Creed or some other creeds, and our fellowship would say, those may be good and helpful, but we're not going to subscribe to them because we don't want our loyalty to be tied up in it, right? Like, okay, Michael, this is a lot. You just are saying a lot of words. My question is, who has been shaping our theology? Like, when we think about theology happening and it not happening in a vacuum, you should assume that you have theological thoughts about God that came from somebody else. And it's important to ask, who has been shaping my theology? And what do they care about? And what are their priorities? And is there something in what maybe I have been taught or something that I've picked up or something that I've inherited that it's time for me to kind of step away from? Not because I just am out here trying to reject every tradition, but because I care about how God has revealed himself in the Word. And that's ultimately where we come back to. Or that's ultimately where I'll come back to. You will not be surprised to know that we put Jesus first. And the first bit of our doctrinal statement at the very beginning says this. We believe that Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God, is revealed in the Bible. The written Word of God is the only Savior and Lord. He is the center of our shared experience of true biblical unity. Jesus says that the whole Bible is about him in Luke 24, and our whole lives are about him. And if we're going to have any kind of unity or any kind of understanding, if we're going to be able to work together on the same mission, I think it's going to be around what Jesus has done, what he is doing, what he promises he's going to finish. And so I know that the content of this sermon has been a little bit different than we typically do. But I do think it's important for us to remember that God makes it possible for us to truly know him. And we honor him when we approach him on the terms that he's asked us to do that. And so let's pray together. Jesus, thank you for your word. I thank you for the men and women who have gone before us and who have written down their thoughts about you in ways that we can interact with them. And Lord, I thank you for your inspiration of the authors of scripture, that you have put your word down first and foremost. And so Lord, as we go this way and that, as we take vacations and time off, as we wander here and there, Lord, I pray that you would be shaping us by your word, that we would remember that we can know you and we can know you accurately, and that that makes all the difference in our lives. Lord, I pray that through this summer and through this series, maybe even in something I've said this morning, we'd identify areas of thought that have been wrong about you. And Lord, that we would surrender those back to you and live in truth. God, I pray that you would grow in us a heart of worship for you and that we'd express these right thoughts in a spirit of your love. And God, that's only possible with you. Would you lead us? Would you guide us? It's in your name we pray. Amen.
