I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t know if it was a result of growing up in a small town, I don’t know if it was a result of the time from, you know, back in the 70s when I was really little. The, uh, I only knew of one color for apples. And what color do you think that was? Red! I mean, if we had apples at school, they were? If we had apples at home, they were? And then I moved to Overland Park, Kansas.
Wow, and there are so many different colors, there are multi-colors, there are like these gala apples that are different colors. And I gotta tell you, at one point, I came across this thing. This is called Red Delicious, this is Golden Delicious.
And let me tell you, it is golden. I mean, I would take a bite of this, and the sugar rush was so amazing. It’s natural, so I can get a sugar rush from it.
And it’s okay. And my teeth would tingle from this apple, and I was like, where have you been all my life? You see, and I learned that if an apple was green, you don’t eat it. I mean, did you guys see the Andy Griffith Show, when Opie got in the back of a truck with one of his friends, and they ate a whole truckload of green apples, and then they were sick? Yeah, those reruns were on when I was a kid, too.
And they were sick, and he learned a lesson first. At first, I was thinking, oh, he ate green apples, but you couldn’t really tell, I don’t think. I think it was in black and white.
But then his dad reminded him that those were in the back of a farmer who brought them in to sell them, and he stole all those apples. So what he did with that choice was different, but now, in Kansas City, I love green apples. Do you know what this is? Granny Smith.
They are so good, they don’t give you the sugar rush like Golden Delicious, but they are fewer calories. There are so many choices that we have. Choices of which apple to buy.
Choices of which grocery store to go to, to get them at. Choices of different types of fruit and vegetables, and all kinds of things that are all over the place. Now, those choices that we have are part of us being in this age, where we went from the age of information to the digital age, and there are choices that fly at us.
Things we can read, things we can do, things happen so quickly. Now, choosing a Golden Delicious apple is not like the apple Adam and Eve chose to eat. Well, it’s actually a fruit, but all the pictures depict it as an apple.
See the difference? We have a lot of choices. Some choices are just choices. Some choices are just opinions, but some choices are between good and evil.
Leslie Neubogen, who is an English missionary and apologist, said something about how in our world today, and he wrote this about 30 years ago, Jesus just becomes another item on the shelf at the store. There are so many things we can choose, and it’s not new. As we continue with the series on Great Minds, we’re going to talk about choices, and there are a lot of choices we have in our lives.
Choices, choices, and more choices. So let’s go to the book of Joshua, where Joshua was given the people a choice. Will you stand as you are able? Joshua 24, starting at verse 14, going through 24.
Now, therefore, fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the river and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods of your fathers served in the region beyond the river or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell.
But as for me and my house, let’s just say this together, we will serve the Lord. Then the people answered, far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods, for it is the Lord, our God, who brought us and our fathers up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight, and preserved us in all the way that we want, and among all the peoples throughout whom we passed. And the Lord drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites, who lived in the land.
Therefore we also will serve the Lord, for he is God. But Joshua said to the people, you are not able to serve the Lord, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God.
He will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm and consume you, after having done you good. And the people said to Joshua, no, but we will serve the Lord.
Then Joshua said to the people, you are witnesses against yourself that you have chosen to serve the Lord, chosen the Lord to serve him. And they said, we are witnesses. He said, then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your heart to the Lord, the God of Israel.
And the people said to Joshua, the Lord, our God, we will serve, and his voice we will obey. The word of God, inspired by God, for the people of God, thanks be to God. Amen.
You may be seated. Joshua was leading a people, remember they had been in the desert for a whole generation, after coming out of being slaves in Egypt. Now what they acquired along the way was not just the knowledge of God.
When they were in the wilderness, the reason they were in the wilderness for so long, is that it took a whole generation to get out of them. But some people still had the idols that they threw in their bags from Egypt. And then each place they went to, they picked up idols of their gods, other things to worship.
I mean, I like to think of it as today, you know, we may say we worship Jesus, but when push comes to shove, we rely on a lot of other things. Now we don’t have gods that are idols, things that we worship, things that are carved out necessarily. We have other things that become idols in our lives.
What is an idol? An idol is anything that we worship. And when I say worship, it means we serve. How do we serve something besides God? What has our heart? When we go to make a decision, what do we have? I’m just going to move this while I talk.
When we go to make a decision in our life, when we go to make a choice, what comes in between us and God? What makes us too busy to choose God in a day? We have so many choices that it’s tough. Are we going to serve God? Are we going to serve someone else? Or are we going to serve ourselves? Or are we going to serve whatever the world tells us is good and right and true? The people were just about to cross the Jordan River. They were ready to start and settle in the homelands.
And before they settled in the homelands, Joshua had to test them and say, if it’s too evil for you to serve God, you know the irony there. And they said, oh no, no, no, no, no, we’re going to serve God. And you’d think if Joshua was a nice guy, he would have just said, cool, praise God.
But Joshua said, you can’t handle the truth. He said, you cannot serve God. You’re going to stray.
And they kept saying, we will serve God. We’re going to choose God. And they had many, many places where they picked up other gods from.
But they go back. And if you go to those places, who won? God versus Egypt, who won? Oh good, everybody got that right. So why would you choose to serve an Egyptian God? God versus the Amorites, who won? So why would you choose to serve an Amorite God? And he walked through with them, look at how great God is.
Look at all the amazing thing God is. You can choose God. And they said, we will choose God.
And he said, well, okay, we’ll go with that. But this is on you. You have made this choice.
It’s kind of a difficult thing that we downplay in modern religion, in modern Christianity. With the pluralistic society we live in, that when we choose God, when we choose Jesus, oh, we were having this conversation last week that when you choose God, there’s something else that comes along. That God has accountability.
And there’s a higher accountability when you receive Christ in your heart, when you accept what Jesus has done for you. Especially, you know, James says not everybody should be teachers, because teachers will be judged more harshly. And that can be a heavy burden.
We need grace. But the good thing is, what we have is not just grace that says you are forgiven for this, but you’re going to move along and do it again. And that could be true, but it’s transforming grace that helps us to be more like Christ, to be able to choose Jesus in any given situation.
Some things in our lives that seem so mundane. What path are we going to choose? It doesn’t seem evil, but it’s a step away from God, or it’s a step towards God. How do you serve? How do you live? How do you love others? How do you make decisions? How do you choose? I mean, everything we do right now is a choice that you can block out what I’m saying.
When we sing, it’s a choice that you can just enjoy the music, or it’s a choice of if you can worship, if you can praise God, if you can choose to glorify God in the midst of everything we’ve been through, in the midst of the pain and the hurt. That’s a choice for God. Now, one of the things that makes it tough is that culturally, it’s not okay to choose God.
It’s not the best decision. It’s not the best for the whole world, it is what we are told. Leslie Nubagen wrote this book, The Gospel in the Pluralist Society, and I took this in an evangelism class in seminary, and I used tabs for things that I think are important in a book, and I picked this book up, and I was looking for that specific quote about choosing Jesus as one item off the shelf, and I couldn’t find it amidst all this stuff, but there’s so much in there, pluralist.
Okay, let’s go back to English. What is a singular word versus a plural word? What does plural mean? Multiple more than one. Pluralist.
There are many things we can choose in the world today, and many more than when all of us were kids. There are many things, there are many idols out there that we can choose, that we can depend on, and there is one God that we can choose to depend on. He said this, it is certainly not more than a hundred years since children in Scottish schools learned at an early state the fact that man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.
That was the Scottish catechism, and they taught it in school. Can you believe that? Can you believe growing up knowing what is your chief chosen goal end telos? What is your calling, your first calling? It’s to glorify God. It’s not, I’m going to sit around and wait until I get my personal calling before I do anything.
It says right now, get up and glorify. Don’t leave, unless the Holy Spirit’s telling you to. Get up and glorify God, and whatever you do, we choose to glorify God, or we choose to set God aside and say, God, you do not matter, or we choose to say, God, you’re everything to me.
Are we going to obey? Are we going to follow? Are we going to trust? Are we going to step out in faith? Or are we going to say, God, yeah, thumbs up, God, but here’s where we’re going today. Leslie Neubogen also said this, the contemporary opinion very widely held that doubt is somehow more honest than faith is an entirely irrational prejudice. It is a form of dogmatism, which is entirely destructive.
He calls this a fashionable preference. The choice, I don’t know if you guys have noticed this pressure, but there is a strong pressure in the world today that if you are convicted in your faith, that is more harmful to you than if you are more open. I don’t need to make up my mind because there’s just such an array of choices that this choice for God cannot be the only right choice.
And he says it’s destructive, meaning it just tears everything down. Meaning the goal, if you listen to it, and I don’t know, should I say if you listen to a debate, is that there’s so many things out there, but you have no idea what was just said. The goal is to confuse and to say it’s better to be ready for the next thing that comes up than just stick with God and who Jesus is and everything we have.
He goes on to say the choice for the church in every age will always be, will our identity be shaped by the scripture or by the culture? Does that sound familiar? By the biblical story or by the cultural story? I mean our culture and our lives and all that play into our faith and how we live out our lives, but is scripture central? Is our view of who God is and how we choose to live for God, does that come from scripture? Or does it come from something else entirely? Does it come from Google? You know, the weird thing is with my Chrome, which is a search engine, I want to search through Google, but it defaults to Bing. It must have gotten paid something for that. So Bing comes up and then when you use Bing, I’m sorry if you’re a fan of Bing, but you do a search and then the first 10 things are sponsored.
Do you know what that means? It means it’s not the answer to my search, it is who paid them the most money to put that on there for the search. And so we have skewed information that comes to us. Those searches have the algorithms that are skewed that we think this is what’s most popular, but they put in there what they want to be most popular.
So we have to make honest choices and not let the flow of the world drive us in what we do. So when push comes to shove, Leslie Nubeson had about six things he said about what the church needs to be today, what distinguishes it, what choices the church needs to make in a pluralist society in order to be the church, in order to be who God has called us to be. Number one, it will be a community of praise in a world of doubt and skepticism where we praise God, where we don’t sit there and just say, I don’t know, God.
We say, how great is our God. In the midst of not everything happening how we want it to happen, we say, how great is our God. In the midst of having our own hurt and pain and having to deal with so much and having anxiety that takes over in our lives and having health issues we are uncertain about, in the midst of that, we say, I choose to praise God.
I choose to lift God up. I choose to glorify God. Number two, it will be a community of truth in a pluralist society that overwhelms and produces relativism.
A pluralist society overwhelms us with choices. And it all is deconstructed down to relative where he also talks a lot about, it’s my truth. This is my truth.
There is no big T. It’s just my, this is what I, this is my truth. And you got to know that it is my opinion when it’s a little T. It’s my experience based on my limited knowledge. There is a big T and that big T can be relied on for, it sounds weird saying big T. There was a restaurant in Clifton, Kansas called the Big T. You can rely on the big T to be open no matter what.
The big T, the big T truth is so powerful and it shapes who we are as a truth. As soon as we lose the truth of who Jesus is and who the church is called to be, we’re called to praise God. We are called to put God first.
As soon as we lose that, we become just muddled in the same relativism as the world is. And it’s infected the church at every level these days. And we are called to step beyond that and trust in the truth.
We are here for the truth that the world might not want to hear about Jesus. But if you love them, you’ll let them know about Jesus. Number three, it will be selfless, a selfless community that does not live for itself, but is deeply involved in the concerns of its neighborhood in a selfish world.
When we were doing the outreach event, I loved how Randall explained that what is, someone said, what is the goal of this? And he said, well, the number one goal is maybe someone will hear about Jesus and it’ll change their life. And I was like, yes. I mean, the goal is that we want people to come and we want people to be here.
But beyond that, when we live for Jesus as number one in someone’s life, not just one hope to be number one, then we are the community of faith. We want people to know Jesus. It’s all about Jesus.
It will be a community, number four, it will be a community prepared to live out the gospel in public life in a world that privatizes all religious claims who grew up with the pressures of faith needing to be private. Faith is, you don’t talk about it. Politics and religion, don’t bring those up.
I brought them both up today. Faith, Christian faith is a community faith. It’s not just private.
I mean, you have a one-on-one relationship with Jesus Christ, but as a community of faith, we bring Christ into the world, not just hide it within the doors. Number five, it will be a community of mutual responsibility in a world of individualism, as in we work together. It’s not about one person.
It’s not about my thing, my world, my silo, my sacred cow. It’s about Jesus and Jesus pulls us all together. Remember we’ve talked about gifts and how we all have gifts and we use them for God’s glory.
Number six, this sounds kind of like the name of someone’s church, so I’m kind of biased with this. Will you say six with me? It will be a community of hope in a world of pessimism and despair about the future. We have hope.
We believe God is good. We believe God is amazing. We believe God is more powerful than any idol that can come before us, any other thing that will help us, enable us to stretch and try to not rely on God.
Choose today whom you will serve. As for us, as for our faith community, we choose to serve the Lord. Amen? Let’s pray.
Almighty God, bless our thought process. Help us to make good decisions. Help us to learn how to choose you in a pluralist world.
Help us to serve you when it might not be easy. Help us to follow you when we might not see the road ahead. Help us to trust in you when so many are trying to say you are untrustworthy.
That’s why we have a community of faith, so we know the truth, the capital T truth, and we can choose amongst many, many things, but we’ll choose to serve you. Amen.