C (41:25)
It. Yes and no. And I hate to. To, you know, run the. Run the fence like that, because it's. The answer requires context, Situational context. Right. The answer requires situational context. So, like, what I noticed a lot of times growing up in church, because I went to church all my life, guys. My dad. My dad was a pastor for many years, and then he went off to do his own ministry where he has orphanages in different countries. And so he stopped pastoring. But I continued to go to church all my life. And I just was. I would always try to talk to people in church about the Bible and nobody knew the Bible. And I, And I started to realize in my mid-20s, this is a problem. Like, I, you know, we go to church, we hang out, we have a good time. I'm part of the youth group, the men's group, all that kind of stuff. We, you know, after church, we go to. To Applebee's or Chili's or whatever, and we're talking about the football game, we're talking about, you know, where we're going to go camping or, you know, when we're going to get together and grill out, but nobody can talk about the Bible. Nobody can even hold a general conversation about the Bible. And to me, this is like a big problem. Like, we're supposed to be studied and approved in the Word as Scripture tells us. We're supposed to actually be learning this thing for our sanctification as, as Paul teaches Timothy in First Timothy, chapter four talks about, these are the scriptures that you've had since your youth that will make you wise for salvation. And I'm like, okay, so I think. I think I need to read this stuff and know it. You know what I mean? Like, it seems to be the. I was always told by youth pastors, like, the Bible's your. Your. Your manual. It's like your. Your driver's manual for life. You know what I mean? It's like the. So I thought I kind of took that seriously, you know, And I was like, all right, so maybe I need to read and know this book, you know? And, and because I didn't know how to live life, I was horrible at it. I was getting people mad at me all the time. I didn't know how to handle relationships. I don't know how to handle weird circumstances, trauma. I didn't know how to handle life at all. And so my thought was, well, if this book does have wisdom to handle life, then I should get to know it. And the more that I studied it, the more I realized people were not studying it around me at church. Right. Where you would expect them. Since we're reading from this book every Sunday and we're given all these wonderful anecdotal stories from the pat. From the pulpit about this book, then people are surely reading it at home. Right? Right. You know, no, no. And so it got really awkward. And that's where I started making these appointments with pastors to ask them more specific questions and kind of dig in because just trying to have general conversation with fellow church goers wasn't. Wasn't working. And so as a result, I didn't, I feel like the, the yes and the no to your, your question is it causes more harm. Yes. For those who want to know a actual definition of discipleship. So if you're reading, we're told, be like Jesus, right? What would Jesus do? Like, we're told, this is like the most general platitude in Christianity, be like Jesus. And then you start reading about Jesus's life and you're like, okay, well, there's no standing temple, so I can't do that. I don't live in ancient Judea. I don't have to deal with Pharisees, so I don't have to, I don't have to come up with rebuttals similar to that. That. So then what can I do to emulate him in his life outside of the persecution he received that I don't receive here in the United States, where, you know, it's a tame society and Christians aren't generally being persecuted. I don't have my own band of disciples that I'm training up, so I can't emulate that. Like, so you start going through the life of Christ, you're like, what can I actually do to emulate Christ? And then I started looking at what he's actually teaching. And I, I, and, you know, but I'm not someone that just reads the New Testament. I was also reading the front of the Book too. And I started realizing that what he was teaching is just from the Old Testament because, you know, I learned that the, the books of the New Testament weren't written until after Christ died and resurrected and ascended to heaven. So, like, he wasn't teaching in Matthew 5 on the Sermon on the Mount or the, the Beatitudes and that whole famous sermon there. He wasn't teaching them from the book of Galatians. Galatians wasn't written until Approximately, you know, A.D. 61 or 2. Like, he was. He was. He was teaching them from the law and the prophets, and he was saying, these are the scriptures. This is the word of God. We live by every. Every word from the mouth of God. And I'm sitting there going, oh, wow. So I need to start at the front of the book. You know, like, that seems to be where a lot of his grounding was for his understanding ending. And he quoted a lot from Isaiah and Deuteronomy. And, And I thought, okay, so I'm gonna start with those two books. And I. And Isaiah is probably one of my favorite books in the Bible at this point because it, it has so much futuristicology. It has people being, you know, the rebase priests and leaders in the days of Isaiah being rebuked for abandoning the covenant of God and the laws of God and then engaging in bail worship, which led them to end eventually cannibalizing themselves. Like they just went into the spiral, you know, of absolute depravity and destruction because they abandoned the laws of God. And then Isaiah talks about if there is not. I can't. I think it's chapter 18. He says, if. If it's not according to. Or sets you. Chapter eight. If it's not according to the law and the prophets, it's not true. This is God speaking to Isaiah. And so I thought to myself, all right, well, it seems like if God spoke something initially day is. Is that everlasting? Are those words everlasting? Yeah, so. So I had to come to the conclusion, yes. Because I kept seeing Isaiah prophesying, in the future, all nations will be required to learn God's wisdom. Right. And it's not burdensome, as Jesus talked about. It's not burdensome. What's burdensome was when men get in the way and start adding extra, extra rules to it. Right. And so what. What a lot of people don't realize is that if you're going to a church looking for destructive instruction and discipleship because you need structure in your life, you're gonna. It depends on the church you go to. But in my experience, many of the churches were so focused on being overly welcoming that, that there was, you know, and also it probably had to do with their denominational teachings, but there was no strict concept of, here's what we do as disciples of Christ. So you have young men and women left without an actual, like, focused vision for what they're supposed to be doing point. It just becomes, oh, keep coming back, you know, we want to see you here Next week. And yeah, we got this, this youth social happening. We're gonna go bowling and. Yeah, man, come on back. Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna look about this, this little. We're gonna start this new study from this workbook that we got on the book of Philippians, and it's gonna be great, man. Come on back. We'll see you on Tuesday. You know, and you're just like, that's great, man. I love being welcomed and I love having fellowship, but it's like, like, that's. I wasn't getting like the actual instructions for, oh, I'm on a date and this girl's got a low cut shirt on and she's throwing me all the signals and she wants to go back to my place. What do I do?