← The Wake-Up Call
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Hey, Good morning, Sower Nation. It is Wednesday. I'm John David Walt and this is your wake up call. It's great to be with you this morning. We've got a lot of goodness to share today, so how about we get right to it? Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead and Christ will shine on you. Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you. And we're praying in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen. You notice that consecration prayer? It doesn't say wake up sleeper and get out of bed. You do have to do that. It says rise from the dead. And what that is is it's like every day we have to get out of bed. Yeah, but every day we've got to wake up with the knowing knowledge that Jesus is risen from the dead and the resurrected Lord is resurrecting you and me. He is living, making his home in us. This is not a nice little theory. This is not a good thought for the day. This is the bedrock truth of the universe, that Jesus fills us with his very presence. It's not like a little power he's given us. It's not like a little extra steam. It's not some help around the edges. It's not an ethic that we're trying to master. No, it's himself. Okay, I just thought I'd throw that out there. Just a little sort of pre game warm up before we dive into the to the Word today. Today's entry is entitled the Most Excellent Way to Measure what Matters Most. And Our text is First Corinthians 13, verses 1 through 3. Hear now the word of the Lord. If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to the flames, that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. The word of the Lord a few years back. Oh, I should say. Now consider this. I like to say that because I like you to be sure and understand that when what I'm about to say is in a completely different category than the word of God. Okay, this is the comment Of John, David, Walt. Not the Word of God. Inspired by the Word of God, hopefully filled with some of the wisdom of heaven. But it's in another category. That's why I go through that reading. I set it apart. Hear now the Word of the Lord. Read the Word of the Lord, then say the word of the Lord. Just so. It's so set up by itself. Exalted, set apart, distinctive, in a category of its own. And then now, now consider this. Okay, man, I just got lots of comments today. All right? A few years back, one of my friends, Nick. Okay, if you watched this week's conversation podcast on the Wake Up Call, you need to watch it. If you hadn't, it's on the YouTube channel, it's on the Apple podcasts. Meet. Nick and I kind of had an interview with each other and we told the whole origin story, the origin of the Wake Up Call. It's so fun. So it was rich to do it. Well, this is who I'm talking about. Nick. Nick Perot. He's also a colleague on the Farm team. He's on our staff. He's our creative director. He's. He's been with us for, I don't know, 13 years. Well, he and I embarked on an experiment. We shared a keen interest and we share it in growing in our experience and expression of the love of God. We also felt a little bit stuck in the process. We were in a discipleship band together, which was helping, but we knew we were missing something. We wanted to grow in love, but other than a touchy feely, subjective sense of how we were doing, we didn't know how to measure our growth. Then we had a bfo. A blinding flash of the obvious. The Bible has a remarkable set of measurements when it comes to love. It can be found in the 13th chapter of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. It has been called the Love chapter and the Wedding text, which is perhaps why we had never considered it before. Nick and I agreed together that we would rememberize this text and make it a point of our ongoing conversation for the rest of our lives. For those who aren't yet aware, Rememberize is different from memorize. To memorize is the quick loading of the short term memory. To rememberize is the slow loading of the long term memory. The chapter opens with a truly remarkable set of observations. We read them earlier. It lists all the attributes of a highly successful Christian. I'll break them down here. There are seven of them. Number one, being supernaturally gifted with foreign languages without having studied them in order to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom of Jesus to people who do not yet know him. 2. Being supernaturally gifted with an angelic language in order to communicate with God through prayer in extraordinary expressions. 3. Possessing the supernatural ability to convey divine communication from God to other people for their care and benefit. 4. Possessing the supernatural ability to discern and understand wisdom and mysteries and knowledge about seemingly unknowable things. 5. Being filled with the supernatural gift of faith to such an extent one has the capacity to to do impossible things move mountains. 6. Being possessed of a supernatural generosity so extravagant that one gives away all they own to the poor. 7. Being possessed of a supernatural gift of courage so profound that one gives up their body to the death of a martyr for the glory of God. What the Bible says next in this celebrated text is truly remarkable. It says if a person does all these heroic and saintly things and yet lacks one thing, then all of it has been worthless, a complete failure and a waste of time. In other words, all these amazing things, these activities are not the measure of transformational growth. So what is the missing measure in the eternal equation? Love. Yes, love. It is explicitly mentioned or referenced 21 times in the 13 verses of this 13th chapter. Love is the measure. Love is the measure of transformational growth, period. Though it may be expressed in myriad manifestations, the transformational answer to the first transformational question comes down to one measurement. Love. Let's pray. Father, thank you for your son Jesus and Lord Jesus. You are the definition of love. And you love, because you are love. And you are the secret in me that makes me love. Come, Holy Spirit and empower me to live in and from this love, praying in your name, Jesus. Amen. And our journal prompts. Do you think of love as soft and fuzzy and not really the main thing? Or has it hit you that love is hardcore and the whole thing? How does what you think about love measure up to how the Bible actually talks about love? Yeah, that's love. Love is the substance. It's the steak and the sauce. Okay. I think we think of love as the sauce. Love is the steak and the sauce. And it's not soft, it's not easy. It's actually quite hard. Once love begins to come into you, the person of Jesus himself who is love, it the he starts pushing sin out. Love displaces sin. We can fight sin for a thousand years and just fight it and fight it and fight it and sin just stays. But sin can't stay in the presence of love. And so the answer is More love. More love is less sin. There's so much to say about it. And I, I know it's Wednesday and you got to get to, you got to get going, you got to get to school, you got to get to work, you got to get busy and, and really you got to get to the fields because that's what we're sowing, friends. Love. And what is love? I mean, it's interesting. The Bible uses a term throughout this thing. There's multiple terms for love in the Greek language. They choose one in particular. It's in the category of its own agape. And that means this sense of like unself interested, want the best for you, even at cost to myself, kind of goodness. Love means I want the best for you and I'm willing to pay for it myself. Okay? That takes Jesus. Love goes way past sharing. It goes into surrender, not surrender to the person, surrender to Jesus. And then Jesus makes you this unending gift of goodness to everybody everywhere. It's extraordinary. You know it when you see it. Well, we need to sing and I'm kind of torn between two songs today. I love the, this classic, kind of a Lenten hymn. Oh, the deep, deep love of Jesus. That's number 121. I kind of want to sing that one. And then I also want to sing number 502. Come ye sinners, poor and needy. That's I will arise and go to Jesus. He will embrace me in his arms. That's a great one. So I'm kind of torn between two. So I tell you what I want to do. I'm going to sing verse one from both of these songs. If you want to go old fashioned hymn sing, get your hymn lap, put your thumb in 121 and in 502. And I'm just going to start in five. I'm going to start with, with 121 and then I'm going to go to 502. We're going to sing the first verse of each one. Maybe we'll sing verse two tomorrow. We'll see. Are you ready? One, two, one.
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Oh, the deep, deep love of Jesus. Vast, unmeasured, boundless, free. Rolling as a mighty ocean in its fullness over me, underneath me, all around me is the current of thy love Leading onward, leading homeward to my glorious rest above.
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Now we're going to switch.
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Come ye sinners, poor and needy, weak and wounded, sick and sore, you, Jesus ready stands to save you, Full of pity, love and power.
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You want to sing? Come on.
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No, I will Arise and go to Jesus he will embrace me in his arms in the arms of my dear Savior oh, there are 10,000 charms
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amen. Well, guys, you saw me kind of motioning. I had a couple of visitors. They were riding their bikes by the seed house. Look here. Here's Kylie. This is Kylie. This is her brother Mattis. There he is. They live here in Gillette. They come to our Gillette Methodist Church. They're. They're in my Sunday school class on Sunday morning. Well, Maddox is. And Kylie comes down to the kids. I'll be there next year. You're going to be there next year? Perfect. Well, anyhow, thank y' all for coming by today. I tried to get them to sing, but it's time to get the fields. It's time to hit the fields, okay. Because guess what? If Jesus in you, you don't just have love, you are love. He's coming through you. And so that's what we're doing today. This is on the agenda. Seeds of love sown into the fields of people. All right. Bye. Bye. Thanks for coming by.
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Love you guys.
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Isn't that great? They just were riding their bikes by, and I saw me in here and I said, come on in. That's what we're doing. We're so in love. Okay, get your seats for The Awakening. I'm J.D. walt. I'm getting dad back next week. I feel just kind of like something's missing here. And it is. He'll be back with me to sing some more, but I'll see you on the field.