Sermon Tone Analysis

“/24/”

People Connecting to God

Jeff Jones, Senior Pastor

January 19~/21, 2007

 

Last week on 24: God gives you and me 24 hours, only a short amount of time that is constantly ticking, an urgent mission, and a unique calling.

In 24, we are looking at what it means to spend our lives wisely, to know God and fulfill his calling—to know that we are fulfilling the calling he has laid out for us.

Last week was the starting gun week, the choice to say, “I’m in the race.

I’m going for it.

I am all in.”

Today as we talk about what that race is all about, we are looking at connection with God, how to build a real, deep, life-changing relationship with God.

Do you know people who seem to have a significant relationship with God, who seem connected?

Wouldn’t it be great to be one of those people?

When I read in the Bible the story of some of the Bible guys I think about that…I would love that kind of relationship with God…like Enoch.

Enoch was one of the first human beings.

His great, great, great granddad was Adam…and Enoch had the closest relationship with God of anyone up to that point.

*Slide: ) ___________ Genesis 5:22-24*

 

In Genesis 5:22-24 we read: /Enoch walked with God 300 years and had other sons and daughters.

Altogether, Enoch lived 365 years.

Enoch walked with God; then he was no more, because God took him away./”

That’s all we know about him, but that’s a lot to know.

He lived a long time, and he walked with God his whole life.

He had such a great relationship with God, that the Bible says, “God took him,” a Hebrew expression that means that he did not die.

God just snatched him up.

Enoch was so close to God; they had such a close relationship, that God just says, “Oh, come on up.”

Wow!

I would love that kind of relationship with God? My guess you would, too.

How do you develop a relationship with God like that?

Today that’s what we are talking about.

Let me ask you a question, and just answer honestly.

Many of you may be able to raise your hands here.

How many of you feel spiritual?

How many of you feel like an Enoch?

Okay, great.

Now, let me talk to the rest of you, people like me, who may not always feel that spiritual, who don’t identify as much with Enoch as his younger brother Ernie, who just never got it all together.

That’s especially true for me when I see other people that look a whole lot more spiritual than me, seem like they really have it together.

My granddad for example prayed about 2 to 4 hours a day…I don’t do that.

Over my life though I have in my attempt to be godly and spiritual come to a conclusion that the way most of us think about spirituality is all wrong…that most Christians make a mistake that ends up leading some people empty, others falsely arrogant, and just doesn’t work.

In fact, when I was preparing this message I almost made the mistake I am talking about, and I changed the message.

I changed my whole approach, because it was wrong.

When we make the mistake I am talking about, which most people make, the way we think about spiritual maturity ends up making some people who should feel close to God feel like losers and others who aren’t mature at all feel like spiritual giants.

Here is the way I picked up on the mistake I’ll uncover in a few minutes.

As I lived my Christian life and got to know various Christians both in my own church circle and in very different church circles, I realized something was wrong.

What makes you seem like a spiritual giant in one circle of Christianity makes you seem like a spiritual bozo in another.

In Bible churches, the circle I grew up in, Bible knowledge was the key to spiritual maturity.

The church I grew up in was so into Bible knowledge that we had Sunday school classes that taught people Greek and Hebrew, the languages the Bible was originally written in, to better understand it.

Those who were really spiritual stepped up to the plate and signed up…the spiritual lightweights, the pansies of the group, just went to some other Bible study.

But if you were really godly, you spent hours reading the Bible.

My charismatic friends, however, viewed things very differently.

In that circle, it seemed to be about experiences and emotion.

It was those who were most open experientially to God who were the spiritual ones, and you could recognize them.

In a worship service, they were the ones who were the most demonstrative, hands raised, dancing around.

Later in my life, after seminary, I was exposed to another circle in a more mainline denomination setting, and there spirituality was about spiritual directors and spiritual retreats.

They read a lot of Henry Nouwin books and would go away on retreats for a few days where you don’t talk to anybody but God.

One of my friends in that world who was really into that at the time gave me these books from these Christians hundreds of years ago called the desert fathers, who went out to live by themselves in the desert as hermits.

They were so spiritual that they lived alone and didn’t talk to anyone.

She told me how wonderful they were, and I was listening and nodding on the outside but on the inside I was thinking, “Weirdos!

Why go off in the desert?

God calls us to a mission.

What are they thinking?”

While in Seminary at Dallas Seminary, I felt a little stale in my relationship with God.

I had been taught how to do a 30 to 45 minute quiet time using my Bible and then journaling my thoughts and had done that since I was 12 years old.

That’s what spiritual people did, and I fit right in what that.

I felt very spiritual, because I was pretty good at doing these journals.

I’m goal oriented, and my goal was to do it every day and fill up a whole bookshelf full of journals with inspiring, deep thoughts…deep thoughts from Jeff Jones.

But 20 years into that, it got stale, so I visited with one of my favorite DTS professors for advice.

He is very artsy (I am not).

He said, “Here’s what you do.

Use Gregorian chant, and just meditate and pray as you listen.

It is a great way to connect deeply with God.” So, I went out and got this Gregorian chant CD (play it).

I stuck it in the player, and sat down at my desk with my eyes closed to meditate…but I didn’t really know what to do.

I couldn’t understand these guys.

I sat there waiting for something miraculous to happen.

I gave it a good shot, but I guess I just wasn’t godly enough to get anything out of it.

I tried it two more days to see if I start any spiritual fires in my heart, but not even a spark.

So, here’s my question in light of my own story—who among all these people is right?

What does a growing relationship with God really look like?

Why can you seem very spiritual in one setting and not spiritual at all in another?

How do you grow spiritually?

That gets me to the mistake I was talking about earlier, that I almost made in the way I was going to teach this message.

If we don’t avoid this mistake, I really believe it will keep 80% of us from a deep connection with God and make the other 20% falsely proud.

Here is the mistake:

 

*Slide: ) ___________ /Our natural mistake: reducing spirituality to a formula/*.

We all do it.

We hear a verse like,

 

*Slide: ) ___________ *2 Peter 3:18:

 

/…but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,/ a great verse, and then we look for the formula.

What do I have to do?

 

*Slide: ) ___________ *A + B + C = SSX (super-sized Christian).

All you have to do is to a, b, and c in that order, and you got it.

You are there.

And every circle of Christians has their own formula, which leaves some people feeling quite spiritual and others feeling left out in the cold.

In my message originally, I was pretty much going to lay out a formula.

Yet, here’s the problem with the formula thing:

 

*Slide: ) ___________ a) You can do the formula and not get the result*.

Trust me, I’ve seen it way too much.

In Bible churches for example I’ve known loads of people who do a daily quiet time, memorize whole books of the Bible, and know more theology than some theology professors—but they are not spiritually mature people.

Another problem:

 

*Slide: ) ___________ b) You can not do the formula and get the result.*

That was troubling to me earlier in my life, because I started to encounter people who were lousy at my formula who happened to be really godly, spiritual mature people…but they didn’t do the formula.

That bothered me and made me think, think enough to realize this: Do you know that according to the formula for spiritual maturity that I grew up with, nobody could be spiritual before the 1700s or 1800s, and that today most of the people in the world could never be spiritual since they are illiterate.

I’m all for daily Bible intake, but do you realize that before the printing press, hardly any Christian owned a Bible?