Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
First Corinthians, chapter 10. We're in a really interesting text. We're probably only going to hit two or three verses, if I'm honest, because we've got a lot of work to do today over the next few minutes. So hopefully you got your Red Bull or your coffee or whatever and you're ready to dive into this. Paul hits a really interesting idea here in First Corinthians chapter 10 in our masterclass series. And of course, we've been kind of talking about a whole bunch of stuff about who God is and what relationships are about and how works in general. And if you're a spiritual seeker, I'm really glad that you're here. We're kind of coming back right now in this text to some basics, to some elementals, to some foundations, to some fundamentals around Christianity.
Mark Clark [00:00:44]:
So we really good week for you to be here. As I'm speaking to you, of course, I'm speaking to people who've maybe been believers their whole life as well. But as I've walked around and talked with people as of late, I'm meeting all kinds of different people who are in different kind of spiritual places, which is really cool. I'm meeting people, yes. That have been Christians whole life. I'm meeting people. Kind of a big chunk of you are people who maybe grew up in church and then you walked away from it. You got into your college years or whatever and you said, hey, my life's my own.
Mark Clark [00:01:14]:
I don't need to go to church anymore. I'm gonna discover myself and different philosophy. Or you discovered, you know, boys or girls or whatever, and you thought, well, this is way better than God. God hasn't really done, you know, in church life. And so you strayed, you kind of walked away. You did your own thing for a while and then you got married and. And you kind of started to get settled a little bit. And then you had a couple kids and you started to worry as those kids started to get raised.
Mark Clark [00:01:39]:
You're like, oh, my goodness, if I don't give them morals, they're gonna end up on crystal meth, kill me in my sleep or listen to Madonna. We gotta get them to church. And so you put them in the car and you drove them to church. And now they're down in village kids, and you feel settled here and you're hoping they get the moral stories that you got growing up. And there's a bunch of you in that. That's kind of a de. Churched. There's a bunch of you in that.
Mark Clark [00:02:00]:
And the gospel has started to actually drop in your life and you've started to own your own faith. That's brilliant. But then I'm meeting a lot of people who. It's like, man, this is my first time in church at all. I don't know anything about Christianity. I'm exploring. And this is a great message for you because it comes back to some of the fundamentals. So Paul says this.
Mark Clark [00:02:18]:
This is verse 14. So we did 1 to 13 last week. And then he says this verse 14 or the week before Last week. Last week was the. This is village church. We talked about that. And so he says this, therefore, my beloved, he starts with. Which kind of sounds like a cliche word, but it's beautiful because literally what it means.
Mark Clark [00:02:36]:
And I just want you to hear this because some of you need to hear this. Paul is saying, you are loved, you are beloved. It's a covenantal kind of love. It's not the fleeting kind of flighty love that's emotional. And some of you just need to know that you're loved. This is a beautiful part of being part of community, is that you're loved. There's communal reality around you. It's not just you in an isolated.
Mark Clark [00:02:57]:
And more and more, as we get isolated as a culture and we've begun to kind of separate, which is. I talked about last week. Rise of depression, rise of isolation, rise of loneliness, the rise of fomo. You know, the fear of missing out when you're scrolling your social media feeds. And why didn't I get invited to that party? And why don't I get to go to Hawaii every seven weeks? And why don't I get to go here and own a boat and own that nice shiny thing? We tend to start comparing and become isolated. We get into our own brains. And this is beautiful. Cause communals, you're loved.
Mark Clark [00:03:28]:
You are loved. I love you as your senior pastor, your lead pastors love you. The people around you at all the sites, like, there's actual love, there's community here. You're not just living life on your own. And so we need to press into that. That's what community groups are a massive part of, how that community actually happens. We, as a church, in the foyer. There's realities of communal life that can change you if you understand that you're beloved.
Mark Clark [00:03:50]:
And so we are. I mean, I moved. Been moving the last few days, this weekend. And what I saw was the power of community in my life that I didn't. We didn't have to do this. I mean, you Move a whole house. It takes a long time, but there was literally 12, 13 people. And I'm not talking about, like, youth that were guilted into it.
Mark Clark [00:04:08]:
You know, go help the pastor. All right? That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about, like, friends, like, actual people that if I had a derailment in my life, people I would go to, people that I love and people who love our family and serve our family well. Watching people just work hours and hours on my stuff for nothing. All right? The reality, that's community. And then we have these moments where there's this neighbor that I'm meeting and I'm hoping they come to Jesus. And then this person who is helping us move, and they're having a little struggle, and so we, you know, a big hug in the kitchen because they're crying. And then this person who's kind of a new Christian and helping us, all of these realities, it's communal.
Mark Clark [00:04:41]:
It's beautiful. And the reality is he says, you're beloved. And what's beautiful about that is it means it's not based on what you do for God. When God says he loves you, it's a covenantal kind of love. It's not based on what you can do for him. It's based on how good he is. And there's a difference in that. The other, as an illustration, when we were moving, and I don't know, you know, when the last time you move, it's kind of stressful, all right? And so it was in the morning, and it was just me and Aaron and our three daughters, and we're moving the house, and it's, you know, 8 o' clock in the morning.
Mark Clark [00:05:13]:
We got to a bunch of stuff, and Aaron and I, of course, are talking very beautifully to one another at this point, all right? And we're just like, hey, you, I love you. You know? And so anyway, so we're kind of doing this thing, and you moved out there, and you moved out there. I thought you said this. And I thought they were coming at this time, and I thought you were coming anyways. But then I thought she was kind of being funny and flirty with me, and she said, hey, you're working at the pace of a millennial now. At that point, it was a negative. And I love millennials, and I think you do work hard. But of course, the stereotype of millennials is they sit around and say, oh, I'm not gonna work unless it fits the.
Mark Clark [00:05:48]:
The, you know, my shape of my personality profile. And so I was like, what are you talking about? And so then I thought she was kind of being playful. And so then I thought I'd be playful back. And I said, oh, shut up. Now, I'm a good guy, all right, but don't tell your wife to shut up. Even in a playful. I thought you were about to get. And my three daughters there, I'm like, oh, shut up.
Mark Clark [00:06:16]:
And then everything all of a sudden went quiet. And I looked up at my three daughters, like. And Mom's like, you know, right? You never talk to you. I'm like, oh, my gosh. Right? That's how the day started. Then the day ended as these people are leaving our house at 1 o' clock in the morning after helping us all day. And Erin does what Erin does. She's the most beautiful soul.
Mark Clark [00:06:36]:
So she loves to tell stories, but her stories take a long time and they're detailed, all right? And so these people are kind of standing at the door and she starts the story. She's da, da, da, da. And then I'm just kind. Even though they're into the story, I'm just kind of tired. And I said the words. Does this have anything to do with them or can they go? And they're like. She's like, okay, don't worry about it. And they're like, what? And then they left.
Mark Clark [00:07:02]:
Now listen, the day began and ended so well. And yet at the end of the day, that woman snuggled into my arms, said, goodnight, baby, this is an amazing house. Like, yeah, baby, that's unconditional love. That's what this is. It doesn't matter how you perform. It's about a God. It's not based on you. Cause if it was based on you, then God wouldn't love you.
Mark Clark [00:07:26]:
And then he would love you. And then he would love you. And. Oh, you said this to me. Oh, you denied that. I can't believe you. I can't believe you told me to shut up. I can't believe you didn't show me anything.
Mark Clark [00:07:34]:
I can't believe. I can't believe it's unconditional love. Because the God we're talking about, for those of you who are new, is a God. There's a doctrine, there's a theological word called immutability. And what it means is, is that God is immutable. He's unchanging. He doesn't change. As the Bible says.
Mark Clark [00:07:48]:
He's the same yesterday, today and forever. He does not change like you and I change. I've noticed that. And you know this in the Context, even of marriage. People change. When my wife and I got married, you know the five love language thing, this is what I was reflecting on this week. The five love languages. You know, the way that you feel.
Mark Clark [00:08:05]:
Love, gifts, acts of service, quality time, words of affirmation, and physical touch. You know, these ways that we feel loved. The reality is, I was sitting around, there was three couples this week, and we were chatting about how we feel loved. And I looked to all the women, I said, what are your love languages? And this was funny. Cause every single one of them went, well, it ain't acts of service or excuse me, it's acts of service and gifts. It ain't words of affirmation. Words are empty, all right? It ain't this, it ain't this. And it's all three of them were like gifts and acts of service.
Mark Clark [00:08:42]:
Like, don't yap a big game. Oh, I love you. You look beautiful. Nya nyah nya. Listen, do something for me, all right? Words are cheap to a woman now. Listen, here's what I realized though. If you draw, you rewind the clock back to when Erin and I were dating, all right? When we were 19 and 18 and we were full of butterflies and everything I did, she was like, oh, I love you. There's no way you're sitting down with a 19 year old Aaron going, what's your love language? And she's going, acts of service and gifts.
Mark Clark [00:09:14]:
She ain't saying that. She's going, oh, his physical touch, his quality time with me, oh, that's all I want. We could live on love and air. I just want to be with him. That's 19 year old Aaron, right? 37 year old Aaron is acts of service and gifts. I think your love language has changed when you get close to your 40s, right, ladies? I think you're just changed, man. You're just like, I don't know, bring me the money and do some stuff, all right? Telling you that wasn't the case. When Aaron and I were sitting eating on our first date, all right, I had $40 cash and we went for dinner and we had to run out on the bill.
Mark Clark [00:09:59]:
Cause the bill was 48 bucks, all right? I was like, let's go, baby. Let's go, let's go. I was just setting the tone for the rest of our life right there. First date, I'm like, here's how it's gonna be, all right? So if it had been gifts back then, she never would have married me. That lady changed. That's what I'm Saying God doesn't do that. He's not a moving target. He doesn't evolve.
Mark Clark [00:10:23]:
He is immutable. He's the same yesterday, same forever. And so it's based on his goodness, his immutability, his love. That's the love that you need to feel that it's not based on what you do. Now he says, okay, so therefore, my beloved, you gotta feel beloved. You gotta understand your love. No matter what you've done this week, the disasters you've created, the mess you've made, the mistakes, the sins, you are still loved by God, by people, by community. You gotta keep going.
Mark Clark [00:10:50]:
Wake up in the morning, keep going, no matter what mistakes you made. And then he says this flee, which is gonna be key. That's kind of the. That's the verb. That's the action of what he wants you to do from this idolatry. Now we're talking about this for a little bit. We've talked about this often as a church, but we gotta come back to it. Cause he keeps coming back to it.
Mark Clark [00:11:07]:
So here's what you gotta understand about idolatry. Idolatry is anything that you take in your life and you elevate it above God. It can be a bad, terrible thing. Like, literally, like in the ancient world, they had idols, right? They would make wood, stone idols, and they would bow down to them and they would worship them. And we tend to look at that and think, well, we don't do that, so we're not idolatrous. But the reality is, the Bible says anytime you put anything above God, even good things, when a good thing becomes a God thing, when family or money or power or your spouse or your kids or a relationship, whatever takes elevation above God. When you. You are to put the Ten Commandments that you.
Mark Clark [00:11:48]:
The first commandment, you to put no other gods before me. Nothing else in your life should be above. If God calls you to do something, that you're going to go do that thing that you don't look at comfort or money or fame or whatever and hold onto it and say, this is more important than God. That's what he means by idolatry. Now, what kind of impact does idolatry have in the modern world? Because the reality is this ain't an ancient thing. Yes, we look back at them and we say, oh, they did these things. But Timothy Keller's got a great book on idols called Counterfeit Gods. If you wanna go read it, he talks about this idea.
Mark Clark [00:12:17]:
He opens his whole book by saying this. After the global economic crisis in 2008. There followed a string of suicides. Freddie Mac CFO, killed himself. CEO of a leading US real estate firm. Sat in his red Jaguar and put a gun in his mouth. French money manager who lost $1.4 billion slit his wrists. There was a series of hangings.
Mark Clark [00:12:43]:
An executive of Bear Stearns found out he wouldn't be hired by JP Morgan Chase. He jumped out of the window of his 28th floor office tower in New York. Why? When they talked to his friends, his friends said this not getting this job broke his spirit. Think about that. How did we come to the place where your job, your reputation, money or power can be spoken of in terms of breaking your spirit actually having an effect on your soul? In the 1830s, a traveler from France came to America and wrote back to his people. Keller says. And he says he wrote this. A strange melancholy haunts the inhabitants of America in the midst of abundance.
Mark Clark [00:13:29]:
Think about that. In the midst of abundance, there's a melancholy because we've trusted to these things. We're hoping prosperity will give us happiness, that they will give us joy, that they will complete, that it will fulfill our lives. And what we come to realize is they don't fulfill our lives. And what happens is we start to go downhill. Not when we lose things, but when we lose an ultimate thing, when we lose something that. So you're looking to. To give you ultimate joy, ultimate meaning, ultimate purpose in life, ultimate identity.
Mark Clark [00:13:59]:
And so the ancient world had different gods. They had Aphrodite. She was the God of beauty. They had Ares or Mars, the God of war. They had Artemis was the fertility goddess. If you wanted to make sure you had children, all of these different gods and goddesses, and what you would have to do is you would have to sacrifice yourself to them to get the response that you wanted. And so you would say, hey, I want to be beautiful, so I'm gonna sacrifice my time, my energy, my wheat, my goat, my children, whatever it was, so that Artemis would give me fertility, so that Aphrodite will give me beauty. And we tend to look at that now.
Mark Clark [00:14:36]:
There was actually a poll done recently in the States where they asked people if there was one thing that you could get more of or you could get at the top of your game, you could get just at the top of it, more of it. If there was one thing you could do, what would it be? If one thing you could get more of, the ultimate top, what would it be? Now I'm gonna just talk to our Surrey site here, the recording site, because I can't hear what you're saying at the movie theaters and in Langley. But the reality is, what do you think? Top few things that people said, if you could get more of it, I want it. What do you think were the top answers? Money. What was it? Beauty. The top two. Time. The top two were more money and a better body.
Mark Clark [00:15:26]:
Those were the top two things. People said, if I could get more of that, I'm gonna be happy. The reality is we tend to look at idolatry and think it's ancient, but we have idols. So think about the way your heart works. The reality is Ezekiel, chapter 14 says, this son of man, these men speaking of Israel, have taken their idols into their hearts. Think about that. That's what ends up destroying you. Because if your idol is.
Mark Clark [00:15:56]:
If you worship beauty, then what happens when you get a scar across your face because of a car accident? What happens when you start to gain a lot of weight that you don't want to gain? What happens when you. When you start to get older? If you worship beauty, your soul begins to shrivel and you start to clamor and do everything in your power. What are you doing? You're offering sacrifices to the God of Aphrodite. These aren't ancient gods. They are alive and well in today's world. And you sacrifice your money and your time and your energy to these gods every day. If you worship me, Mammon, the God of money, you're gonna sacrifice your time, your stress levels, your family, your health. You're going to sacrifice anything in the worship of Mammon to get more money.
Mark Clark [00:16:48]:
What if you lose all your money? If you worship money and you lose it, how are you going to feel? If you worship education and you don't get into that school, how are you going to feel? You're going to feel dumb. You're going to feel like you didn't arrive. If you worship your spouse and they die, you have no savior to save you. Because you just buried what Keller calls your functional savior, the one who gives you meaning and purpose in life. You just bury them in the ground and you have no hope because you get all of your fulfillment and all your happiness. From then, there is no savior left to save you. These are all things called idolatry. They're spiritual addictions.
Mark Clark [00:17:25]:
We love them, we trust them, and we obey them. And God calls us to flee from them, to give them up. Think about Abraham. Abraham and Isaac. Jacob, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Abraham, Isaac the Son. And God said, hey, what do I want you to do? I want you to kill Him. I want you to give them to me.
Mark Clark [00:17:45]:
What will be required of you when you start to figure out your idols is God will say, I want them. I might strip you of them. Because that's the only time you're gonna feel me. It's the only time you're gonna actually need me is when I take the thing that you idolize, the thing that you get all your joy from or the thing Keller says if you lost it, you would wanna die. What's that thing? What's the thing you can't imagine your life without, that is an idol. So let me. One writer says this. Evaluate three things in your life to find your idol.
Mark Clark [00:18:19]:
So I wanna be really practical because if we're supposed to flee from something, we gotta figure out what that thing is. So everybody in here, across the sites, I want you to figure out what your idols are. There's three things you should evaluate. The first is your. You can write these down or remember them, whatever. The first is, you need to evaluate your imagination. And what I mean by that is, what do you do with your solitude? Think about that. When you are alone, no one's looking.
Mark Clark [00:18:48]:
What do you spend your time on? What kind of websites do you scroll? Because that is gonna help define for you what your idol is. What is the thing that you get mean? What is the thing you love to do? Do you have a crazy lust problem? And sexuality is your idology? And that's what you spend your time when you're alone. That's what you spend your time immersing yourself in. Do you look for. Do you shop all the time when you're alone? Do you look for newer shiny things? Newer cars, newer this, newer that, newer that? Your Amazon account blows up every single day. There's boxes coming to your house. You might have an idolatry problem around materialism, around mammon. The reality is, what do you spend your time doing when you are alone, when no one's looking? Your money.
Mark Clark [00:19:35]:
Now, secondly, is about money. So evaluate your imagination. And then what you do with your spare time. What you do with your solitude. Because that's gonna tell you who you really are, not what you tell other people. Not this external thing, right? I'm this. I'm that. I think my idols, you know, that I do too much and you're.
Mark Clark [00:19:53]:
No, no. It's like a job interview. Like, what's your weakness? Well, I probably just, you know, I work too hard. It's like, right? That's not a thing. The reality is, what do you do with your solitude? What do you do when you're alone? That's gonna be a ma. What do you imagine? What does your brain imagine? When you think about the mythical reality of your life and what you dream about, that's going to be an indicator of an idol. The second thing is money. What do you spend your money on that is a massive indicator of your idol, the thing that you take value from.
Mark Clark [00:20:22]:
You can tell me you love Jesus, you can tell me you love mission, you can tell me you love the local church. But if your bank account doesn't say that, then you don't, don't, don't try to pull the COVID over my eyes or your friend's eyes about how much you love God and love the local church and love the mission of Jesus. When your budget shows nothing in regard to reflection of that Jesus says, where your heart is, there your treasure will be also. So follow your money. You want to know what you worship? Don't show me the worship albums and the music you listen to. And whether you raise your hands or not when we're singing a song in church ain't gonna tell me what you worship. Give me your credit card statement. That will tell me what you really worship, what you really value.
Mark Clark [00:21:06]:
And if you haven't got the pie chart out and figure out how much should be going to kingdom things, then you aren't worshiping. Your treasure isn't where you think it is. You're fooling yourself. Of course you can be deceived by others, counterfeit teachers. But of course Matthew chapter seven says you can also deceive yourself so that when you get in the end, you come to Jesus, he goes away from me. I never even knew you. You actually deceived yourself. You were counterfeit.
Mark Clark [00:21:32]:
And all the way through the church there has been counterfeit conversions. Like during the Great Awakening. Jonathan Edwards Whitfield. All of these guys were nervous because all these people are coming to Jesus. All these people are getting baptized. But they don't know if they're actually counterfeit conversions or not. And they have no way to actually do it. So they're like, what am I gonna do? Have these people actually been changed at the affections level, where their soul, their heart, the things they love have been actually changed.
Mark Clark [00:21:56]:
Talk about that in a sec. The third is your uncontrolled emotions. Your uncontrolled emotions. So imagination, what you do through solitude, money and your uncontrolled emotions when you freak out, when you get angry or depressed and sad, search out the bottom of your most powerful emotions and in there you're gonna find an idol. I had my buddy, he came to me. He's talking to me. Yesterday, he said he was parked somewhere and he was coming back to his car, and there was a bylaw officer. Okay, if you're a bylaw officer, we love you.
Mark Clark [00:22:30]:
So this guy comes back to his car, and there's a bylaw officer standing there giving him a ticket. And he just walked up to him and he just said, I started losing it. He goes, the guy had long hair and, like, a beard. He starts making fun of his hair. He's like, don't give me a ticket. What's with your hair? It looks disgusting. I can't believe you have long hair. You're gross.
Mark Clark [00:22:51]:
And he gets in his car and drives away. He comes over my house. He's like, what the heck happened to me? He's a Christian, and he's looking at this guy making fun of his hair, making fun of how he dresses, like, you're a loser. And he's like, what got into me? You know what happened? Something. Something hit a nerve of his idolatry, of his ego. He thinks he should run the town. He thinks he should be parked wherever he wants to park. Don't you know who I am? And now this bylaw, who's a bylaw officer.
Mark Clark [00:23:15]:
Get a life. Look at your clothes. Look at your hair. I mean, how low do you have to go, bro? It's an idol. You start looking at your uncontrolled emotions. When do you get angry? When do you get depressingly sad? You start looking at your money. You start looking at your imagination, what you do to your solitude. You might find an idol.
Mark Clark [00:23:33]:
And what he says is you actually flee from the idols. What Thomas Chalmers calls the extra of a new affection. The only way you're ever gonna flee from an idol. We talked about this many times, is that you have to love something more than you love that sin. That's the only way to defeat a sin. You don't just defeat a sin by saying, I hate this, I hate this. I hate this. You have to flee from it.
Mark Clark [00:23:57]:
And actually, this why it says flee from it. And you have to come to Jesus that you start to love more than you love the sin. But that's the problem. How do you start to love God? Understanding he exists and he's good, right? The psalms talk about taste and see that the Lord is. You gotta taste. You gotta see that he's good, that he's for you. That's the only way. If you just have a version of God, who's angry and mean and it's so stale being a Christian.
Mark Clark [00:24:21]:
I can't believe we're just. All this stuff we can't do. Then you're never gonna flee from this to him and actually have your heart changed. You have to know, okay? I love this more than I love the sin. Which means you gotta put time, energy, and you gotta start to understand God exists. He's for you. He's amazing. He's unreal.
Mark Clark [00:24:36]:
Listen, I was in a golf tournament this week and we won. Okay, I won a golf tournament this week, but here. Thank you. One person's excited. All right, here's what's crazy. Here's what's crazy. I never should have won this golf tournament. All right? It was four guys.
Mark Clark [00:24:51]:
One guy I knew, one guy I never met, another guy I called two days before and said you should come out. Okay? So this is the winning team. I'm gonna show you a picture of the winning team. Okay? Good looking guys. Okay? So we win this golf tournament. But here's the crazy thing about it. Two of These guys are 20 handicaps, okay? Which for those of you not in the golf world, is not good. And then me and the other guy are mediocre golfers.
Mark Clark [00:25:15]:
All right? So we show up, we meet each other. I meet this guy, we get off the first tee, and I tee off. The other guy tees off. We go in the woods. The other guy duffs 1, 30ft, and the other guy puts it, you know, out there. 240 yards, nothing crazy in the spot. And we get up to the ball, and the guy I'd never met, it was first tee, shook his hand. We teed off together.
Mark Clark [00:25:34]:
He looks and he goes, well, here's one thing I know. We ain't winning this golf tournament. Sorry, what? I'm like, dude, don't put that on me, Ricky Bobby, listen, don't get negative. Let's keep it positive, man, you need Tony Robbins in your life or something. You need to speak. Speak life. We are winning this golf tournament. We are winning.
Mark Clark [00:25:54]:
Don't put that. I don't want to listen. He's like, did you just see those shots? Swing it up. He duffs one, boom. Second shot. Next guy duffs one, boom. Second Shot. I don't boom, duff one.
Mark Clark [00:26:04]:
He's like, see? Fourth guy gets up, blast one par five onto the green, hits a 270 yards. In the air, the guy looks like, what the heck? I'm like, yeah, player, let's go. Right, so. But you gotta understand, some miracles happened no miracle. No. No miracles. There's no way we're winning this golf tournament. We're collectively hackers.
Mark Clark [00:26:31]:
Okay, we start draining putts from 50ft. We start. We drove a ball and a par 4 onto the green. And as the guys were walking off in front of us, the ball lipped the hole and stopped four feet from the hole, putted an eagle, hitting 240 yard shots, draining putts 60ft. The Lord exists in every way, right? Miracles. It was crazy. Listen, there is no possible, according to physics, way we could have won that golf tour. None.
Mark Clark [00:27:04]:
We're half asleep, we didn't know each other. There was nothing right about it at all. But the Lord, it was his divine will. It was his miracle. Still happened. Now, my point is, my gosh, he is worth fleeing to. All right? He is good. He exists.
Mark Clark [00:27:24]:
And he's so good that he makes you win golf tournaments when you don't deserve it. He's sweet, he's good. You gotta taste and see that the Lord is good. Don't just cognitively think to yourself, oh, I got some theological ideas. I'm telling you, I'm arguing with you, I'm pleading with you. This isn't just a worldview thing. This is an experiential thing. The only way you're ever gonna flee from your sin and flee from your idols and stay in the presence of Jesus is if you really believe he exists and you really know that he's so good.
Mark Clark [00:27:54]:
He's so good. He's better than all of it. And he's better than all of it, though, in a really quirky way, especially for our generation. Cause he's better than all of it. But he's better than all of it, long term. And that's the problem, is that immediacy versus long term, eternal reality is a really hard play. Cause here's what I think many of us do, and it's a really dumb thing. We trade God and goodness and eternal delight for present really temporal quick stuff.
Mark Clark [00:28:22]:
And that's the dumbest trade on the planet. That'd be like saying, okay, here's what I have. I got two options for you. I got $10,000 cash right now. I'll give it to you right now. You can take it. Or wait seven years and I'll give you a million bucks. Which one do you want? There are many who just couldn't handle it.
Mark Clark [00:28:41]:
And they'd say, Give me the 10, give me the 10. Cause it's now, it's immediate. I don't know about the future. Give it to me now. Give it to me now. And the reality of God and the gospel is that you're gonna get a kind of goodness as you progressively go, and ultimately in eternity, that is beyond anything you could ever imagine. But the problem is, in the meantime, it means self mastery. In the meantime, it means discipline.
Mark Clark [00:29:04]:
In the meantime, it means the hard work of sanctification, the growing into the image of Christ, the killing of sin. John Owen said, kill sin or it will be killing you. The reality is that's the daily work. And so some of you are like, I don't want the long term gain. Give me the ten grand now. And you, you sit around and you do your stuff. You explore all kinds of ideas. You do the immediate things.
Mark Clark [00:29:26]:
And C.S. lewis says, you're so dumb, because what you're doing is you're trading a holiday at sea for sitting around making mud pies in the dirt, thinking that sex and drink and these moments of money are actually the greatest things in the world. But the reality is, they're all pointers to a much bigger reality. But in the meantime, you gotta wait. You gotta be disciplined in order to get it. That's the cost of discipleship. That's the point. And so he's saying, you gotta flee.
Mark Clark [00:29:50]:
But the only way you're gonna flee and understand it is if you know the goodness of God. So I'm pleading with you, understand how good he is, how brilliant he is, how amazing he is. He is worth running to. He is worth running to. And some of you, all you've had is a pitch that says, run from something. Run from hell, right? That was the image that I got the first time I ever heard the gospel in summer camp, right? Run. The kids tired Monday through Friday, and then Friday night, it's Turn or Burn night. It's, hey, kids, come around the fire.
Mark Clark [00:30:20]:
Here's the thing. All right, look, listen, listen, listen, listen, look, look. Fire, big gasoline. They pour a gasoline. You want to go to hell? No. Then pray this prayer. We just all do it. All the counselors would be like, my God, Lord, please give my life to Jesus again, don't want to go to hell.
Mark Clark [00:30:38]:
That will never enslave, inspire you unto greatness, because you're running only from something. You're not running to him. You're not understanding his goodness. You're not understanding the beauty of who he is. Now, here's the reality. Here's the other beauty of that golf tournament. You know, one of the guys, he was sitting there just as we ended. First off, one of the guys kept taking P's, like, every hole.
Mark Clark [00:31:01]:
He's the. He was the guy who was at the beginning. He's like, we're never going to win this. And it was like, dude, just talk. Just don't talk to me. So that guy, every hole, he's taking a pee. We're like, what are you doing? He's like, dude, I'm so excited. I've never been in the lead before of anything.
Mark Clark [00:31:14]:
All right. Made his day. Miracle. He went home. He was the man. All right. It was miracle. The other beautiful thing was right at the end of the tournament, one of the guys looked at his phone and he realized the date.
Mark Clark [00:31:24]:
And he's like, man, this is crazy. And it was a tournament for night shift, right? So this ministry that helps the poor, people on drugs, the homeless, so on and so forth. And this guy looks at his phone, he realizes the date, and he goes, huh? He goes, Tomorrow is my 13th anniversary for sobriety. He goes, tomorrow is. I didn't even realize it. He goes, thirteen years ago today, I'm sitting in a basement smoking crack, doing everything you can imagine. And I call my mom 13 days tomorrow morning. And I say, you will end up finding me dead unless I change my life.
Mark Clark [00:31:59]:
And the next day, he's like, I'm in a rehab center. And now here he is winning golf tournaments with Pastor Mark, man. Come on, baby. He does miracles still, man. He does miracles. He can do a miracle in your life. He exists. He's good.
Mark Clark [00:32:17]:
Flee from sin, yes. Flee from idolatry, yes. But flee to him his goodness. Now, here's the reality. He then says, here's the solution to all this. I speak as sensible people. Judge for yourselves what I say. And then he says, this.
Mark Clark [00:32:32]:
Here's what you're running to, the cup of blessing. Remember, he's got. They're doing communion and they're talking about, hey, if I can. There was all these pagan. There was all these pagan ideas of communion. So he says, the cup and the bread, right? We're gonna be doing communion a little bit. The cup and the bread. They were going to these pagan meals.
Mark Clark [00:32:48]:
They're having orgies and getting drunk, and then they were trying to turn them into communion. And he's going, no Corinthians. You're so dumb. You don't understand. When you come to the table of the Lord, it's the cup that you're remembering, the blood of Jesus. It's the bread. You're remembering the body of Jesus. All of these things that this is the solution to.
Mark Clark [00:33:03]:
Your problem, the gospel, the reality of the cup of blessing that we bless, Is it not a participation in the blood of Christ, that this is the foundation to build your life on the blood of Jesus? The death of Jesus on the cross for your sin, he died instead of you. Because of you. And for you, he shed his blood. He didn't spill it by accident. It was a shedding. He participated. He knew what he was doing. He says to Pilate, you wouldn't even be able to take my life from me unless I gave you the power to do it.
Mark Clark [00:33:33]:
Nobody takes my life from me. He gave his life. The blood of Christ. That becomes the definition of your life. This is the gospel. This is another word. For the gospel is the good news, the reality that in the death of Jesus, your sin is completely, utterly, fully atoned for. Good Friday, he says from the cross, it is finished.
Mark Clark [00:33:54]:
There's nothing you can add to it with all your morality, with all of your goodness. It's the blood of Christ that actually does it. That's his point. You need to keep going to the blood of Jesus. And when we talk about good news, it means good news enters into bad spaces. That's the definition of good news. That there's terrible reality, that there's reality in itself that good news needs to come into. So your life, there's reality, there's pain.
Mark Clark [00:34:19]:
There's certain vocations in the world, like mine as a pastor, where we know daily that things are wrong with the world. It's broken. But once in a while, for the normal Joe, the cloud gets lifted. Like I see it all the time. Because we're in the world of phone calls at midnight for the car accident. We're in the world of suicides and depression. And we're in this whole world where we see it constantly in people's lives. That spouse dies, we're at funerals, we're at hospital visits.
Mark Clark [00:34:46]:
But for the regular Joe, you go through your life trying to be fulfilled through these things, and once in a while, the cloud gets lifted. Someone dies, someone gets a diagnosis, someone gets sick. There's a theater that gets shot up somewhere and you go, dang, the world's a mess. It's a disaster. Once in a while, your soul jumps into something and it bumps up against something. And the reality is that thing that bumps up against. It's a reminder of the fact that there is something transcendent. Many philosophers throughout the years have said the fact that you come to the end of yourself and you realize that you're not perfect and you come to the end of your knowledge.
Mark Clark [00:35:21]:
You come to a place of ignorance, where you go, I don't know. Everything means you're bumping up against transcendence. Transcendence is built into your soul, right? There's something about it. Like last weekend, my girls were in a play, Peter Pan. So my oldest girl was in three shows, four shows. And then my youngest daughter was. And so of course, they had all the rehearsals and everything. So we go.
Mark Clark [00:35:41]:
And my oldest daughter was Peter Pan. And so she, you know, in the play, she flies, right? She's on these ropes and guys are off stage and like, opening scenes, she flies. And every time they did it. Cause I went to watch, you know, 12 shows pretending, you know, like, okay, what's gonna happen now? Oh, I know. Okay. So she does this. And every single time, the audience would go like, wow, right? This kid flew through the air. Now, we all know it ain't actual magic, right? But every single time, all 12 shows, there was this gasp from the audience.
Mark Clark [00:36:17]:
And so she flies through the air. And my buddy's there, and he's with his son. So his son's five years old. Old, and my buddy's 50. So they're sitting there, and I lean forward when Sienna goes through the air and flies for the first time. And everyone goes, you know, and I. And I lean forward and I go, pretty cool. Hey, buddy, right? Talking to him, the five year old.
Mark Clark [00:36:37]:
And my buddy's like, yeah, that was amazing, right? I'm like, you're 50, bro. I'm not talking to you. This guy's 50. He's like, how did she do that? So. So here's what's crazy about that. Why are you 50 and you still awed by magic? Because there's something in our soul that, like, longs, right? We have this longing. CS Lewis talked about this. If you follow that longing out, you end up getting to heaven.
Mark Clark [00:37:06]:
You end up getting to the place where. Why do we love these stories? Because we want there to be a place where you never grow old. It's called heaven. Revelation 22. There'll be no more tears, no more death, no more sorrow. We want a place where you can fly. We want a place where. Where the.
Mark Clark [00:37:24]:
All the stories that we love, that we've written into culture, we want them to be true. And what the story of Jesus says is that all those stories were pointers to the reality that. Listen, one of two things had to happen. Either you had to give your blood, or the blood of your child or the blood of a goat. Or whatever, or Jesus came and he gave his blood. So you need to build your life on one of those two things. You can work for it, get on the treadmill, sweat it out, bleed yourself, or trust in the blood of Jesus. Those are your only two options.
Mark Clark [00:37:55]:
And Jesus came and did this for us to fulfill the transcendent longing to say no, there really is a place and I'm the way to actually get there. Now, if we decide not to do those things, if we decide that we're not gonna trust the blood of Christ, we're gonna trust to something else. There's one writer who pointed out there's four places that we tend to look when we don't wanna look to the blood of Jesus for our salvation. There's four places we tend to look. The first one he says is self. The default position, he says of everyone when they feel unsatisfied, is let me better myself, let me fix myself. A better version of me will be the solution to my dissatisfaction, right? That's the reality. And so we go after it.
Mark Clark [00:38:39]:
But the true reality is we know that we try to fix ourself. And I'm telling you, there's a couple weird things about trying to fix ourself or looking to ourself as salvation in our culture. That's what we do. That's the default position. It's the new age philosophy. If you go to any bookstore, what is the section that is the most best selling books? It's self help. You fix yourself, right? And so here's what's happening to a generation. Think about how messed up this is.
Mark Clark [00:39:02]:
In 100 years from now, they're gonna look back at the best selling books and it's not gonna be Chaucer, it's not gonna be Shakespeare, it's not gonna be Charles Williams, it's not gonna be Charles Dickens. It's gonna be six minute abs, right? I got my six minute abs. I don't know how to read a poem. I don't know who John Dunn is. I've never heard of Romeo and Juliet. But boy, my six minute abs are killing it. That's what we work on ourself. We look to ourself.
Mark Clark [00:39:33]:
And here's the problem with that. In 10 years, no matter how much you work on yourself, you will disappoint you still, no matter how good your abs look, no matter how toned you are and tanned you are, no matter if you're, you know this ladies you try to rescue, you try to look at your own. I like curly hair. Now I Like straight hair. I like curly hair now. I like straight hair. You change it. You change it.
Mark Clark [00:39:54]:
You change it. Why? Cause there's this constant movement of satisfaction. We gotta constantly be moving. We gotta constantly be trying to better ourself. And the writer says this. You are not the answer to the satisfaction question. You are not the answer to the satisfaction question. The second place we look, if we don't look to ourself, is we look to others.
Mark Clark [00:40:13]:
We look to other people to give us satisfaction ultimately in life. Our friends, our spouse, our children. But the reality is, that's an impossible weight to bear. Women. You look to your husband to fulfill you and give you joy and give you meaning and to rescue you, to be your salvation. That's a problem. How long did it take you to train him to put the seat down after he pees? You're looking to him to rescue you. He can't even aim.
Mark Clark [00:40:42]:
He's gonna be a really bad savior in the end. Don't look to other people. Some of you look to your kids. You're like, I want you to save me. I want you to give me meaning. So I want you to accomplish all the things I couldn't accomplish. Be very careful, because every time you look to somebody else to give you ultimate meaning, you crush them. You will crush your spouse.
Mark Clark [00:41:03]:
You will crush that little soul of your kid, by the way. So here's the reality. Here's what I know, man. My kids, all three of them, they're smarter than me. They're more talented than me. They're brilliant. And all of them could succeed in life far beyond anything I've been able to do. They're so good, every single one of them could be famous.
Mark Clark [00:41:19]:
Every single one can write, can sing, can dance. They have so much passion. They have so much artistic ability. They're brilliant kids, all three daughters. All right? The world is their oyster. Now, here's the thing, though. In the end, I'm not projecting this on you and your hopes for your kids. You can dream whatever you want for your kids.
Mark Clark [00:41:35]:
But in the end, if my kids end up marrying a good guy who loves Jesus and being a soccer mom and raising some good kids, I am not disappointed. I am not gonna project some assumption on my kids about what success looks like, as if they should live out some dream vicariously. You better have the best grades. You better be first and not second. You better do this. You project your own salvation onto your kids. You'll crush them. So some of you do that.
Mark Clark [00:42:04]:
You look to others. Friends, family, kids, whatever, okay? Third place we look, we run to the world. We run to food, we run to wine, we run to sex. We run to all of these things, hoping to get fulfillment and joy from them. But the reality is, if you just see unbelievers can do that too. People who don't know Jesus can do that and they can enjoy those things, but they'll never enjoy the thing behind the thing, which is God gave us these wonderful gifts. The problem is we take these wonderful gifts, whether it be sex or wine or food, and we. We just destroy them.
Mark Clark [00:42:35]:
When we don't realize that they're gifts from Him. We think we created it, and so we destroy it. And then it creates more longing and the cycle begins. It's like a kid on Christmas. If you came. If you came down the stairs and gave a kid a Christmas gift and he opened it up and went, oh, my goodness, this is great. Threw it on the ground and crushed it, and then looked at you and whined and cried that you gave him the gift. That is literally what it's like when God gives us something beautiful and we destroy it.
Mark Clark [00:43:00]:
We take a gift that he's given us and we abuse it. We use it outside of the wrong context and it destroys our own soul. So we look to ourselves, we look to other people, we look to the world to actually give us meaning. And then finally, we look to religion, and I'll end here and then pray for us. We look to religion, we look to, hey, I will earn favor. Instead of, I'm gonna let Jesus earn the favor for me. I will earn the favor in front of God. I will be moral.
Mark Clark [00:43:24]:
I will be a good person. And when you do that, you got to understand, you're going to crush. You're going to crush your soul, and you're not going to earn salvation. You can't accomplish it yourself. Look, if you live your life in a way that externally you have to look perfect. You have to look, it's going to be a problem because you will, in the end, be caught not being perfect because you didn't trust in the righteous of Jesus. You're trusting in the righteousness of yourself. Listen, this weekend we were having this big dinner, and my buddy had to go run home and get a bottle of wine, right? So he's running home, and I said, oh, I'll come.
Mark Clark [00:43:54]:
And he's like, okay. And then, oh, we gotta get our dogs anyway from your house. Okay, great. So both of our dogs are in his backyard. So we pull up to the house, we run in the house. We open the garage, we open the door to the back, and he had forgotten his alarm was on, okay? So we open it up to get the dogs, and the alarm goes off. He lives in this little, small neighborhood. Rain, rain, rain, rain.
Mark Clark [00:44:15]:
Rain all over the place. Horns everywhere. Rain, rain, rain. Lights every flying around. All right? Alarms going off. We grab the dogs, and I start walking down the driveway like this. And I got these two dogs, beautiful little boxers, and they're like. They're pulling me around.
Mark Clark [00:44:31]:
I'm like, you gotta get in the car. So I got this car, and I'm opening up the car, and I'm sitting there like this, and I'm throwing one dog in. I'm throwing the other dog in, and I look up, and there's this old lady standing there on the road with these sunglasses. I'm like, all right. Like five feet from me at the end. And I'm like, this alarm's going off. I have two dogs. And my buddy walks out with sunglasses on a bottle of wine.
Mark Clark [00:44:57]:
And we're, like, sitting there. She's like. And we're like. And he's like, I own the place, right? And she's like. And we just shoved the dogs in, took off, right? I'm a pastor that looks bad. And if I live my life on my own righteousness and what you think of me, that'd be a bad day. But that's how many of us live. We want the righteous.
Mark Clark [00:45:26]:
We want the righteous. We want to earn it. We want to earn it. We want to earn it. Paul just busted up an entire way of living. He says, in the end, there's only two ways to try to approach God. There's two ways, and they're both wrong. There's religion, which is you trying to earn it.
Mark Clark [00:45:43]:
Then there's e religion, which is you trusting in yourself and not believing in anything. Or there's the gospel. There's the blood of Jesus and what he did. Father, I pray for all of us, even if we're here seeking and we're wondering about the deepest question that this would center us, that the blood of Christ accomplished for us that thing we're seeking. And now, as we do communion in a bit, and we partake of the body and blood, that it'd be so meaningful. And even right now in this room and across these rooms, across these sites, if there's people here who don't know you, who've been building their life on themself, Jesus, that they right now would give their life to you, that they would repent. Of sin and invite you into their life as Lord and Savior and treasure. And then they would partake of communion, maybe for the first time.
Mark Clark [00:46:25]:
And then they'd have the courage to let us know. Go up to one of the connect desk, say, hey, I made a commitment to Jesus today. I asked Jesus into my life as Lord, Savior, treasure. I'm now going to define my life on the blood of Christ rather than my own sweat and blood and tears. That freedom and that they taste and see that you are good. And for those of us who already know you, let this just the sweetness of it, the beauty of you, the fact that you exist and you're for us. Just change us on the spot. Change what we do, change what we want to do to bring you glory.
Mark Clark [00:46:53]:
In Jesus great name we pray. Amen.