Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
Teams, if you got a Bible, we are First Corinthians, chapter three. We've made the turn away from the first two chapters into chapter three. And Paul talks about something very important. And so I just got a few thoughts to hit you with in. In this message around what he talks about in chapter three. And it has to really do with a big part of our life, especially if you're exploring Christianity and you're here, maybe you're of another religion or you're agnostic or an atheist or whatever, and you're wondering, man, what is Christianity about? Paul comes out in chapter three, and last week we ended on verse one where he looks at them and he talks about them as brothers and sisters. And he says, but I. Brothers, meaning you're Christians, you're part of the church.
Mark Clark [00:00:42]:
You're not some, you know, you're not people who haven't believed in Jesus yet. But he looks at them and he says, I'm a little discouraged. As a pastor, I can kind of connect with this at times because you look at your church or your congregation or your friends or whatever, the people you're supposed to be really walking alongside of hoping that they actually are following Jesus and going deep with him. And he says, I'm frustrated I could not address you as spiritual people. And so there's two things he's not saying in calling them spiritual people versus he says, of course, but as people of the flesh. He's not creating a dichotomy between spirit and flesh. That's the first thing he's not doing. Meaning there was kind of this old Platonic idea, this dualistic idea where the flesh was bad and the spirit.
Mark Clark [00:01:27]:
And so that kind of worked. That's Greco Roman thought. And it worked its way into the church where, hey, we're in the fleshly physical world right now, but one day we'll die and we'll go to the spirit world, and then we'll be in heaven and we'll be on clouds and everything will be spiritual, and that will be a good thing. And the reality is that worked its way into Christianity, so that some of you still think that that's what Christianity teaches and that's what you teach your kids. And that's what you think about in your mind when you think about the difference between this life and the afterlife. But that is never the way the Bible actually talks about it, all the way from Genesis all the way to Revelation. The Judeo Christian ideas that the physical world is good, God made it good, which is why he created Adam and Eve in the garden, when there was sexuality and there was nakedness and there was physicality. And then sin enters the picture.
Mark Clark [00:02:12]:
And so what God did is he created a story with the Establishing the people of Israel and the sacrificial system that climaxes the personal work of Jesus. God becoming human, becoming flesh. That's what the word incarnation means, is the Greek word carne. It means that God came into meat. All right? That's literally what incarnation means, that God became a human being again, affirming the goodness of physical creation. And then all the way to the end, where Jesus, of course, dies, then he resurrects, he becomes re embodied. And then the. The whole world is going to be resurrected in the.
Mark Clark [00:02:44]:
So there's actually going to be a resurrected earth where people who believed in Jesus will actually get re. Physical again back into a physical body and flourish in the context of physicality. That if it wasn't that way, then what would be happening is God would have changed his mind. He would have said, I created the physical world, which was great. Then sin entered the picture, and then I didn't know what to do about it. Satan won. Evil won. Sin won, People won.
Mark Clark [00:03:10]:
So now I changed the rules, and now I just want to just take you all to a spirit world. And that's not what he doesn't. It'd be like my buddy this week, we were watching this Tiger woods and Phil Mickelson match where they matched off against each other in Vegas and played against each other for $9 million. And I was sitting there, and I looked at my buddy and I said, I'll bet we're doing, like, some little side bets, you know, just between the two of us. And I said, okay, I'll bet you five bucks right now that Tiger woods wins this hole. And he's like, okay, you're on. All right. And then Tiger lost that hole.
Mark Clark [00:03:41]:
Cause he was not playing good. And he lost that hole. And I said, okay. What? He's like, oh, pay up. I'm like, oh, good thing we didn't shake on it, right? See, that's changing the rules, all right? You don't. Just don't. That's not how God functions. He doesn't just get to shift up the rules whenever he wants.
Mark Clark [00:03:57]:
All right? He made a play. Sin came in, and he didn't just say, okay, away with that plan. Now onto another plan. He actually said, I'm gonna enter into the plan and redeem the world. So he's not saying physical bad, spirit, good. First thing, he's not saying, Second thing he's not saying is he's not saying that there are some people in the world that are spiritual people just in general, and then there's people who are just naturalistic people. He's not saying that the Bible's pretty clear that all of you, all of us are spiritual. Everything is spiritual.
Mark Clark [00:04:32]:
Everyone is spiritual. Even if you don't believe in spirituality, you were made by God in the garden. He made you with these. This is why you have these desires that well up in you. This is why you think about transcendent things, why you understand things like beauty and love and you have consciousness. The why you look and say that there's such a thing as evil. That's because you're spiritual people. You're not just developed, your cognitive faculties have not just evolved over time through animalistic instinct, or you would never have a category called evil.
Mark Clark [00:05:06]:
That when someone, you know takes guns out and gets up in Mandalay Bay and shoots, you know, hundreds of people and kills over 50 people, the biggest magic that you wouldn't look at that and it wouldn't bother you from the sense of this was an evil act. The fact that you look at it like an evil act says that you are a spiritual person. That somewhere along the lines you had a moral compass that transcends your natural reality. And you should trace that down. You should actually follow that and begin to say, why do I actually. Why do these things kind of bug me? Why do I have a category? And then you have the reality of consciousness, which naturalistic scientists basically look at and say, we have no idea where our consciousness came from. We have no idea. It's one of the biggest challenges if you are a naturist.
Mark Clark [00:05:52]:
A guy named David Skeel, who's a philosopher, he says this consciousness, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as the critical awareness of one's own identity and situation, is the single most complex and mysterious feature of our existence. Meaning there is a ghost in the machine. That if you come to life with a purely evolutionistic perspective, a naturalistic perspective, then what you begin to realize is we are just a brain on a stick. Matter had to create mind. And of course, Christians would say there was mind before matter. That's why you're conscious. That's why you can self reflect. That's why we're different than animals.
Mark Clark [00:06:29]:
There's no indication that animals have self reflection, understand their place in the world, understand what they're doing at any given moment. All right, they might have kind of a soul level to them as the Bible talks about, but not to the level of humankind being able to understand their own activities and where they fit in the food chain and ask the questions of what the meaning of life is and so on. And so what we begin to realize is we have consciousness. And it's one of the big issues, because if matter was the only thing, then we would never have ever created mind. You needed mind and consciousness to actually come from somewhere. Which is why Steven Weinberg, who's a physicist and an atheist, said this science may have to bypass the problem of human consciousness altogether because it may just be too hard for us. Meaning that purely naturalistic ideas about the universe can't come up with the origin of consciousness where it ever came from. Because matter, again, cannot just create mind.
Mark Clark [00:07:25]:
You need mind actually to create matter. And so Christianity comes along and says, you really do have a spiritual life. There is a. I remember I worked at a golf course before I moved out here. I got married in 2003. My wife and I were moving out here to go to College in 2004. And so I worked for a whole summer at this golf course. And I would get up in the morning, and I was the guy who made the holes, all right? So I'd be up at 4 o' clock and get out to the green.
Mark Clark [00:07:51]:
I'd make the holes, I'd go around, hang out, and I'd cut all the tee boxes and do all the sand traps. I remember this guy I was hanging out with, we'd hang out every day, and he was kind of exploring spirituality. And I'd been a Christian for a bunch of years. And so I started telling him about Jesus. And he challenged me, and he said, listen, I love spirituality. And we would sit around. We'd just sit on a hill for like an hour in the morning and smoke a pack of cigarettes and talk about the existential realities of the universe. We would say, what do you believe? What do you believe? And so we would do that.
Mark Clark [00:08:23]:
And he said, you know, here's what I want you to do. I want you to read a book that's impacted me as a person, even though I'm an agnostic, even though I'm an atheist. I don't really know any of this. I don't believe in any of this. I don't think there's a God or whatever, but there's this book that's impacted me, and I want you to read it. And it was called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And he said, this is what I want you to do. It's about it's kind of Buddhist, New Age philosophy.
Mark Clark [00:08:43]:
Some of you might have read this book, it's a pretty famous book. And so I said, okay, I'll read that book and then we're gonna talk about the meaning of it. So I'd sit and read this book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And I'd read this book and then we'd get together and we'd sit around, oh, we'd smoke these cigarettes and we'd talk about. Oh, and the thing was, is when I read that book, we had very different views of why, of course. Cause he's saying I'm spiritual and I don't know why. And I would say, well, if we're just naturalistic realities, then you have real good reason to be spiritual. You have no good reason to have ever thought about spiritual things at all.
Mark Clark [00:09:14]:
Because we're just. I mean, computers don't have self awareness, they don't have self consciousness. And scientists have said, oh no, one day computers will have self consciousness. But the reality is, and that's what he would say to me, he would say, oh, don't you know that computers have self consciousness? And I would say, yeah, they have self consciousness. Maybe one day, because we programmed them, you needed mind to program the computer first to ever begin to even self reflect. And the other thing is his free will. Do you think you have free will? And he would say, yeah, I've got free will. And I would say, well, that from a naturalistic, purely evolutionary perspective, you don't have free will because matter just gets pushed around by the laws around them, the laws of physics, the laws that govern the universe.
Mark Clark [00:09:55]:
There's no actual free will. If a cloud is out there, it's being pushed around and defined by whatever laws of wind are happening and the motion of moisture. That really. And here's the reality. You and I begin to realize that we are more than just physical creatures. We know it. In fact, I was reading an article this week on the Vietnam War and why America lost the Vietnam War. Partly it was because they took the ideas of B.F.
Mark Clark [00:10:24]:
skinner, who was a psychologist, and applied them to the idea of what the Pentagon was trying to do in Vietnam. And what they said was, if you have mice in a lab and you can actually define the behavior of a mouse just by shocking it, and if you shock it enough, you'll start to define its behavior. And so it was called the shock doctrine. So if we can take a mouse and we go meep, meep, meep, meep, meep, we can define its Behavior. And they say, well, we can do the same thing in Vietnam. If we bomb them enough, if we drop napalm on them enough, then their actions and patterns of behavior and thought will slowly get carved out where they will give up. But the reality was, of course, after many, many years, the Vietnamese never gave up. They got tortured, they got killed.
Mark Clark [00:11:04]:
Some of them, they say, are still fighting. They're in the jungle. They still think the war is going on. They never gave up. Why? Because here's the thing. You and I were more than just physical responses to things. They actually had a transcendent narrative. They had passions and desires and meaning that went beyond a physical response that says, I will die for something.
Mark Clark [00:11:28]:
That's the reality of you and me. The Vietnamese were more than just mice in a lab where you could prod them and make them do. And so are you. Because the realities of your life might shape you, but you can transcend those. Why all? Because all of us are actually spiritual people. So he's not saying there are some people who are spiritual. Some people. Not all people are spiritual.
Mark Clark [00:11:50]:
The definitive question is, he's saying, are you defined by Christ and the big S Spirit, the spirit of God. That's what he's saying. And he's saying, hey, church. Hey, church that I planted in Corinth. Hey, I was with you for 18 months. I started this church. You came out of this disaster. It's background.
Mark Clark [00:12:08]:
You believed in Jesus. And now you're all sitting there and I'm looking at you, and you're all a bit of, yes, you're spiritual people, but you're acting like people of the flesh. And I'm your pastor and I actually care. And I wanna deal with you and say, it's not about one person spiritual and the other's not. You're all spiritual. The question is, are you actually living out the reality of Jesus and the Spirit in your life, in your behavior? I'm not asking you what you think. See, here's what you and I talk about. We think.
Mark Clark [00:12:38]:
Because here's what I'm beginning to realize. I think our assumption in modern culture is the hardest thing to change about someone is what they think. Belief, belonging, behavior. I think we think the hardest thing to change about someone is their beliefs, which is why Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, you're constantly like, I want you to believe this politically. I want you to believe this about marriage, or, I want you to believe this about politics, or I want you to believe this about economics. And we all sit around and we tag and we're constantly talking to each other, trying to change how you think, because how you think is the most important thing and how you think is the most important thing. And Paul comes out of the gate and he says, you know what frustrates me? Not how you're thinking Corinthians, because your theology's solid. It's how you're behaving.
Mark Clark [00:13:19]:
It's the fact that you can think a whole bunch of stuff that might be really true, but your life is a disaster. You're still greedy, you're still sexually immoral and doing whatever you want. There has been this massive gap between what you believe and actually what you do. And he says, when you're in that moment, here's the big why. Why do you do that? He says, it's not because you're smarter than everybody else. It's not because you're trying to live. It's not because you're more advanced or you're whatever. It's because you're infants in Christ.
Mark Clark [00:14:00]:
You are immature. That's your problem. So you wanna know when you go inside your own soul and go, I don't know why I believe this about Jesus in the Bible and about my life, but I can't translate it over to my behavior. And I'm trying to figure out why. The reason is because you're immature. You're an infant. My brother just had a. I'll show you a picture.
Mark Clark [00:14:26]:
My brother just had a baby two days ago, all right? Little Tristan. So little Tristan came out and. And just this cute little useless baby. Useless. This thing does not earn money. Little Tristan just. Just sucks resources, all right? And he just sits there and he just wants milk, and he just. He has nothing to contribute.
Mark Clark [00:14:56]:
He just sits around and is useless. My brother texted me this morning. He's like, this is war. This is first baby. He's like, this is war. He's like, I gotta take my moments to figure out when I can sleep and when I can eat. Because you never know when he's just gonna come out again. He's, ah, I need stuff, right? So my brother just loses it.
Mark Clark [00:15:14]:
He's like, how did you do this three times, bro? That's an infant, man. That's useless. I mean, all it does is suck resources. It's immature. It just sits around and wants to stuff. And Paul says, some of you, I'm not even asking the question of whether you're Christians, you're spiritual people. The problem is, is that you're infants, you're children still. There's no Maturity in your life.
Mark Clark [00:15:44]:
You've never figured out how to get in the zone, walk by yourself, actually have some self mastery in regard to your sex life or you're not serving your spouse spouse. You're not mature and generous with your money, where you're actually prioritizing your life like a mature adult and saying, I need to organize my budget around the mission of. For instance, I asked our executive pastor, I said, hey, can you give me a report of the giving for this year? We're coming in last month. We need a million dollars to raise just in December to be able to keep the mission going forward. We're gonna need money in the new year. We're upping our budget to 8.2, $8.3 million, which means a 12% increase, which means all of us need to actually give about 12% more than we did last year in order to make the mission happen. And I got a report of the giving and I looked and to be honest, guys, some of you, it's like, praise God, you're being generous. You're killing it.
Mark Clark [00:16:36]:
I love you. You're great. So many of you are giving like almost nothing or nothing, which means you're non contributing zeros. You are simply sucking resources like a baby in a towel. You're making us keep the lights on, pay people, do technology so we can reach as many people for Jesus as possible. And you sit here and consume and give nothing. Or you give pittance because I know what you make and I know what I make and what I give. And you don't want the pastor out giving you 10 times over.
Mark Clark [00:17:16]:
You're a loser. If that's your case. So you're saying, okay, so what are you gonna do? Well, you got options. Ask Jesus to grow you up so you stop being an infant who simply sucks things or go somewhere else. Let them carry the weight of your dead bones around. Let them entertain you. Let them put on a show and ride a unicycle for you. Oh, I want them to come back.
Mark Clark [00:17:51]:
I want them to come back. But you give nothing. I'm not. Listen, hold on. If you're not a Christian, I'm not even talking. You're exploring. Don't give us a. I don't.
Mark Clark [00:18:03]:
We don't want your money. We want you to meet Jesus. Then Jesus will take your money, all right? Meaning he'll actually reprioritize it around the things and the mission of the church. This is the most important work. We're gonna have to build a building in 2019 and raise money. We're gonna have to break 25 million to $30 million. Guys, listen. This is our moment.
Mark Clark [00:18:30]:
Do you understand the opportunity we have? We just baptized 30 people in a day. Guys, go. Whole lives in ministries, they don't see 30 baptisms in years. We baptized 150 people last year. 1400 people in the last nine years. This doesn't happen in places like Canada. We have one shot at this thing, and you're keeping your money for your own comfort. Don't do that.
Mark Clark [00:18:55]:
We're gonna have to raise $30 million. Guys, listen. Don't make me spend all my. You know what I wanna do? I wanna preach the Bible to you the best I can possibly preach it. You know what I don't wanna do? Spend 40 hours a week meeting with people for lunch, begging them for money for the next four years. Because if that's what I'm gonna do with my time, these sermons are gonna get lame. O. I'm not gonna have any time, all right? It's just gonna be like.
Mark Clark [00:19:22]:
Cause I'm gonna be, please get more money. We need $30 million. Please. Cause a bunch of you. Well, I'm just. You know, I get my little. I know I make this much, but I'll just do a little bit. Cause I like to see Mark work hard.
Mark Clark [00:19:34]:
Don't do that. We have so much more we can do with our time. Some of you have this opportunity to sit down and go, how can I prioritize the long game here in the next three or four years so we can do something significant in the nation of Canada? That's what I want to give our life for. I don't want to sit around and just be the church and hey, Joe and hey, Schmo. I don't know what that is. And just. That's infantile. That's his point.
Mark Clark [00:20:02]:
Grow up. Grow up. In regard to. There's many ways that you blow my mind. Village church, you encourage me. But then when I look sometimes at these reports, I'm like, there's so many of you. You're still a kid. You think you're mature because you sing the right worship songs and you might serve in ministry, thinking, well, if I serve a bunch of hours, that means I don't have to financially do anything.
Mark Clark [00:20:32]:
You're playing a game. God goes where your. What did Jesus teach? Where your treasure is, there your heart is. That's what I want to evaluate. That's how I'm gonna know what you care about. Now, that's one example of a billion. The point is, ask yourself the question is my behavior actually line up with my belief? Here's what Dallas Willard said years ago. He wrote this.
Mark Clark [00:20:56]:
A notable heresy has come into being throughout Christian circles. The widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only because we need him as Savior, and that we have the right to postpone our obedience to him as Lord as long as we want to. And he calls it vampire Christianity, where we come at Jesus and we say, give us a little bit of your blood, please. But I don't want to obey you in the hard things of life in the now. But I'll see you in heaven when I die. Just leave me alone till then. And then Willard says, who? Why do you think if you don't enjoy pushing in to the obedience of Jesus Christ in your 80 years right now, do you think you're going to love being in his presence for eternity? Where's that connection? And so Paul says, you want to know what the solution is? You got to mature. That's why he calls them infants in Christ.
Mark Clark [00:21:53]:
He's not afraid to offend them. All right? He's like, hey, guys, I wish I could ask you. I wish I could go deeper with you. I wish I could do this. But man, you're acting like infants. And then he gives these other. He says, I fed you with milk. But of course, when you grow up, you need to move, be like, Tristan's gonna move beyond milk at some point.
Mark Clark [00:22:11]:
He's gonna, you know, have a job and he's gonna be an athlete. Whatever he's gonna do, he can't do any. Who's living on a milk only diet here, right? Not gonna happen. You need energy. And Paul goes, man, once you mature, then we can move off of stuff. He says, I fed you with milk. Not solid food. For you were not ready for it, man.
Mark Clark [00:22:31]:
I was there and you were still. I'm not talking about your beliefs. I'm not talking about your belonging. Talk about your behavior was off. And your behavior told me a whole lot about those other two things. And he says, you weren't ready for it. And even now you're not ready. Oh, man, he's just like, his heart's just breaking as a pastor.
Mark Clark [00:22:49]:
He's like, how aren't you even ready now? Does it really take this long? And so he says this for you are still of the flesh. That's his concern. You haven't grown up. You're still going back to the things of the world to define your pleasure, to define your delight. And he says, and then he gives these Two examples of the kind of infantile reality. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, he says, here's a problem in the church. You're also jealous. Like, do you know these human beings, these people who are jealous all the time, and they nitpick and they gossip and they slander and they pull the.
Mark Clark [00:23:26]:
And then you're talking about, well, the church meant that and the leaders meant that. And this is what he's talking about. Even as the church, there's strife and there's jealousy among you. And he said, it's just a sign of infantile thinking. You're acting like children when you have strife and division and jealousy. How many of us have belonged? I remember the first church I ever joined. It was just defined by strife and nonsense and jealousy. The pastor got.
Mark Clark [00:23:49]:
He says, I'm gonna resign today. And he was Scottish. And so they had like this. This big meeting. And we all showed up at this member meeting, and some of the people were handing out Scottish tartans because that means you support the pastor. And other people were like, I'm here to filet him. And everyone got some of their microphone and they're, hi, Kelly. And everyone's fighting and scrapping each other.
Mark Clark [00:24:09]:
It's like village church. Let's never be that nonsense. Because it's immature. It's stupid. That's what he's saying. Strife, jealousy, being negative and tearing people down and gossiping. It's just like when people have nothing better to do with their time. If you're on mission, you don't have time for this nonsense.
Mark Clark [00:24:33]:
I was reading an article this week. A guy writes this thing in Canada about how video preaching, you know, is wrong and why you shouldn't do video preaching because of an empire building and blah, blah. All that guy's gotta be in the room for it to be godly and all stuff. I'm sitting there going, who's got the time for this? What are we talking about? This is jealousy and infighting and strife and nonsense. People are meeting Jesus, and we as leaders are sitting around talking about, well, I think this. And I think it's like the church, once it's on mission, this goes away. Because who's got the time? It's like your marriage. If you guys have too much sitting around to do.
Mark Clark [00:25:17]:
You ever wonder why? I mean, you look at. Go back, you know, two, three generations, right? When my grandfather worked the job. Not because it was like, you know, satisfied the curvature of his soul, right? Which is what our generation does, because he had to put food on the table. He worked at IBM. All right? My grandfather, he's 96 years old. He didn't go there and say, well, you know, this isn't for me. All right? Do you have any other. It's just not according to my enneagram, all right? It's not feeding me and what I'm doing, needing.
Mark Clark [00:25:54]:
All right? That's like, ridiculous. And so he would just do stuff because that's what he had to do to eat. And his marriage flourished and lasted 65 years because the guy was front facing, he was working, he was diligent, he was tired, which I think is what men were designed to do. Be tired by the end of the day, because if you're not tired because all you've been doing is sitting around, you know, thinking up stuff, then you're gonna get into a lot of trouble. It's true about our marriages. We have these jobs where we're not diligently looking forward, working hard, and we're tired by the end of the day and we need each other. So there's too much time. And when there's too much time, like it's.
Mark Clark [00:26:40]:
Guys, in war, if you haven't fought for weeks, what are you gonna do? You're gonna start shooting each other? Because there's nothing else that you're going to fight. But if you're always facing the enemy, you don't have time to fight each other. Think about your marriage, your spouse. Some of you are in really tough times. I did marriage counseling this week and I was shepherding this couple and I'm like, oh, just my heart was breaking for the difficulty they were going through. And I was like, man, some of you are fighting and you don't realize that that person is not the enemy. The enemy is Satan that's trying to destroy your marriage. The enemy's your own sin and your own narcissism and your own selfish desires.
Mark Clark [00:27:18]:
All of that is the enemy. You need to target the enemy and work on that rather than looking at the person going, I hate you because you woke up this morning twisting your mustache trying to figure out how to mess my life up. They didn't. But if you don't, you're not fighting the right things. This is what the problem with the church is, is that we sit around and we're not fighting the right wars. We're fighting each other. And he says, okay, so what is the solution to all this? His solution is he starts talking about, you know, some of you divided for when one says, I follow Paul. Another says, I follow Paulus, and you're not being mere? Are you not being merely human? Meaning we're all doing the same work, we're all going the same direction.
Mark Clark [00:27:58]:
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Apollos is a local church pastor and teacher there. Paul, of course, started the church. And they said, what is that we are. And here's the great. One of the great solutions to the problems in your life, whether you're a Christian or you're not a Christian. Here, here's one of the great solutions. This word right here. Servants.
Mark Clark [00:28:16]:
He says, one of the great solutions is to posture yourself. This is the Greek word doulos, which meant slave or busboy. Like a servant in a restaurant. He says, picture. Now, when he comes, when he brings up this word, here's where it lands for us. It brings up a problem and a point. The problem it brings up first is that you and I don't like the idea that we're servants. In fact, Socrates back in the day said, how can a man be happy if he is servant to anybody at all? This is one of the definitive questions of the master class of life.
Mark Clark [00:28:51]:
It's not a question, though, of if you're a servant of something. Sren Kierkegaard, a philosopher, years ago, said, everybody's a slave to something. Everybody's a servant boy to something. The question is what? Some of you are servants to religion. Some of you are servants to your own inclination. Some of you are servants, Kierkegaard said, to the aesthetical life. And it's those people, people who are addicted to their feelings about things. Shiny things, glimmery things, how things look, that are actually the people who are in the ultimate slavery, even though they think they're not enslaved at all.
Mark Clark [00:29:22]:
And he said, this is the ultimate irony is that you have. Like, I sit down with these 20 somethings who are single, and they look at me and they say, man, I'm playing the field. I get to sleep around. I get to do my thing. Look at you, boy, you're enslaved. You're 38 years old. You're married to one girl that you gotta be with for the rest of your life. Don't you know variety's the spice of life? I'm free, baby.
Mark Clark [00:29:44]:
That's a world that's fascinating. Cause yesterday I went to Cactus Club to pick up some. Cause my wife had done this market all day, and so I helped her with that. And then it was like, okay, we're too busy, we gotta get. So they ordered Cactus Club and I went to Cactus Club. To pick up food. My buddy and I were sitting there and we're just watching all the servers and all the people in Cactus Club. It's a petri dish of sexual tension.
Mark Clark [00:30:09]:
It's just animals just walking around, just. And they're testing each other, all right? And they're all playing and it's just half naked people throwing into an environment of dim lights. And let's see what happens. And every moment it's, can I impress her with this? And you see the guys walking. What's up, players? What's up, players? All right? And then the girl's like, hey, all right. And there's like this. It's like this big game. It's a zoo of just animals.
Mark Clark [00:30:41]:
Who's gonna demolish? Who's gonna just rah, rah. And it's all this. There's all this sexual energy in the air. Hey, what's up? Hey, what's up? You all right? Everybody's. And I'm looking, and I'm looking around at all this nonsense. And these are the people that if you went outside after, they would look at me and go, man, you're enslaved. You wanna talk about slavery? You might as well have chains around your neck in that place. You guys are enslaved to your own delight and pleasure and the hormones that are running through your minds.
Mark Clark [00:31:29]:
You are in the deepest slavery and you think you are free, which is the danger. You're enslaved to the aesthetic life. You're enslaved to the momentary pleasures that you get addicted to in your brain's like, da, da, da, da, da, da da. That is the definition of slavery. See, we're all servants of something. Some of you to your own pleasure and delight in the moment. And you have no long game and no view of what a disciplined life of self mastery will give you when you're 90 years old. Looking back at your life, David Foster Wallace, who was a atheist boy, he was an agnostic, didn't know if there was a God.
Mark Clark [00:32:14]:
2006, he gave this university speech to the graduating class. This was shortly before he took his own life. David Foster Wallace was a brilliant thinker in his 30s. Wrote some amazing postmodern novels that are still looked at as like the standard of. How did he actually write this? Shortly after 2006 in this speech, actually, he took his own life. David Foster Wallace says this. I'm gonna give you a few paragraphs. Cause I think it's really important, even from an agnostic standpoint.
Mark Clark [00:32:48]:
He says this in the day to day trenches of adult life. There is no such Thing as atheism. There's no such thing as not worshiping. This is what he's saying to a graduating class in a university. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship and an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual type thing to worship, be it Jesus Christ or Allah, Yahweh or Wiccan, Mother Goddess, the four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles. Is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap the real meaning in life, then you will never have enough.
Mark Clark [00:33:28]:
Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you on one level. We all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, cliches, epigrams, parables, the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power. You'll feel weak and afraid and you'll need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect being seen as smart and you'll end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
Mark Clark [00:34:05]:
The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful. It's that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into day after day, getting more more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on these default settings because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and extraordinary wealth and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded this wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull sized kingdoms alone at the center of all creation. This is a primer for what Jesus comes along and says, you serve something.
Mark Clark [00:35:03]:
Let me try to get you to shift kingdoms from your skull sized kingdom to an ever expanding glorious kingdom of which I'm the king and you are not, and you serve me, not yourself. How do you define your own identity as servant? Because here's what and Paul's whole point is who is what does it matter? Apollos Paul, we create these things in the church where like I serve that pastor and I'M part of this thing. And I'm. And we trade off these things. And Paul goes, do you know how nonsensical that is? Who cares about. His point? Next is he gives this analogy of what actually happened. He goes, sure, I planted. Okay? I planted the church.
Mark Clark [00:35:48]:
I started it. Apollos, he sits around and teaches you and shepherds you daily. So he's watering it, and he's like, but God is the one who gives the growth. Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything. How's that for offense? I'm garbage. I'm a two out of ten. Don't worship me. Don't you know my plead with you is love Jesus Christ, not Mark Clark.
Mark Clark [00:36:14]:
Love God, not Mark. I'm a wreck. I'm nothing. Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything but only God who gives the growth. God's the only one. He's saying, what do you. When you go to a restaurant, when you go to ak? So my buddy Sean, nine years ago, he opened a restaurant called the burgers priest. 300 square feet in Toronto.
Mark Clark [00:36:36]:
Risked all his money, and now it's become like a burger joint. 1415 locations across Canada. He selected the cut of beef, the amount of salt, the way that the fries work. He did all of these things. He constructed it. And now with all these sites, you go in, he says, this here's what matters. Do you care when you go into the Burgers Priest? Okay. When you go, do you care what the name of the kid at the till is? No.
Mark Clark [00:37:01]:
Here's what you care about. That chant's in the kitchen. That Shawn is the one who selected the cut of beef. And it's still quality product. He's got the fries, he's got the bunnies, he's got the salt content. Hello, my name is Sam. I don't care. Sam.
Mark Clark [00:37:17]:
Chris. John. Unimportant to me, child. What I care about is this burger is gonna taste like it came from the master himself. That you, Chris, are not in the kitchen. Cause that would scare me. Punch the numbers, take my money, but don't be the one setting the menu. And Paul goes.
Mark Clark [00:37:40]:
When it comes to your life and your faith, I'm Paul and I'm the kid at the till. What matters is that God's in the kitchen, not me. What matters is that God is in ultimate control to grow you, change you, save you, to set you free from your life. And ultimately, he's saying, all this is connected to the kind of life that says, I can't figure out how to move from Belief to behavior. I'm almost living, and I'll close with this. I'm almost living, as one writer has said, as a Christian atheist, meaning this. He wrote a book called Christian Atheist, and he said this, see how many of these are true about you, and then I'll pray for us. He says, you know you're a Christian atheist, meaning you believe in God, but you live like he doesn't exist.
Mark Clark [00:38:28]:
Which is what Paul's addressing here. He says, you know you're a Christian atheist. If when you believe in God but don't really know him, is that you. When you believe in God but are ashamed of your past, meaning you don't really believe that what the cross did takes away the shame and guilt of the things that you've done in your past. When you believe in God but you aren't sure he loves you, you haven't read and marinated your mind in the Scriptures to say he loves you not because of you, but in spite of you. He loves you because of what Jesus did and performed for you, not your performance for him. When you believe in God but not in prayer, you don't know what it means to communicate to him out of passion, not out of a wish list, but out of I want to connect with you, I want to love you. I actually want to know you.
Mark Clark [00:39:10]:
And this is a way you've given it to me. When you believe in God but don't think he's fair, you're acting like a Christian atheist. When you believe in God but you won't forgive another person. When you believe in God but you don't think you can change. When you believe in God but still worry all the time. When you believe in God but pursue happiness at any cost instead of holiness. When you believe in God but trust money more. When you believe in God but you don't share your faith.
Mark Clark [00:39:44]:
When you believe in God but not in his church, the local expression of what it means to be a person changed by the spirit of God in your cities and in your towns and prioritizing your life and your time and your money and your mind and your heart toward that mission. He says, you just may be a Christian atheist, someone who believes in God but lives like he doesn't exist. Father, I pray that this warning from the Apostle Paul to us in these rooms across these sites would be make sure there is not this disparity between what you believe and how you behave. And if there is, we ask Jesus that you would do a work in the hearts and minds of all of us, right now in these rooms to change that reality that you would not only change what we want to do, but what we do by changing what we want to do. That our lives would actually start to reflect you. And this wouldn't be something that is just cognitive, where we've compartmentalize our lives into belief systems. But we have no idea what it means to beat our bodies into submission, beat our behaviors and patterns that, as Paul says, into the submission that we would not be people who have created a false dichotomy that accepts you as savior, but does not obey you as Lord. Expunge that from among us.
Mark Clark [00:41:07]:
Do that work among us. We receive it, we ask for it, and let it be the heartbeat of our prayers and even our song as we sing in response. Change us. In Jesus good name we pray. Amen.