Q&A Genesis 28

Hey everyone, thanks again for listening to Q&A with the Pastor. I'm sitting down with Keith where I will ask him a couple questions from this last week's sermon, which was on Genesis 28 and Jacob's Ladder. Keith, you talked a little bit at the beginning of engaging the culture. How do you engage the culture in terms of observing what's there, taking in what the culture is doing, but without allowing your heart to be tempted by it? I would assume that you can watch things and look at things and analyze things. and allow your heart to go on a path that you didn't intend to. So how do you protect your heart while engaging the culture with the gospel? Yeah, first one of my goals isn't to try to know everything about culture or be the one who's primarily my purpose is to redeem the culture, whatever that means. I live in America. I experience certain parts of the culture just by being an American. You can't avoid it. It doesn't mean I have live streaming TV all the time so that I know everything that's being said. I'm not going out and making sure I buy the top 10 music CDs. I can't actually remember the last Yeah, I don't know a lot about what's going on in the culture, to be honest. My radio's been broken in my car, so I don't have a clue what the kids are listening to these days, let's put it that way. So, yeah, first I wouldn't say we need, you know, there's not this mandate to go out and know everything, to change everything, to correct everything. The mandate is to, well, proclaim the gospel and let that change everything. So as I talk about, you know, engaging the culture, it's really more, there's two different kind of positions you can have or two different dispositions you can have towards culture. One, which is kind of the Bob Jones hideaway, burn everything that doesn't talk about God in the scriptural sense. You're burning your Beatles CDs, your Led Zeppelin, you're burning it all and you're going to hide away in the cave and not ever hear anything. You actually create your own Christian culture. Well, the other idea is that you're an evangelical and you're out in the world, but not of the world. And so, you know, I hear music when I go to stores. I hear what's being played. And sometimes, like John Mayer, I heard one of his songs in Lowe's once. And I went home and Googled it, listened to it, and kind of analyzed the lyrics and thought, okay, this guy's really, really out there. Yeah, there's kind of two warnings there. Let's not be the kind of Christians that are hiding away from everything going on in the world. Let's not be the Christians who want to be hip and do everything that's in the world. As a Christian, just be a faithful follower of Christ and just know that if you're engaging people in the way you should be, if you're not hiding away, you're going to be engaging culture. Let's not be afraid of the ideas. I think that's the big thing there. Let's not be afraid of the ideas the world has to offer. We know that Christianity is the truth. And we should have absolute confidence that the other ideas that we get, materialism, this new emphasis on sexual fantasy, and just this new sexually charged generation, these ideas, these worldviews, and these high ends, they're all lacking compared to the truth. So let's not be afraid of them. Let's engage them. I know that you talked about in the sermon how our job is not to continue the question making but at some point give an answer to the culture's questions. I know that you said that the culture is continually asking the questions and we even see in the Gospels where Christ asks people what are they longing for? What are they going after? And ultimately we have the answer in the Gospel. Not that it's from us but we have the answer there. Your generation, Asher, I mean, come on. You know, Led Zeppelin, there's at least some depth there. But Justin Timberlake, is this hard to engage that? I don't know. I don't know at all. I mean, yeah, I guess you could compare those two. I don't know. Well, your generation... I think I contrasted. Okay, well, your generation is... I have no idea, yeah. We're wrong because we were taught by your generation. So the fault is on you. I will take absolute no responsibility for Justin Timberlake. Well, all right. Anyway, another question that I have from your sermon you you seem to be talking to children a lot and specifically You would even say now children and then you would you would go off into something that you think the Bible is explicitly talking to them about What is your reasoning for this and why do you why do you do it so often? Can you address that? Yeah, we have been a church and I'm very thankful that many of the families have this conviction, because it's one that I have as well, that we should have children in the service because they should be hearing the Word of God, learning to sit under it, and it's amazing how much they soak in at an early age. So, I don't want children to think that they're not part of the audience, they're not part of the listening group, and so part of the way I'm trying to intentionally instruct children to be listeners is to speak to them directly. Another part of that is I assume of all the listeners in the congregation, they need to have it explained to them on a further, on their own particular level. So yeah, many of the things I'm saying, I'm assuming children may not, you know, younger children especially may not get I am speaking to adults primarily, but I think if anyone kind of needs the truth delivered to them in a very specific, unique way, it would be the children. It's a conviction that if they're going to be there, let's try to feed them and care for them and nurture them as best we can. Do you think that's you getting in the way of the parents, or do you think that's coming alongside the parents? Instead of the children here, well, it's not just my dad telling me this. No, parents are the primarily trainers and teachers and gospel proclaimers to their children. I hope that they hear me authenticating and helping provide testimony that what their parents are doing is right and true. And also, it's that moment where the parents can start listening and say, okay, that's what I'm going to ask my child about later. That was a good point. Your own prodding conversation that they can have later in the day. I hope. Okay. Now, let's talk about your sin, all right? Now, you're a very transparent person, and not to a fault, but how can we take how you talk about your sin, maybe in a sermon or maybe just in everyday life, and not instigate other sins within other people? So, if I look up to you and I admire you, And I hear you talking about your sinful past before you were unconverted. How can I not naturally go, well, he turned out okay, but he did all these rotten things in the past. He still talks about them now. He'll call them wrong, but he still wound up okay. So how can we promote godliness without also distracting people from moralism and also not distracting them from evilness? Yeah, that's a great question. When I was a high school teacher, I would always give a pep talk about once a month about how I had failed to study like these children were studying in high school, these students were studying in high school. And, you know, trying to give them a motivation that they have, they can have a better life than me. They can have, if they commit themselves to being pure or innocent. Well, there was always the one kid that would go back home and say, well, I don't want to study because You know, my teacher, he told me he didn't study and look how well he turned out. You didn't get the point. So it's a very good question because somehow that doesn't translate all the time. So when I talk about my sin, I try not to go into great detail because the last thing I want to do is glorify my sin. I also want to, I mean one of the main points there was I think the testimony of the child that has been pure and innocent and followed Christ from an early age, I think that life worships God more because you're giving more time to God, more devotion. I think the way to talk about it is not to talk about the sin, but to talk about how God was even keeping you from further sin. Alright, let me just tell you my backdrop for this. I'm thinking about how Augustine talked about his sin in the Confessions. So, whenever he would go through, actually in pretty good detail, about his sinful life when he was living with a concubine, or he was living with another woman, he's stealing pears. He's always talking about what God was doing. Even then, you began to draw me. And so, he would talk about his sin, mainly just to get to how God was good in keeping him from further sin. God was still good in what he was doing. And, this is getting off of Augustine a little bit, but, I think one of the most helpful things to do is to not talk about the sin, but the consequences of it. Okay, so my years of living as an absolute rebel, a reckless person, it set certain sin patterns in my mind. It set certain, it put stains on my affections. I mentioned that in the sermon, I was trying to be, maybe I was too vague, but I still have memories from my past that keep me from being a pure, innocent worshiper today. And I think that talking about the consequences and how they have long-term effects, it's not just you sin, you're forgiven, and you move on. No, there's real consequences to sin. I think that's how you address it, so that they're afraid of the consequences, not just the sin. Okay, now that we've talked a little bit about your sin, let's talk about Jesus. Take a detour there. You talked about in the sermon how Christ is our worship leader. Now, when I think of a worship leader, I think of someone flapping their arms in the front, or I think of a concert. How can Christ be our worship leader in our worship at church and also in our worship in everyday life? Yeah, when I said worship leader, I really should have defined it better because, well, the term worship leader has been so used to, you know, now it's that person who stands up front and conducts with his hand or leads by singing and so forth. I'm actually trying to redefine the term there. I needed to redefine it better. I'm borrowing from Hebrews very explicitly here because the author of Hebrews calls Jesus the Great High Priest and we are now priests. And the reason that he is the Great High Priest and we are priests is that he leads us into worship. That's his role of worship leader. His death and burial and ability to bring us now into God's presence without offense and without sin, that makes him the worship leader. He is actually the road, the path, or the ladder that allows us to have access up. And so it's almost, he's really the... the pathfinder or the path itself that leads us. And so, worship leader, yeah, the way we think of worship leader today, that really is more the Holy Spirit's role as God. He's the one who, in the words of the great hymn, he's the one that's tuning our hearts. He's the one who is teaching us the melody so that we can stay on the path of Christ and worship the Father. Now, let's go from that into a Trinitarian perspective, because you talked about how the Son leads us to worship. the Father and how the Spirit guides us in that worship, but how can we observe that without thinking that we are only then worshiping the Father and not also worshiping the Son? Yeah, that's a very good question. What we know of the Trinity is how He has revealed Himself to us, and so the Father has sent the Son, and the Father and the Son have sent the Spirit. So, there's a hierarchy of persons, not a hierarchy of being. There's one essence, and so there cannot be a hierarchy of being. They each share, they all share the one essence, not their own. They don't have their own essences. So, there's a hierarchy of person. And that hierarchy of person leads us to the Father. He is the preeminent one. He has preeminence among the persons of the Trinity. And so, the Father, we are brought to the Father by the Son. This is Jesus teaches us to pray to the Father in His name. And the Spirit points us to Jesus, the Son, who takes us to the Father. Now, we worship the Son. I mean, that's one of the main arguments for Jesus' deity is that He allows people to worship Him. He allows people to praise Him. His name receives all honor and glory and praise in Scripture. So, He's clearly divine. Now, we are worshiping the Son when we worship the Father. The issue there is there's the dissension of the triune persons, the Father sends the Son, who sends the Spirit, and that same order is what drives us back up to God. The Spirit takes us to the Son, the Son takes us to the Father. But they all have one essence. So when I'm glorifying the Father, I'm glorifying the essence of the Son, because it's the same in one essence. And the Son is glorified when the Father is glorified. How does the Holy Spirit fit into that mix? I mean, do you ever see scripturally when the Holy Spirit is worshipped? Yeah, actually, that was one of the arguments. So the first, in the early church, getting people to confess one God, two persons, that was the first battle. And that one was easier to do. Getting people to understand that there's a third, that once you open up the door for two, then there can be three, that thankfully the Son is very clearly divine. The Spirit is also very clearly divine, but you don't have the Spirit being worshipped. You don't have the same kind of declarations of the Spirit as you have the Son, because, well, the Spirit is still somewhat vague, even in terms of what He's doing, because He hasn't been sent for most of the New Testament. So, the Spirit is worshipped because He shares the same one essence as the Father, and He's worshipped the most when the Father's worshipped the same thing as the Son. All right, now I don't know how difficult for you it was when preparing this, or preaching it, how do you get at the gospel? How do you get at the gospel of Christ within the teaching of Jacob's ladder? I mean, certainly there's imagery there that is wonderful to just sit and observe, but without knowledge of the gospel, how do you connect those dots? Or is it even possible to see unless you have somewhat knowledge of the gospel itself? Yeah, the New Testament is complained in the Old, and the Old is explained in the New. That's the basic principle that I follow. We need to read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament, because there it's explained. And obviously, the latter is creating a relationship with God. God is renewing a relationship with man, and it's going to be with Jacob. The latter represents a renewed ability to meet and have friendship. Thankfully, Jesus gives such a clear declaration that he is that latter in the end of chapter 1 of the Gospel of John, that it was just an obvious That was where the Scarlet Thread clearly takes us. So, Genesis 3.15, we're waiting on the Son. All of a sudden, there's this type of Christ, the ladder, that connects us to the Father. And it just works out perfectly, and Jesus himself makes it clear. This is me. I'm the path that gets you to your destination. So, this passage, it was actually fairly easy because there's a clear type that Christ himself alludes back to and says, this is me. Now, if I'm in the Old Testament, if I'm just a Jewish man and all I have is the Old Testament, I see the ladder is a way to God, but I would only think that was only given to Jacob. It wasn't given to me. It was just a ladder that Jacob had that very small window to. See, it's the New Testament that lets us see that, no, that window is open for everyone to believe. Because Jesus has died on the cross for our sins Well great. Thank you for those. What are you preaching on this weekend? We're going to continue with Jacob. He's going to go and find him a wife and end up with two and And we're going to look at how ugly you are. That's one of the main... You mean me specifically? Well, if you want to take it that way. But no, how ugly we are and how much God loves us despite our ugliness. That's the main idea there. Is it... would you say it's going to be your best sermon yet? I pray that God will be glorified and the gospel will be clear. Okay, wow. That's all we can hope for, right? Alright, well Keith, thanks so much for your time. If you listen to this and you have questions from the sermon, be sure to email them to congregation at jpbc.org and we will be happy to ask Keith these questions and hopefully he will have answers for us. Keith, thanks so much.