Mark Clark [00:00:00]:
Hey everyone, Mark Clark here. Hopefully you were doing well. Welcome to the Mark Clark podcast. Glad you are listening, watching. Today we're talking about adversity, influence and what it really means to experience God for 1 Corinthians, chapter 1, verse 6 to 7. Hopefully you enjoy this one. We're talking about everything from Jordan Peterson's cultural impact to Paul's words in First Corinthians. We'll explore why the small choices you make in life every single day matter eternally, infinitely, and how suffering can actually shape your calling and how your life can become a testimony that impacts the world around you.
Mark Clark [00:00:31]:
So stick around. This one is gonna encourage and challenge you. At the same time. We're doing the masterclass on life experiencing God. Let's go. Okay. So few days ago, my buddies and I were walking, walking down the street and we passed this guy and he's probably 22, 23 years old, middle Eastern guy and kinda walk, he's walking with his dog and he's got his phone out. He's.
Mark Clark [00:01:00]:
And I can hear a voice coming from the phone and I recognize the voice. The voice is Jordan Peterson, very famous psychologist and does a lot of public speaking. And his book's, you know, best selling book right now in the world. Very controversial. Some of his things he talks about conservative thinker, really comes out and kind of speaks into the postmodern milieu and talks about the fact that, you know, we're kind of lost a little bit in the gray. We're not really sure what to do anymore about truth and all of these things. And he kind of comes forward with an ideology and a philosophy that tries to bring order into the chaos of what our world is kind of going through. And I hear this voice coming from this guy's phone.
Mark Clark [00:01:46]:
As I walked by him, I looked at him and I said, jordan Peterson. And he kind of looked up at me like, how would you know that? Randomly you can just tell by this guy's voice, you know, who it is. And I said, yeah, yeah. I said, you like Jordan Peterson? He's like, yeah. He's like, I've just discovered him. And he said, I'm beginning to understand why people like him. I feel lost. And he roots me.
Mark Clark [00:02:11]:
He helps me figure life out. His ideas, his rules for life, ground me because I feel a little kind of thrown. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, you should listen to his lectures on the Bible. He has these Bible lectures that he comes, he's not a Christian, but he comes at it from this psychological perspective and he unpacks a bunch of Old Testament things. It's very interesting. University of Toronto professor. And he's like, really? And so we kept walking and we looked behind us and he was following us. And he kept kind of walking after me and continuing the conversation.
Mark Clark [00:02:46]:
Yeah, but what about. And then what about and what about. And so we kind of talked through this stuff and I, and I told him what I did for a living and da da, da, da. And he just kept following us. And then we were like, hey dude, knock it off, all right? Just get away. And then we ran into the bushes. But the point is, the point is it's fascinating because he's the exact demographic of what a guy like Jordan Peterson does is. He, he connects to these.
Mark Clark [00:03:12]:
The majority of people connected to his stuff are 20 something, 30 something year old men who feel a little lost and confused about their direction in life. And he roots them in something solid, at least a worldview that is tangible, that they can kind of grab ahold of to figure life out. And masterclass is all about figuring life out. It's all about us kind of going along in life as mothers or students or grandparents or business owners or just whatever you do for a living. And we have these massive questions about life about or where did we come from and where are we going? Origins and meaning and morality. Where did you get your moral codes and destiny? Where are we going? Where is this whole story going? What is life about? Is there such thing as salvation? Where do we come from? What's the problem? Why do we feel there's a problem? What's the solution to that problem? Environmental questions, Questions about where we are in the context of our lives and community and what shaped us. Are we a product of our environment? Are we the product of how we were born or. All of these things are massive questions in life.
Mark Clark [00:04:18]:
And Paul unpacks all of them in first Corinthians. And that's why we've used as our text First Corinthians, chapter one is where I am. I'm trying to hit three or four verses today. We're on week four and we're already three or four verses in, so we are just motoring through first Corinthians, but we will get through it quicker. But he hits all these things and today he's got a few things to kind of address the first one. If you read verse four, we'll just kind of come at this running. I give thanks to my God. The question, I mean stop at the word I.
Mark Clark [00:04:47]:
I mean the apostle Paul, that's who is our masterclass instructor for this series. He is Paul. For those of you who weren't here week one, he was a murderer. He was a guy who really God shouldn't have used. Very religious zealot. And God has used him to do amazing things. People say he would have been famous even if he didn't write 13 books of the New Testament. His philosophy, his ideas.
Mark Clark [00:05:05]:
He planted churches in the major cities of the ancient world. We're still talking about him 2,000 years later, even though he's not Jesus. This is the massive impact that he's had around philosophy, around the way people think around Western civilization is the these 13 letters he wrote and the missionary trips he had. He actually changed the world forever by these churches that he's planted, these outposts of being able. Jesus didn't really give us a lot of church structure. It was the Apostle Paul that came and brought structure to these, hey, we're gonna have outposts and colonies of groups of people that follow Jesus. What should that be called? How does it structure itself? The Apostle Paul did these amazing things. But here's the fascinating thing.
Mark Clark [00:05:45]:
We all want to kind of be like him in the sense of influence. Leadership is influence. And what you gotta understand is every moment you wanna influence people, whether it's your spouse or your kids or your community or your co workers or whatever it is, we all want influence to some degree. And so what is kind of the secret to that? I picked up a book this week called Leadership by Doris Kearns Goodwin. She's a Pulitzer Prize winning author who's written about a ton of different leaders throughout history. And this book compares Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. Takes all those four leaders and tries to compare them and say, how have they made impact in the world? And what she tries to find is, well, what's common between them and what she realizes. There's not a lot of things common between those four presidents.
Mark Clark [00:06:32]:
But one thing she talked about was the one thing that is common is, and this is very important, is that they face adversity. Now, here's what's fascinating. You look at the Apostle Paul and the influence that he's had. He had the kind of life where he faced adversity over and over and over again. He was beaten, he was put in prison, he was on trial. So one of the things that you gotta understand about your life, I remember I was out with some guys recently. We were talking, they were business owners and we were talking about different things and they said, you know, one of the things that you have in front of you, Mark, is you have this thing where you have these staff under you and these young leaders who want to be developed by you and so on. And I said, yeah, it's really, you know, it's tough to do that.
Mark Clark [00:07:09]:
And how do you do it with staff under you? And I'm trying to learn from these guys. And they said, well, one of the things, though, as you try to build the systems and build the structures to do that, is one of the things that you have in your life. And one of the reasons that you are where you are in life is because of adversity. It's because your father left you when you were a kid, and out of that you got Tourette syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder. You had to deal with the social realities of that. You had to deal with the divorce that you faced. You had to deal with losing him when you were 15 years old. All these things.
Mark Clark [00:07:42]:
And the problem you have, the advantage of, what Gladwell calls the advantage of disadvantage, that the disadvantages you have in life actually form the way. And I said, yeah, but how do you manufacture that in a staff member? How do you manufacture that in a leader? How do you manufacture that in a church where literally, and here's what the Bible constantly says, even the Apostle Paul's life, you want to make sure you have an impact. You want to make sure you're a leader that actually has. Has something about them that can influence the world around them. The problem is the New age movement will tell you, lean away from pain, lean away from diversity, lean away from tragedy and Christianity, One of the first, less of the masterclasses. You actually have to lean into those things because it's those things that are gonna make you who you are. And it's very hard to man. So my question is, how do you even manufacture that? And I'm like, how do I manufacture? And they're like, unfortunately, you can't.
Mark Clark [00:08:36]:
And one guy told a story about when he started working at Samsung years ago. He said, you can't do this anymore because of all the rules around actually hiring people. But he said when he started to work at Samsung, they took him out to New York City. They said, give me your wallet. And so all these 30 people who were gonna get hired at Samsung, they had to give their wallets to them. And they said, okay, in two weeks, meet us back in the Samsung company offices. But for two weeks, you have no money, and you gotta survive on the street for two weeks in Manhattan. All right? You Couldn't do that today.
Mark Clark [00:09:08]:
Cause people would be like, ah, I need my latte. All right. But. And so for two weeks, these guys had to figure out, they made friends with homeless guys, they figured out where to get food, they figured out where to sleep, they figured out the streets. And he said five people out of 30 survived that exercise. And all five of them became the highest level leaders in Samsung. You know, Samsung has the most amount of Fortune 500 CEOs in the world that they spun out of their culture. Why? Because right at the beginning they said, I want you to suffer, I want you to have adversity.
Mark Clark [00:09:42]:
Because adversity is gonna create something in your life where you become the kind of person who's actually gonna have influence. And so Christianity says, look at Jesus, he went through pain. You don't get resurrection. Life without the cross first. And so we all need to have a perspective where we say, as I try to figure this thing called life out, I've gotta understand I can sometimes lean into adversity and find what God wants me to do. And so he says, I give thanks to my God always for you, verse 4. Because of the grace of God that was given you in Christ Jesus. And then he says this, that in every way, you were enriched in him, in all speech.
Mark Clark [00:10:20]:
And then he says this in all knowledge. Which means Christianity isn't just about ideas or philosophies or principles like religion is. Oftentimes people look at Christianity and they say, well, I'm not gonna really believe in it because it's for dumb people, right? You have Christians over here who are silly and dumb and they believe in weird things. And then you have real people who are smart, you have scientists, you have people who are philosophers. But the reality is that whole dichotomy was blown up years ago. And we've started realizing that Christianity, or at least theism, is actually the best idea in the marketplace of ideas. Even regarding knowledge. He says, gnosis, the idea that it's rational, it's logical, that if you go down the scientific route and you begin to ask the question of where the universe even came from, you need somebody outside of the system to create the laws of physics and mathematics that set up the realities, to create the Big Bang, which actually allows the universe and all matter, time, energy to come into existence.
Mark Clark [00:11:21]:
All you need something before that. As people have looked at design, as people have looked at DNA, as people have looked at history and archeology and philosophy. Most philosophy departments today and the universities across North America are actually run by theists Or Christians. A lot of that, driven by a guy named Alvin Plantigo, is recognized as the greatest living God philosopher in the world. And he's an evangelical Christian. The reality is Christianity actually makes sense. It's not for dumb people. It's not for backwater people, you know, living down wherever, going, hey, if you don't love Jesus, I'll stab you.
Mark Clark [00:11:57]:
All right? That's how we tend to think about Christianity. Like it's just really. And Paul goes, no, no, no, listen. You need to run the ramp of gnosis, knowledge before you take the leap of faith that there are reasons to actually believe. These aren't just people being hopeful that actually they're good. And oftentimes people look and they say so. One of the big things that people push back against Christianity and they say, it's not real, it's not something I believe in, is because there's so much suffering in the world, right? When I talk to people, they say there's too much pain and suffering in the world. God cannot exist.
Mark Clark [00:12:32]:
But what we have to understand in that moment, Charles Taylor, who's a philosophy, points out the fact that we are the only and first people in history that have actually deduced this. And the reason we've. If you look back at the ancient writers, Book of Job, Habakkuk, even philosophers, pagan philosophers in ancient times, they experienced way more suffering than we ever experienced. But rarely do they in their writings ever say suffering equals no God, or the gods don't exist because they're suffering in the world. Why is that? Charles Taylor says it's because it's a post enlightenment philosophy that you and I have begun to trust our own rational ideas. So much so that we idolize the mind so much that we think, and here's the fundamental problem and assumption that has not been proven at all and is a flawed assumption, which is this. We think that if we can't understand the purpose and the meaning for something, that there must not be one. And if we can't understand why a moment of suffering would happen in life, that God must not exist.
Mark Clark [00:13:33]:
But no ancient philosopher ever thought that way. Most ancient philosophers would say what? That we're not smart enough to figure out how the universe works, but we've come along in the last two or three hundred years and say, no, no, no, that's exactly the thing we are. We are smart. And we're smart enough to figure out how everything works. And the reality is that has got us into trouble because we think if we can't figure it out, God must Not exist. He must not be above our intellect. And Charles Chandler says that's a fundamental problem, is if God exists, he is definitely way smarter than you and definitely transcends your intellect at every level. And so no one throughout history said, well, there's too much, you know, problem.
Mark Clark [00:14:11]:
Or if you look at the problem of hell, people look at me all the time across the table from coffee, go, well, hell exists, Ergo, I can't believe in Christianity. But think about that for a second. Don't be such a product of your white, democratic, Western civilized. Well, I don't believe in. How? Why? Well, because I was educated at SFU and I think that God would do this and not this. Really talk to your Indian friends, talk to your Chinese friends, talk to your people all around the world who recognize that God isn't necessarily a democratic, white, suburban thinker. All right? You're a product of your own reality. You think that you get a vote, man, you don't get a vote when it comes to God.
Mark Clark [00:14:55]:
This isn't by consensus. He's not asking your opinion. And so make sure that you're not a product of your own culture. So much so that you go, well, God's gotta function like me because he doesn't have to function like you and he doesn't function like you in any way. And so here's the reality. Paul says not only is Christianity legit in regard to speech, but it's also legit in regard to knowledge. And then he says this, verse 6, even as the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you. So that's fascinating.
Mark Clark [00:15:26]:
He uses the word testimony. It's a metaphor that comes from the law court, which is someone is testifying to something, sitting on a stand, and they're testifying, right? This is like Jack Nicholson, all right, and A Few Good Men, all right? When Tom Cruise is like, I want the truth, right? And then he's like, you can't handle the truth. Do not sleep under the blanket of freedom in which I provide and then question the means in which I provide it. Yeah, I ordered the code Red. You know, some of you are like, woo, what's going on right now? All right, so that's a testimony. That's a guy on a stand, all right? And he's testifying about something. You can't handle the truth. This is what happened.
Mark Clark [00:16:04]:
This is where it is. And so he says, okay, there's this testimony going out from the stand. And what is the testimony? He says, this, the testimony about Christ was confirmed among you, verse 7, so that you are not lacking in any gift. And so literally what he's saying is this. He's saying, you wanna know? So Paul went out and he testified among a people that the gospel was real. He said, here I'm on the stand and Jesus was born. He lived a perfect life. He died on a cross.
Mark Clark [00:16:37]:
Here's what it meant. He rose from the dead. Here's what it meant. That's the testimony sitting in a law court scene. And then he says, okay, now what's the proof that my testimony is actually true? How was it confirmed among you? This is very fascinating. He says, here's the confirmation that what I said was true. It's that there's no gift, spiritual gift. The word is charismata.
Mark Clark [00:16:59]:
It's like this experiential reality. There's nothing lacking experientially among you as a people, you as an individual, you as a church. And that's the confirmation and the proof that the gospel is real and religion is not. Now think about that for yourself. He's saying, that's the testimony from the seat saying, you wanna know if Christianity's true? You wanna know if you're. Here's a controlling question, whether you actually know Jesus. All right, here's where it starts to get real. Here's where it starts to get difficult for you and me.
Mark Clark [00:17:30]:
Here's where it starts to hit a nerve. He says, you wanna know if you're saved? Ask the question, have you experienced him? Charismata, the gift of grace. So much so that you have things in your life. Listen. That happen, that are so above you and beyond you, you could not explain them. Without God existing and without the spirit moving in your life, there's things and moments that if you're paying attention, you're gonna recognize. You wanna know the confirmation? It's the experiences take place in your life this week. I know I gave a golf analogy last week, but this week I actually was in a golf tournament.
Mark Clark [00:18:18]:
All right, so take it back. A few weeks ago, 100 Huntley street, which is a Christian television network, got in touch with me and they asked me if I could shoot some. Some videos and teachings on Matthew. And I'm like, matthew? I'm not aware of any teachings I have on Matthew, but okay, so anyway, so I'm like, okay, so myself, I got in front of the camera in the little studio we had and I kind of just off the top of my head riffed for 45 minutes and by the end of it had created 16 of these three minute teachings or whatever. And so Our production guy Greg, sent them off, said, here you go, you know, take them. Great. Never heard from it again. And so then I started to get texts and I started to, hey, you're on 100 Huntley Street.
Mark Clark [00:19:01]:
I'm like, you watch that? Like, from random people, right? Like, just random, dude. Like the most pagan guys I know, they're like, dude, you're on 100 hudley street, bro. I'm like, what are you watching that? Well, I don't even know that was a thing. All right, so me and my buddy, we have this golf tournament on Tuesday. And we show up early because we're gonna play at 12, but we want to kind of play first for a bit and get warmed up. So we're like, okay, let's get there. Let's figure it out. And they're like, well, we're not letting anybody out on the course till 9 o'.
Mark Clark [00:19:32]:
Clock. But, you know, I know you, the other guy I'm with, and I know you, and so I'll let you on. So it was like 7, 7:30 in the morning, and it's foggy and you can't really see anything. But that wouldn't stop us, so we just played. Anyway, so we go out and we get onto the third or fourth hole. We're just kind of messing around, hitting shots, and this girl drives up and she's got a helmet on, and she's, you know, been raking the bunkers and kind of messing around with the, you know, getting the greens already or whatever. And she. She drives up to us, and me and my buddy are there, and she looks at me and she goes, you.
Mark Clark [00:20:06]:
You were on 100 Huntley street yesterday? And I'm like, what the. What talking about? Okay. So my buddy goes, danny. And she's like, yeah. And he goes, she played golf with us, like, months ago. I'm like, what? And she's like, yeah, don't you remember? She's like, we got teamed up and we all went off and you. And so now I was like, oh, yeah, yeah. So I started telling her about.
Mark Clark [00:20:29]:
Jesus. I started telling her what I did for a living. Da, da, da. We're talking about all these things. And then she was gone. Never really thought of her again. She pulls up and she's like, yesterday, I saw you on 100th Street. I took a photo of it and I posted it all over social media.
Mark Clark [00:20:44]:
And I said, I played golf with this guy. You should watch this. All right, now, in that, I just looked at her and she goes. And now I pull up at 7:30 in the morning. No one's allowed on the golf course. There's fog all over the place. I'm working and you walk right into my sight. The day after I see you on television and Snapchat about you.
Mark Clark [00:21:04]:
And I said, Danny, God is hunting you down. You can't escape it. He's coming for you girl. All right? Now you can't like when you experience moments like this in your life. All right? Even if you're not a Christian, even if you're exploring Christianity, what Paul is saying is let me tell you something. If you don't believe or you're not experiencing him in the goodness of what it's not because he hasn't given you what you need. He has given you everything. Verse 7 so that you are not lacking in any gift.
Mark Clark [00:21:47]:
He says he's given you everything you need. The problem is, are you going to actually understand it? Seek it out, Say this is God hunting me down, this is God speaking to me. And here's the problem is that when I look at your lives, here's what I want you to know. I want you to actually experience Jesus in the everyday of your life. Because that's how you know. When Paul wants to explain to them in Galatians 3, how do they know they actually know the God of the universe. He says, look at among you, you publicly crucified. What about the miracles that happen among you? Were you justified by works or by faith? And then he says, and then the Spirit came on you and you experienced things among you that confirmed the gospel was true.
Mark Clark [00:22:32]:
Here's my fear. Some of you only know God cognitively and not experientially yet even though you've known him your whole life, some of you know doctrine and you're afraid of experiences because you see people who are out there doing over charismatic over experiential things. And you rightly are nervous about it because sometimes the church does do that. It's over sentimentalized, it's anti intellectual, it's all about your emotions and coming to four church services a week and getting all hopped up on the drug of the experience. And it's all like, he's your moorings on Monday, all right? He's your testimony on Tuesday, he's your, your winner on Wednesday, all right? And you're like, and there's preachers up there stomping around and getting you all excited. And the problem is is your whole faith becomes vicariously just, just meshed with a leader and you don't know what to do. When you're by yourself. And so you need another church experience and another charismatic sermon and another this and another that.
Mark Clark [00:23:34]:
And it begins to be all experiential. And so there's Christians that have reacted to that and gone, okay, let's not trust experiences because they're classically not actually very trustworthy. Because we don't know if God's telling you to move to Pittsburgh or whether you just had too much pizza. You don't know that it's hard, right? And so if you over experiential, then you start to get into trouble. If you have no doctrine. But we understand, okay, that's over there. But the reality over here is my fear for most of you is that you're not experiencing him at all. You only know him theoretically, theologically, cognitively.
Mark Clark [00:24:09]:
And here's what I mean. You wanna know why a lot of your kids think about your kids. All right, we have a lot of young families. You don't want your kids to walk away from Jesus when they grow up and become teenagers, right? What's gonna cause that One of the things is going to be this, that. Here's what they saw mom and dad experience. They did not experience God in their home like as you walked in the day to day. They didn't have that. There was no experiential reality in their life.
Mark Clark [00:24:39]:
As it came to God, it was a quick prayer before a meal and a quick prayer before bed. But you didn't know him. You didn't, you didn't. It wasn't infused as part of the daily rhythm and pattern of what you held above everything else. What they saw was mom and dad constructed a little compartment, put God in it, and it wasn't really anything above that. So let's put God on trial. Let's go. Wait a minute.
Mark Clark [00:25:08]:
Okay, so what you're saying is I could have experiences, but all I have is I said a prayer when I was 12. I go to summer camp. I went to summer camp, I go to church every week. But I actually don't even like I don't experience you. I don't hear you talk, I don't feel your direction. I don't feel you welling up in me in a kind of passion and a kind of. What is that? Imagine. And let's be honest, God do that among us.
Mark Clark [00:25:34]:
Because here's the thing. Imagine you said, imagine. I looked and Aaron said, mark, I love you and I think you're attractive. All right, imagine she said that just hypothetically. Now, Mark, I find you attractive. Okay, great. But Words are cheap. So here's the thing.
Mark Clark [00:25:51]:
What if my wife told me she finds me attractive, but then every time I moved on her. All right, Every time. Okay, maybe that's not a good way to say that. Every time I, like, kissed her or tried to snuggle her on the couch, all right, or whatever, she kind of. She kind of ew. Like, ew, like, get away from. Like, I need a space. Like, all right, now imagine that happen every time I tried to kiss her or hold her hand.
Mark Clark [00:26:17]:
All right? Or, like, be with her. Like, imagine that. So you can tell me you're attracted to me. You can tell me you love me, but then in experience, you actually are acting like you don't. So the reality is this. When God tells you I want you to experience me, and you're not presently experiencing him, what's the problem? Because some of you, to be honest with you, you get more joy out of money than you do Jesus. You get more joy out of eating weed gummies with your buddies and getting hammered and ordering stuff on Amazon and gossiping around than you do actually connecting with the God of the universe. You spend far more time doing the other, and you're far more fascinated and have far more joy and fun with the things of the world than you do with Jesus, which is a problem.
Mark Clark [00:27:02]:
So where is the problem? Lying. If you're gonna put God on trial, there's one of two things. It's either his fault or yours. And the text is leaning toward whose fault do you think it might be? Yours. You've been here long enough, even if you're new, to know I'm gonna blame you before I blame God. That in every way, you were enriched in him, even as the testimony of Christ was confirmed among you so that you are not lacking. He's not holding anything back from you. So what do we gotta do? You gotta unlock it, man.
Mark Clark [00:27:43]:
Unlock what he has poured out. And some of you aren't. By your life, by your practices. This means all the things about. You need to lean into him. The everyday things. It's. Do you.
Mark Clark [00:27:59]:
What is your money? Do what the Apostle Paul did. Some of you are like, hey, how do I unlock it? How do I unlock it? What did Paul do? He sacrificed his body to the fire. He gave everything for this because he went, what is 76 years? When I got eternity in front of me, what am I gonna honor? And so what does your prayer life look like? Does it flow from you naturally? I was reading Spurgeon this week, and he was talking about the idea of the vine and the fruit and how fruit just naturally grow off a vine. It's not forced. It's not begrudging. And so the question is, if you're tapped in, man, prayer should come out of you like natural fruit coming out of a healthy branch and a vine. What is your prayer life like? Is it forced or is it naturally forced? Like, when you're sitting around with people, when's the last time? Instead of talking about people for two hours and what's the problem with them? You stop the room with three or four friends and say, you know what? Let's pray for these people. Does that flow? Where's your money life? Where's your sex life? Where's your family life? Where's your relationship life? Where's your work life? All of these things surrender to him, and you're like, yeah, yeah, but that's fine.
Mark Clark [00:29:13]:
But that feels so small. Like, what are the big stuff? Listen, it's the little things that make all the difference. You look at Malcolm Gladwell in his book, the Tipping Point, tells a story about how New York City, how Manhattan went from being a city with the highest crime in the United states in the mid-70s through the late 80s, and how it now has become one of the safest cities in the world and how that happened. And so you know what happened. There's all kinds of theories and journals written about it. In the Tipping Point, he talks about the idea that when Rudy Giuliani took leadership, he adopted something called broken windows theory, which is basically, if you see a broken window and nobody repairs it, people perceive chaos to be ruling the streets. And so Rudy Giuliani said, basically, so at that time, Manhattan, every subway car was just covered in paint, spray paint. People would just spray paint.
Mark Clark [00:30:10]:
So he just said, okay, here's the deal. There's gonna be no more spray paint in the subway of Manhattan, and there's gonna be no more beggars who sit there with their big mohawks. And they sit and they suck coins out of the subway thing just to get. And they sit and they beg, and they got knives. You've seen the movies of 70s 80s Manhattan. Like, that's in your brain. All right? That was how it was. And so he said, okay, why don't we do this? We'll just.
Mark Clark [00:30:32]:
We'll just create a little makeshift police station right down in the subway, and we'll just start arresting guys. We'll line them up like a chain gang as they get arrested to show the people that someone's in control. And every time a Subway car gets painted, someone goes down, they take it off the track, and they paint over it. And then when someone comes with the graffiti, the people are sitting there with the paint. And the minute they do it, they just paint over it. So that every subway car in New York was totally clean. And over the course of many, many, many years, what started to happen is the whole culture began to shift. Because broken windows theory was that someone's in control here.
Mark Clark [00:31:07]:
And so it started to actually produce something. Listen. And Gladwell says this. It's the little things. It's the tiny little things about your life that you can shift right here, right now, today, and go, I gotta shift this. And this is the impact it's gonna have in the long game. I'm gonna shift this. Listen, it's the things you say no to tomorrow that are gonna make this a reality in your life.
Mark Clark [00:31:33]:
I think about when I was doing drugs and I was stealing money from cars and doing all that stuff as a high school kid. I remember the day we went into a parking lot. We had no money. There was all these cars there, and we threw a big rock through a guy's window, and we went and stole all his money so we could get money for dope. And we ran off, and then we were sitting in this little apartment complex, and we were like, okay, we got this much money. We need a little bit more. Let's go hit three or four more cars. And they said, well, let's go down to the parking lot of this thing.
Mark Clark [00:32:05]:
I was probably, like, 16 or something, and me and my buddy looked at each other and said, you know what? We gotta go home. You guys go hit it. Let us know how much you get. We gotta go home. And there was a separation. One crowd went here, one crowd went there. That was the day they all got caught and arrested that day. I said no to something.
Mark Clark [00:32:25]:
Shifted the trajectory of my life. It's the things you're gonna say no to tomorrow. It's the things you're gonna say yes to tomorrow. The opportunities that you go, okay, maybe I should. Like when I did that video thing, it was like, 100 Huntley Street. They're like, hey, wanna do this thing? It's not like they gave me some contract for a bunch of money. They're like, hey, wanna do a thing where you talk about Jesus? I'm like, sure. But it's not like I said yes to an opportunity.
Mark Clark [00:32:55]:
And then what did I do? I mean, someone texted me the other day. It was actually playing at Steve Nash as they were working out, right? They're working out at Steve Nash, all these people. And I'm up on the screen going, like, you should love Jesus. You joke, right? Forget about your own body, fool. This is good stuff right here. I've never been to a Steve Nash, all right? Can't you tell? I've never been lifted a weight. And then someone said, yeah, you were on at the spa too. Like, that's what I'm talking about.
Mark Clark [00:33:27]:
That's my zone. So here's the thing. Why AM I on TVs talking about Jesus to people all over the greater Vancouver area? What's going on here? It's not like I planned it. I walked in and the camera guy said, oh, by the way, I actually was in the studio to shoot a promo for something else. And then he's like, oh, 100 hungry. So he wants the thing. I'm like, okay. And I riffed for 45 minutes off the top of my head with no planning, but it's because I said yes to an opportunity.
Mark Clark [00:33:56]:
What are the things you're gonna say no to? What are the things you're gonna say yes to that's gonna define your life in a way that you can't even imagine? And so the Apostle Paul looks at us and he says, it's not only speech, it's not only knowledge. And if you want the confirmation that you actually know Jesus, the reality is you gotta ask the question whether you actually experience him at all. And then he says this verse 7. So that you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing. Lacking in any gift. Here's what he means. He doesn't mean like that you personally. What's he talking about? He's talking about the church at large, that you as a community, actually don't lack any gift among you.
Mark Clark [00:34:41]:
Because every person who becomes a believer actually given a gift of the Spirit where they live a life far beyond their own power in reality. Some of you, teaching and exhortation and encouragement and leadership, all these gifts that he's gonna talk about in chapter 12, 13, 14. The reality is he's saying, among you, you lack nothing. Meaning, the power is that you are a church, a koinonia, a fellowship. That's the word he's gonna use in a bit. Fellowship seems to me kind of like a way, kind of a weird word. Like, it's a very Christiany. Like when I was hanging out, all right, like, with my buddies before, you know, I was a Christian.
Mark Clark [00:35:16]:
It wasn't like, hey, guys, wanna get together Friday night, smoke some Weed and have some fellowship. They'd be like, what? Some what? Right? You don't use that word. That's a weird word. But the word fellowship in the Bible is actually this super subversive. It's literally like a group of people who get to be on a movement together. He's saying you don't lack anything among you because all of you have this different role to play. And together you can actually have massive impact in your cities and families and country for the sake of the kingdom. Massive.
Mark Clark [00:35:50]:
Together you can apart, you're weaker together. When he's talking about church, when he's talking about koinonia, it's not some coin. Some of you, when you're, you're just kind of exploring Christianity and you're like, I couldn't join a church because the word church to me just feels old and it feels dusty and it feels. I get that. I drove by a church the other day, kind of one of these classic churches. I was on my way to one of our sites and it was kind of, you know, steeple and I pulled in the parking lot and I watched. And 99% of the people who walked into that church were 70 plus year old women. And I realized there's nothing wrong with 70 plus year old women.
Mark Clark [00:36:30]:
They're amazing. But I realized that that's how people think of the church. They think that it's just full of that and that's what the church is. And they don't realize that the church is this subversive, you give your life movement of God in the world, that it's this counter group that goes, I'm gonna give my life, my time, my money, organize my sex. I'm gonna design everything around this and sacrifice everything for this movement. Like if you think back to like the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. Or you look back to the Protestant Reformation, right? With Martin Luther, you look back to William Wilberforce destroying slavery in the British Empire. I guarantee.
Mark Clark [00:37:14]:
Listen to me. I guarantee I sit any of you down and I say, Martin Luther King Jr. S civil rights. Are you gonna walk with him in Alabama? What are you gonna say? Yeah, yeah, one person, for Pete's sake. What are you gonna say? You wanna fight for the equality of black people in the 60s? Yes. You get that opportunity, Every one of you would go, I'm gonna walk with King in Alabama. I'm gonna be there. I'm gonna fight with Martin Luther the Protestant Reformation against the Catholic Church, even if I die for it.
Mark Clark [00:37:54]:
Yeah. And here's your opportunity right here. In 2018, to be part of a movement, be part of a church that fights for those still enslaved around the world, that fights for the people in your city who are spiritually still a disaster. This ain't cookie time. This ain't safe. This is a fellowship of people who give their life for this. And we're way better off together. Listen, the guy I was playing golf with, here's the crazy thing about that meeting with Danny.
Mark Clark [00:38:36]:
We need each other. Because I didn't even recognize Dani. I didn't even. I didn't. He knew her name. He's a pastor. I mean, he's not actually a pastor. He just works a normal job.
Mark Clark [00:38:46]:
But he's pastoral. More pastoral than me. He knew her name. He's like, danny, I remember it was June 21st. We played together. And you do this in life. I'm like, I don't even remember your name, bro. I needed him to connect with her, but she would never listen to his sermons because he's terrible at preaching.
Mark Clark [00:39:12]:
His name's Lou. Worst preacher in the greater Vancouver area. I needed Lou, man, because he knew her name. He connected with her. For her, that's like. That was the love, that was the connection, that was the relationship. For me, it was the messaging. I need Lou.
Mark Clark [00:39:32]:
Lou needs me. This is the power of each other. That's what he's saying. You don't lack any gift among you to make the impact that I want you to have, because some of you are this and some of you are that and that. Go back. Go back to verse six. Even as the testimony about Christ, you wanna know what the testimony is? You know what the testimony. Here's the testimony.
Mark Clark [00:39:53]:
Here's what the church can do. It can live in such a way that there's a testimony that hits the world, and they feel it and they go, I want it raises questions. It's like, I want to be a part of that. I felt a testimony. I felt somebody from the stand say and do something that caused a ripple effect. And I felt it. That's what we want. It's like Johnny Cochran, right? When he's fighting for O.J.
Mark Clark [00:40:16]:
in 1995, and he gets up and he puts the knit cap on his head, all right? And then OJ's tried the glove on. And then what did Johnny say? He's like, if it don't fit, you must have quit. All right, man. If it don't fit, you must acquit. And everyone still remembers that stuff. Why? Because it was the testimony that went out and the world felt it he goes, what if you lived a life that was so insanely powerful, so insanely other, that the world around you felt a testimony, felt it hit them and changed them and shocked them. Like that community, Amish community in Pennsylvania where the guy walked into an elementary school, little one room schoolhouse and shot a bunch of kids and then took his own life. And what did the family do? The family loved on, supported and provided food for his wife and their children.
Mark Clark [00:41:13]:
And the world went, what is going on here? Why? Because that Amish community take the actual teachings of Jesus serious, where you love your enemy and you pray for those who persecute you. It would have been totally. The world never would have batted an eye. Yeah, of course they took your precious kids away. You should hate that family for the rest of your life. The world would have gone, yeah, that's normal. Instead they go, let's love them. Why? Because the world's gonna feel that as a testimony that shocks them into asking a massive question.
Mark Clark [00:41:46]:
What is different about these people? Why aren't I like that? And then lastly, he says this. You're not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. Listen, there's a lot of debate among philosophies about the end of the world and we'll unpack it as we go. But the reality is this. Paul says, you wanna know where this is all going? Here's where it's going. It's not gonna dissipate into nothing like atheism and naturalism say, you're not gonna be sucked into the ocean of the all soul like New age movement says. Here's where the story is going. Jesus Christ is gonna be revealed.
Mark Clark [00:42:31]:
There's gonna be a veil that gets pulled back and what's true about him is now gonna be seen and understood around the whole world. And every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. And he says, you right now, you're waiting for what? For the revealing of what you already know to be true in your heart and mind. But then it's gonna be universally true because Jesus is gonna come back and have victory over Satan, sin and death. And there'll be no more tears and no more crying and there'll be no more pain because he's gonna bring about a new creation. That's what he's saying. That's what puts steel in your spine when disaster hits your life. That's what makes you get up in the morning when all you see is tragedy.
Mark Clark [00:43:16]:
Listen, we, when we were gathering as a Church. I'll close with this. We were gathering as a church plant, and we were just 16 of us. I told you this. Three of our parents died, and one of the girls, when her mom passed away, brain tumor. I was preaching through Revelation 5 at the time. And I remember when her mom passed away, I really had nothing to say. And so all I had was Revelation 5, which is what I was preaching through.
Mark Clark [00:43:45]:
And I want to read it to you, and then I want to say something about it as you face the difficulty and the tragedy of your life. And it will come. And what holds you together in those moments is the understanding that there will be a revealing. In Revelation 5, it says this. Then I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne, a scroll written within and on the back sealed with seven seals. So a scroll was the writing of, like, history. And what happened. Every moment that happened in Book of Revelation is written on a scroll.
Mark Clark [00:44:19]:
All right, so the plan, what's going on in the world, the tragedy, the pain, the goodness that's on the scroll. And he says this. I saw a mighty angel proclaiming with a loud voice, listen to this question. Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals? And no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it. And I began to weep loudly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it. And one of the elders said to me, weep no more. Behold the lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has conquered so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals. Here, do me a favor.
Mark Clark [00:45:05]:
Stand up at this site and all across the sites, Calgary, Langley, everyone stand up. Listen to this. This is what you hold onto when life falls apart. And between the throne and the four living creatures. And among the elders, I saw a lamb standing as though it had been slain. And he went and he took the scroll from the right hand of him who was seated on the throne. And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the 24 elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. And they sang a new song.
Mark Clark [00:45:54]:
Worthy are you to take the scroll and open its seals. For you were slain and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God. And they shall reign on the earth. Here's the reality. This is all I had for her. This is All I had for her. Listen. I shared last week about the family in our church that lost their husband, their father, father of three.
Mark Clark [00:46:25]:
This week, I realized someone sent me a picture. His name's Chase. A couple years ago, my wife and I actually baptized him. I'll show you that picture. This is us baptizing Chase, who, a week and a half ago, got in a car accident and was instantly gone. Look at him. He's got his life ahead of him. He's young.
Mark Clark [00:46:58]:
He's the last one who's going to pass away. Nobody knows when it's your time. When you face tragedy and difficulty. Know this. The Lamb was slain and he holds the scroll. He's in complete control of everything, even your last day. And you don't know when that last day is. And I don't say that to scare you.
Mark Clark [00:47:30]:
I tell you because it's reality. You don't know when you will die. And will you stand before God and give an account? And the question on the table is going to be, are you going to put your own record front of the God of the universe or the record of the Lamb who was slain? And know this. You can get up in the morning when you face the pain and the tragedy. Because the Lamb is in control and you are not. And that's a good thing, Father. You are good. You have us.
Mark Clark [00:48:05]:
You are in control. And you know, and I pray that the confrontation of our life, the fact that we might be people who think we know you, but we don't actually experience you, would change today. And it would start with the little things. And for those of us going through pain and difficulty and facing tragedy in our life, either now or the things that we will face in the coming months and years ahead, that we would know and hold on to the fact that the slain Lamb holds the plan and that that would be enough. We lack no gift here to have a life that is full in you and to share it with others. Do that work among us. Change us in Jesus, great name we pray. Amen.