Mark Clark [00:00:03]:
First Corinthians, chapter 10. A lot of work to do because Paul hits a whole bunch of stuff. And if you're new and you're exploring Christianity, kind of good text, or even if you got raised in the church, good text because it challenges kind of both sides of those issues. So just listen to the text. I'm gonna read a bunch of verses for you, and then we'll start to unpack it. So First Corinthians, chapter 10, verse 19. And it says this. What do I imply? Then he came from what he was talking about last week.
Mark Clark [00:00:30]:
And he's kind of. He continues on this. He's talking about Israel, he's talking about getting to the promised land. He's talking about communion and taking the Lord's Supper and how they remember. The Corinthians had come out of this really messed up pagan background where they had this kind of party spirit about them. And like many of you, like modern day reality, there was this sense of the drunkenness. They would party at these things. There was orgies at these things.
Mark Clark [00:00:53]:
They had no. They had this crazy life, right? It was very much like greater Vancouver area, the greater Calgary area, Canada as a whole. Just people, not caring people doing whatever they wanted with their bodies, saying, hey, look, what I do with my body doesn't matter. I can give my body to anybody because it's not my soul, it's not my spirit. And Paul's been arguing, no, no, no. Your soul and your body are intimately integrated. And so you can't create dichotomies in your life where you can do whatever you want. I was watching on TV the other day, there was actually a.
Mark Clark [00:01:21]:
There was a newscast and all the news cameras came because there was a party. It was local, but about an hour from here. And the party was so huge. They had like two, 200 women, 100 guys. Most of the women were just in, like, their underwear. They had so much alcohol, so many drugs. People were throwing up all over the place. Multiple helicopters landed at one point in the backyard.
Mark Clark [00:01:46]:
And it was such a crazy party that the news actually showed up. And the neighbors are like, what's going on? And they interviewed the guy rolling the party. He's like, dude, this is the greatest party ever. We're just gonna keep doing this. And the neighbors are like, sorry, what? And there's literally helicopters and naked people running around hammered, puking all the way. Okay? That's the kind of life that the Corinthians led. And here was the problem. And many of us can kind of try to connect with it is that they had that kind of life.
Mark Clark [00:02:11]:
Then they met Jesus, and they wanted to then continue doing exactly what they were doing, but just add Jesus to it. Add a badge called Jesus. Maybe I go to church, maybe I read the Bible once in a while. Maybe I pray once in a while when I'm in trouble. And so I'm a Christian. And then I just continue on my life, living it as I wanna live it, with no desire inside of me to change. And so what they were doing is they were going to these meals, they were getting hammered, they were still having sex, they were doing all these crazy things, and yet they were calling themselves Christian. Actually, they were turning communion into that.
Mark Clark [00:02:44]:
And so Paul's writing to them and saying, hold on, you can't create dichotomies like this in your life. And so he's challenging them as he's challenging us. And he says, what do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? Cause he's told them, just be very careful eating food sacrificed to idols because it could make people stumble. And his issue was not that there was anything actually wrong with the food, that there was freedom in Christ. They could eat the food. But if there was people who had kind of ties to that old lifestyle where they eat the food that was sacrificed to idols because it was part of a large religious experience, then you gotta be careful. So now he's coming to this conclusion, and the Christians are saying, so what are you saying? Is there magical something in the food that I'm not allowed to eat it? And so he answers. He says, no, that food offered idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? No, he says, no, I imply that what pagan sacrifice they offer to demons and not to God.
Mark Clark [00:03:36]:
I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons and shoot down to verse 31, and then we'll unpack it. So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. Give no offense to Jews or to Greeks or to the Church of God. Just as I try to. To please everyone and everything, I do not seeking my own advantage, but that of many that they may be saved. Okay, what's this point? This week I was in Phoenix.
Mark Clark [00:04:04]:
I'll explain why in a sec. And I was golfing in Phoenix, and I was looking out as I walked around these golf courses, and I noticed there were all these Kind of birds. And there was different kinds of birds and I'm not a bird expert, so don't send me your emails about that. Was not that kind of bird and that's not what they do. Shut up. So I noticed there was these birds and they're kind of. Some of these birds are almost like sparrows or something where they kind of peck away at things and they kind of like gather these little things and they go and do this and they're all down in the little like details and there's little runners around the ground and look like little road runners or something. And I noticed those and then I noticed massive eagles flying above us.
Mark Clark [00:04:38]:
And I started thinking about different kinds of birds and trying to bring it into Christianity. Because the reality is some teachers like the Apostle Paul or you in your life or whatever are, are more like the little birds that kind of constantly gather and you're constantly looking for little practical things. You wanna gather this, you wanna run around the. You're in the mud, you're kinda in the small microcosm realities of life. Other teachers, other concepts are eagles, they're flying high, it's 30,000ft. It's big picture, it's big vision. And the problem is if all we talk about is the little things, then we're gonna miss the big picture. And if all we talk about is the big picture, we're gonna miss the little things.
Mark Clark [00:05:13]:
And here's the great thing about the Apostle Paul. He moves from the really technical little things. He moves from here's how to actually have a sex life. Here's what your nights out, here's how to spend money, here's how to do worship, here's how to think about beauty. He does all that, but then he ultimately, if we get to it, will root it in the big vision, the 30,000 foot vision that actually is supposed to change your life. And if he didn't do that, if he just stuck here, which is some of you, you have your pens out, you're ready to take notes, just give me four principles and what I'm supposed to do with my life. It's because you guys are like the sparrows of the world. You just tell me what to do and I'll do it.
Mark Clark [00:05:45]:
And the problem with that, if you don't understand the big picture and the big kind of flying eagle thing is that you're gonna start to do stuff, but it's not gonna mean anything. It's gonna be religion. It's just gonna say do this, do this, do this. But you're not actually gonna follow God from your heart at all. As I came back from. And we do this all the time. As I came back, I was in the. I love to buy my kids things when I'm away to kinda say, hey, I was away.
Mark Clark [00:06:06]:
I know it's tough, but I'm gonna buy you something and make up for it. So I was in the airport, and I'm like, oh, snap, I forgot to get them something. And so, of course, I did what a lot of dads do. I just went to the little airport thing, and I picked four gifts, right? One's for Bella, one's for Hayden, one's for Sienna, all looking corny. And then one's for my wife. Little more expensive to say sorry for going away for five days, three days after we moved into our new house. What? Okay. So I get all these things in a bag, and I get home, and I sit there and I give them to them.
Mark Clark [00:06:38]:
And I'm sitting there and I'm watching them, and Bella opens hers, and my wife opens hers, and, hey, noble source seeing Novozurs. And a couple of them started to giggle at the. And they just looked at me and they said, thanks for the airport gifts, dad. And they all gave me a hug. All right. So they just know that's my struggle, Right? There's literally. The tags are still on them from the airport with the price. They're like, oh, mine's more than yours.
Mark Clark [00:07:01]:
All right. So that's being religious about it. That's like, there's no heart and soul in that. That's like, I gotta check a box off. I totally forgot it was the last thing in my. Oh, good, I'm at the airport. Anyway, I got time to kill. Let me do stuff.
Mark Clark [00:07:13]:
That's kind of the religious spirit. It's those of you who are down here in the weeds. But then you gotta move up and you gotta see the big, big, big vision. The big why the big 30,000 foot thing. And that's what the apostle Paul does really well. And that's what this text does very well. Even in regard to parenting, my wife tends to think if I get down, it's the big picture versus small picture. She says, if all the girls like you try.
Mark Clark [00:07:34]:
I try to parent my father, my daughters, and I'm constantly honing in on things they do wrong, and I just jump on it. You're grounded. You got this. You got a timeout. You got this. And I'm constantly doing it. Cause I think I got to shake them. I gotta.
Mark Clark [00:07:45]:
But my wife's like, listen, you don't want them just remembering these little technical mechanical details about your parenthood. You want them remembering the big picture. You want them remembering fatherhood. You want them remembering what it was like to be your kid at 30,000ft. That's what you want. Not just every single granular detail. And so there's a difference in life. And Paul says, the only way I can root you and tell you what to do with your life in all these different segments is I don't wanna just tell you, here, do this, here do that.
Mark Clark [00:08:14]:
Here's four principles. I wanna root it in the big picture. And that's what he does. And so here's where he starts. What do I imply then? That food offered to idols is anything, or that an idol is anything? Cause he's trying to kinda say, don't, you know, don't get involved in this. He says, no, I imply that what pagan sacrifice they offer to demons. And so he's trying to say, the reality is we have all these things in our life. We have all these things that we've struggled with.
Mark Clark [00:08:40]:
And I don't want you to participate with demonic things. I don't want you to participate in realities that are counter to what you've actually come to know in Jesus. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons. So he's trying to say we can't live out this kind of.
Mark Clark [00:08:58]:
Life. That creates a kind of a dichotomy where we wanna live in both worlds, we wanna straddle both things. That's what he's trying to say. He's trying to get us away from that kind of living. And he's trying. Now, how do you get someone away from that kind of living? How do you make it so that we don't actually live here, where we're trying to partake a little bit of Jesus, but then we wanna partake a little bit of the world we wanna try to live in. That the only way to do it, as we've talked about many, many times, is to not work on the external things, but to actually work on your affections. Because some of you, all you've done is you've done the religious things, but you've never changed what you want to do.
Mark Clark [00:09:30]:
And the key to actually following Jesus with your life is actually to change what you want to do, that your actual behavior, the only way your behavior is ever gonna change is by having your affections change, to have what you want to do, change. That's the reality. When I became a Christian, When I was 17, 18 years old, I did all the things that people who weren't Christians did. The drug thing, the party thing, the smoking thing, the stealing thing, all the kinds of things. And then I met Jesus. And here's what happened. No one came along and said, now you have to stop doing these things. Actually, I spent two years just trying to explore Christianity by myself.
Mark Clark [00:10:07]:
But what did happen is my affections for those things shifted because I went from doing all those things. Because here's the reality. What you do with your time is connected to your passion. So that's. So I started then going from the parties and the da, da, da. Then I started sitting in my bedroom till 2 o' clock in the morning, reading my Bible by firelight. All right? I'd be like, I wanna be like. I wanna be like.
Mark Clark [00:10:31]:
They were right. I just wanna be just like them. I just bring in a candle. I don't want electricity. Screw that. And then I'm gonna sit and read it by, and I'm gonna get that into my soul. And so I started. That's what I started to do.
Mark Clark [00:10:42]:
I mean, I was still smoking cigarettes. I was like, I wanna be like. I wanna be like them. And I would just start reading the Bible. I would start saying, who is Jesus? I would read the Gospels, I would do whatever he told me to do. Cause I wanted to be conf. I was starting to get confronted by a reality I'd never considered before. What I did with my time actually started to change.
Mark Clark [00:11:02]:
And that's what you gotta start looking at your life. You gotta start thinking, if I'm the type of person who doesn't want to do the things that God is calling me to do with my time and my energy, it's because my passion hasn't been changed. It's because I might not actually be a Christian if I don't have passion, if I don't have treasure, if I don't delight in the things that God calls me and asks me to do, then I might not actually know him. That's the tension of the text. And so what happened with me is all of a sudden I give my life to Jesus. I start reading the Bible, I start hearing a voice being compulsed by a power. Talk to this person, pray for that person. Do this, do this in your life.
Mark Clark [00:11:40]:
Give up that sin. Move toward this. And I started living a different kind of life. Because what I did with my time shifted. That's the Reality, what you do with your time. And it's all about passion. So some of you, if you're like, I wanna be a Christian, but I'm actually not all that passionate about the things the Bible tells me to do. In fact, it's the opposite.
Mark Clark [00:11:58]:
Your prayer needs to be actually. Convert me, Lord. Like, convert my soul, convert my affections. Convert what my passions, what I wanna do. Cause that's what you're gonna end up doing every single time. St. Augustine constantly talked about the fact that even more than being thinking people, we're feeling people. And so if you look at a kid in a park, he goes from the seesaw to the sandbox.
Mark Clark [00:12:18]:
And he said, the reason they do that is not because they're thinking in right and wrong terms. They're simply thinking, what has pop, what has sparkle? What makes me feel good? That's what I'm gonna do. So I watch my kids. I got home last night, they're riding around on bicycles. Then they move over to the trampoline. Then they go over here and they show me music. Then they go. They're not thinking what's right, what's wrong in life.
Mark Clark [00:12:39]:
They're going, what pops? What sparkles? What makes me feel good right now? That's what I'm gonna do. You and I, that is how we live. What your passion is, that's what you're gonna do. And so at the Village Church golf tournament in 2017, the reason I was away is cause a guy bid to go golfing with me for five days in Phoenix. Okay? That's where I was. And so five days in Phoenix, a guy bid. I mean, this is what you guys gotta come to. The Village Golf Tour.
Mark Clark [00:13:08]:
This is the kind of crazy prizes you get. All right, Hang out with me for five days. All right? So five days of Phoenix. The guy bid a lot of money so he could do that. And then it all went to the kids in Iraq. So it's awesome. So I sacrificed.
Mark Clark [00:13:25]:
And went, all right? It was tough. It was for the kids. I was like, jesus, I'll really struggle through this. But anyways, so we went down to Phoenix. And here's the thing. We played.
Mark Clark [00:13:41]:
In four and a half days, nine rounds of golf, okay? Full rounds, all right? Now, here's the only way that's mathematically possible.
Mark Clark [00:13:52]:
We flew in Monday. And what you need to do is you need to calculate the time that your plane lands and how long an Uber will take from the airport to the first tee, and then book a time like that because the sun can't go down. And then you've gotta make sure that you're then up at 6 o' clock every morning. You're on the tee box by about 7:20 so that you can play, eat lunch and then play again before the sun goes down. So what we needed to do is structure all of this. And every day, it doesn't matter how late we're. All we did was play. Played golf, eight, went to bed.
Mark Clark [00:14:24]:
Played golf, eight, went to bed for four and a half straight days. Nine rounds, all right? Nine rounds of golf. Now, here's the thing. Why did we do any of that? Because we're passionate about it, right? We were so jacked. You don't have to force that on us. Now, if it was like a, hey, go away with Mark for four days and curl probably wouldn't have happened like that, all right? We would have woke up at noon and been like, I don't know. I don't know what's happening. Hurry, hurry.
Mark Clark [00:14:54]:
Hard. All right, can we go now? Bond spiel, what am I in? And so, because I'm passionate. And so if someone's passionate about something, you don't have to force them to do it. That's what religion does. Do this, do that, read your Bible, make sure you pray, make sure you worship, make sure you go to church. What am I doing? I'm projecting on you something you don't even care about. But if you love it, you will get up early, you will lean in. You will do everything in your power to get the most of it.
Mark Clark [00:15:22]:
This is the fundamental difference between being a real Christian and a fake one. Have you accepted Jesus as Lord and savior but not experienced him as treasure yet?
Mark Clark [00:15:36]:
You don't even like him. You use him to get out of hell.
Mark Clark [00:15:43]:
You use him to get saved from sin. But you don't like him. You don't treasure him. You don't delight in him. You don't value him. You don't see him as the smartest person who ever lived. You don't see him as the greatest treasure that ever lived. If that is the case, you will continue to sit at the table of demons and then go back to the table of Jesus and go back to the table of Satan and go back to the table of Jesus because you haven't figured out who your actual allegiance is to yet.
Mark Clark [00:16:14]:
I'm talking about on a soul level, not what you say. This is the tension that he's trying to leave us with and saying, I wanna challenge you to actually feel it on the inside. That's his Whole point. And so he says, you cannot drink of the cup of the Lord and of demons. And so there's this reality of demonic life, and he doesn't shy away from it. He doesn't pretend it's not real. He's saying, behind the veil of reality, there is a spiritual realm. There's no such thing as neutral behavior in your life.
Mark Clark [00:16:46]:
There's no such thing as non. It's not spiritual people and non spiritual people. There's always spirituality happening. Every decision you make, everything you do. He's saying, listen, there's no actual God behind the idols, but there are demonic forces, powers that wanna keep our eyes off of God. That's the reality. And so that's why in verse 19 to 20, he's saying that food offered idols is anything, or that idols anything. No, I imply that what pagans sacrifice, they offer to demons and not to God.
Mark Clark [00:17:15]:
And I don't want you to be participants with demons. Even in the most neutral act, like eating. There's. See, behind beauty, behind money, behind eating, behind every action and behavior you can think of in life, there's a demonic version of it that can derail your heart away from the living God. That's his point. And if you go through life thinking that the world is just this dualistic reality of the physical world and the spiritual world, and you don't realize that everything is spiritual and everyone is spiritual and every decision is spiritual at every level, then you will go through life not understanding this. And so he's saying, you've got to get on your mind the understanding that everything that's going on is a spiritual battle. This is why in Ephesians 6, he talks about the idea, you gotta put on the armor of God, put on the shield of this and the breastplate of this and a sword of this and a helmet of this, because you're in the midst of a war.
Mark Clark [00:18:09]:
That's the reality behind everything that happens. There's a spiritual dimension. Meaning when you're experiencing temptation, Jesus in the wilderness, he's being tempted. Who's behind the temptation? Satan is. Remember I told you a story a couple weeks ago of us in Napa, and there was that swinging couple who was like, hey, do you wanna participate in a session? Da, da. And it's like there was weird reaction to that. So first when a couple looks at you and proposes swinging with you and your friends, all right, there's a couple weird emotions. First, you're kind of flattered, all right, that you're like, oh, I'm swingable.
Mark Clark [00:18:41]:
All Right. It's kind of nice, right? All right. And then you're like, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no. That's. You know. And then what happened was we kind of evolved. Then we started laughing about it.
Mark Clark [00:18:54]:
We got in the car, we started making fun of them, we started laughing, saying, oh, my goodness, how could you live your life like that? Sounds chaotic. Sounds tiring. I don't even know what to do with that. It's just easier to have one person. Better to have one person. And we're laughing. And then by the time we were back at the place we were staying at, I looked at the group and I said, to be honest, guys, as funny as all this is, as flattering as it is, look, it's actually demonic. There was actually something evil happening in the room when they were talking to us.
Mark Clark [00:19:24]:
But here's the thing about the demonic. It doesn't look the classic way of demonic. Like when we think of demonic, right? We think like exorcism of Emily Rose. Like, you're walking out to the barn at midnight and there's fire, and you're like, what's going on? There's a fire and you're like. And you run away. Because that's the way we've been pitched it, right? It's like there's some kind of. And if it doesn't look like that, then it must not be demonic. That is counterfeit reality.
Mark Clark [00:19:53]:
Because he just said, food can be the good things. The things that feel really flattering and shiny, the things that are really great feeling things on the surface. A beautiful couple presenting an idea. Demonic, shiny things. Cars, money, houses. What you do with your time and your life. There can be demonic things behind them that are actually distracting you in life. So sometimes it really does look the traditional demonic way.
Mark Clark [00:20:27]:
That's the reality. But sometimes it doesn't look or feel demonic at all. Which is why CS Lewis says you read the Screwtape letters. His whole point is the uncle demon is right into the younger demon. He's saying, listen, don't let him be aware that we exist, or else he's gonna know God exists. Don't let him even become ever self aware that he's going through, that he's involved in anything demonic at all. Just let him go. Cause he says this, the road to hell is very slow and gradual, and there's no sudden turns because all of a sudden you're there and you didn't even know it because you partook.
Mark Clark [00:21:02]:
You opened yourself up and it blows away the traditional Christian idea that if I'm a Christian. Demons can't affect me. It's like, no. Ephesians 6 was written to Christians saying, hey, by the way, you're the church. The demonic can affect you. This is why you need to put on the armor of God. This is why in Acts 5, Peter says to Ananias, satan has actually lied to you. Why have.
Mark Clark [00:21:24]:
Why have you allowed Satan to actually use you and lie to the Holy Spirit? The Satanic reality, the demonic reality, can be a piece of the Christian life, which is why people need to be aware. That. And why Paul is writing to the Corinthians saying, be very careful. Cause here's the questions you have to ask. You need to ask yourself, am I serving God or am I serving the gods? That's the point of the text. And any day can be something different. You're serving the gods. And so my wife, when we do marriage counseling, she oftentimes says this.
Mark Clark [00:21:52]:
I'll use marriage and sexuality as an example. Cause Paul constantly does, she says to couples, satan will do everything in his power to get you two to sleep together before you're married. And then after you're married, he'll do everything in his power to make you not sleep together. That's how he works, right? Some of you know this. Think about it. Those of you who've been married for 20 years, right? Think back to when you were dating. It was like you. It was everything.
Mark Clark [00:22:21]:
You couldn't keep your hands off each other. It's like, oh, I just. Okay, we gotta go to church. Calm it down. All right, touch him. Okay. Okay, we're good. We're good right now.
Mark Clark [00:22:31]:
It's like, all right, are we already at that time of the month? Go ahead. Right?
Mark Clark [00:22:40]:
That's a different thing.
Mark Clark [00:22:43]:
And Satan is alive and well in both of those. Because you will stray, your soul will be shriveled if you take something outside of the way God designed it and you actually try to do something else with it. There's a demonic version of money, of sexuality, of beauty, of all of it, every single. And this is why.
Mark Clark [00:23:06]:
The constant tension in life. Where am I gonna eat? Where am I gonna eat at the food of demons? Where am I gonna eat at the food of God? The food of Jesus, the table of Jesus. That's the point. He's giving us this dichotomy. He's saying, who do you serve? The gods or God? One writer puts it this way. Listen to this. Take the most mundane things, how do they become demonic? Says this drinking can turn into drunkenness. Working long hours can lead to workaholism.
Mark Clark [00:23:34]:
Respect for one's parents can flip into ancestor worship. Patriotism can produce idolatry of the state. Watching TV can lead to useless lives. A desire for material goods can become materialism. Taking medication can result in addiction. It doesn't mean we don't do these things. It just means there's a demonic version of everything and we must fight it. Right? That's the point.
Mark Clark [00:24:04]:
And so Paul is saying, listen, we can't actually live a life where we try to combine these two things together. You cannot drink the cup of Lord and the cup of demons. You cannot partake of the table, and the table, you can't. This is syncretism. We do this constantly in our life. We try to combine two things that don't go together. We try to do it from a worldview perspective. Right.
Mark Clark [00:24:26]:
We live in postmodern Canada. And what does postmodern Canada say? We can do both, even if things don't agree, even if they're total opposites. Jesus, demons who just put them all together, it doesn't matter. You believe this, I believe that you believe that. When we die, think about the worldviews and how we have conversations as a culture. People can believe whatever they wanna believe. What's true for you is true for you. What's true for me is true for me.
Mark Clark [00:24:48]:
And that's how we're gonna live our life. And the Bible comes along and says, that is a cowardice way to approach the conversation about the most meaningful things on the planet. Metaphysical reality is not meant to be deduced. Do you believe that? You believe it's green, I believe it's red. It doesn't matter. Let's all just agree that is a cowardice. Because what that is, what's behind that is not tolerance and a nice spirit. It's cowardice to have the real conversation, to try to get to truth.
Mark Clark [00:25:17]:
And so we create these. Well, you believe this, you can be that religion and that religion at the same time. It doesn't matter. But you gotta make some choices. Because Hinduism and Buddhism believe that the end of all things is becoming unconscious and being a drop in the water and going to a state of enlightenment where basically personhood disappears. Christianity comes along and says, no, personhood is always retained. You go to a place of eternal heaven, eternal bliss, eternal relationship with Jesus. Those are two different realities.
Mark Clark [00:25:46]:
The Canadian arsonist nudist cult believes that if you dance around the fire, you're gonna reach enlightenment. Strip off all your clothes, dance around. You can Google it later. That's the thing. I didn't just make it up. You're like, oh my gosh, he's tired. Go look it up. There's a Canadian nudist, arsonist cult.
Mark Clark [00:26:03]:
All right? I mean, maybe actually don't look it up. That was a bad idea. All right? Be like a trigger.
Mark Clark [00:26:13]:
But they believe that dancing around things, stripping naked, eating mushrooms is the way you're gonna experience salvation and enlightenment. Christianity comes along and says, no, the only way to experience true enlightenment, true is to believe in Jesus, to repent of sin, to trust that he died for sin. One of those two things is right. They both can't be right at the same time. And we've got to start to understand that ideas have ramifications, ideas have implications. Over and over and over again there will be a point where logic will start to go against the worldview of the modern world to the point where we will start bumping up against reality. And that's what happens. So we can start adopting ideas, but sooner or later reality will bump up against those ideas and say, you can't actually live a life with syncretism.
Mark Clark [00:26:59]:
You can't actually live a life where you believe two opposites and say they're true at the same time. You can't actually, because at some point we hit a ceiling. Take, I'm gonna take this as an example. Take the example of the modern day conversation about self identity that somebody says, I get to define my identity, I get to define my gender, I get to define who I am, but not by my physical reality. As if there's no hint from the physical world. But I will define who I am by what I feel inside. Now there's a lot of conversation to be had about this. I'm simply trying to use this as an illustration of how far basically how much you bump up against reality.
Mark Clark [00:27:37]:
So here's the problem with that thinking is that what we've started to realize now as a society, because we're only 10, 20 years into this at kind of a massive scale, is as we start to change those genders, we start to realize that, I mean, you take something like the sports world, okay? There's more and more reports coming out about how this mentality is affecting sports. And so you have mixed martial arts, there's a man who starts to identify as a woman, and so he starts to dress like a woman and take hormones and so on and so forth, and he becomes more like a woman. And then he gets in the ring with other women and he does mixed martial arts with them. And there's been multiple accounts where they have. Actually, women are getting their skulls crushed in the ring by men who have transitioned over to become women in mixed martial arts, almost killing them. There's basketball, there's high school sports. Every record is just being blown away by boys, men who are identifying as women and saying, look, now I'm a woman. And they're just outrunning the women twice over.
Mark Clark [00:28:39]:
They're breaking every high school speed record, 100 meter dash, long jump, high jump, weightlifting. There's a guy who just in one day, he said, hey, look, I'm shifting over to a woman. And broke every single woman weightlifting record in the world in one day.
Mark Clark [00:28:55]:
Why? Because the reality is this. Here's what nature says. Men just tend to be, as a general principle, just physically stronger than women. It's just the reality.
Mark Clark [00:29:10]:
This is what nature. So at some point we bump up against reality, right? At some point we bump up against nature. What nature has said. We start hitting it even when our worldview, we're like, no, I wanna retain this idea. Nature then pushes back and says it's a bad idea. And we go, no, no, but I wanna retain it. Cause it feels really good in this cultural moment. And nature itself, which is fascinating.
Mark Clark [00:29:35]:
It's a whole other conversation about this. Because generally speaking, we are evolutionists, we are naturalistic evolutionary thinkers. So the whole premise of that is survival the fittest, which means only certain ideas and certain genetic realities actually enter the next phase of an evolutionary process and era and epoch based on what the animal needed to survive. Which is why tigers do this. And eagles have eyes like this. And giraffes have elongated, elongated necks. And fish have these gills. And people do this, men and women.
Mark Clark [00:30:05]:
And the differences between us, because one bears a child. Do you know why? Do you know why? In regard to nature, that babies, when they come out, like human babies, when they come out, they need to be like, held and their heads all bobble around and they need to be held. And we need to actually care about them for like a year without looking away from them. You ever seen, like a giraffe give birth? Giraffes go along and then just keeps walking, all right? And the baby's like.
Mark Clark [00:30:40]:
And just starts walking along. I'm not sure that's the noise that's made, but.
Mark Clark [00:30:47]:
An animal just comes out. And it's not like a giraffe neck does what a human baby neck does. Like man. The mom's like, hold it up, hold it up. Why? Because the female passage is only so big that the Body has to force the baby out of the passage before it's actually ready. Like, humans aren't cooked enough yet.
Mark Clark [00:31:13]:
According to nature. We need, like, weeks, months, more in there to actually be ready to face the world. We can't. But animal. Anyway, we're off on a total tangent. The point is, at some point, reality, you bump up against nature, all right? You bump up against what reality is forcing. And you gotta. And you gotta start rewiring a worldview based on what reality keeps pumping up against you.
Mark Clark [00:31:36]:
And so here's the apostle Paul saying, be very careful when you want to live a life that says, I want to continue in this perpetual habitual sin, and I want to become a Christian and believe in Jesus. I wanna believe this about salvation. I wanna believe this about the end of the world. I wanna believe this about myself. And I believe that you're right in believing all those things. It doesn't work. He's saying, if this idea is true, that idea by default is excluded. Because Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me.
Mark Clark [00:32:08]:
There's one path, one truth, one way, and his name is Jesus. That's the point by default. Everything else, therefore, is wrong.
Mark Clark [00:32:18]:
And so the question is not, hey, can. Can one religion be true and the other one be true. No, it's that they're all. It's not that. See, our culture isn't even saying that they're all false. Here's the flip crazy part. They're saying they're all true.
Mark Clark [00:32:35]:
They're not. Cause they're afraid. It's easier to sit around at a restaurant and have a glass with your friends.
Mark Clark [00:32:44]:
If they're flat Earthers and you wanna go, are you nuts? Have you ever been in a plane? We have pictures from the moon, but it's easier to go, that's cool, bro. Another glass. Flat Earther, not flat Earther. We're both right. What's that? What?
Mark Clark [00:33:05]:
It's so much easier not to lose friends. But Paul goes, don't do it. It's cowardice. And it's the worst idea in the marketplace of ideas. It's very important to actually fight for truth. It's very important to mine down deep, even if it hurts to be able to go after truth.
Mark Clark [00:33:26]:
The other thing he says is not only from a worldview perspective and a philosophy perspective, you can't live lives that have syncretism, but also you can't live lives so that have syncretism in regard to behavior. You can't live like This a Christianized version of what you already are and what you are determined to remain. Doesn't really work in Christianity. If you got a Bible, you don't have to turn there. But Galatians, chapter five. Paul says this. I mean, listen to how he calls out now a life. I say, walk by the Spirit and you'll not gratify the desires of the flesh.
Mark Clark [00:34:01]:
Listen to this dichotomy he creates. The desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, the desires of the Spirit against the flesh. For these are opposed to each other and to keep you from doing the things you want. But if you're led by the Spirit, you're not under law. The works of the flesh are evident. Now picture your own life. Sexual immorality. Person defined by that doesn't know the life of the Spirit.
Mark Clark [00:34:23]:
This isn't. Sometimes I'm over here, and sometimes when we're here and I wrestle and I'm struggling. No, he's saying there's categories, there's family identification. You are either of Christ in the Spirit or you are not. It's not. I struggle with the flesh and all. And that's not what he's talking about saying. There's two kinds of people.
Mark Clark [00:34:45]:
Definitively, categorically, if you are led by the Spirit, not a lot. Now, the works of the flesh are evident. Sexual morality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Okay, let's put aside the ones that are kind of crazy, because I'm thinking 99.999% of the people in this room are involved in orgies. But.
Mark Clark [00:35:23]:
Strife.
Mark Clark [00:35:25]:
Jealousy, Jealousy. You ever been jealous of your girlfriend and the husband she got and the car she gets to drive around in? Well, you're in the old beater still.
Mark Clark [00:35:40]:
You're comparing your life against someone else.
Mark Clark [00:35:44]:
Fits of anger. When's the last time you were angry.
Mark Clark [00:35:49]:
Man? I was struggling with this.
Mark Clark [00:35:52]:
When I was in.
Mark Clark [00:35:55]:
Phoenix. We went out for dinner. And my sin is anger. Like, I go from 0 to 100. This is what the Lord's working on me. And we sat down at this dinner. It was one of those dinners where they cook for you and you sit around, you know, like, you sit around like a half circle. And the guy comes and he throws all the rice and he throws the stuff on and he cooks it for you, and he's Kind of interacting with you.
Mark Clark [00:36:19]:
He's doing all this crazy stuff, and then he feeds you. And you're sitting. It's beautiful. It's a place called Sapporo. It's awesome. So we're sitting there eating Sapporo's, and I get my salad, and I'm eating my salad. And he starts. Now, I don't know if you've ever been to one of these places, but they're kind of wacky.
Mark Clark [00:36:34]:
And so they have this big, like, grill thing, and they smack it really hard against the thing. And then this guy, his style was to smack it against the thing and go really loud. But I didn't know that. Like, I don't. Why are we doing this? I'm here to relax and have a nice dinner. You're screaming at me, making noises like a hyena out of nowhere. So I didn't know this at the time. So I'm sitting there and I'm eating my salad.
Mark Clark [00:36:58]:
I'm in the zone. I mean, I played 36 holes of golf, so I'm kind of tired. And he goes. And I'm like. And I jumped. And my salad went all over my buddy's pants. It looked like I puked all over. He had the whole side of his pants.
Mark Clark [00:37:12]:
He's like, what the. And I'm like, what the. And I looked up. He goes, ah. And I'm like, what is. What is this dinner? This is crazy.
Mark Clark [00:37:21]:
So then I'm over here, and now he starts. Now he starts kind of like picking on me almost. I felt like I was in high school again. All right? I'm like, why is this guy got a thing for me? He's like, ah. And I'm like, what does that mean? And so a couple minutes later, no joke, they do this thing where they cut up a little piece of egg right on the fryer, and then they toss it like that, and you catch it in your mouth. Okay? So this guy got. And they're very skilled. They know exactly what they're doing.
Mark Clark [00:37:49]:
They know how to. This guy could swing it around, throw eggs around. So he cracks it, actually chops it all up. Goes. And these people were total strangers. Goes. They go, guy wasn't even looking. All right?
Mark Clark [00:38:02]:
Throws it out there. All right? Bum done. Goes through the whole table. Gets to me. I'm like, what does that mean?
Mark Clark [00:38:10]:
Flips the egg. I'm not kidding you. A burning hot piece of egg lands on my eyeball. All right? Like.
Mark Clark [00:38:17]:
And I'm like. And I went like this. And I went like this and there's egg literally all over my face. And everyone's just like, baa. And I'm like, what? I almost turned the thing over in his face. He knew exactly. Oh, ha. And then he goes again.
Mark Clark [00:38:33]:
I'm like, again. Are you nuts? Ready to crack your face? So.
Mark Clark [00:38:39]:
I had to bury the anger. I had to just go, you know what? Just say it was a mistake and move on with it. This freaking guy, okay.
Mark Clark [00:38:49]:
Burned my eye like, it's like it was burning hot. Why would you do that to someone?
Mark Clark [00:38:54]:
He worked there. I'm paying him to do this to me.
Mark Clark [00:39:02]:
Okay? Jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy. Drunken. Have you ever been envious of someone? Drunkenness. All of these things are people Paul's saying who aren't of Christ in the Spirit yet. So again, we're asking that same question from the text last week. Are you actually a Christian? And he's trying to draw that out and say, this is all about self evaluation in light of what Christ and the Spirit have done. And then he says this. Against those things, they will inherit the kingdom of God.
Mark Clark [00:39:34]:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness. Against such things, there is no law. Listen to this. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. This is all dead to someone who really knows Jesus. Yeah, it might happen, like, once in a while. I'm talking about defined by delight in.
Mark Clark [00:40:02]:
But those who are in Christ Jesus, this old person, these old actions, these old behaviors, these old delights are actually finished. They're over. Here's the beautiful thing about this. And then I'll pray for us.
Mark Clark [00:40:15]:
The beautiful thing about this is. This is what I love about the Bible. Remember we were talking a couple weeks ago about a culture that tells us we have all these rights but doesn't give us responsibility, that we lose the meaning of life if we don't take some responsibility. If we don't carry a load, we wake up and we're lost. Which is why we have the rise of suicide and the rise of depression. Because now no one's telling you you have any responsibility or any. You're not responsible for yourself. You're not responsible for anybody else.
Mark Clark [00:40:41]:
Here's the Apostle Paul coming out of the gate and saying, no, no, you're very responsible for your own life. To such a point, I want you to do self evaluation to see if you actually know him. You gotta do self evaluation on which category you actually exist within. And he wants to Blow up. Which is why he spent so many verses on this and why we have. He wants to blow up the modern temptations to just project all of your problems in life onto somebody else and blame your spouse, blame your environment, blame your parents, blame everything else but you. You, though, are the problem. One writer put it this way.
Mark Clark [00:41:20]:
The human propensity to see my problem as different or worse than what anyone else has experienced is here debunked the contemporary trend to blame the way I am on God or parents or society or the devil, rather than acknowledging that our sinful nature.
Mark Clark [00:41:41]:
Are the most direct cause of our disobedience in life and run counter to what Paul is saying here. This is why I love the Bible. It will not let you throw excuses at God for your life. You are where you are and you are the common denominator, not your environment. Yes, the environment hacks against you. I get it. There's diagnosis, there's problems. It feels like we're struggling uphill constantly.
Mark Clark [00:42:08]:
I get it. Work kicks against us. Marriage kicks against us. Kids kick against us. Pain, struggle, agony. I get it. Environment is tough. It's not to blame for where you're at.
Mark Clark [00:42:22]:
I get that. We all had parents that were not perfect. My dad was an utter disaster. Divorced my mom when I was eight. Was an alcoholic.
Mark Clark [00:42:33]:
His sister was literally chemically schizophrenic, committed suicide. I get it. Our nature, our genes suck sometimes.
Mark Clark [00:42:47]:
So what do I do with that? Blame my environment and go to a corner and just give up? No, you gotta push through it. Make something of your life.
Mark Clark [00:43:00]:
So your parents suck, maybe your environment sucks, maybe. But here's the beauty of the Bible saying, stand up, take a load. Don't blame everybody else. Who are you inside? Don't die and get to the gates and say, yeah, but, Lord, my neighbor wasn't nice to me.
Mark Clark [00:43:22]:
The question is not gonna be what you read in some books, what you saw in the news, what your neighbor thought of this issue or that. What did you do with my son? What did you do with Jesus? What did you do with the cross and the resurrection? That will be the definitive question when we stand before him in the end.
Mark Clark [00:43:40]:
Father, I pray that we, as a group of people across all of these sites, would have the.
Mark Clark [00:43:47]:
Courage to be able to give our hearts, our lives to you.
Mark Clark [00:43:53]:
To be able to walk away from sin. And then once we are justified by your finished work for us, we would actually start to work the road and process of sanctification, which is the killing of all this sin. And if we are still stuck here actually delighting in all of this stuff on Paul's side of the ledger. That was before Jesus. Let us ask some massive questions about whether we even know you. And if we feel like we do. Holy Spirit, I pray that you would reveal the things and the ways that we could actually have victory over these things. That our passions would change, that you would change not what we do, but what we want to do.
Mark Clark [00:44:26]:
The things we love, the things we get up early to do, the things we take such delight in. We work so hard at them.
Mark Clark [00:44:35]:
And thank you, Jesus, that you don't crush us with religion. You call us to responsibility. Because.
Mark Clark [00:44:42]:
Grace is opposed to works, yes, to earn it, but it's not opposed to effort.
Mark Clark [00:44:51]:
To pick up our own lives and to say before you, this is what I'm gonna do. This is where I'm gonna go. One step in front of the other. Walk, he says in the spirit, walk. One step, one step, one step toward victory. So that in 30 years from now, our life is living for your glory in a way we never could have imagined. Imagined people who walked into these sites today who have doubts and they've made mistakes and they have sins and they have stuff they're just stuck in and they feel down and defeated. I pray that they would see and hear the beauty of the grace of God in Jesus Christ and what he did for them on the cross, that he took the wrath of God for them so they're not going to experience the result of it.
Mark Clark [00:45:29]:
And then he rose again to say, I'll give you power now to walk in newness of life. Let's do something.
Mark Clark [00:45:36]:
And that would be freeing for us.
Mark Clark [00:45:40]:
It would be life changing for us. We would join.
Mark Clark [00:45:45]:
The people.
Mark Clark [00:45:47]:
All through history who have been confronted by the beauty of the gospel and the power of the Spirit and given their life to you and. And confess with their mouth that Jesus is Lord and believed in their heart that you raised them from the dead. And then you say, we will be saved even from ourselves. Jesus, I pray you would do that miraculous work in every heart and mind. In your good name we have gathered and we pray. Amen.