Sermon Notes: 1 Corinthians 2:6-16 – Pure Religion Sunday 2024 (formerly “Stand Sunday”)

One statement that stood out to me over the years in our child welfare work was: “The level of function in your house has to be greater than the level of dysfunction you are bringing into your house.” – Author Unknown

Only in hindsight, after my breakdown in 2021/2022, can I look back and see all the ways my soul was leaking. My level of function was super low, but my God given wiring was helping me live above my functionality.

My mental and emotional health began deteriorating from the moment I learned to ignore and stuff what my central nervous system was trying to do for me like the wise Creator Jesus designed it to do. I was 4 years old then, and that process of stuffing would do its damage until the age of 49 when my brain and body would decide to rescue me with a system crash, all by God’s good design.

Battling my central nervous system as a kid created some bad habits. I had a violent bent that loved to fight through my school years. I had a super competitiveness that hated to lose. I had a hidden abuse of food. I hid thoughts of hurting myself when my central nervous system was overloaded. I finally broke down.

You know what didn’t help any of that? My salvation at the age of 20. Now, hang on don’t freak out. I know that may sound like heresy to some folks. Let me explain.

Everything broken and sideways in us does not instantly get fixed and straightened out the second we repent and believe the good news.

Coming to a saving faith in Jesus transferred me from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God. Saving faith in Jesus changed my status from being at war with God to a son of God. God’s gracious saving provided me with the Counselor Holy Spirit and a host of other good gifts.  

What I didn’t understand was the nature of discipleship. I didn’t understand that part of God’s work of salvation is God enabling me to work out my salvation with fear and trembling. Working our faith out is God working in us to work it out, and it requires our active engagement. Listen to Paul:

Philippians 2:12-13 (CSB) 12 Therefore, my dear friends, just as you have always obeyed, so now, not only in my presence but even more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. 13 For it is God who is working in you both to will and to work according to his good purpose.

I had to learn the Holy Spirit was not going to exercise the fruit of “self-control” for me. The fruit of the Spirit is not passive. The fruit of the Spirit must be picked from the tree of His presence as a working out of the faith to reject the fruit of the flesh.

It was my image-bearing duty to exercise self-control with Holy Spirit’s help to stop suppressing what he designed the central nervous system to do to help me.

I had to learn to process what had happened to me, and with the mind of Christ exercise self-control over my brain, it’s broken functioning, and thus my body’s response. All that was my job.

At salvation, the Spirit quickened my conscience in such a way that caused me to see my bad habits of dealing with the hurt needed to shift.

I understood that I needed to stop picking fights and beating people up and getting beaten up (something about a fight calmed my central nervous system). I needed to stop being a jerk about winning (stopped playing church league softball). I needed to stop abusing food. I also needed to stop wondering how I could hurt myself when overwhelmed by relational stress.

The problem for me after salvation was that I didn’t know how to fix what caused the bad habits, so I just changed my habits and never dealt with what caused me to do those things. I could only see the behaviors not what caused them.

So, I chose to keep ignoring those strong emotions by stuffing them. How? I increased my activity level to triathlons so I could just eat and not have to deal with the results of increased eating as well as provide an alternative to fighting (too tired to fight after training for a triathlon). I would also not let other human beings get too close so I could manage relational stress that resulted in me wanting to hurt myself.

Why am I telling you this?

I’m telling you this because I used my Bible to justify it all.

I had enough Biblical clarity to obey the Lord’s word. But I was pursuing good things with a leaky soul. I was setting myself up for a colossal crash.

I WAS OPERATING AT EXTREMELY LOW EMOTIONALLY INTELLIGENCE CAPACITY, and didn’t know it. In fact, right before I crashed, I had an EQ test as part of a group of pastors and the results made me fighting mad because there was no way my EQ was that low. I was too smart and educated to come off looking like a goober. But it was telling me something I didn’t want to hear, and that was I was on the verge of breaking down.

You would think I had it all together. I looked like I was just fine.

I lived like this from the age of 4, through my salvation at 20, made some adjustments to match my new God-given conscience, and made it to age 49 before I had to pay the price.

I was not prepared for the reality that if we were going to obey the Lord’s clear instructions in James 1:27, I needed to be at a level of functionality that could handle the work of helping to heal what was broken, handle the losses of being a church planter/elder/employee/leader. And I was not at that level of functionality.

Here is my thesis: I don’t want to project on everybody my brokenness. I don’t think I’m doing that. I believe many followers of Jesus today are on the edge of mental and emotional health for a multitude of reasons. As Bob Roberts has been saying for a few years now, we wasted Covid. God gave us a chance to slow down and reevaluate, and we couldn’t wait to get back to an unsustainable lifestyle as soon as we could.

I believe everyone is moved by the need to obey James 1:27 and wants to get after it.

However, the thought of one more thing or having to expend another ounce of emotive energy almost sends us over the edge. Not because we are less than but because we over the line in just about every area and have been beaten up by a host of abusers (worldviews like naturalism, systems like the school system, personal decisions, cultural values, unhealthy conflict, doing too much, life circumstances). And the truth is we are good at stuffing and not processing. And if we don’t get after some healing, we are going to break.

We have to prepare the saints of God for this work in order for them to thrive through it rather than letting it destroy themselves and their families. If we don’t prepare folks for this, we are negligent. This takes a whole gospel discipleship.

Rather than bind up wounds with discipleship that equips the whole human, churches are good at piling on guilt and getting people to do more, and it’s usually those who don’t need to do more who end up doing more while the rest just watch.

We must begin to address our mental and emotional well-being as an issue of Christian discipleship. We can’t let naturalists and other faiths define the care of human beings. We must lead the way in properly applying God’s word and Proverbs 25:2 discoveries of the Lord’s ways and means of human flourishing in creation.  

We are only able to lead people to places we have gone to, and when it comes to healing relational wounding in child welfare, if we are not there, we will not be able to help others get well, and if we are not well, we have no business guilting people or being guilted into that work only to crash and burn.

If our discipleship is truncated, we will disciple truncated Christians.

What if the Lord’s answer to the prayer for him to send laborers to the harvest is that we would bind up the wounds of the laborers, and when we do, we will have an army mobilized for the work?

We have preached a truncated gospel that has focused only on saving people from hell. We have failed to preach the good news of the kingdom that saves, heals, and restores for mission.

Believing that I’m going to heaven and there’s nothing left to do leads to us not taking Genesis 1:26-28 seriously, and thus disengaging.

So, I want to ask and answer two questions.

What has our truncated gospel produced that is holding back his church from doing James 1:27 in the public square? What can we do to help us tap into the healing work of the gospel?

I will answer that first question by sharing my adapted and shortened list from Peter Scazzero’s book “Emotionally Healthy Spirituality” in the section, “Symptoms of an Unhealthy Spirituality.” These symptoms are real, and I believe they are a result of a truncated gospel message.

What has our truncated gospel produced that is holding the church back from doing James 1:127?

We do ministry to avoid God dealing with our internal hurt.

Scazzero would say that we “use God to run from God.”

Example: Sometimes, we do spiritual activities to medicate our dysregulation (anxiety produced by fear or shame or guilt). Some people use food. Some use drugs. Some use work. Some use sexual relationships.

Christians are masters of using ministry and spiritual things to keep us busy so we can’t get quiet and deal with our dysregulation.

We got saved, and that thing sits there and does not go away. We quietly think it’s because maybe we did something wrong, or our salvation is not somehow complete.

We live in anxiety and fear, so we think if we do one more thing, maybe that’s the magic line the Lord has set for us to get to so our angst will go away. Maybe that one more thing will please God. NOTE: God being pleased with us is the precious gift of the cross where his pleasure comes as part of the package of the justifying work of Jesus in our place for our sin.

Example: Focus on theological obsessions out of concern for our own fears or deeply rooted issues rather than a genuine concern for what is true. So, we have our “hobby horse” doctrine we try to convert people to rather than doing anything of significance. We select our favorite theologian who espouses what we like and read them more than the Bible and end up hurting people more than loving people.

We ignore anger, sadness, and fear.

A truncated gospel might leave us believing that since we got saved, I should never be angry, experience sadness, or taste fear.

Somehow people have learned that anger is evil. Somehow people have learned we should never be sad, and faith automatically overshadows fear.

The fact is that anger can be holy, and maybe we should experience holy anger a little more often.

Maybe sadness is an indicator of hurt that we need to deal with, and sometimes the real cost of loving people well.

Fear can be our helper when properly harnessed (like when frightened by a bear we run), but when rooted in hurt it is a restless evil.

Anger, sadness, and fear are not to be avoided. Rather they are indicators of deeper things the Lord is working out in us.

We deny the impact of the past on the present.

Philippians 3:13-14 (CSB) 13 Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have taken hold of it. But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and reaching forward to what is ahead, 14 I pursue as my goal the prize promised by God’s heavenly call in Christ Jesus.

We may tend to take verses like these and mischaracterize Paul’s intent. He was talking about his potential brag over his Hebrew credentials that might keep him out of hot water with the Judaizers not difficulties of the past that have wounded his soul.

So, we use verses like these to deny that our past does affect the present when we all know what’s going on inside but don’t want to say it because it makes us look faithless or unspiritual.

We avoid diving into the implications of texts like Philippians 4:8 that deal with my thought life and the profound implications of thinking for the Christian and the place of our thoughts in connection to prayer that is the cure for worry and anxiety.

A truncated gospel does not equip us to ask about the connections of Philippians 4:4 to Philippians 4:8 and the connection to discipleship in Philippians 4:9. It’s just concerned with me not going to hell. A truncated gospel proof texts the Bible. It does not study the whole Bible.

We cover up our brokenness, weakness, and failure.

A truncated gospel leads us to cover up stuff that we thought getting saved would fix.

I did that for a long time, as I shared with you.

The kingdom of God never teaches us to cover up stuff.

We must be as safely vulnerable and transparent as we can with each other so that we can pursue healing.

It was in some of my most embarrassing and painful places in front of Jennifer, my sons, you, and my elders that the Lord began to work healing in my soul. That kind of stuff begins to heal in the light of human relationships.

Relational hurt is only healed in relationships.

We never cast our pearls before swine, but we must cast our pearl before the Lord Jesus and his sheep. There, we journey toward healing.

We have no boundaries.

Scazzero says, “We live without limits.”

When we don’t teach the gospel from the whole Bible, we miss that God says “no”, a lot. He invites us to join him in governing things with order, you know, boundaries.

You might call the Decalogue the 10 boundaries.

Do you know it’s ok to say “no” personally and corporately with the expectation that people should not get offended because we are other’s focused not self-centered?

Do you know that in the kingdom of God we should be able to set boundaries in the world robustly enough to leave margin for the life, function, and service to the church (covenant people of God)?

If these are symptoms of a truncated gospel, then we need to ask and answer our second question.

What can we do to receive the restoring work of the gospel of the kingdom?

Know the gospel of the kingdom and understand that the restoration of all things is a present reality we are participating in as new creation first fruits.

Creation. Fall. Redemption. Restoration.

Redemption is complete. Jesus has ascended, and he rules at the right hand of the Father.

He is currently leading and empowering the restoration through his body the church, of which he is the Chief Shepherd.

If God is restoring all things, then we must understand that our healing and capacity to participate in the restoration of families has to get online.

It’s not acceptable to claim victimhood as if there is nothing we can do. We are victors in Christ who are tasked as ambassadors of his kingdom authority, and that includes our ability to get in the fight for our well-being and the well-being of others.

Our healing in preparation for the work is not impossible. Jesus has provided salvation and Holy Spirit and his supernatural power. Therefore, we can participate in restoring and setting right what sin has damaged.

This is not some goofy prosperity theology that avoids hardship and makes people rich. That’s a lie. We don’t need Jesus for that.

No, this is getting in the hard fight to see Jesus’ kingdom come and will be done on earth as in heaven, and it is costly and hard AND entirely possible to stack some wins.

One of those wins must be our own mental and emotional well-being so we can have something to bring to the fight.

Grow in our discovery, understanding, and application of the mind.

We are going to have to come to terms with the mind, brain, and body connection.

1 Corinthians 2:6-16. Let’s stand and read this together.

There is a lot going on here. Paul’s words fall on us whose entire worldview is predominantly naturalistic. What is says is like as an enigma wrapped in a mystery.

Paul is super clear that the work of Jesus was hidden from the rulers of the age so they would play into his hands by crucifying Jesus according to God’s plan. If they had understood, they would not have participated in God’s plan for them to kill Jesus!

But we have access to the depths of this mysterious good news of the kingdom. The mystery of the unseen is not hidden from us. We have the Spirit, the word, and thus we have the very mind of Christ.

Can you define the mind?

The mind is not the brain. The brain is the organ the Wise Creator Jesus designed to be operated by the human mind.

Have you processed the Bible’s instruction that we are a mashup of immaterial reality and physical reality in such a way that we are a soul that has a mind? No other creature God made is like us.

Angels are not like us. Lions are not like us. The sons of God are not like us.

We alone are image-bearers designed to rule with God over all of creation so we are immaterial and material in such a way that we can’t separate them neatly so that we can rule over all things with God material and immaterial. The image-bearing soul has a mind, and those of us redeemed by the good news of the kingdom have the mind of Christ.

What is the mind?

“The mind is an embodied and relational process, emerging from within and between brains, that regulates the flow of energy and information.” – Dr. Curt Thompson

Go read his work “Anatomy of the Soul” for yourself.

What I do want for you this morning is for you to see that you have Christ’s mind as the operating system of your mind, and with your mind, you can exercise self-control and enter a process of wellness and healing mentally and emotionally that will increase your capacity to get in the fight.

When we do that together in accountability to one another, we will raise up an army of warriors to invade the stronghold of lies set up by the Dragon Serpent in the difficult work of child welfare, and we will win the day.

We have to take seriously our Genesis 1:26-28 creation mandate to subdue and maximize creation by learning the mind-brain-body connection. We left that discovery to the unbelieving world, and there are a few brave Christian men and women taking back the domain of neurobiology for the kingdom of God, and it’s time we stop letting pagans twist what God gave us for human flourishing.

We can’t leave this reality to non-Christians to define things, and we can’t afford to not work it out in fear and trembling for our own well-being. We must bring the healing balm of mental and emotional well-being to folks and rescue children and families from darkness for the fame of Jesus Christ.

Integrate mental/emotional work into your daily Bible reading and journaling to help you exercise self-control with your mind to get your brain and body to line up so you can get in the fight.

February 1, 2025, at Restoration Rome: We will do a day long training for those who want to get into some of this deeper with TBRI. Be on the lookout for more information.

We will have you sign up and there may be a cost to secure your commitment because we will provide food.

I want to invite you to a 21-day process to help you start getting mentally and emotionally fit. Ideally you would do 3 21-day cycles. It takes 63 days to grow new neuropathways in the human brain. Dr. Leaf calls this process the “neurocycle”.

Step 1: Gather

First, gather awareness of how you are feeling mentally and physically. Sit quietly with your eyes closed and pay attention to your body and what its doing.

1. How do you feel mentally and physically right now?

2. Are you struggling to concentrate?
3. Do you find you are getting more frustrated and irritable with people?
4. Do you feel fatigued? Muscle tension? Headaches?
5. Are you struggling with sleep?
6. Do you feel anxious? Depressed? Lethargic?

Step 2: Reflect

Now, just be curious and question your emotions and feelings. It’s tough to make changes when you don’t know exactly what needs to change, but exploring contributing factors or sources of stress can help.

1. Why do you feel exhausted and spent?

2. Why do you feel that you have been “on” too long?
3. Why do you feel overwhelmed?
4. What could you do differently right now to feel better?
5. What if you took a break, or slowed down? What would happen?
6. What are you fearing will happen if you take a few steps back or slow down?
7. Are you tying your productivity to your self-worth? Why?
8. What unrealistic expectations can you let go of?
9. Are you taking on more commitments as a way of trying to fit in or people-please? Why?
10. How can you make your mental health a priority?

Reflect now for a few moments.

Step 3: Write

Now, write down the answers to your reflections from step 2. This will help organize your thinking and gain clarity.

Step 4: Recheck

In this step, go back over what you just reflected on and wrote by exploring and asking questions.

1. What can you change in your life?

2. What advice would you give to someone else if they came to you with this issue?
3. What toxic patterns or habits are you noticing?
4. What assumptions are you making in your thinking?

Step 5: Active Reach

For this step, do any or all the following:

Create a “to-don’t” list instead of a to-do list.

Examine your current commitments. What can you give up? What can you delegate to someone else?

Try to incorporate more “thinker moments” into your day, where you switch off to the external and switch on to the internal and daydream, nap, or stare out a window. Let your mind wander. This is a great way to give the mind and brain time to rest and reboot, which is so important when it comes to mental health.

Build more fun into your routine! Go for more walks, exercise, read some fiction, paint….do more of what brings you joy!

Set and enforce boundaries before you take on anything further.

1. Pause
2. If you agree, take a moment to review what would be required of you.
3. Ask yourself if you truly have the energy and time.
4. Consider whether doing it will offer any kind of value to your life or goals.
5. Question if you want to do this or if you are just trying to people-please.
6. Remember that you’re not lazy, selfish, or mean for declining a request for your precious time. Being selective about accepting commitments is key to taking care of your mental health. Honor the truly important commitments and proactively prevent burnout!