Rancho Bernardo Community Presbyterian Church

Romans 12:2 and Genesis 22:1-3

I love learning about the Revolutionary War period.  Every year in July I read a book about the founders of our nation.  I also enjoy watching specials on the history channel and learning all kinds of new things about our history.  This year I learned about that hurricane in 1780 that destroyed so much of the British army in South Carolina just as General Cornwallis had the American army pinned down for the final defeat.  Wow, talk about an act of God!  I love learning those kinds of things!  That is why it is fun to preach today on the spiritual app of study.  This is one of my favorite apps!

This weekend we continue our summer series on spiritual apps. We began it a couple weeks ago with the explanation that just like people download an app for their smartphones, so we can access certain spiritual apps for specific needs.  I commented that I don’t need a GPS app to help me get from my home to the office, but I found a GPS very helpful in Dallas, Texas.

The power of spiritual apps (short for applications) is that they can help us live the life we’ve always wanted.  In fact, we mentioned John Ortberg’s book by that title, The Life You’ve Always Wanted, as a resource for helping us grow into the best version of who we want to be.  This weekend, let’s explore the spiritual app of study.

Let me start by saying that I am astonished about our modern tendency to gullibly trust others to feed us pre-digested information.  Perhaps we are just overwhelmed with the amount of knowledge available, so we tend to rely too heavily on others’ expertise to interpret information for us.  “It must be correct since I read it in the newspaper!”  Are you sure?  “I saw it on television last week.”  Do television reports ever make mistakes?  Perhaps the most intriguing are those moving stories that get passed around the internet.  How many of them are true?

A few years ago I picked up an inspiring story about how a child needed an organ transplant, and the United States Navy sent the Blue Angels to pick up the donated body organ from an eastern state and deliver it in time to save the child’s life on the west coast.  I told the story as a sermon example.  A couple days later, I got an email from someone who worked with the Blue Angels explaining that while it was nice to credit them with this heroic life saving mission, the story was actually a hoax. 

Unfortunately, many of the inspiring stories circulating on the internet are hoaxes.  Over the years I’ve received dozens of moving email stories that turned out to be hoaxes.  Have you seen the one about Madalyn Murray O’Hair forcing God out of some government document?  Hoax.  Have you seen the one about archeologists uncovering a “giant” that validates a Bible verse in Genesis?  Hoax. 

One of the reasons the spiritual app of study is helpful is that it can keep us from being too gullible.   We can learn to be a bit more like King Solomon in the Bible.   The Bible tells us that King Solomon was the wisest man in his generation.  He was an amateur scholar who enjoyed learning about anything and everything.  His inquisitive mind led him to knowledge and wisdom.  Because he was a lifelong student with an open, teachable attitude, leaders of other nations sought out his wisdom.

The app of study encourages us to be critical in our thinking and not trust everything we read or hear.  While it recognizes that important truths can be found in many different arenas: politics, sciences, literature, psychology, sociology, economics, and other fields, it is still worth double-checking our sources.

Study also involves curiosity about anything and everything.  “I wonder why that works that way?”  “How did they come up with that?”  The real goal, however, is more than knowledge of more facts.  The ability to continually learn in any situation grows into a more loving person.

This spiritual app is less about how much we read or research and more about how much we think.  Last weekend I reminded us of Patrick Henry’s famous words, “Give me liberty or give me death.”  Patrick Henry, though never much of a scholar, was greatly admired for his wisdom.  Mostly a self-taught man, he developed a rule of thumb about reading books.  It was his practice to read about half an hour each day and then spend the rest of the day thinking about what he had read.  Henry believed that it was not so much how many books he read as how deeply he thought about what he read.[1] 

Many of us may find it surprising to learn that Abraham Lincoln had a similar approach to reading and wisdom.  I have always thought of President Lincoln as a voracious reader.  I pictured him reading numerous books throughout his life.  His law partner, William Herndon, revealed something very different about Lincoln.  Lincoln was never a particularly good reader.   While Herndon enjoyed reading many different books in various fields, Lincoln would scan a page or two then hand it back and ask Herndon to summarize what was in it.  Lincoln read slowly, out loud, his entire life. 

Lincoln was never a very good reader, but he was a deep thinker.  Herndon concluded that Lincoln may have read less and thought more than any man of that day in America.[2]  In other words, Lincoln mastered the app of study because he thought deeply about the information he received.

So what is the point? The goal of the spiritual app of study is to help us become a person who is able to listen carefully and engage in honest, meaningful conversations … especially when we disagree with someone. 

Have you ever been so frustrated or angry and disagreed so vehemently with someone that you actually had trouble hearing what the other person was saying?  Yep.  It happens to all of us.  In the midst of heated disputes, our thinking brain actually shuts down while our reptilian brain takes over in a fight or flight reaction.  So what can we do to keep ourselves from subverting our loving relationships?  The spiritual app of study helps us become a person who is able to slow down our assumptions and ideas in order to listen deeply and understand where others are coming from.  It helps us avoid becoming so hardened in our current ideas that we lose the ability to change our mind through open dialogue. 

This spiritual app can be particularly helpful when it comes to understanding the Bible.  A studious look at scripture helps us realize that often a common interpretation of a familiar Bible story misses some important insight.  For instance, let’s take the well-known Bible story of God asking Abraham to offer his son on the altar.

Early in my ministry I arrived home one afternoon to the twinkling eyes of my wife, anxious to tell me about our oldest son’s day.  Nate had led a group of dolls in a worship service.  He lined up the toys and then pretended to be a pastor leading worship.  He announced the numbers of each hymn twice, just like he had heard his dad do.  Speaking distinctly he said, “We will now sing hymn number four.  That is number four in the hymnbook.”  After he sang a song he led his congregation in a prayer.  Then he preached a sermon to them.  His text was the sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham.  (I had recently preached on this text.)  Nate had a very different take on the story. 

Nate explained to the dolls that Isaac, Abraham’s son, had argued with God over the need to present a sacrifice.  Isaac explained to God that he did not want to sacrifice his father.  But God announced to Isaac, “I know that you love your father very much, but you must place him on the altar and sacrifice him to me.”  In Nate’s rendition the son finally placed his father on the altar as a sacrifice.  Just as he raised his hand to take the man’s life, an angel stopped him and explained that God would accept a ram in place of the father.  It had simply been a test of his love for God.

Our son did not know that he was already practicing one of the spiritual apps-devotional meditation.  This is a way of reading the Bible devotionally in order to get at the ‘feeling’ levels of the story.  (We will talk about this next week.)  The danger with only reading the Bible devotionally, however, is that our understanding may suffer from serious inaccuracies in interpretation.  This is where the app of study can help us grow in knowledge and wisdom.

The app of study begins with our seeking as much data and information as we can find from as many sources as possible.  For instance, we gain new insight into the story of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac when we include in our studies knowledge from cultural anthropology.

Cultural anthropology scholars recognize that the surrounding cultures of Abraham’s day often practiced child sacrifice.  It was a common custom in ancient fertility cults to require parents to sacrifice their first son.  If the parents gave up their first-born child, then the god of fertility would give more children.  Thus, many of the Canaanite cultures practiced child sacrifice.

By Canaanite standards, God was not asking Abraham to do anything unusual.  When God asked Abraham to offer his son on the altar, Abraham would prove that he was as faithful as the followers of the other gods.  Once God knew for sure that Abraham would do no less than the devoted followers of other gods, then God did a very surprising thing.  God stopped the human sacrifice.  Instead of requiring that Israelites sacrifice their own children, the Lord taught them a new way to show devotion.  They could offer a substitute sacrifice of an animal in place of their children.  The surprising part of the story in ancient times was not that God asked for the sacrifice of a first-born son, but rather that God accepted a substitute animal in place of Isaac.

The spiritual app of study, then, involves two things.  First, we learn to open our minds by challenging our old assumptions.  Then, when we receive new information, we examine the sources and think deeply as we ask God for wisdom.  God then gives us new insights from the Bible as a way of renewing our minds.

So how is this a spiritual app?  Isn’t this just being an intelligent thoughtful person?  Yes… and no.  What we are really talking about is the old-fashioned Bible word “repentance.”  We often think of repentance as having to do with feelings.  We tend to think that repentance means feeling bad about something we did wrong.  Actually, the Greek word for repentance, metanoia, means, “to change one’s mind.”  We repent when we learn to think differently about something.  Following Jesus involves continuous repentance.  We are always in the process of re-examining what we thought we already knew in order to stay connected with others who hold differing opinions.

In Luke 13 we see an example of how Jesus called people to new thinking.  Some people in the crowd told Jesus about a recent

tragedy.  A tower had collapsed and killed some people.  The common understanding was that the tower had collapsed as an act of God punishing sinners.  Jesus told them to repent.  Repent?  He wasn’t asking them to feel bad about the tragedy.  He was not addressing their feelings, at all.  He was challenging their thinking.  He wanted them to stop thinking that they absolutely knew God’s will.

We cannot continue following Jesus without ongoing repentance, a change of mind.  Now, here’s the problem.  We can’t change our thinking on our own.  We know what we know.  We don’t know what we don’t know.  When left to ourselves we think we are right.  We receive information and sift it through our understandings, which are based on our experiences.  We find it mystifying that someone else wouldn’t see it our way.  If left to ourselves, we cannot change what we think once we have made up our minds that we are right.  So how do we repent?  Only God can move us to repentance.  The only thing we can do is practice the app of study by staying open to new information and asking God to invade our thoughts.

The spiritual app of study invites us to become a lifelong learner.  One of the major benefits is that this helps us stay connected with others even when we strongly disagree with them.  We remain open to listen and learn because we are constantly aware that our current views may be wrong.  This attitude helps us to be a more loving person. 

I bet there are some who are really not on board at this point.  “Say what you want, preacher, but I know what I know.  I’m right!”  Meanwhile, others are thinking, “Well since the preacher said it, he must be right.” 

A few years ago a group of us from our church went to a conference in the Midwest.  After checking in at the hotel, we climbed into the car to drive from the hotel over to the church hosting the conference.  I was handed a map of the city and asked to navigate.  While those in the backseat visited, I gave the driver directions.  “Turn right at the next street.  Now go three blocks and then turn left.”  When I looked up and said we should be on a bridge crossing a river, it was obvious that there was no bridge or river in sight.  In a matter of minutes I had taken us into the whole wrong part of town.  It was not a nice part of town.  We debated whether or not to stop and ask for directions.  Finally someone climbed out of the car and went into a store to ask an attendant for help.  They came back laughing at what the person in the store had said.  “I told him our pastor got us lost.  He said, ‘Only believe what a pastor says in the pulpit.  Once he is out of the pulpit don’t believe a word he says.’” 

While my wife might agree with that advice, I have a correction.   Don’t always believe what the preacher says in the pulpit either.  There was no hurricane that nearly wiped out the British in South Carolina.  Hoax!                           

[1] Henry Mayer, A Son of Thunder: Patrick Henry and the American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991) 41.

[2] Benjamin P.  Thomas, Abraham Lincoln (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1952) 99.