Play It Out | Kyle Idleman | 5.23.21

[Music] uh oh [Music] [Music] cool [Music] [Applause] [Music] maybe seated so in the uh spirit of full disclosure just want to make sure we all understand what we were singing about in those last few minutes when we are singing for god to bring revival in this land what that means is that as people of god it begins with us it begins with us modeling humility it begins with us repenting that's where revival begins when the people of god repent and so we're in the series called it is written and we're learning to find victory over temptation where we repent we confess our sins our temptations and then we learn by the power of god by the word of god to walk in victory we're in james chapter 1 james is going to talk to us about the spiral of sin kind of the cycle of temptation before we jump into some of the texts that was just read for us i want to tell you about this story that was written a number of years ago by h.g wells he wrote this short fable called the country of the blind and in this story the country of the blind there is this village in ecuador that is beautiful but it is very remote and for the past 15 generations everyone born in that village for whatever reason has been blind in fact blindness goes so far back in that village that the concept of sight isn't even a thing they don't even know what it means to see that idea was lost generations earlier but according to his story one day there was an explorer that was hiking and he stumbled upon the country of the blind and he realized pretty quickly that he was the only person in that country who could see that everyone else was blind and so he began to try to tell the people who lived there about sight about eyes and he talked to them about the greenness of the grass and and the blue sky but when he did the people just didn't understand and then they didn't believe him and then they thought he was crazy and and he tried to talk to them about you know the sun and the moon and the stars at night and they they mocked him and they began to ridicule him and they all decided together that there was something wrong with this man who said that he could see they thought of his sight as a disability that that probably he should do something about i mean that was their mentality and they they began to ridicule him they didn't want to hear anything more from him about seeing or what it was like to have sight when i read the short story i thought a little bit about what it's like to live in our world today because it can sometimes feel like we live in in the country of the blind and if you if you have eyes to see what is beyond just the natural world then people think you're a little off if you can see sin and see temptation if you see the reality of evil forces that we talked about last week the reality of a tempter who attacks and if you see these things if you see behind this earthly curtain to what lies beyond increasingly you're made to feel like there's something wrong with you because you can see what other people can't and so what james is going to do is he's going to talk to us about the reality of sin and temptation he's going to try to open our eyes to what's happening around us the spiral of sin and and the cycle of temptation how it works so that we can identify it we can see it our eyes can be opened to it and we can we can escape it so in james chapter one he begins um by talking about temptation verse 13 by saying when tempted when not if tempted when tempted like it's it's everywhere and it's inevitable so if you say well i don't i don't really have an issue with that i don't feel very tempted in my life okay well that's because you're blind to it like you've become numb to it you don't you don't see it you've become accustomed to it but but it's it's a win it's not an if it's it's temptation and it's it's everywhere and and if you look at chapter one this comes after a section where he's talked about uh suffering and trials so in earlier in chapter one he says when trials come and now he says when temptation comes and he he links together he links together trials in temptation he links together difficulties and struggles in life with a temptation to sin and so if if you if you think about this in your own life chances are that you could probably track a little bit of this right when when you were going through something difficult then maybe you found that your default was disobedience right when you are feeling some sense of disappointment in your life there is a tendency towards a destructive decisions like am i the only one who would recognize this like when you're going through something difficult you have this vulnerability to do some things that you might not otherwise struggle with like if you've had a really hard day at work and it was just a struggle and nothing went your way on the drive home then you see krispy kreme and it's like i deserve that after the day i've had i deserve it and that temptation is a little bit more real to you because of the trials that you've been through and i i don't know if you've thought about the link here james doesn't do this i mean i some of this is is my speculation he talks about the link between trial and temptation he doesn't really say why there are a number of reasons why i think though it comes from especially in our western world that i deserve it mentality so if i'm going through this and i deserve that if i'm struggling in this way and it's not my fault and it's what someone else has done to me or it's situations and circumstances that i can't control and i'm having to endure that then i deserve this i deserve this pleasure even if it's only for a moment i deserve it and so we have the spirit of entitlement that often comes in seasons of suffering and some of you i mean this is your story it's your story and you feel like after after your husband hasn't seen you or noticed you you feel like you deserve to have someone make you feel seen and special you feel like after your your wife has rejected you then you deserve to have some indulging on the website after you've gone through what you've gone through your senior year in high school you deserve to go a little bit crazy before you start college in the fall after they've treated you the way they've treated you it worked and then you deserve to do what you said you weren't going to do and stop at the bar have a few drinks on the way home after the person has been disrespectful to you and treated you the way they have then then you deserve to lose your temper and get angry and call some names i mean they they have it coming if this happens to you then you have a right to respond in this way that's how temptation and trial tends to get linked together if i'm going through this then i i deserve to do that we might not say it consciously but there's something within us that justifies temptation based on you know what we're going through so there's this one two punch that james talks about that we get hit with a trial and then the enemy comes in with a couple quick temptation jabs like that's that's how it plays out so he says when tempted he talks about where it comes from when tempted no one should say god is tempting me for god cannot be tempted by evil nor does he tempt anyone when i read this as a pastor i'm assuming that james as a pastor had people saying this like he says no one should say god is tempting me which probably means they're people who are saying well god's tempting me in other words i have a right to give in to the desire that i feel because god's the one who gave me the desire and he's the one who seems to be opening up the door for that desire to be fulfilled so it's god who's tempting me if he's tempting me that it must be okay and james says don't do that god doesn't god doesn't tempt anyone there's tests and there's trials and then there are temptations and god doesn't god doesn't tempt anyone it doesn't come from god so the question then is well where does it where does it come from verse 14 each one is tempted when by his own evil desires its own evil desire so let's talk about desires here because this is where it begins and we all would probably recognize that we have some divine desires some desires that god has given us that i have good purpose that are powerful that have meaning [Music] but oftentimes our desires are not uh focused on being fulfilled the way god has said so he gives us a desire but then we don't follow what he said in order to find fulfillment in those desires and then that becomes really destructive so how do our how do our desires become how do they become evil you know how how do our desires get derailed i think there are a couple of ways that would be worth highlighting one is just dna yeah the bible will talk about sin struggles that are generational that they from adam on they've been passed down there's this inheritance that gets passed down i mean some of you recognize this right like you got something maybe good from mom or dad like we talk about inheritance of wealth but you also inherited weaknesses like you got some things that are blessings but maybe you got maybe you got your dad's nose and your mom's thighs you didn't ask for that you didn't ask for that like inheritance isn't always strength sometimes it's stronghold it's not always wealth sometimes it's weakness we recognize that that's true and and many of you would understand this in your temptation and struggles is that you're not the first one in your family to deal with it in fact you were determined it wouldn't be your story and yet it's been it's been a struggle for you as well and and and james doesn't blame mom and dad doesn't blame generate he says it's your own evil desire so it's not an excuse but it's an explanation it's understanding how our our desires get derailed um and then for a lot of us in fact for all of us to some degree or another what makes our desires evil is the way that they're developed in the world we live in like every thing around us whether we know it or not or realize it or not has a way of if we're not careful discipling our desires and there are a couple of laws and psychology that i've mentioned that i think are especially relevant here and the bible teach teaches these things very clearly but i know for some of you it helps if you hear how science confirms what scripture has already said so so one law of psychology is the law of cognition it's where we get cognitive psychology the the law of cognition says that that your life is shaped by your thoughts if you want to change your attitude or change your relationships or change your behavior that what you think about and how you think has a lot to do with those things the bible puts it exactly that way in proverbs chapter 4 a man's life is shaped by his thoughts as a man thinks in his heart so is he the bible says and so our desires are significantly shaped by the way we think what we think about our thoughts are shaping our defining our determining are deepening the desires that we have and then there's also what's called the law of exposure the law of exposure says that our mind absorbs and then reflects whatever it's exposed to the most right so whatever you listen to and look at whatever you give your attention to and focus towards that's what you think about and what you think about has a way for our purposes here of defining determining your desires what you expose yourselves to determines your thoughts your thoughts and significantly not the only factor significantly determines desire and so those are laws some of you hear that you're like well i don't know about that like i don't that stuff doesn't affect me i i feel like i can you know i don't get impacted influenced by a lot of that stuff i feel like i can watch what i want to and listen to what i want to it doesn't really well that's uh wrong like so it's a law it's it's it's it's a law like it's like arguing against the law of gravity like you you can do that but you look like a when when you fall and hit your face on the ground i don't it's a law so i just got the sign language for that out of the corner of my eye uh you [Laughter] you don't have to like it to live by it right you still have to live by it so there are these there are these laws that we we live by and have a way of defining our desires about 10 years ago i read a book called wired for intimacy and the the author his name is william strothers he gives this word picture and it reminded me of when i was a boy and um elementary school and we would go to my grandparents who lived in illinois and my my grandparents had they didn't live on a farm they lived in a neighborhood but they had some farmland outside the county and my grandpa i was the only grandson so the two of us would sometimes go out spend the day on the farm and he had at his farm this old uh this isn't the actual water pump but it was like this this old water pump that was on the farm and i remember this when i was a kid and and this water pump i don't know if he did it on purpose or if there was something a little bit wrong with it but it would just constantly it would constantly drip constantly drip even when it shut off it would constantly drip and there was a cement concrete slab underneath this and here's what happens over time is the water drips out of the water pump and then it would hit the concrete and it would go maybe the three feet of that slab and off the end of it just one drip after another after another and and over time it developed this uh trough and not deep but you know half an inch an inch you could just see where that water over time had had worn through that concrete and and and in his book strothers talks about that this is this is the way our brains work now we all have these troughs we all have these pathways they're called neural pathways and everything that we're exposed to is developing in some way a neural a neural pathway and and so when you have desires that come up as young adults as adults the neural pathways you've established that's where those desires go they get they get put in that trough they get funneled down that neural pathway now in his book he talks about the fact that pornography is is like playing with neurochemical fire neurochemical fire and he says what modern day pornography does is it doesn't create troughs it creates canyons and what has happened for you know many in this generation is that they find themselves stuck in a canyon their desires are stuck in this canyon they don't remember they don't remember ever deciding that this is where i want my desires to go they don't ever remember having any control over funneling their desires down that neural pathway but but from the time they were young there was this constant dripping they were constantly being exposed to the certain way of thinking and and this trough turned into a canyon and now these desires that they have are just all being funneled through this canyon i don't know how to get out of it the bible calls this a stronghold in your life that you're caught up in this um temptation caught up in the sin and and your desires your thoughts um you don't know how to recapture them so in second corinthians 10 paul's writing to christians about this how to break free from strongholds and he he says to take every thought captive take captive every thought and make it obedient to christ and he uses uh like mma language here you wrestle it you throw it down you hold it down every thought and as you do that there's a lot of elasticity in those neural pathways and eventually that canyon begins to close up eventually new pathways can be created god makes can make everything new it's what he can do and so paul says here you take every thought captive and you stamp it with it is written you you claim the truth of god over that thought and and so our desires get derailed and i know that culturally in the country of the blind what you'll be told is hey the way you find freedom is you just give in to your desire whatever you feel is what you should do give into your desires whatever they are whenever you want and i would just tell you there's no quicker path away from freedom than that your desires will make a slave out of you and this is a hard thing to talk about because even as i'm talking what your desires are doing one of the ways one ways you know this is real is that while i'm talking your desires are doing two things they're lowering your defenses and they're making you defensive like right like right now they're lowering your defenses they're making you think things like well i hear what you're saying kyle and i think that's probably true for a lot of people but i'm okay i'm okay i've got this reigned in i know how far it's too far i just you're telling yourself things like this isn't really affecting anyone other than me that's the kind of thing you're telling yourself and and you're lying you're lying to yourself but your desires are are trying to lower your defenses they're they're telling hey you can take one bite you just eat one bite and then they make you defensive so somebody tries to talk to you about it and you're like oh really you're going to talk to me about that what about you and and that's what desires do is they lower your defenses they make you defensive and then the next step as this plays out is um begins with desire and then it goes towards deception it says you're dragged away by their own evil desires and enticed dragged away and enticed dragged away is a hunting term means snared in a trap you take something that is desired and you use it as bait but it's a trap this is how the tempter works he knows about our desires and then he sets a trap i saw a story in the news a couple months ago a pretty good picture of this this is this is mason and mason is uh caught in a claw vending machine and he was able to crawl up in there he saw all these toys and and so he climbed but then he couldn't get out he was trapped had to call the fire uh house and they came to rescue him and and we look at this and we're like oh mason really you don't think this is your life you you don't think this is you like i get you that your toys are nicer and more expensive but but you you don't think as an adult you've ever found yourself in mason's position like you're you're trapped you've got four like your monthly payments are just surrounding you and you're sitting amongst all your toys like this this this happens to us this happens to us too we get snared in a trap and and then james says that you're enticed and that phrase enticed is a fisherman's term which means lured by bait um i fish once in a while not an avid fisherman but this is a lure it's not my lure which one of the ways you know i'm not an avid fisherman i had to buy the prop but but this is a lure and um i think it's called a spinning lure but the way this works is you know it uh hides the hook it's sparkly lines of distraction it gets noticed and a good fisherman knows that if this lure isn't working that's okay you just switch to a different lure find some different bait and you just keep switching until you find something that hits and the good fisherman knows that the key is that you you you don't just throw in the hook like you hide the hook you hide the hook and and you show him the bait and that's what the tempter does for us he's an expert at hiding the hook and showing the bait when i was a sophomore in high school i was working on a science project you remember science projects and and some of you remember because you did your kids last year but i was i was working on my science project and and my partner in this for my science project was somebody that many of you would recognize uh is matt bayless who uh leads worship for us often and we're 15 16 years old and we were doing our science project and and what we were doing it on is the effects of alcoholism effects of alcohol and our science teacher approved it but just made it clear that we weren't to experiment on ourselves and um and so we we had an idea of how to do an experiment we're going to have a mouse a maze and some alcohol and the idea was that we'd run the mouse through the maze get the mouse drunk and then run the mouse through the maze again and then document the differences that was the idea and and so we needed a mouse of maize and some beer and and so the mouse and the maze not not too much trouble for 15 year olds to get their hands on but beer was a little tougher neither of our parents had alcohol in the home and so i remembered though that my neighbor would would sit on his back porch and drink beer and i'm like well doesn't hurt to ask so i i go over and knock on his door he answers the door i don't know him i'm like um i'm your neighbor and we've got this science project that we're working on we need some beer and there are probably all kinds of questions he should have asked and things he should have said that he said okay and he went and he he got us a six-pack of budweiser told us to have a good day being being neighborly and so the experiment began and i'll just say this if you ever find yourself in a similar position where you're trying to get a mouse drunk it's harder than it sounds like it's not it's not easy we thought it would be so first thing we did was we tried to get it to drink right out of the can we just thought hey this we'll try to have this we'll have this mouse shotgun this beer sure he's gonna love it no he had no interest in it and then we poured um a budweiser into a bowl kind of made a a bud wiser bathtub for the mouse and and yeah and and we put the mouse in it and um thought well maybe that will work that didn't work i wasn't interested and we kept it outside in the cage for a while tried to get it thirsty and then we we got a like a turkey baster and we tried to force feed it i guess and that didn't that didn't work either like nothing nothing seems we had like a t-totaling mouse i don't i don't know i i wanted to i felt like at some point it was the problem the mouse had like how do i trade in my southern baptist mouse for a good catholic map mouse how do i do that [Applause] i ran that by my catholic friend so don't email don't don't email me i'll and eventually what we did is we came up with the idea of a uh a milkshake or a beer shake or a mouse shake however you want to look and so we took the beer we mixed up with some cheese blended that together and and it worked it worked and i don't remember i mean we did well we got a blue ribbon in a science project uh in hindsight though i think we falsified most of the research which is kind of what you do with high school science projects uh and and here's how here's how it works here's how we are lured is we have a temperature and the temperature doesn't just say hey here's the hook hope you bite like he hides it disguises it tries different things sees what'll get you and then he's an expert at blending and he'll he'll blend something that's really actually good something that god has said is good but he'll blend it with a little bit of poison i'll take what god has said is good and he'll say well yeah but you don't have to do it god's way and he just blends that all up he likes especially he likes to take lies and blend lies together with truth and just he just blends it together so that you don't really notice the lies and then you can find people on youtube who are like experts at blending and they'll take oh here's what god said and here's some lies hit the blender oh okay and it makes us all feel a little bit better about taking a bite james says then after desire is conceived it gives birth to sin so it's desire deception disobedience and then he says sin when it is full grown gives birth to death and and that's that's how it plays out desire deception disobedience death and he uses language here that seems really strange i think because he talks about it in terms of pregnancy it says your desire gives birth when it's full grown it gives birth to sin and then the sin gives birth to death what's he talking about there i think he's using this language because for for many of us the desire we give into it we satisfy it get pregnant with it and it doesn't seem like anything's really happening like oh oh okay and we think we're getting away with it nobody seems to notice we're not showing but then one day you start to show and he says and you get pregnant with it and then what you deliver is death that is a really uncomfortable um combination of ideas that you're you're pregnant with desire and then you give birth to death it's uncomfortable to me because birth is always especially in the literature is going to be associated with things that are beautiful and sweet and good and i think one of the things james does here is he he contrasts these things because this is what temptation does is it promises something good but it's not what it delivers it promises it promises intimacy and you feel you feel so lonely and so temptation promises that that's going to go away and you do about anything for that to go away and so it promises intimacy but you know you know what it delivers don't you it delivers loneliness you feel more lonely than ever and it it promises pleasure and there is pleasure that it doesn't last and it delivers pain it promises life part of the temptation right now is like you're you you see other people and i i feel like i'm missing out but that's not what gets delivered what gets delivered is is death and so james says this is how it plays out this is how the spiral of temptation works you got to think it through and big book of a.a says you got to think through the drink like when the drink is in front of you that's all you see you're blind to what's on the other side of it and where it's gonna you gotta think through the drink you gotta stop and open your eyes and see what's on the other side of it you gotta see where it's leading and who it's going to impact and how it's going to affect the world around you and the people around you got to think through that you you got to think through the yelling and the screaming and yeah you know what you're going to feel better for a moment but on the other side of that you got to think through it you got to think through 30 seconds after you log off the website you got to think through the other side of that you got to think through after you swipe the credit card or order the item you got to think through it like right now that's all you can see but you got to think through it you got to think through sending the text like like right now that it's right there that's all you can see but you got to think through the drink you got to see to the other side of it you got to play this thing out because you're getting pregnant with something and you're going to deliver death and pain not just into your life but into the lives of people around you john or james 3 16 or 116 rather he goes on to say don't be deceived my dear brothers and sisters in other words don't don't be blind don't be blind my dear brothers and sisters every good and perfect gift is from above coming down from the father of heavenly lights who does not change like shifting shadows don't be blind to this don't let your eyes be closed to the reality that god is a good father who gives good gifts and he's coming back down to what we hit last week that god is a father who can be trusted he is a good father and his way is the best way and and you're going to be surrounded with lies that say otherwise don't be deceived by that god is a good father his gifts are good gifts and he doesn't shift like changing shadows and so he says look at that keep your eyes focused on that and and so we find that temptation is not just about resisting it's about replacing it's not just about resisting your desires it's about replacing your desires with the greatest desire a greater desire and what god offers so let me take you back to the country of the blind the story goes that the man who stumbled onto that lost country the man who was mocked and ridiculed because he could see that eventually he became more and more quiet about his sight because nobody wanted to hear it but but he fell in love with a young lady who lived in the country of the blind and the father of the young lady said look you can marry my daughter but you got to do something about your condition and so the father talked to the doctor in the community and the doctor said i don't think the surgery is difficult i think we just need to remove these things that he talks about called eyes and then he'll be normal he'll be fixed and so the father went and talked to the man and said look you want to marry my daughter here's what you need to do you need you need to be like everyone else and so wells writes that this man had fully meant to go to a lonely place he had determined to go to a lonely place where the meadows were beautiful and there remain until the hour of his surgery would come that as he walked he lifted up his eyes and he saw the beauty of the morning and the man who could see escaped the country of the blind that night he laid under the night sky and he stared at the bright stars and he let the beauty fill his eyes this is what we are doing now we are letting our eyes see we are being reminded of the beauty that god is a good father who gives good gifts and everywhere around us we're told there's something wrong for us with us for seeing it that way i mean i i know that some of you are are you're going to leave here and and for the most part every moment that you spend the rest of this week is going to be in the country of the blind but you keep your eyes open and you keep your heart soft what keeps your eyes open and what keeps your heart soft the word of god opens our eyes the spirit of god softens our heart it's a word of god it is the spirit of god let's pray god i thank you for um i thank you for your grace that allows us to see like there's no one here that gets to claim credit for that you have allowed us to see you've made us to see we were blind by our own sin and you gave us sight not because we earned it or deserved it because you you paid the price for us on the cross and then you called us and we heard and so i thank you for that i pray that this would be a church um where people who are blind could become people who see who see what's real and true who see beyond a natural world and and recognize that there is there is an eternity that awaits us and jesus i pray that even in these next few minutes that um as we take communion it would be a time of repentance and confession and as we do that there's just something powerful in that where it washes away what's been blinding us the sin that has kept us from seeing so i pray that as we take communion together you would you would restore our sight it's in jesus name we pray amen

Channel: Southeast Christian Church

Views: 6,124

Keywords: Southeast Christian Church, Dave Stone, Kyle Idleman, creative church, sermon series, worship, Jesus, God, Louisville, Kentucky

Id: YJpJ_HG5vJ8

Length: 36min 44sec (2204 seconds)

Published: Sun May 23 2021