350lb Gorilla in the Room

Well, thank you, Mr. Babb, and good afternoon, everyone. I bring you large greetings from your brethren up north in the Roseburg area. We were just scheduled to come down here today, but we thought, well, we need to get out and stretch our legs. So we just managed to pass by Roseburg about the time that they were getting done with services. So we popped in and got a chance to see Bob and Laura and Mr. and Mrs. New send their greetings in their regards. So they all said, tell everyone hello for us. I said, I will do that. I will certainly do that, and we'll pass on the greetings. Well, brethren, if you happen to have a connection to the internet, there's a very good chance you couldn't escape last week without a reference to the dress. For those that happen to be blissfully unaware of what internet phenomenon I'm referring to, one, consider yourself blessed, and two, it's white and gold. This past week, the internet collectively blew its mind over a photograph of a dress. Seriously, a photograph of a dress. But the trick with this dress and why it was so interesting is that due to the lighting of the photograph, it changed how individuals perceived the photo. So some people would see it as one color, while another would see it as another. Now, reality, the actual dress itself, was blue and black. But because the photo was taken in a certain degree of light, it appeared to many to be white and gold. So others clearly saw black and blue, others clearly saw white and gold. Science has since weighed in and managed to explain the situation through something called color constancy. But it brought to the forefront a conversation over the idea of perception. How we as humans see things and how we perceive the world around us. And the fact that we don't always, not everybody sees the world around us the same. That was kind of an interesting thing that came out of it. The dress, quote-unquote, went beyond viral. I went beyond viral. For two days, it seemed like the only thing anybody could talk about. Now, granted, I surround myself with 13 and 14 year olds, so that explains a lot. But the reality is, we've all been at the receiving end of this kind of viral content. We've all gotten something from someone, oh, you gotta check this out! And when you get done with you, oh, that's really funny! I want to send that to people I know so that they can see it. And that's why we refer to them as viral. They pass from one person to the next as you kind of forward them to everybody that you know.

The toss-up with viral videos is a lot like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates. You never really know what you're gonna get. And so you open up the viral video, and maybe it's a video about some baby who just absolutely loses their cookies when the mom blows its nose. You know, the baby just goes crazy because mom's blowing her nose. Maybe it's a parrot, which at first glance seems to be a little more intelligent than some of the students that you teach. Maybe it's folks catching fish with a remote control boat. Maybe it's people launching themselves down a hallway with fire extinguishers in an office chair. So on and so forth. Many of them are humorous. But many of the times, as you probably well have noticed as well, you sit down and you think to yourself, boy, I'd sure love that two to three minutes back. But that's the two to three minutes I'm never going to get back. You know, that was not the case with the video that I'm about to show you guys. And I appreciate you guys being willing to set up the projector and everything. I know it's a lot of extra work, but I want to take a second and show this to you guys. I've got to get myself logged back in here and make sure that I'm not standing on my power cord. There we go. Turn this back on real quick.

Give that a second to load up. But this particular video, that wasn't the case. This wasn't a video that I wanted my two to three minutes back. This was a video that I found absolutely fascinating. And frankly, it was pleasantly surprising. It was pleasantly surprising. And the reason that it was pleasantly surprising was it was atypical of the kind of video that you receive when you get something from someone that is one of these viral type videos. It was actually something that was interesting. It was actually something that had a particular message to it. It was something that actually was able to give me a little bit of a spiritual instruction. I thought I'd share this with you today because it contains a very important spiritual lesson for the spring holy day season. As we're all beginning this process and going through this process of examination and thinking about our life spiritually, this was a really interesting lesson for me. The video is very short and I'm going to take just a little bit of time to show it to you. It requires audience participation. There's no sound. All you have to do is watch. But I'm going to give you a task. You have some very specific instructions to follow on this particular task. If you've seen this before, please follow along and don't give away the ending. I'm going to play this real quick just to give you your instructions. You don't have to have sound. Mine does sort of. It's playing right now.

What you're going to do real quick is you're going to keep track of the amount of times that the people in the white shirts pass the basketball. Now my understanding is that there's actually some kind of a discrepancy between genders. There's one gender that tends to be a little better at this than others. I won't tell you who that is, but I'm sure you can probably figure it out.

But just take a look at it real quick. You're looking for the number of times the basketball was passed between those that are wearing white shirts. Okay? Yes, sir. Any time the white passed the basketball to another white-shirted person. Okay.

Okay. So how many passes do people count real quick?

Thirteen. I got eight. I got seven. Fifteen. Sixteen. Did anybody notice anything weird?

Something unusual. What'd you see? A gorilla. How many saw the gorilla?

So if your hand's not in the air right now, you're like me the first time I watched it. What gorilla? There's not a gorilla in this video. Let me rewind it for a moment.

All right. Now, what I want you to do this time, we're going to do it just a little. I'm not giving you a specific task this time. What I want you to do is just kind of forget about how many times the basketball was passed. Just watch it as a scene as a whole. Step back, watch the whole thing progress. This is the exact same video. All I did was rewind it. If you didn't see the gorilla, go ahead and kill it. If you didn't see the gorilla, you're not alone. Actually, just a little over half of the people who watch this video do not see the gorilla up front. Now, there is a slight gender preference. It turns out more women than men tend to see the gorilla. Women, you're multitaskers. You tend to be watching more of the scene at a given time. Guys were just like, I'm going to figure out how many times that ball was passed. The answer, by the way, for the ball passing is 13. That's the way we guys are. We're like, yes, 13 times! I got it! But, you know, when I saw this the first time and they said, but did you see the gorilla? I said, no, what gorilla? What are you talking about? I was flabbergasted to see that there actually was a gorilla. Not only just a gorilla, I was shocked that it was so obvious. The gorilla walked through the screen, stopped, went like this a few times, right in the middle of the scene, and then walked out the other side. I was flabbergasted, but it got me thinking. It got me thinking a lot. Why are we able to see the gorilla the second time around and not necessarily the first time that we see it? How could we possibly miss something so obvious? Dr. Daniel Simons and Dr. Christopher Shabris, who are the two fellows at Harvard that did this particular study, designed it to prove a psychological concept known as selective attention. What selective attention is, selective attention is the idea that if individuals are given a specific task to perform, in this case, your specific task was to focus on one aspect of the video. How many times the ball was passed? Especially if that video is very dynamic, very kinetic, there's a lot of movement, then they'll miss out on other very obvious aspects of the situation because of their laser-like focus on the task at hand. In other words, we call this in the vernacular, not seeing the forest for the trees. You're focused so much on that one little thing that you miss out on all of the other things, maybe at the periphery. But in other words, we can become so focused on the details that we can miss the point. In order to see the whole image, we have to take a step back and we have to examine the scene in context, and only then can we see the 350-pound gorilla in the room.

You know, this time of year as we approach the Passover, God's people are actively examining their lives. They're looking at that picture and they're looking for the sin in their lives as we're instructed. Let's start taking a look today at the instructions that were given and start by kind of examining the need for, well, examining. So let's turn over to 1 Corinthians. We'll head over to 1 Corinthians 11. And we're going to begin today taking a look at the instructions given to us by the Apostle Paul and to the Corinthian church regarding our taking of the Passover.

We'll go ahead and pick it up in verse 23 of 1 Corinthians 11.

And we're going to read through verse 32. So 1 Corinthians 11, 23, and we'll read it through verse 32. 1 Corinthians 11 verse 23 says, Verse 27 Paul starts out by reminding the people of Corinth what the Passover observance is all about.

And the idea that letting them know as often as they take of this particular holy day and of these symbols, that they commemorate and they proclaim the death of Christ until he returns. And really, let you know how important this holy day is. But he then goes on to warn them in verse 27 that they're not to take of this particular holy day unworthily. That word's given me pause for years as I've read through that and looked at what does it mean to be unworthy. What does it mean to take the Passover unworthily. And what it kind of conjures in my mind, I don't know about your own, conjures this image in your mind of a giant balance. Do you ever remember those from science class? You got the one thing on one side, the little two little plates on one side, and it kind of does one of these. You put a known mass on one side and then you just keep sticking mass on the other until you get everything to balance. The problem in this image in my head is that on one side of that balance is the perfect standard of Jesus Christ, and on the other side is me. Clearly, even at my best, I can't measure up. So am I considered unworthy of taking the Passover? No. No. And sometimes we have that tendency to put ourselves up on this thing where we go, there's no way we can measure up, so therefore, no, that's not what the goal is. Rather, our Passover examination is not a summative assessment. It's not a summative assessment. You know, assessment is one of those huge buzzwords in education today, and for those that are all plugged in, if you have kids in school or whatever else, some of you maybe that are in public schools, you recognize the sheer number of tests that you take today compared to the number of tests that your parents took. There's state tests, there's district tests, there's unit tests, there's quizzes, there's... I mean, it's just it's constant. It truly is constant. Our computer lab, honestly, the middle school that I teach at, our computer lab from the months of middle of February clear through June, is booked daily for state testing, standardized state testing on computers daily. There are classes in there every single day doing some form of state testing between the months of February and June. It's just crazy. Education is so data-driven. You have to know exactly where your kids are, you have to know exactly what they're doing, and you have to keep track of all of their data, and there's two ways to do that. There are summative assessments, and there are formative assessments. Summative assessment is the test that many of you guys are likely familiar with, that you had when you were in school. Basically, the teacher goes through, they do the curriculum, they give the lecture, they teach the class, you go through, you do a lab, you do whatever, you do your homework, your classwork, and when the unit's done, there's a test. You take the test, you get your grade, no one ever goes back, you never look at it again. You never see it again. You get your grade back, and well, that's where I'm at. It's a very Daniel 527 kind of thing.

You know, your wage, you're measured, and today, you know, many of the students are found wanting. Okay, they're just, they're not quite, and it was the same thing when we were in school. You know, the number of kids that did poorly was there, too. But in other words, you get the grade, and you move on to the next topic. You never come back to that. You never have a chance to correct what went wrong or what you didn't understand. It's, nope, here's your grade, we're moving on. That's a summative assessment. That's a summative assessment, and our Passover examination is not summative.

The opposite side of that coin is what's called formative assessment. Formative assessment. And that's where the student is tested, and the results of that testing is used by the teacher to see what needs to be retaught. Now, as you can imagine, from my side as a teacher, formative assessment's hard.

I have 34 kids in a class, five classes a day. That's about 140 to 150 kids by the time it's all said and done, and every one of them is in a very different place. Not everybody knows the same thing at the same time and where they're at. So you have to structure things in such a way that you can make sure that the students that didn't get it have an opportunity to get it. You know, when we get a chance to go through and cover that material again, you get a chance to focus on areas where they're deficient. Areas where they need help. And ultimately, yeah, they do have a summative assessment eventually. You can't stay in the same unit all year long. Eventually, you have to cut it off and move forward. But it's not necessarily to decide whether they got it or not. It's to find out where they are at that moment in time so that you can go back and re-teach if needed. And rather, in our Passover examination every year is a formative assessment. Do you ever notice that it seems like we're continually tried in the same areas of our life? It's called re-teaching. That's what that is. It's re-teaching. For whatever reason, we didn't get it the last time and we needed another opportunity to go through it. Another opportunity to understand it. You know, God allows us to be, you know, tried in the same places in our lives so that we can learn the lesson that we were intended to learn. Whether that lesson is to overcome a certain sin. Whether that lesson is to learn to rely on God, to increase our faith. You know, whatever that lesson may be, God gives us these re-teaching opportunities to give us a chance to pass the test. Formative assessment also allows us to look at our life in its various facets. Look at individual aspects and find the areas that we do need to work on and make those changes as need be so that when that summative assessment finally does come, we will be found worthy. You know, the word translated unworthily here in 1 Corinthians 11 is the Greek word anaxios. It's a Greek word anaxios, which is actually better translated in an irreverent manner. Rather than unworthy, but in an irreverent manner. And so the commentary is when you read into this section, it seems to indicate that Corinthians had some issues in the way that they kept the Passover. They were getting together and they were observing it irreverently. Many were eating and drinking of the bread and wine to their fill or treating it like a meal rather than the symbols of Christ's body. Some were partaking of the wine to the point of drunkenness, which is evidenced by Paul's instructions in 29 to 34 that they need to be careful to discern the spiritual aspects of the Passover. And then in verse 34, he tells them to eat before you come to the Passover. It's not a common dinner. It's a solemn commemoration. But Paul, without a doubt, tells us the attitude with which we need to examine ourselves. He tells us that that's extremely important. He also tells us that the way that we take of the Passover is also extremely important. So what do we need to do? Well, verse 28. Let's go back to verse 28 real quick. 1 Corinthians 11 verse 28. 1 Corinthians verse 11, or I'm sorry, 11, 28. It says, But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup. So we see that we're to examine ourselves. The word examine there is dokimatsu, which is translated here as examine, but that doesn't really tell the whole story. Let's go over to 2 Corinthians 13 real quick. Let's go over to 2 Corinthians 13. We'll see some additional context here. 2 Corinthians 13. 2 Corinthians 13, and we're going to pick it up in verse 5.

Same word translated within my Bible, examine, but it's a slightly different use of the word.

2 Corinthians 13 verse 5 is examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you, unless indeed you are disqualified? But I trust that you will know that we are not disqualified. But the word examine there, as we're again instructed to do here, this one's not necessarily within the context of Passover.

This one's a little bit of a different context. This is rather an overall examination to see whether we're in the faith or not. It's a little bit of a different word use here. The word is pyrazzo, which means to objectively test. To objectively test. That we're to test ourselves objectively, without bias, without looking at our life in such a way that we might be led to believe one thing about ourselves or another. That we are willing to step back and take a look at the whole picture and see really where we are. Trying to kind of see ourselves as God sees us. Trying to see ourselves as God sees us. Sometimes, going into our Passover examination, we pray that, God in mercy, please let me see myself in the way that you see me. Show me the places in my life that need to be taken care of. But it's a much, much stronger word. A little bit later in here, as well. There's a section right here in 1 Corinthians 13 that talks about proving. Let me find it real quick. I lost it. Right here where it says test yourself. It says test yourself. Some translations say prove yourself. Prove yourself. That's kind of a context of a metal worker. Looking at a metal worker, how they prove metal through the use of heat. Barnes' notes on the New Testament have a really incredible explanation of the concept of testing and proving ourselves. It's from this section. Barnes notes on the New Testament says, this word, prove, refers to a saying or trying metals by the powerful action of heat. The idea here is that they should make the most thorough trial of their religion to see whether it would stand the test. It says, see the note on 1 Corinthians 3 verse 13. The proof of their piety was to be arrived at by a faithful examination of their own hearts and lives by a diligent comparison of their views and feelings with the word of God, and especially by making trial of it in life. The best way to prove our piety is to subject it to actual trial in the various duties and responsibilities of life.

This is a great analogy. It says, a man who wishes to prove an axe to find out whether it is good or not doesn't sit down and look at it. He doesn't read all the treatises which he can find on axe making and on the properties of iron and of steel, as valuable as that information may be, but he shoulders his axe, he goes into the woods, and he puts it into trial there. If it cuts well, if it does not break, if it's not soon made dull, he understands the quality of his axe better than he could in any other way. So if a man wishes to know what his religion is worth, let him try it in the places where religion is of any value. Let him go into the world with it. Let him go into the dry go into the world and try to do good, to endure affliction in a proper manner, to combat the errors in the follies of life, to admonish sinners of the error of their ways, and to urge forward the great work of the conversion of the world, and he will soon see there what his religion is worth.

As easily as a man can test the qualities of an axe, let him not merely sit down and think and compare himself with the Bible and look at his own heart, valuable as that may be in many respects, but let him treat his religion as he would anything else. Let him subject it to actual experiment. You know, this is the kind of examination that we need to be doing in our lives before Passover.

We need to be looking at our lives, every aspect, every facet of our life, to determine whether we're proving our faith. This isn't an academic study. It's an active evaluation of our lives. We need to get our hands dirty. It's corrective self-examination.

The question that we have to ask ourselves when we do corrective self-examination is actually fairly simple, but it's very hard to answer. Are we walking the walk? Does every aspect of our life, outside of our academic study of the Bible and our academic study of God's Word, does it show us walking the walk? You know, summation of this section can actually be found in 1 Corinthians 11.31. Let's go back over there real quick. 1 Corinthians 11 verse 31. And we'll kind of see the summation of the section that we saw at the beginning.

1 Corinthians 11 verse 31 says, For if we would judge ourselves, we would not be judged. But when we are judged, we are chastened by the Lord, that we may not be condemned with the world.

You know, if we would judge ourselves, if we would find the areas of our life that need fixing and fix them, then there would be no need for the chastening of the Lord and the condemnation that then comes from that chastening. But, brethren, we don't do that well. Mankind has never done that well. It was a problem then, it's a problem now, and it will continue to be a problem until Christ's return, because we don't see the gorilla. We don't see the gorilla.

You know, worldwide, on January 1st, the people of the world examine their lives.

They take a look and take stock of the things that they feel like they need to work on in their lives. And, you know, the list of things that people put together usually has one thing at the top. And some of the more common things that people look at, for example, is eating better, exercising, quitting smoking, drinking less, among a whole host of other things. The concept of Lent is kind of similar to that idea, you know, taking one aspect of... I actually have a student, I have a very high Catholic population, so they're in the middle of Lent at the moment, and one of my students gave up talking for Lent. Yeah, seriously. It's obnoxious. Just write it down. Just write it down. You're not gonna do this again, are you? Yeah, there you go. But people put together these lists, and you know, statistics show about six weeks after January 1st, most of those folks have fallen off the wagon, and they're back to the same old habits that they vowed not to do six weeks earlier. Brethren, do we in God's Church treat our examination at Passover like a New Year's resolution? You know, we might actually cringe a little bit at that question, and intuitively, you know, we know that we shouldn't, and it hurts to admit it, but you know, I've done so without realizing it. When we conduct our examination, we find an area of our life that needs to be fixed, and so we decide, I'm going to really work on this one aspect of my life. Whatever this thing happens to be, this is the one. This is this year's thing I'm going to look at and I'm going to work on. And you know, whatever it may be, you know, whether it's demonstrating faith, or not taking the Lord's name in vain, or whatever it happens to be, we do a phenomenal job for about six weeks. We push really, really hard for about six weeks, but after a while, we start to slip. We maybe fall off the wagon and we're not real good about getting back on, and sure enough, next year in our examination, it's the same thing at the top of the list. How is that different than a New Year's resolution? Maybe we decide that we need to focus more on our prayer and on our study, and sure enough, for the first month, we're doing great, but then it goes by the wayside. Why weren't we able to fix it? Why weren't we able to completely take care of the situation? When we examine our lives, we naturally focus on the big things that we feel like we need to work on, and in order for us to be successful in those things, once we've identified them, we focus on them with all of our energy, everything we've got on that one thing, but in the process, while our eyes are focused on that one aspect, we completely miss the gorilla that walked in the side of the screen, beat its chest in the middle, and walked out the other side.

We were so focused on the symptom, we missed the disease. So focused on the symptom, we missed the disease. And I want to make sure that what I'm saying is clear and that I'm not being misunderstood. There's nothing wrong with focusing on specific aspects of our life during the Passover examination. Nothing wrong with that at all. In fact, we need to be making every effort to prune the branches from our life that don't bear fruit, but we need to be very careful that we don't focus on the symptoms of the problem to the exclusion of the cause of those symptoms. Otherwise, we can't effectively treat the symptoms and the branches are just going to grow back. From a medical standpoint, if somebody goes to the doctor because they're having shortness of breath, they're having a tightness in their chest, and they have pain radiating down their left arm, you know, the doctor doesn't hand them a couple of pain pills to manage the pain and send them home.

They work to get to the root of the problem. They try to figure out what's going on. They test it.

They prove that they know what's going on, and when they find out that that person is having a heart attack, because those are the symptoms of a heart attack, they maybe do surgery, they prescribe some form of medication, and voila! Not only is the root problem gone, the multitude of symptoms are gone, too. When you treat the heart attack, suddenly the pain in the arm is gone. Suddenly, the other symptoms are gone. Brethren, we need to get to the root of the problem spiritually. We have to get to the root of the problem spiritually. We have to take that step back, like we did with the video this morning, and we have to examine our life as a whole within the context of God's intent for our lives, so that we can see that gorilla traipsing through the scene. And when we do, when we do, chances are that we'll find the primary cause or the majority of the symptoms that we can identify is the cornerstone of carnality, a lack of discipline and self-control. Trouble-taming the tongue? Need to spend more time with your Bible?

Having difficulties bringing thoughts into captivity? Need to pray more? The list goes on.

But the root cause of each and every one is discipline and self-control. The two go hand in hand. Paul recognized the importance of those two things in one of the most well-put descriptions of the struggle that we fight. Let's turn over to Romans 7. Romans 7, we'll see the dichotomy in Paul's life. Romans 7, I'm going to read this in the New Living Translation. It seems to just capture Paul's passion so much better in this particular thing. There's some disjointedness in the King James translations, but the New Living Translation has got a really good... I like the way that it's set up. Romans 7, and we'll pick it up in verse 13 for a little bit of context. Romans 7 verse 13, and we'll read through the bottom to verse 25. Romans 7, beginning in verse 13. Pardon me. It says, so the trouble is not with the... I'm sorry, that would be verse 14. Romans 7 verse 13. I told you we were going to start in 13.

Has then what is good become death to me? No. But sin that it might appear sin was producing death in me through what is good, so that sin through the commandment might become exceedingly sinful. So the trouble is not with the law, for it is spiritual and good. The trouble is with me.

For I am all too human, a slave to sin. I don't really understand myself, for what I want to do is right, but I don't do it. Instead, I do what I hate. But if I know that what I'm doing is wrong, this shows that I agree that the law is good. So I'm not the one doing wrong. It's sin living in me that does it. And I know that nothing good lives in me, that is my sinful nature. I want to do what is right, but I can't. I want to do what is good, but I don't. I don't want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway. But if I do what I don't want to do, I am not really the one doing wrong. It is sin living in me that does it. I have discovered this principle of life that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. Verse 22, I love God's law with all my heart, but there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to the sin that is still within me. Oh, what a miserable person I am and who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and by death. Thank God the answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. So you see how it is. In my mind, I really want to obey God's law, but because of my sinful nature, I am a slave to sin. You know, Paul recognized that he struggled with self-control and with discipline. He remarks that that what he wants to do, he doesn't do. What he knows he shouldn't do, that's what he does. He knows it's wrong, but he just can't stop himself. He has no protection against the sin in his life that enslaves him because, to a degree, he's out of control. Let's go over to Proverbs 25. Proverbs 25.

Proverbs 25, we'll pick it up in verse 28. Proverbs 25. 28. We'll see what King David has to say regarding—or, I'm sorry, in this case, Solomon—has to say regarding the idea of his self-control or the lack thereof.

Proverbs 25. 28. Pates a pretty strong word picture in this particular section.

Whoever has no rule over his own spirit is like a city broken down without walls.

You know, the walls in the days of ancient Israel was a key factor that protected a city.

We hear the walls of many cities mentioned through the Bible as these awesome things. The walls of Jericho are a great example that were so amazing, so great, so wonderful, and then utterly shattered by God. And that was a statement that God made. You know, you think these walls are protecting you? No. Crunch, down goes the walls, and in comes the Israelites. You know, we hear that some of the Assyrian cities had walls that were the thickness of two chariots.

You know, they were rumored to be unable to be breached, that people couldn't get through them. But walls protect the city's inhabitants. In fact, as a city, if you had a serious enough set of walls around your city and you had a decent enough supply line, you almost didn't need an army.

If you had enough supply and you had big enough walls, you just wait for the other army to get bored and go home. I mean, they can't get through. As you just sit back and wait, wait them out!

You know, there's some examples within the Bible of some long sieges like that from places with walls. But a city without walls has no protection whatsoever. They are completely unable to defend themselves. Completely unable to defend themselves against their enemies. You know, and we're the same way. Without self-control and without discipline, we can't resist the temptation that Satan throws our way either. Let's go over to Galatians 5 real quick. Galatians 5 is a well-known, very well-known passage. Galatians 5, we see a discussion of the fruits of the spirit.

Just to illustrate where this self-control and where this discipline comes from.

Galatians 5, and we'll pick it up in verse 16. Galatians 5 verse 16 says, I'dolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousy, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunks, I mean, the list just keeps going, revelries, and the like of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Verse 22, but the fruit of the spirit is love, it's joy, it's peace, it's long suffering, it's kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such, there is no law. And those who are Christ have crucified the flesh with its passions and its desires, for if we live in the spirit, let us also walk in the spirit. That question we asked earlier, are we walking the walk? Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, or envying one another. You know, self-control is listed among the fruits of the spirit. And this section takes it a little bit further in that those that can do these things are of Christ, that they've crucified the flesh. In other words, they put to death carnality, and that they walk in the spirit if they do them. That's a tall order. It's a tall order, but it's an incredible promise to those who can overcome the lusts of the flesh and exhibit the fruits of the spirit in that section.

But self-control and discipline are two sides of the same coin.

They're not problems that we can just solve tomorrow. We can't wake up tomorrow and simply decide, I'm going to do a lot better about self-control and discipline. It takes work. It takes time. It'll last about three days, and we'll be right back to where it was before. You've got to have a plan. You've got to have a plan. And you know, these are huge, huge issues to try to fix. If you've got a, you know, things are out of control, it's a huge issue to fix. But as you maybe have heard the old adage, the only way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time. I would assume the only way to eat a big gorilla is also one bite at a time. So we have to start small. What we're going to do today is kind of set up a plan, looking at three ways that we can help to take care of this issue of self-control and discipline within our spiritual lives. We're going to take a look at three specific things today with the time we have left. The first of those things is we want to look at establishing good habits. Establishing good habits. Second thing we're going to look at is learning to say no. And then one of the more important components of the whole process is the third one, which is learning to use a growth model. Learning to use a growth model. Rather, in other words, not focused on where we are right now, but where we've come from in that process. So it's establish good habits, it's learn to say no, and then it's use a growth model. So we'll start by taking a look at establishing good habits. And when you talk about habits and when you talk about good habits, there's one name that tends to come to mind, and that is Stephen Covey. Stephen Covey literally wrote the book on establishing good habits. His book, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People, sold over 15 million copies worldwide. And on many companies out there today use that book as the backbone of their management philosophies. I was surprised, actually, with as much of a religious component as there is to the book as he's going through it, I was surprised to have it come up in a staff meeting at work in a place that, you know, prides itself on separation of church and state. We're saying over here that, oh, but these biblical principles this guy's talking about, they've got some merit. So it's kind of an interesting, interesting dichotomy there. But Covey knocked the ball out of the park with habit number three.

Habit number three in the book is putting the first things first. This is what he has to say about putting the first things first. He says, to live a more balanced existence, you have to recognize that not doing everything that comes along is okay. There's no need to overextend yourself. All it takes is realizing that it's all right to say no when necessary and then focus on your highest priorities. Habit number three happens day in and day out, moment by moment. It deals with many of the questions addressed in the field of time management, but that's not all that it's about.

Habit number three is about life management as well. Your purpose, your values, your roles, and your priorities. What are, quote unquote, first things? Well, first things are those things that you personally find of most worth. If you put first things first, you're organizing and managing time and events according to the personal priorities that you established in habit number two.

So according to Covey, there's no way we'll complete everything that we set out to do each day. You know, we often say there's not enough hours in the day. We need to be okay with that. We need to understand that we're not going to get to everything. But the problem is, if we put off the most important things in our life until the end of the day, we're not going to fit them in.

They're not going to get done. So what are our priorities? You know, we've done this exercise once before. I'm not going to have you necessarily do it again, but the idea of figuring out what those most important things in our life are, you know, it's important. And up into the past few years, I never really had a set time where I did prayer and Bible study. I always had kind of, it feels like an overly hectic life. I don't know why. I always feel really busy all the time. But I would fit in Bible study and prayer wherever I had time. You know, if I had five, ten minutes here, I'd take care of it there as much as I could. And then I'd do five or ten minutes here later on, right? And it just wasn't, to be honest, very effective. You know, I find that I wasn't able to get in depth with things. I wasn't able to go to the level of depth that I wanted to go. You know, I'd make sure that my prayer was done in the evening, usually when I was exhausted. So eyes are closed and you're like, and then it was just not working. It was not working. And it wasn't a good situation. So I found for me, and everybody's different, but I found for me, I have to have a set time. Each day, every day, that's the time when I pray. That's the time that I study. And for me, it's in the morning before my day starts to get hectic. Because before I head to work, I have time. I mean, it's early time, but it's time. So what I started doing was, I looked at 4 a.m. and that's the time that I work at getting up now. Unfortunately, after I did that first little bit, I realized that man is not meant to be awake at 4 a.m. That is extremely early, unless you're fishing. That's extremely early in the morning. But getting up at 4 a.m. and getting up for me works. But unfortunately, what I found is Monday tends to be no problem. Monday's pretty easy. 4 o'clock, no problem. No problem on Mondays. Tuesdays, it's like 4.10, 4.15. Wednesdays, it's pushing for 20, for 30. You know, Friday's 7 o'clock. So, but no, I'm kidding, of course. But you get worn down as the week goes on, and you're trying to get this set established. So establishing those good habits, it's just absolutely crucial. Absolutely crucial to get those habits taken care of. We do recognize our Bible study needs to be daily. Don't worry about turning over here, but Acts 17 verse 11 gives us the example of the Bereans, who it specifically says within Scripture, searched the Scriptures daily to prove that what they were being taught was true and that it was so. Giving us a good example that it is expected that we're going to crack this Bible daily. We're going to be in the Word daily, that we're going to be digging through what God has given us, because this is what God has given us. This is the Word that God has provided for us. We've got to be in that every day. That example was recorded for a reason. We want to make sure that we're there each and every day. But in addition, we have to keep the lines of communication open between ourselves and God the Father as well. Christ set the example of the model prayer, which included asking for our daily needs. Daily needs. That means it's intended to be daily also. In fact, there's another passage if you start turning over to Psalm 55.

Psalm 55 is one of our memory scriptures out of the little memory scripture box that ABC put together a few years ago. But Psalm 55 will be in verse 17, but not just daily, but multiple times each day. Psalm 55 verse 17. Psalm 55, 17.

Verse 16 for context. David says, As for me, I will call upon God, and the Lord shall save me evening and morning, and at noon I will pray and I will cry aloud, and he shall hear my voice. So not just daily, multiple times daily. You can kind of see it's kind of interesting there too. You can see where they start the day, you know, evening, morning, noon. So it's that night before actually is the start of the day within that particular culture. So the biggest benefit that we can get from establishing this habit of prayer and study is you can start your day close to God.

And as it mentions in Psalms, you remain close to God as the day goes on, coming back multiple times throughout the day. So I, for me, early morning works well. Other people, one of my in-laws, it talks about evening is her best time. And then she's going from there with the start of her day, much like it mentions within Psalms here. But according to research, it takes 21 days to establish a habit.

21 days, three weeks. And I would encourage you to establish that time if you've not done so already, or whatever reason you've gotten lax, because it's a foundation for the rest of the steps that we're going to look at. That is the first step, is getting in constant communication with God, both on upload and download. So the second point is learn to say no.

Learn to say no. I mentioned a little bit by Stephen Covey in here, looking at things that you're not going to get to everything. But not only that, we have to learn to tell ourselves no. We have to learn to tell ourselves no. And we find ourselves in situations each and every day where we're faced with decisions. And this is kind of an interesting thing for me to think about. The idea that one decision can truly make a difference. You know, it's that the butterfly effect concept, where you do one thing here, and that leads down this path, and then you have decisions here.

It could be a totally different direction than where you were going to end up going down this particular path. But one direction down that road may lead in the direction that God wants us to go. And the other only serves as a detour off the old narrow path. We need to be ensuring that we're making the right choices, and that part of that requires us to tell ourselves no. Our carnal human nature is going to take us down the path that is most self-serving to that nature, each and every time, if we let it.

The other path is contrary to that nature. It'll try to go the way that it's comfortable with each and every time. So we have to learn to tell ourselves no. Mr. Armstrong wrote a short article back in the January 1968 issue of the Plain Truth. January 1968 issue of the Plain Truth. It's called, How to Prevent Sin. Very short little article, but here it is.

It provided some good advice for ways to keep ourselves from traveling down that other path. It says, the way to put a thing out of the mind is to put an opposite thought in the mind. So often I've noticed parents of babies strive so hard to shush up the baby when it's crying.

There's either something causing pain, which should be removed, or something in the baby's mind that's causing it's crying or it's fretting. Just saying shush or commanding the baby to stop fussing usually doesn't get very good results. We've reared four children and long ago I learned the trick of quieting the baby by getting its mind on something else.

Distracting it. Instead of commanding it to stop crying, attract its attention with some new object. Get it interested in playing with that object and before you know it, the child will forget about its crying. Try using the same method on yourself, but instead of material or worldly things, a mature person should use self-discipline and set his mind on spiritual things.

Open your Bible. Put the study of some spiritual subject in your mind. Next time you're tempted, try it. Pray over it. Ask God to help you. See how rapidly you begin to win the victory over temptation and sin, and how marvelous will be your spiritual and character growth. January 1968. You know, shutting down the thoughts of our mind before they take hold is crucial, and that is telling ourselves, no. You know, we get into these things where you are maybe wronged by somebody. Well, I just have to tell that person off.

I'm just, I'm going to give them a piece of my mind. I'm, you know, I can't believe they treated me this way. Well, jeez, no. No. It's not worth it. No. If you can maneuver the brain onto a different topic, distract it with something. I can't tell you how many times I've written email responses at work, like, and then stopped and went, no. Delete. Do not send. I feel better now. I ranted about it.

Do not send said email, but I have to tell myself, no, sometimes, on those types of things as well. But if you can distract yourself with something else, you can effectively shut that sin down from being committed. You know, distraction is one way, but another equally powerful method. You know, he mentioned distraction in the, in the article, but another equally powerful method is just having the willpower and the strength to say no, to tell yourself no. It's much more difficult, but there are a lot of examples of people who've done it, and that's really, that's what we're shooting for. That's the ideal. The kind of strength and willpower and self-control we can tell ourselves no and mean it. Let's go to Job 2. Job 2. Job 2, and we'll start taking a look in verse 9. Job 2 verse 9. We're going to pick the story up in verse 1. We're not going to read the whole, whole entire thing, but we kind of know the basic story here while you're turning there. You know, Satan was just out kind of wandering to and fro, at least so it says, presented himself with all the other sons of God. God asked Satan if he's considered a servant Job, goes on to tell him about all of his positive qualities, and then Satan says, you know, you let me mess with Job directly. Let me go after Job. I'll show you what he's really made of. God basically tells him, you know, hey, go down, do your worst. Just don't kill him. Go down and do what you can do. And we see Satan proceed to kind of make Job miserable. We pick up this story in verse 9 with Job's conversation with his wife, and it's really important here. I'm not trying to lambast Job's wife, okay? I think sometimes we do that. We look at this and we go, I can't believe that she would ever say such a thing. She lost all of her children, too. And sometimes we say things that are really stupid when we don't feel, you know, when we're having a rough time with something. And we, it's one of those moments where you say it and you go, no, no, no, it's gone. I can't get it back. And I'm sure that this is one of those moments in Job's wife's life, you know. Otherwise, we don't really tend to paint her as it's just shrew, and I don't know. I don't think that's necessarily the case. But Job 2, verse 9, says, then his wife said to him, do you still hold fast to your integrity, curse God, and die?

But he said to her, you speak as one of the foolish woman speaks. Notice he didn't say she was foolish. He says, you speak as one of the foolish woman speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity? And in all of this, Job did not sin with his lips.

You know, Job's wife, again, had some advice. Curse God and die, be done with all of this. And Job could have listened. He could have gone along with that. He could have done what she suggested. But instead, he took a look down that path that he knew he shouldn't take. And he decided that the other one was better, and he took the high road. We have to have the strength to do this, and it takes time, it takes effort, it takes an incredibly strong will. We want to start small. We want to start in the small things, telling ourselves no and work ourselves up to the big things. The very last thing that we want to take a look at is we want to take a look at what it means to use a growth model, and why it's so important for us to use a growth model when we analyze ourselves and analyze our spiritual life. You know, Mr. Armstrong's article mentioned that every time that we overcome sin and temptation, we grow in character. We grow in character when we do that. And it's important that we focus on that growth, because sometimes we can look at where we are, and we can look at that standard of Christ, we can see how far we have to go, and get really discouraged. Really discouraged! Just, ah, never going to be able to do this.

When the reality is, if we just were to turn around for a second and look at how far we've come, from where God picked us up out of our little dust and dirt and shook us off and said, no, you're mine, I choose you. If we could just turn around and see kind of how far we've come, we can take a look at just and have a little bit better attitude about the process moving forward. But we do, we slip up. It's easy to get frustrated. We slip up in really, really ridiculously stupid ways sometimes. Things that we should know better about. We let our tongue get away from us in a conversation with somebody. We get all upset about it. We say, like Job's wife may have done, say something kind of stupid. You know, maybe we've gossiped about somebody, or we've made an unfair judgment, or you know, we get upset and we don't always do the things that we should do. We sometimes feel like we can't ever get anything right and that we're never going to measure up. You know, when the federal government enacted the No Child Left Behind law, I don't know how many are familiar with that years ago, when the federal government put the No Child Left Behind law in place, school districts started scrambling to try to figure out what in the world they were going to do and what it meant for them from a standpoint not only of the school, but for their populations of students. And, namely, the populations of students they were most concerned about were special education students and students who English is their second language.

The law required, this was the official requirement of the law, it said that they had to have a 70% pass rate, all schools, on any and all standardized tests that were given. Now, those standardized tests are math, they're science, and they're language arts. Or English, as we would have known when we were in school.

The trick is, every year that goes up by 5%. So you had to meet the 70%. Even if you didn't meet the 70%, your bar goes up by 5% the next year. You didn't make the bar, but we're going to raise the bar the next year. And if you still don't make that bar, that's fine, it's going up another 5%.

Better get on it, was the point that the federal government had made at that time. The problem was, and eventually that whole law topped out at 100%, and it was expected that 100% of the students in the country would pass these standardized state tests. The problem was, the state tests that were placed on students in many cases for many of those populations are unrealistic. They're unrealistic.

Some of those students will not meet that metric due to language deficiencies, mental capacities, a number of other things. Every kid is different. You know, when we treat all of our children as coming out, everybody's the same, you know, number two yellow pencil. Sometimes there's a problem with that. The school that I teach at, for example, 50% of my students speak English as a second language. They were born into a household where they spoke Spanish. They learned to speak Spanish as a child, never learned to read in Spanish necessarily, but they learned to speak it. So they have basic conversational Spanish. Then they started school, just like any other kid would, in kindergarten and first grade, and all their classes were taught in English. So they have no idea what the teacher's saying, no clue what the teacher's saying. You know, they're learning a new language in the process. So as they're going through, they're now starting to learn the language that the class, by about third to fourth grade usually, but they're still unable to read in both Spanish and English. So what ends up happening is you end up with a group of individuals who are essentially subliterate in both languages. So not just the one language, but subliterate in both.

Now you enter the eighth grade science test. So these kids now are multiple grade levels behind reading and language-wise, and then we give them an eighth grade science test that they don't understand the academic language presented on the test. And sometimes it's even tests that... it's words like this. And I know we look at this with all that's pretty simple, but we don't... when was the last time you used this word? For example, one of the test questions that one of the kids complained about years and years and years ago. They said, what in the world does arid mean?

What does arid mean? It was talking about how the western side of Oregon was less arid than the eastern side. And that was a word they'd never really ever come across before. Okay, well we know what it means dry, right? We know what it means, but most of the time people just use dry. They don't use arid. What was the last time you used arid in a daily conversation? So there's certain things like that that end up going... and when we're in the test we can't tell them what that means. We can't give them any kind of hints or anything. So for a number of those kids, that pass score, that cut score that the state puts out, is just unattainable at that time. Now they may hit it and a few years later as you know they get a little better at things, but it's difficult for them to get there. And so what ends up happening is you get this kid that realizes they didn't pass the test and you can visibly see it on their face. Oh, all right. I guess I'm just, you know, not that smart or whatever. You know, and you end up seeing these kids get really, really discouraged from this process. And so a lot of districts are starting to move towards what is called a growth model. Okay, and a growth model is what I would advocate we need to do in our spiritual life as well. It's the idea that you measure the growth that you have from one test to the next. You take a look at the difference in how much you've grown in that particular setting. And so a lot of the kids that start with me in science, sometimes maybe they'll have a first test score in the 200 range, 207, 203, expectation for passing is about a 235. So they'll start around a 2 to a 200, 203. And by the time they get to their last tests, a lot of them are scoring 232 is 234, like just right in the vicinity, but just not quite there. And they get really down on themselves. So you have to turn them around, like we mentioned earlier, and look behind and go, no, no, no, look, the first time you took this, you had like a 200. And now you're almost passing. Okay, don't get upset about it. Don't get discouraged about it. Use that and do better on the next one. So they get this incredible growth. We need to recognize that our salvation is an ongoing process. And it's one that we're not going to be truly, completely successful with until Christ's return. That doesn't mean we don't exercise every effort to overcome. I'm not saying, oh well, we're never going to make it, so why try? That's not what I'm saying. But we need to recognize that the best way to look at our success from year to year is by growth. Looking back at the year before and saying, how far have I come? Or if I haven't come that far, what am I going to do next year to make sure that I do? And how am I going to fix that? Let's take a look at Lamentations 3. Take a look at Lamentations 3. We don't go over here all that often.

Lamentations 3, as you're turning over there, we're going to pick it up in verse 40. But utilizing a growth model like this requires us to set goals. And it requires us to kind of frequently check in on those goals as we progress. It requires us to kind of objectively examine where we're at and whether or not we're making our adjustments in our spiritual life accordingly. Lamentations 3, verse 40. Lamentations 3, verse 40 says, let us search out and examine our ways and turn back to the Lord. Let us lift our hearts and hands to God in heaven. We have turned us dressed. We have rebelled. You have not pardoned, of course, talking about the situation going on within this particular passage. You know, brethren, we're going to slip up. We're not perfect. We're not perfect, and we know that. But when we do, we need to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and course correct. Figure out where we're going, how to get there to get our lives back on track. And the reality is it's likely going to take us more than just a single year to achieve a measure of self-control that we can consider growth. But if we can focus our efforts on the root of the issue, if we can find the root of the issue, find the symptoms, figure out the root of the cause of those symptoms, we'll have success. You know, if we can treat the disease, we can control the symptoms. Brethren, as the Passover season grows ever nearer, we need to ensure that our examination is complete, that we've asked God through prayer to help us see ourselves as He sees us, and that we've taken a step back and viewed our life in its entirety through God's lens.

We need to resist the urge to make Passover resolutions. We really need to resist the urge.

We need to look deeper than that. We need to find the core issue and really work on treating the core issue, rather than focusing on the symptoms of the problem. You know, we won't see you guys again until after the Days of Unleavened Bread are over with, unless we end up coming down here for the Holy Day, and I don't know if that's the case or not, but as you guys are going through this process, we definitely wish you a very spiritually rewarding beginning to your Spring Holy Day season, and I sincerely hope that the rest of your examination and the de-leavening and all that goes along with Spring Holy Days, I hope that it all go really well. So, I have a fantastic Spring Holy Day season.