College of Knowledge

Okay, so let's go. The title of today's sermon is, A College of Knowledge. College of Knowledge. Bring this out because a good friend of mine, of our family, she wrote a music piece a few years ago. It's probably been a decade or better now. She wrote a music score after hearing a sermon, and she was inspired to write this beautiful piece, and I'll have it here eventually. So I get it from her because she plays piano, and her name is Laura Beth Zollner. Don't know if any of you know her, but fine young lady. Yes, you do. She wrote this piece called, Where is God in the Winter? Where is God in the Winter? Now, I could say here, especially after getting back and having the weather we had there, which was kind of nice, 85 with the breeze blowing in St. Lucia, I got back here and it was 95 and no wind blowing when I got off the airplane. So I might even ask, Where's God in the Summer here in Florida being, Where's God in the Winter? Down here, I think he's hanging out with us because it's pretty nice. Because I look forward to that November, December, January, and February. We're just like, Ah, this feels so good!

In Tennessee, where Laura Beth is from, it's not so much in January. I've seen January's and Mary has too. That's why she loves this place down here, where you don't see the sunshine the entire month. It's just cloud cover. It's 45 degrees in the day, 25 at night. And the winters can sometimes, especially January, make everything feel very long. And for many people, and many of you are from the North, you know how long a winter can be. I think we have more Yankees here than we do Southern people in reality. Eight months. Yes, it can be very, very long. And so I appreciate her music score and her thoughts on that. And that's what made me think about this. Because we have now between the last or the eighth day, the last great day, and Passover, we have a long period of time. And most of it's winter. And that's the longest time God ever extends us out, his people, between Holy Days. And sometimes it can feel rather long. Sometimes it can lead to, as winter does to a lot of people, like my wife says, it gets me depressed if I'm too cold and it's been too long. And people have that issue and problem. So I thought about this and I thought, it's a great place. Let's go for the next six months, because it is roughly six months. Let's go to the College of Knowledge. First, I must say, most people go to college or a university to learn, to be educated, to learn a skill or be educated in various fields of study. Some of you probably have. Some go to party. Right? Party, party, party, party, party, party, party. You know how it goes. That's why some people go to a college or a university. Some to find themselves and to find a career path. Perhaps a career path besides partying. You may be a nurse or maybe another profession. Maybe an architect, maybe a lawyer, maybe one of these fields that you need to have a certain amount of study in. Many people do this and should because when you get out of high school, you might think you know a lot. When I was 18 and 19, I was a genius. I was a genius. I had all the answers. Genius, genius, genius to everything. It was only 10 years after that time I looked back at that time and realized I was 10% genius and 90% idiot.

Because of the things I the way I looked at things and things I did and so forth. So it is important that we are educated. Frank, you went to college or university. What'd you go for? Okay.

Well, not partying. Just joking.

History. Okay. Matthew, you're in college. University. Why did you go? Why are you going?

Yes, you can get a job, but it also helps you get a better job as long as you don't master in partying and I don't think you do.

But I want to look at what we can do for the next six months. Because the word of God is literally a college of knowledge. The word of God is a college of knowledge.

You read in this book, this Bible, that it's actually called a light. It's actually called, this book is called a lamp. Or it should be. Right? A lamp to our feet. Because you're not going to get anywhere in the dark. Even if you think you do well in the dark, you won't. We have people in the dark that think Saturday is the only time to open up the book. That can be very dark, especially when you go six months and you open your your your classroom. Your college. Every seventh day. Can make for a long, cold winter. What's interesting is Psalm 119. Psalm 119, verse 105. And scripture 105 says that this word, this Bible, that you all have in your hand, or you have in your hand in another form, should be a lamp to our feet. Is it? Only you can answer that question, but I would like for you to entertain for the next while just how important that lamp or light might be to you. It is so important that the word of God in Psalm 119, another verse about 80, 80, 80, 89. God reveals that his word is eternal.

It's going to last forever. It's going to be around forever. It's not going to be well, wait a minute, they're going to burn the earth up. Christ said it.

No, his word is going to be forever and ever and ever. That's pretty important, especially to us physical beings. Christ said in John 6 that his words are spirit. Oh, I know how to feed your spirit.

The spirit that God has given you, his Holy Spirit. Try feeding the word.

But Christ also said at the same time that his words are life. There's a lot of stuff said about this book that most people in America and around the world today, they don't care for it. They don't want it. I don't know. Scripture says a famine of the word. I don't know if it's because we can't put it out or people just don't want it. And these are so few and far between. Don't know. We'll know in the years ahead.

But. We need some light during the next six months.

We can get it. But we also have stuff we need to learn. And that's why I called this sermon a college of knowledge. Let me ask you, not everybody wants to go to college. Not everybody wants to learn.

Or you may feel like, well, if this is the college of knowledge, I don't need a lamp to light my way because I know all this anyway. I've read the book. I know all parts of it. I got it.

Is that a scary? Scary road to go down a dark road, perhaps to go down.

In the New Living Translation in Hebrews 4, it actually says that the Word of God is alive. Alive. And it says that it's powerful. I like how the New Living Translation put that. Alive and powerful. Well, I think I've just given you enough descriptions of and benefits of delving into the Word or staying into the Word. Or perhaps wanting to be a little more educated. Because 40 years of this book, many times feel like I've just scratched the surface. Oh, I'll get one book done and wow, that's good. I got that. And then I'm going, man, I don't know that much about that other book.

Because we understand the Bible does not contain the Word of God. That's right. The United Church of God teaches the Bible does not contain the Word of God. Because it is the Word of God. It doesn't contain it. It is the very Word of God, as he talked about being God-breathed. So, today I'd like to let's look at a piece of the curriculum of the vast library known as Textus Receptus. Textus Receptus. Do you love these Latin words? Okay. Makes you feel educated. Makes you feel smarter. Makes you feel like you're in academic world. Yes. Well, it actually just means received text for the New Testament. It's what they believed was given and that's what's in this book. It's just a theological term using the Latin as doctors in various fields use the Latin. But it just means received text. Those texts that were put together to form this Bible from the 1500s through the 1600s. That's what the old King James came out of and it's the way they would do things. I would go into that deeper, but you don't need it. Okay. You want to go in and look these words, these two words up on the internet, go and delve deep into the Latin and the stuff. There's volumes out there, but is it that important? No.

So today I want to look at what Paul wrote to the church at Colossae. The area of Colossae is right down here in modern Turkey. Surely it was at the time it was a church because now it's just a blank hill. It's 10 miles from Laodicea. You can't see that on there, but there was a tri-cities area there. And so the closest town to it was Laodicea. Paul even references in the book of Colossians. Ephesus, the major church at the time in Turkey where Paul spent initially three years pastoring and working in Turkey, was a hundred miles away. So, a pretty good distance from this city of Colossae. I will say that there was debate for a long time until the historians found out where did it get its name. And then they found that it was a major, major city for caravans going through. And selling goods as they would try to get to the ocean. They bring the ocean and then take it into Galatia territory then. But they had this unique thing that they found out that the city was actually named for a flower. Now, I don't know if any of you have a chalacenas in your yards. Probably don't, because they can't find it now. But it was a unique flower that was purple, purplish-red in color. And they found that they could press this and get the color out of it.

And so then they had people coming through and raising. So they became known as chalacens because of the purple wool that they were able to process and make. And it was from this chalacenas flower that they grew there and they didn't seem to have it anywhere else. And next thing you know, everybody wanted. Remember Lydia was from Thyatira where they had purple and theirs was they actually came not from a flower but from a snail. Yes. Well, here they found a different way, a different color, but it was also in the purple-red color scheme. And so everybody wanted it. So they were very prosperous.

The members of the church were doing well. Everybody in the city was doing well. As a matter of fact, they went back so far that they found that chalacen was in existence 1500 years before Abraham. I don't know how they found that out, but they did. But that's what they say. But so let's just say it's thousands of years old. But then it was destroyed in an earthquake in and that's the amazing part was that the people were saying, well, Paul didn't write this letter till this certain time to chalacen. But that couldn't existed because the whole city was destroyed in 60, 62 A.D. So it had to be written in a time before because he wouldn't write a letter to a city that didn't exist. The church didn't exist. But people wanted to, well, we don't like what he said. And critics have a real problem with the book of chalacens.

They had a pastor named Epaphras. Epaphras. So Paul, from what we can find out in his letters, he never went to chalacen the whole time. But he had a great minister, Epaphras, who stayed there and worked with Paul and came to the prison because chalacens, the book chalacens was one of the prison epistles. He wrote it when he was in prison along with Ephesians, what is it, Ephesians, Philemon, Philippians. There was a group called prison epistles and he wrote all these letters when he was in prison. So it's interesting that people had a real problem, theologians did, with his letter to this city because they compared it to his other letters. And he used 55 Greek, Kone Greek, words that he never used in any other letters. Why? They don't know. They just said, well, maybe somebody hijacked the letter. No, Paul would write letters and if you study Ephesians and you study Philemon, you'll find he writes different to each of the cities. Now people don't want to take credit away from Paul and this was inspired word and so forth that he had. Well, I'm not going through the book of it today, but it's a unique, unique set of scriptures. So hopefully you can on the Internet, you can actually see where it used to be. There's a field, a large field, an amount, and they found that this is where Colossae is. There's nothing there but just some stones. So when the earthquake hit in 60 to 62 A.D., it just wiped out the hotel. Beautiful area, though. Very beautiful area of Turkey that you can go and visit if you don't mind standing on just some amount of grass. That's all. But Paul left us with this letter or book. We call it a book, but it was a letter to those people.

The uniqueness is through Philemon and the slave Onesimus and so forth like that, that you can study yourselves. I'll bring it out sometime at a Bible study of those issues. But I'd like you to go with me since we are in this College of Knowledge. I'd like you to go with me to Colossae. Colossians. Colossians. Colossians. Wow, I've said it so much. Let's go to Colossians. Because today I'd like to look at two verses. That's it. Two verses in the entire book that to me are so inspiring, so challenging that they test us like a college does. They give us information like a college does, or a university. And if we truly understand and school ourselves, we will come out educated more than perhaps we even thought we could be. So I'm going to read from the New King James Version. And so if you will, turn there in Colossians. Colossians 1 and verse 9. Said, For this reason we also, since the day we heard it, do not cease to pray for you and ask. That you, I'm going to stop there. Wouldn't it be nice that Paul just took it that we, he prays for these people for what he's about to tell them. Because they're not a brand new church. They have their own pastor. They've been around for a while. They're in a wealthy society because it's not a poor city by any means. To ask that you may be filled with the knowledge. Knowledge. That's typically why we go to college. To have knowledge, to come out with knowledge, to know stuff we don't know already. Otherwise there's no reason to go.

So, but here he says, Now you may be filled with the knowledge of his will. Boy, isn't that a big one. Knowledge of God's will. See, I didn't, I still don't know, but I can accept his will. Christ said, not my will, but your will be done. So Christ gave us that example. We may not always understand why God does what he does. I needed, I need, the church needs, his family in the world needed Dwight Harrison. Though it wasn't God's will. Many people prayed. I have to accept his will. I'll be doing his funeral tomorrow, and I've settled myself that I'm not going to question God. Because I understand this is that, that we may, not just them, we may be filled with the knowledge of his will. We don't always understand things, but we have to understand when someone's smarter than we are. And he even said, my thoughts are not your thoughts. My thoughts are what? Way, way out of the universe higher than ours.

So Paul is telling them, as he's telling us, that he wants us to be filled with the knowledge of his will in wisdom and spiritual understanding. So he explains it there. How wisdom and spiritual understanding. Because if we have that, we're not going to be bogged down by the things that affect us in this world. We have spiritual understanding. We're going to understand so many things that the world doesn't understand because we've been to the College of Knowledge. This book will teach us. What did he say? It was alive? It was powerful? I mean, it's eternal? All this is what other book? Can even come close. So we may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding. And then he completes the sentence in verse 10. That you may have a walk worthy of the Lord. Well, I need that. My walk, I think, is pretty good sometimes, but then I look at it and go, that wasn't a very good walk. A walk worthy worthy of the Lord. That means the Lord would be willing to walk in my shoes. Ow! That's not always good.

Fully pleasing him. You see how deep these words are? These are just two sentences just like make you think. I was stuck on this for a week, just in these two verses, seeing how I didn't really measure up and how I need to do a better job. Fully pleasing him, being fruitful in every good work, and increasing, as a major sentence here, in the knowledge of God. Increasing in the knowledge of God.

How educated are you about the knowledge of God? Well, you may say, well, I know the word theos means God, and theology means the study of God, and I've studied and I've read the book, and I read the Bible every day, and that's great. And I pray every day, so I have this, but sometimes we can get into this feeling of I'm good.

I'm pretty good. I've been doing this all these years.

But I can tell you, as a minister, I struggle. I struggle.

And as I read these verses, I'm going, I got work to do, and I need to go and take some extra classes in the College of Knowledge in the next six months. Because I want to come out on the back side by the time spring holy day is stronger than I am right now, and I should be pretty strong, being I had a great feast. But I know what can happen. I know what can happen in the weeks and months. So how do we do that?

I have four ways. I want to give you, as I have, 15 minutes, 18 minutes to finish a sermon up. And I want to give that to you on four ways to attain knowledge. Four ways to attain knowledge. And I hope you will either write these down or think about them because what they represent and how we can use them for the College of Knowledge, not just worldly thinking. So the very first one way is empirical. Empirical.

That means through information. Think about it. That's how we can increase our knowledge, will, and pleasing of God.

College of Knowledge. But how many of us have read?

Know that book? Know that one? Oh yeah, know that one real well.

But how do we increase?

Through information. Through information. It helps not only me as a speaker being I know what the city of Colossae is all about. I can tell you about Thyatira. I can tell you about this. But not everything I got was out of here. I got a lot of stuff out of here because it helped me to understand the background. It helped me to understand what the people are going through. Two of mine. One is The Oriental Heritage by Will Durant. Thirteen volume historical books. There's thirteen of them. The Oriental Heritage is the very first one. I have gone into this many times because it's basically just a history. It's a history book. I can go back here and it will tell me as this guy went all over the world and researched everything he could find out about the different nations. Here's Persia. There's Persia. There's Egypt. He went back and just did a 30 pages in here about Egypt, about their kings, about their queens, their religion, their industry, their government. He does this with Egypt. He does it with Persia. He does it with Babylonians. He does it with the Romans, which can also help you understand the New Testament when who's running the place in the New Testament when Jesus is walking, what Roman lost it. He's not a biblical guy, really, at all.

This one volume will take you months and months to read. It's so deep. He used 70 of his 90 years writing the history of the world, and he did this one. This has helped me understand what the Babylonians were like, because this Bible only told me so much. What does this do? This doesn't replace this. This helps me understand this to a greater level so I can have more knowledge and understand what people went through. You can imagine somebody coming from 2000 years and they're miraculously dropped into services today. They're from the Colossae church, and they're going to walk in and look at you like, what?

Ho, what are you talking about? The way you look. We're going to look at him or her like, put some clothes on.

That's why it's so important. History. My other book is one of my favorites, not named after me, Smith's Bible Dictionary, because it was actually composed of written in the 1800s. I don't read a lot of books, historical books, and biblical stuff written in the last, you know, few decades because they're usually bent on some religious story somewhere. But this was mostly just a lot of history. And Smith's Bible Dictionary is a simple book you can pick up, and you can look it up, and here is some, okay, millet, mills, meadows.

It just describes what really what meadow meant, because you may think it means what it means today, but back then it didn't. And so it helps you to understand. That's what I bring to sound. My other one here is translation, 26 translations of the Holy Bible, because I may come across the Scripture and I read it in the New King James, and I read it in the New Living Translation and go, well, boy, there's quite a bit of difference here.

So I pull out my 26 translations of the Holy Bible. It's not just one, but there's many volumes of this. But it just pulls out. I can go through here and I can read 26 different translations. A lot of them are the same, but it just helps me, not only as a minister, but it helps me to understand the Bible and be able to explain it. Because as I was working with a young girl at the feast that we were able to baptize this year at the feast, I told her that one of the biggest things is she reads by, I said, but don't just read it, know it so that you can explain it just like a story.

Because if we read it and can understand it like a story, and Christ was very good at giving stories, that's how we remember so much of his scripture, then we can explain it to somebody that asks us a question when we don't even have our Bibles with us. We do it with little children, right? We tell them bedtime stories, and they may hear that bedtime story, you know, 10 or 12 times, oh, read it to me again, read it to me again, you read it to them again, and then they go, and then they finally come to a point and say, let me tell you this story.

This is what kind of God wants us to do with his children. Read the story so much that pretty soon we could tell God the story. That's beautiful, but if you can explain how things fit in historically. Now, I know some people don't like history. That's fine, but there's stuff there that can enhance your understanding, and when you read a scripture, you'll go, wow, wow, that's good.

Next, second way, experiential. Experiential. Through experience. Experience is a great, great teacher. Most of us find out, right? And we usually learn more when we experience something. Sometimes we have to have it done over and over and over again before we learn the lesson. God's the same way. He kept looking at Israel. Will you stop with the idolatry? Will you just keep my Sabbath? How long did he say that?

Thousands of years. He's still saying it. Okay, because the experience isn't good. He puts the story of Israel, and he puts the story of Judah for us to. So we don't have to live that way of what they went through because of the experience. But so many times, we have to learn that, don't we? And no matter what we did, we may think we have this. If you, my experience was, I was 14 years old, and my sister was 16, and we had this little, my family had this beetle bug, you know, the Volkswagen bug.

How many of you might remember? In 19, it was a year would have been about 1970 for something like this little bitty things, you know, the only car we had. And so my sister was going in. She's 16, you know, driving. She goes to some movie. So we went to this movie, her and her girlfriend, and I was sitting in the back seat. I was supposed to go. Like, if anything happened, I was supposed to look after them, all 115 pounds of me at the time. But we got there, and we had a flat tire when we came out.

Well, I had seen my father change many a tire. So he didn't know what to do. I said, I do. So I just went in the front, you know, the engines in the back of that, went in the front, pulled out the tire, got the jack. You know, jack was that tire, you know? So I took this thing off. I was looking like, man, you know, I'm old.

I got this, you know, I may be 14, but I'm 18, really, you know? And all of a sudden, I get it, and I'm taking, I already loosened the legs, I'm taking the wheel off, and guess what? The car goes like this. I had never sketched the wheels. I never saw my dad do it. He did it. I just didn't see him. You know, you put something in front of the tire so it can't move.

Didn't know. I didn't know. All of a sudden, two guys jump out of a car coming by and just grab the car and pull it back and straighten it up and stick something under the tire. Then I changed the tire and I went. Do you know, to this day, I haven't had a flat tire in quite a few years, but I have had many in the past, the very first thing I do is scotch the wheel because of experience.

With God, experience matters. I had a young man work for me. His name was Mark, and he grew up in the church, earned all this stuff, but he didn't accept it. He just wanted to do his own thing, and he did. He did for 49 years of his life until he died of a heart attack. Big, strong, 6'1", 220 pound knot. I bit a fat on him. He was just strong as a bull. And he told me at the end that he said, I've broken every one of the Ten Commandments.

And I said, well, spiritually, I have. And he said, no, physically, I have broken every single one of them. He killed a girl with his car. Another girl was actually killed in another accident with him. He spent time in prison drugs. That's what gave his heart out. He had too too much cocaine, they said, in times.

He said, I knew it was right. I just had to do it my way. And here he was, 49, laying in a hospital bed and said, and there he had a Bible sitting beside him. And I'm like, well, that's a good start. He said, I've known all along. Now I've had to pay for all this time. He asked me when I get out, would you baptize me? But I don't want to have hands laid upon me because I don't deserve the Holy Spirit. What I've done. He got out, and I was in the Bahamas when he had a massive heart attack and never got back to see him.

Experience is a tough teacher, but sometimes it's the best.

You break God's law long enough, and it will break you. Number three, rationale. Rational, like Spock. Logic. Logical captain, as he would say on his TV show. Rational. It's logic. It's something that makes sense. It's how we learn. It's how we learn. How we can increase in knowledge. It's reasoning. Yes, reasoning.

If there's a creation, it probably, most likely, positively, absolutely, in my mind, means there's a creator. But that's not rational to some people today, is it?

Why did the Messiah, Jesus Christ, Yahshua, why did he have to be born a Jew? Is it because prophecy said that? Yes. But there's also reasoning. He had to be born a Jew because of what Bell said earlier. The Jews were the only one keeping the Sabbath. And so, he was to be sinless from when he was born to when he died. And if he was at a place where they didn't keep the Sabbath, how is he going to do that? Logic. It's logical. That's how we can also do these things. Finally, the last one is Revelation. Revelation. Through God's Spirit and through the Word of God. That's how we can learn. That's how we can know. It's kind of like it's truth revealed to you. How many of us have just read something that we've read many times before and go, oh wow! And you didn't say, well, I should have had a V8. You were like, man, how did I not see that before? That is fantastic. And you realize it didn't come from you.

But it came from the Holy Spirit and also from the Word of God because it because he said the Word was spirit and it's life and it feeds. We can feed our spirit. How else are we going to grow in grace and knowledge?

I have just a few scriptures. We'll turn to the last scriptures and I'll wrap this up. I hope you have found this to be educational. I hope you have found this to be. This can help you find a way to increase in knowledge as the collagians were told to, to understand how you can understand the will of God even greater by understanding his word as you've never understood it before. And I've wow! I mean, I've had Bible studies with you. I've had different things and people will bring up things and I'm going, man, I like this because you helped me and I'm the one that's supposed to be the teacher. And well, how are you able to do it? Because you've read the Word and you've had something revealed to you and you studied. You've done all these. We just need to do more. More. Let's go to 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians.

1 Corinthians 2. And yes, you know my favorite scripture is 1 Corinthians 2.9, but we're going to skip that. You know what that means. Hopefully, if you don't by now, you probably won't get it. Where I has not seen nor heard, I won't go there. But, verse 10, it says, But God has revealed them to us through his Spirit. What is he talking about? For the Spirit searches all things, yes, the deep things of God. Deep things of God. For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of a man, which is your breathing, it's life that's in you, which is in him. Even so, no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now, we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit which is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. That's a big deal. He's wanting to give us things that no one else in this world can even begin to understand. They're out of this world. They're godly. They're divine. And he wants us to know them. 13. These things we speak also not in words which man's wisdom teaches, but which the Holy Spirit teaches, comparing spiritual things with the spiritual. But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him. The carnal mind is enmity towards God. Nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he who is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is rightly judged by no one. For who has known the mind of the Lord, that he may instruct him, but we have the mind of Christ.

Brethren, read the book. For the next six months, let's go into this book. So our Bible studies will be out of this world, so that the messages we hear, the messages we talk about, will be of the divine nature. Remember what Peter said? Partakers of the divine nature? Go to the College of Knowledge and get your degree. I guarantee you, in the Kingdom of God.