Everything Burns?

Welcome back. We're all mostly back from the feast. We're here. Maybe you're excited to be back. Maybe you wish you didn't have to come back. Maybe you're here a little reluctantly, wishing that the feast could have gone on. You know, sometimes I read about when in ancient Israel they said, hey, let's just do it another seven days. Let's do another week.

And sometimes we want that. But the Feast of Tabernacles is temporary. It's a temporary thing. It ends. You know, we celebrate that there, even. That is part of what we do, is we go and we stay in these temporary places, and we celebrate that they are temporary, and that they're pointing towards something that is permanent. But it's temporary. We dwell in temporary dwellings, and really almost everything about our lives is temporary, right? Where we live, where we work, where we go to school, they're all temporary. There's very few things in life that are permanent. Isaiah 40 talks about all flesh being grass, right? We're here a little while, and then we're gone. Things are temporary, and the fall feasts, they remind us of that. Now, the Feast of Trumpets points us toward the fact that this world is coming to an end, and we celebrate things changing, right? Things becoming something new, right? But we don't get to permanence until that very last day of the feast, right? And then we come home, and so here we are. Right? How do we take all of those things that we have been learning, and like Mr. Japhet said, how do we take those and move those forward? What's the thing that's going to help us move forward? I want to read 2 Peter 3 verse 10. You know it. The day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat. Both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up. We're told that the physical world is temporary. It's going to be burned up. It's all going to go away. There's a scene in a Batman movie from about 20 years ago with the Joker. Even if you haven't seen the movie, you've probably seen memes from this particular scene. The Joker sits atop a giant pile of cash and slides down this huge pile of money, and then he pours gasoline on it and he lights it on fire. He tells over the course of the dialogue in the movie. He tells him, he says, everything burns. Everything burns. All of it. In the end, everything burns.

Are they saying the same thing? Or Peter and the Joker saying the same thing? Obviously not. Obviously not. But there is sort of a way of thinking that we can get caught up in because we know things do end. They're different, though, right? They're different. The Joker is different because the Joker embodies something that we would call nihilism. Nihilism. It's the belief that values, the values that we have, the systems that we have, have real no basis. No real meaning. And so therefore, because they have no real meaning, you can burn it all down. Tear it all down. Everything can be torn down and burned down because it doesn't really matter. That includes our social constructs, our social order, our government, religions, schools, institutions. Right? They're all illegitimate. None of them really have legitimacy if there's really no concrete values. And there's really no meaning. These are all just illusions that we've constructed and propped up around ourselves. And so we can tear them all down. We can burn them all down.

Everything burns. But that's obviously not how we approach life. As Christians, we know we know everything does burn. Ultimately, you know, Peter tells us that things do burn. Right? But we don't live our lives. We don't approach our lives in this way that everything burns. But there is an element of what we of how we think that I'll say has a little bit of, let's call it nihilistic overlap. Right? We overlap with some of the thinking that maybe a nihilist would have.

And as we get into the message today, you'll see this is really the thinking of our age. Right? The devil has been cast down to the earth, we're told, and he has but a short time and his wrath is great. And he wants to tear it all down. He wants to burn it all down, especially you and me, especially the work that God is doing in us. He wants it all to be torn down. We'd love to see nothing but all humanity thrown into the lake of fire.

Right? That's what he wants. But that's not what we're after. That's not the kind of burning it all down that we're looking toward. But if we're not careful, we can start to align ourselves with thinking that goes that way. Because we know where it all ends. Daniel 2 in verse 34, it says, you watched while a stone... This is talking about Daniel. He had... Well, King Nebuchadnezzar has this vision, right, of this great statue.

The statue with the head of gold and it gets less valuable as it goes on down. But Daniel explains what that vision meant. He says, you watched while a stone was cut out without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay and broke them in pieces.

Then the iron, the clay, the bronze, and the silver, and the gold, they were crushed together and became like chaff from the summer threshing floors. The wind carried them away so that no trace of them was found, and the stone that struck the image became a great mountain and filled the whole earth.

And in the days... Verse 44, it says, in the days of these kings, the God of heaven will set up a kingdom which shall never be destroyed, and the kingdom shall not be left to other people. It shall break in pieces and consume all of these kingdoms, and it shall stand forever. We know what's coming. We know that there is permanence coming, and there's something that God is creating that's going to come and replace the systems of this world, all the institutions of this world.

It'll replace them. We look forward to that. Right? And so there's part of us that maybe also looks to the destruction of some of those institutions and says, yeah, bring them down. Psalm 2 in verse 8 says, ask of me, and I will give you... This is a prophecy of Jesus Christ.

It says, ask of me, and I will give you the nations for your inheritance and the ends of the earth for your possession. You shall break them with a rod of iron. You shall dash them to pieces like a potter's vessel. It's going to break them all down, tear them all down. This verse is quoted in Revelation 2 of us, Jesus Christ, speaking to the churches.

Revelation 2 in verse 26, he says, and he who overcomes and keeps my works until the end, to him I will give power over the nations. And here he quotes Psalm 2. He shall rule them with a rod of iron. They shall be dashed to pieces like the potter's vessel. So Jesus Christ not only has given that power, he says, I'm going to share that with you.

So we know we'll participate in that. We'll be those who rule with a rod of iron, in a sense. We know there's a certain amount of correction, destruction that comes with that. And we know at the very end of this world's systems, this talks about in Revelation 18, it says, therefore her plagues will come in one day, death and mourning and famine, and she will be utterly burned with fire, for strong is the Lord God who judges her.

So we're told, again, this world's systems will burn down, be utterly burned with fire. And so we can anticipate that, right? And sometimes we're excited about that. But if we're not careful in our thinking, we can let some of this world's tearing down, some of this world's thinking merge into our thinking and sort of blend in ways that are not really healthy. And we're coming up on an election season. We've got midterm elections coming up. You can expect, we know how this goes, there's going to be all sorts of tearing down, tearing down of that person for the thing that they did while they were in power, tearing down of this thing that was done and this thing that was said, burn it all down, those people are illegitimate, those people are wrong.

And it's the same thing from both sides. And it's a lot of tearing down, and a lot of burning down, and a lot of the kind of thinking that we don't need to be trapped in. There's a very, there's an interesting book that I started reading not too long ago.

It's called The Revolt of the Public. It was written by Martin Gurry in 2014, and he wrote this book, Analyzing Society. Martin Gurry was a CIA media analyst, and so I thought, you know, I thought maybe that his analysis of certain aspects of media might be helpful to me in my my new job. And so I dug in, and I read some things. But his assessment, he was writing about, especially the year 2011, and some of the tumult that happened in 2011. You might remember the Arab Spring, and some of the, there were widespread protests across Europe and in various Arab countries. Some of them were not necessarily related to each other. But it was a year of a lot of protests, a lot of uprising, and he analyzed it, and he attributed it to some things. And then 10 years later, so 2024, he wrote his assessment of where we had gotten to and was it accurate. He said this, he said, the public's rage against the status quo has forever been stuck on negation. The public is always against, it's always bashing at the institutions without offering alternatives, an approach that logically leads to nihilism, the love of destruction for its own sake.

And here he really gets at these tendencies that you've probably seen, if you've ever been on the internet. It's very easy to be against, it's very easy to express negation about something.

Because we can all agree that we're against that. The challenge is, you generally can all point to something and say, oh, we're against that, but what are we for? Well, we're actually all for slightly different things. That's why all these political ads that are going to come out are going to be about the thing that we're against. It's not going to talk as much about the thing that any particular candidate is for, because you might not agree with what they're for. But you can all agree with what we're against, and we can rally people in that direction. So we are generally, as a people, we are stuck on negation humanly. Carnally, that's what we do.

Bashing at the institutions without offering alternatives. Whose spirit and mentality does that sound like? The one who would elevate himself against God and make himself like God, and at what expense, at what risk? It's satanic thinking.

And it's his influence. It's his spirit that we know is blind in society and motivates and drives society. And it's that same sort of thinking that we can get caught up in. We've even seen it recently here. There are riots in France that are happening. This particular article said these, you know, the violence sweeping France was never really about schools. It started off in schools, it seemed like it was related to education, but it really just stirred up a whole lot of this antagonism toward the government. The sub-header there says, much of the protesting by students has become an exercise in nihilistic resentment. That's where our world gets stuck. And you can think about it even from things. Last year, you might think about some of the Gen Z uprisings that happened in Nepal. There were others around the world where people got together and organized online, right, on their social networks, and they organized these uprisings, and they tore down governments. They brought governments to their knees. And, you know, often those people who participate in the uprising, they don't actually get a voice in the new government. It's come and replaced with something that looks very similar to whatever was torn down, right? But it was easy to get in and tear it down. We see it in individual examples. You remember the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO last year, right? It was a horrible thing, but you might also remember how much support that guy got. How many people came and said, yes, this is really representative of, you know, the horrible things that this healthcare institution, the healthcare system in general, is done to us as a people and tear it down, right? Even if it meant murdering someone in cold blood. And so he's gotten all sorts of funding and GoFundMe sites that have funded his legal counsel, and people support that because they want to tear it down, right? They want to tear it down. It's really, it's that same spirit that produced the murder of Charlie Kirk, right? Just tear it down. I don't agree with that. I'm not going to engage with that. I'm going to tear that down.

You know, those are extreme examples, and I think we can all sort of agree that we would not condone those things.

We, you know, none of us is advocating murdering CEOs regardless of whether they mishandle their organizations or not, right? But there are some milder things where we can, again, because of our sort of overlap, we can, our mentality can sort of shift into support. I'll give you an uncomfortable example. You may remember this moment from early last year when the richest man in the world stood on stage with a chainsaw representing to some people the way that we were going to clean up our government, right? Now, it's a little weird for us because we know, well, none of us in general want an inefficient government, right? We want good government. We want government that's efficient, that doesn't have waste, right? And whatever you think of Elon and his approach to things, right? I don't think he was getting up there and being horribly malevolent. But at the same time, the imagery and the reaction that it evokes from people, right, is more on that nihilistic side of things. For us, it's uncomfortable because we know that all these governments are going to be torn down, right? And all of them are ultimately only legitimate to the extent that God has given them power and authority. And so there's part of us that wants to say, well, yeah, it's, you know, get in there, chop it down, tear it all up, right? But this is less of a savior wielding a two-edged sword, right, than a nihilist standing in front of a burning pile of cash, right? It's closer to that sort of imagery and mentality. So how do we make sure that we don't have our mentality align with the thinking of this world, right? The nihilism of this world that wants to tear it all down for the sake of tearing it down, right, for the sake of destroying life. The feasts that we have just come back from are the answer to that, right? And the thinking that those these feasts teach us, those can carry us forward, right? Even through an election season, they can help us to understand how to think. That's the thing that we want to take, because, again, they're teaching us that life is temporary, but something permanent is coming. Let's go to the book of Hebrews. Hebrews 12 and verse 26 says, but now he has promised, God has promised, saying, yet once more I shake not only the earth but also heaven. This is talking about the future. This is not a thing that's been done yet. God is going to shake not only the earth but also heaven.

Now this, yet once more, indicates the removal of those things that are being shaken, as of things that are made. You can imagine, you can imagine, the image I like to think of, I think I read in one commentary, was sort of the, like a tree, like imagine a ripe fruit tree, and God coming along and shaking, and all the things that aren't going to remain, they fall off, and then the thing that's left is what's permanent, what's solid, what's stable.

This once more indicates the removal of those things that are being shaken, as of things that are made, the things that are created. What Peter told us, the elements, right, that the things which cannot be shaken may remain. There are things that will remain, that will last forever, that will be permanent, and we get to have a part in that, and that's what these feasts teach us.

Tabernacles gives us an answer. The eighth day gives us an answer to what will remain after all is shaken, after all is torn down, because even though the millennium is temporary, that thousand-year period is temporary, permanence begins, right, sort of the seeds of what is permanent begin there, and it begins to grow. But notice here in Hebrews, the things that we need to note here, two things. One is that God does the shaking. God does the shaking. We're not the ones that need to be worried about going in and doing the shaking, and shaking things up, that's really not our job, that's not our position. You know, even when we return with Jesus Christ, right, and we're the armies clothed in white, riding behind him, it seems like things are taken care of very quickly, right. Jesus Christ slays them with the word of his mouth, and it seems like the descriptions of people sort of dying very instantly, you know, things, eyes dissolving in their sockets and tongues in their mouths, it's pretty graphic imagery. It sounds like that happens very fast, right. It doesn't sound like we come down and land on the Mount of Olives, and Jesus Christ has to lay out a battle plan, and we wage war for a few months, and you know, it doesn't sound like that at all, it sounds very, very quick. There's... God is going to do the bulk of the shaking. We assist him, we're told that we are there with him, we're his armies, but God is the one leading the way, and certainly in this life, there's very little shaking that we could do. We're not a very strong group, we're small people, right. And so it's God that does the shaking, but two, there are things that remain. There are things that remain. It's interesting, because here in Hebrews, he is quoting... when he talks about things being shaken, the author of Hebrews is quoting the book of Haggai. So let's go back to the book of Haggai.

Haggai 2 and verse 6. For thus says the Lord of hosts, once more, it is a little while, I will shake heaven and earth the sea and dry land, and I will shake all nations, and they shall come to the desire of all nations, and I will fill this temporal with glory, says the Lord of hosts. Now if you just read that out of context, and it sounds interesting, and we don't know what it is, right, but if you remember the book of Haggai, the book of Haggai is written during the time that Israel, that Judah, sorry, came back from captivity. So if you remember the history of Israel, right, they get into the promised land, they turn into a great nation, and then they split into two nations. The northern kingdom is taken captive by the Assyrians. The southern kingdom later is taken captive by the Babylonians, and they're gone for 70 years. 70 years Jerusalem sits empty, but then there's a remnant that comes back. There's a remnant that comes back, and they begin to rebuild. They rebuild the wall, and then here, the book of Haggai, they're rebuilding the temple. And Haggai is a prophet. He's preaching to them as they're beginning to rebuild the temple. That's the context, is building. They're building something.

And God says there's a time coming that He's going to shake all nations, but He's going to fill His temple with glory. Okay.

If you look at the... well, let's go back to Haggai 2 in verse 1. Notice when Haggai brings this message.

In the seventh month, on the 21st of the month, the seventh month, that's when we keep the feast. Feast of Tabernacles begins on the 15th of the month. The 21st of the month is the seventh day of the Feast of Tabernacles. So here we have a feast message that Haggai is bringing to the people. He's bringing and giving them a prophecy and giving them encouragement here during the Feast of Tabernacles. He's saying things will be shaken. The temporary things are going to go away and be removed, but there is something permanent that is being established. Verse 2, speak now to Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua, the son of Jehazadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people, saying, who is left among you who saw this temple in its former glory? There were some people who were old enough in that group to have seen the original temple before it was burned down. They saw it. They saw this big, glorious temple, Solomon's Temple, and it was spectacular by all accounts. It was something to see. But when they started laying the foundation, even just seeing the foundation, the people who had seen the previous one knew this temple was going to be nothing like it. It wasn't going to be big and beautiful. It wasn't going to be Solomon's Temple. It wasn't going to be that thing that they had known before. It was going to be something small. It was going to be something a little more humble, a little more modest in their eyes. He says, and how do you see it now? In comparison with it, is this not in your eyes as nothing?

Yet now be strong, Zerubbabel, says the Lord, and be strong, Joshua, son of Jehazadak, the high priest, and be strong, all you people of the land, says the Lord.

He says, and work, for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts. His message to them, his encouragement to them, was build. Build up. And he's encouraging them. And the encouragement is simply, I'm with you. I am with you.

God is with them in this. He's with you and me in the work that he's given us to do, in the building up that he has given us to do. And he's given us a lot of building up to do. That's the antidote to what our world wants to bring. He says build. Verse 5, according to the word that I covenanted with you when you came out of Egypt, so my spirit remains among you. Do not fear. His encouragement to them was, my spirit is among you. It's working among you, right, working with you to do this work. But we have it even better off. It's not simply among us. It's in us. And so he says, my spirit remains among you. Do not fear. Because his spirit's in us, right, we shouldn't, we don't need to fear or be timid about this world, its ideas, what it wants to do, what it wants to bring. We have something we're doing, something that we are a part of, that we get to build, right, that God's spirit is powering.

In verse 9, of this littler, modest temple, he tells him, he says, the glory of this latter temple shall be greater than the former, says the Lord of Hosts.

And in this place I will give peace, says the Lord of Hosts. This is the same temple, this temple that they built is the temple that centuries later Jesus Christ would come to.

And that he would come in and clear it out, you know, come in and flip the tables and get it cleaned up. But there's a really beautiful section, Matthew 21, where Jesus comes back to the temple and after he clears it out, the children all sing his praises, right. And the teachers come over and they say to him, can't you get these people to shut up? He says, nope, can't stop it, right. He was actually in that temple, right. He came and was glorified in that temple in that way, right. Sort of a precursor to what will happen in the future. But he came and he brought peace, right. God says, in this place I will give peace.

That temple that looked like the little thing, the nothing, right, God had greater plans for. He had big plans for that temple, right, and they were fulfilled. The point being that, you know, the little things that we build now, they matter. They do matter.

You might look at your life and say, well, what really can I do, right. What can I really build? Does it really matter? It does matter. Jesus Christ, He's a builder.

The word that's used to describe Him, when people hear about Him, I think it's in Mark 6. They say, isn't that the carpenter? That's how it's translated in a lot of the English translations. The word there is probably pronounced like Tekton, something like that. I don't speak Greek. But it basically means builder. He was a builder. He was a guy.

I used to imagine him as sort of like a finished carpenter going in. But, you know, it's not that. He was a builder. The people that you can read about in antiquity that are labeled as this, a lot of them are doing stone work. Sometimes it's woodwork. But they're building. They're creating homes. They're building structures. They're making farming implements. They're building. They're building stuff. Jesus Christ was a builder. And so, we shouldn't be surprised when he uses these building up analogies to teach us. Matthew 16, he says, Also I say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock, speaking of himself, I will build my church.

And the gates of Hades shall not prevail against it. He was going to build his church. And that's why you and I are sitting here today. It's because he started building. He started building. Matthew 7, he also expects us to be builders. Here at the end of the Sermon on the Mount, here's his wrap-up. Here's his conclusion to the instructions that he's given to his disciples. He says, Therefore, whoever hears these sayings of mine and does them, I will liken them to a wise man who built his house on the rock. He says, I'm going to... The metaphor that Jesus Christ chose to use after he gave all of that instruction was, you're like a wise builder. If you're really taking the things that he has taught and applying them in your life, then you are like a wise builder. And you're building something, as his metaphor goes on, you're building something on rock, on foundation that will have permanence, that will stand. It's not something that's going to get blown away and destroyed and burn up with all the elements. It's actually going to last. That's going to have permanence. And he expects this not only now, but this is where he is expecting things to go in the future, and things will go. In Isaiah 58, we read in a few different contexts, we read it around atonement, because there's passages in there about fasting and what a proper fast looks like. And so in these fall feasts, we think about that. We've celebrated that day. And we know what a proper fast produces. It produces joy, actually, removing the heavy burdens. But this is in that same context. A proper fast, a day of atonement, moves into a time of abundance and a time of joy and a time of building and restoration.

Those from among you shall build up the old waste places. You shall raise up the foundations of many generations, and you shall be called the repairer of the breach, the restorer of streets to dwell in. He's saying in the future, too, his way produces builders, restorers. And that's part of what we celebrate at the feast. When we think about reconstruction of this whole world, it's going to have been torn down. It's going to have been reduced to a lot of rubble. But we will be able to be there to help with the rebuilding, the reconstruction, the repairing, the restoration. That's going to be our role. But we have to be that now. How do we do that now?

Mr. Clint Porter gave a sermon not too long ago about healing.

And he talked about healing as being sort of the future bursting forth into the present. The present. That's kind of what miracles are. Sometimes, though, it doesn't burst forth. Sometimes it's work. We've got to take the future and we've got to be active about drawing it into the present in our lives. That's what being lights is in this world, is being the kind of people that can reflect the present here, or reflect the future here in the present. Those are the kind of people that we need to be. So how do we do that? How do we live as builders in this world now? How do we build the little things that will be permanent, that will last?

I have two points for you. Just two points.

Point number one. Be humble with information. I know this is going to sound counterintuitive. You're saying, wait a second, we're talking about building up. Why are we talking about information?

I want to quote to you from Revolt to the Public, this book that I told you that I read.

He says simply, the perturbing agent between authority and the public is information. Information. In this society, in our world, the thing that causes disruption, the thing that tears down, tends to be information. It's information. It's knowledge about something. And this is not new. This is not new. 1 Corinthians chapter 8 and verse 1. 1 Corinthians 8 and verse 1 says, Now concerning things offered to idols, you say, hold on, that is context that is not really relevant to what we're talking about. But it absolutely is. He's talking about the hot issue of his day. This is what all of the kids on Roman TikTok were talking about. I don't know.

This was the hot issue of his day, and he is talking about how to address the hot issues, the big things. He says, we know that we have all knowledge. Knowledge puffs up. But love, well, love, it builds up. That's what edifies mean. He's saying love builds up, knowledge puffs up.

And the problem isn't knowing. He's not saying go out and cover your ears and don't know anything. Try to not know anything at all. There were people who actually took that really seriously and tried to do that. They know nothing. There are people who know a lot. The problem is not knowing things. That's not what Paul's getting at. The problem is thinking that you know things that you don't really know. He says, if anyone thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know. But if anyone loves God, this one is known by him.

New American commentary on this section says, the limitations of human knowledge should promote humility rather than pride. Everything that we can know as humans, and we can know a lot these days, or at least we can think we know a lot. Right? Chad GPT sure knows a lot. But even as much as humans know, even if we have some artificial general intelligence that knows everything there is to know, that humans know, there's still some basic fundamental questions in the later chapters of Job that God asks Job and says, where were you? Do you have an answer for this? And, you know, we still can't answer those questions. The limitations of human knowledge should actually really humble us. And especially when we look individually at the things that we can know, relative to even the limited scope of human knowledge, it should be very humbling to us.

We should be able to recognize that, well, maybe I don't know as much as I think I know. You know, sometimes even the things we should know, you know, every job I've ever had, where I've been an expert about something, we still have to come together and we get together and we have meetings about stuff that we all think we know really well, and then we learn even more about what we already thought we knew, right? Because we didn't know. Because our knowledge is just so limited in scope. We just, we don't always really know.

But sometimes we can be like Job, we can think we know, and we can say things, and God says that we darken counsel by words without knowledge, right? We tear down. If I can be really open. It was interesting reading this book because as he was writing, as he was writing, he's describing the events that were going on in the world in 2011. I think most of you probably, most of the people in this room were were in the church in 2011, right? And it was, it was not a great time, right? To say the least. There was some challenging times there. But as I was reading through his analysis of what caused all these issues politically, right? It was the rise of social media, the broad distribution of information, right? And people who had the ability to rebroadcast information, I thought to myself, oh no, we, like I'd lived this experience already, you know? We lived it in 2010. We lived it a year early, right? We saw those things happen. We saw people who would, you know, they'd, well, they'd shine their light on some particular piece of information, right? Look at this over here, and now that you know that, you can go tear these things down and delegitimize these people.

We've all seen that. We all saw that at work in the church, and for the same reasons. That actually, to me, it was actually a little encouraging to read about that, because I realized, you know, maybe, maybe it wasn't so much that we were these unique perpetrators of collectively, that we had perpetrated all this stuff within the church, but rather that there was this societal trend that was happening. There was thinking that was happening, and tools that were available, right? That we just weren't ready for. And it produced some pretty rough results, produced some hard things and some hard times.

But I really think that the solution to all of that is humility with information.

Humility with information is really the... that's the antidote to rage bait. You've probably heard the term rage bait. It turns... we talk about the fact that we used to think that sex cells, but really what sells is rage, is anger, right? That's what sells. Because we can all agree that it's okay to be really angry about this thing over here, or that thing over there. But the solution to rage bait is just a little bit of humility with information. Being able to say, well, maybe, maybe, like the proverb says, the first one to bring their case is right, but then, you know, their neighbor comes along and examines them, and there's a little more information there that I didn't have. My limited information is not enough for me to justify tearing things down over.

So that's my first point. Be humble with information. The second point is to edify with your words. This is the building upside. Point one is mostly about playing defense. If we're going to be able to build up, if we're going to play offense in that sense, we also have to play defense. There's a book in Nehemiah, we read a real sort of interesting story about those who are rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem, and it says that they went out and they would rebuild because they knew their enemies were threatening them, so they had a sword in one hand and they're building in the other. They're building with one hand, they got their swords ready in the other hand, they're playing defense, and they're playing offense, and they were out there building. We, too, we have to play a little bit of defense to make sure that we are not susceptible to the tearing down that is so natural to our carnal human nature before we can play a really good offense. And this is how we play a really good offense. Edify with your words.

Let's go over to Ephesians 4. Ephesians 4 in verse 29 says, Let no corrupt word proceed out of your mouth. Now, when I was young, this was the swearing Scripture.

This is the one where you say, okay, this is the no four-letter word Scripture.

But that's a very constrained view of this verse. Let no corrupt word. Well, a lot of corrupt words can come out of your mouth without you ever swearing.

We can say some pretty corrupted things. We can do a lot of tearing down. He says, by contrast, but what is good for necessary edification?

What's going to build up? Which of my words will build up? That it may impart grace to the hearers. There's an even bigger challenge. How do you build up and impart grace to those who are hearing? That's a pretty high bar that he says. This word for edification is this is the same word for building up that we read that Jesus Christ uses of builders when he talks about building his church. When he talks about us being builders, we're edifiers, those who build up the church. This can be both our spoken words and our written words. There's a lot that we build that we do that feels maybe a little bit permanent in this world. Our words can feel kind of ethereal. They can feel like maybe they go out there and then they disappear. That's what happens with some of our sermons. I have sermons that I've given that I don't even remember. Our words can feel a little bit temporary, but our words are some of, if you think about it, the power of your words is something that can have eternal consequences in ways that the more permanent things that we feel like we can create or can build do not. Because the physical things, again, they're all burned up. But our words, when Jesus Christ talks about his words being spirit and life, he's talking about the fact that these words that he was saying have eternal consequences for you and for me if we apply them. Our words can do the same. Our words can be permanent in that sense. Somebody who becomes an eternal being in God's family who can say, that conversation that I had with you, that thing changed me. We know God is at work behind that, right? But he's chosen to work through human instruments, and our words are among the most powerful things that we have that we can use for building, for building up. I'll give you an example.

Mr. Micah Gunn, he's a deacon up in the Columbus congregation. He's our presenter on Magnified podcast. He has an audio podcast that he runs as well. He had one episode where he talked about wrestling with God. I want to read to you a comment thread, some of the back and forth from a comment thread, in response to that episode. Because I think it demonstrates the ability of words to be able to build up. So this is not Micah. This is the other guy. The other guy says, the way we see it, God cheated, speaking about God wrestling with Jacob. God cheated. God is a coward. I wish I had a chance to fight Jesus, except that he would cheat. It's pretty... It's hard to even read those words, right? And I don't know about you, but you hear those words and it's like, okay, gloves off, right? But look at... Well, just look what happens here, because again, if you recognize that this is somebody who is blinded by the devil, who has really... Has to have God open their mind to be able to understand and to be able to grow. Well, now that changes how we are going to engage that person, right? So that's what Micah did. He said, respectfully, it seems you have some serious pain in your life that has resulted in bitterness toward God. I'm sorry that's the case. I appreciate your grit. I actually see your comments as active wrestling with that same God. I hope that wrestling might someday lead to love and respect before Him. The guy replied that he could never love and respect a God that would burn people in hell forever. And Micah explained that he doesn't think the view... The Bible supports that view, right? That believes that people are annihilated, right? If they reject God fully. And he went on to tell him, he said, it sounds like you had one view of God, and when you didn't like it, you rejected it. And that's fair. You just might want to ask the question, was it the right view? It doesn't sound like you've rejected the God, just the one you've understood.

And he responds, he says... So here's where he does this total flip. He goes from calling God a cheat and a liar. And he says, you know, that's what I've been thinking lately as well.

God is not what was presented to me. I believe in God, creation, and Jesus. I prayed for salvation, for sins in the past, the present, and sins I'd yet to commit. I was baptized. I meant it, but I feel betrayed. Please don't take anything I say as a personal attack. I think you're a pretty good guy. I just have to find out what God is about. That's the power of words. Words that don't necessarily come in and cut and tear down, but words that engage with someone and say, you know, maybe there's more to the picture here. Maybe there's something more to see. We don't know this guy's story. We don't know what's happened since this was maybe a little over a year ago. Someday we will know. Someday we'll know his story. And hopefully this exchange here was maybe a little something that helped to change his mind. Our words have that power. Our words can have lasting consequences, permanent consequences. Are your words going to build something permanent? That's up to you.

The true temple where God already dwells, right, he is building up.

Are we a part of building it? Are we building it? Mr. J. Fit read from Ephesians 2 in the sermonette where it talks about us being built up.

We can be a part of that in the way that we engage with each other, and especially with our words.

I'm going to go back to 2 Peter 3, because here he's moving on from all things being burned up. He says, nevertheless, we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. That's what we're building toward. That's what we're moving toward. That's what we get to be a part of. It's a tremendous blessing for us to be able to be a part of that, to be able to participate in these holy days that we've now come out of, and to be able to move forward and go forward and help build toward them.

This is all temporary. Even the millennial period is temporary, even for us as spirit beings. We wait for this moment when there's a new heaven and a new earth. That's the thing that we're looking toward and building toward. Peter asks, he says, therefore, since all these things will be dissolved, what manner of persons ought you to be? The theists teach us that among all the things that we ought to be, we must be builders.