Powering Disruptive Change

I wanted to talk a little bit today about disruption. I don't know how often you guys hear this word, but it's a word that I hear pretty much every day, often multiple times a day, at work, as we live now in a world where everything is just rapidly changing. There's so much disruption going on, whether you think about in our political world, but certainly as well in technology, and all the things that are changing in terms of the way that we live our day-to-day lives. If you think about the phone that you carry, most people carry a smartphone these days.

You have more computing in that smartphone than was available to take man to the moon the first time. It's really staggering when you think about the computing power that exists. Of course, we use it for things like cat videos and dogs playing the piano and things like that. But it is good for more than that as well.

As we think about disruption and disruptive technologies and ideas, there's usually a core element that lies at the heart of those. Some of the areas of disruption that we experience right now that get talked about, things that will happen in many of our lifetimes when you look at it, are things like autonomous vehicles. In fact, in some parts of the country, autonomous vehicles, driverless vehicles, are already on the road. What about things like artificial intelligence?

A conference I was at before the feast. We had different demonstrations of robots and the things that they could do. Recognizing faces, being able to track when they saw people, how many people are in a room, being able to interact, at least with common commands like you might give to a Siri. All of these things are coming and they're going to disrupt our lives.

But all of these disruptions, when you look at any disruption that's happened across the years, has central elements in it. So if we look, for example, think about DNA. Several decades ago, DNA was unlocked in terms of understanding human genetics. And all of the things that have come out of that central idea of understanding DNA, as now we can have new medical treatments that are targeted specifically at people, and the specific disease that they have based on their genetic makeup.

We can identify certain birth defects that happen and actually fix those in the womb, because we understand DNA. So at the core of DNA, so many things build out in order to do that. Think about microchips. Many of us can probably remember back in the day when you had to turn on a TV and then wait for about 30-45 seconds while that TV warmed up. And the picture started to flicker up on the screen. Now anyone who's under about age 20 is looking at me thinking, what in the world does that mean? There used to be these things called vacuum tubes. And when you opened up a TV, you'd see these glass tubes that looked kind of like light bulbs.

And that was what was in a TV or other electronics. And you'd actually have to turn it on and wait for it to warm up. For those of you who remember listening to the radio, you'd turn on this big chunky radio and you could almost feel it warming up. You could hear the hiss of the static as the signal came in, the tubes warmed up, and you actually had reception.

Now once we figured out as human beings how to deal with microchips and silicon instead of vacuum tubes, all of that went away. It enabled miniaturization. That's why we can have cell phones in our pockets, smart phones in our pockets. That's why we can have computers driving our cars in a way that we could never have before. That's why we can develop other miniaturized devices like these drones that fly around and can take pictures and video and help with maps and all the rest.

All of these incredible things, but come back to a central idea, in this case the microchip. Now you might wonder about the last thing on here, which is self-service. I talked to somebody back probably ten years ago or so when I was working on some things at work, and they said, you know, what do you think is the most breakthrough innovation that happened in the 20th century? And this person's viewpoint was that the biggest breakthrough that happened, the biggest innovation, was the idea of self-service. Now that might seem strange at first when you hear that. Go with the regular microchip.

There we go. So it might seem strange to think about that at first, but, you know, when you go back, if you've seen an old movie or something, people walk into the grocery store, right, or the general store in an old Western movie, and what do they do? They would go up to the counter and they would tell the grocer, or to the drug store and tell the druggist, here's what I want. And the grocer would go back to the shelf and pick up all these different things, put them together in a bag or a box, and hand them over the counter.

Now, at some point in time, somebody thought, you know, we don't really need one desk and have the grocer running all over the place, getting things for people. What if they went into a grocery store and actually just filled their own shopping cart with merchandise, and then took it to the checkout counter? And from that central idea of self-service, you get into all kinds of new things. Fast food would have never existed before that, and we go from there to kiosks.

Many of you might have passed through an airport on the way to or from the feast. A lot of airports now, you look around, and the restaurants at the airport, they just have iPads sitting there at the table, and you click in your own order, and somebody just shows up to come and deliver your food. You even pay right there on that iPad. It's self-service. And it gets to the point where sometimes we get frustrated actually having to deal with a human being on the other side of a transaction because it takes longer, or like they actually want to talk to us or something.

And it just gets to be a hassle because you're trying to get a transaction done, right? Or you get up at two in the morning and decide you want to buy a riding lawnmower off of amazon.com. This idea of self-service completely revolutionized the way that we shop, the way that we transact with people in day-to-day business that we do. One more thing let's consider. I spoke a few months back and used the example of the light bulb. I want to turn back to that just briefly. I found this chart that graphically illustrates the cost of lighting.

And I won't go back through everything that I talked about the last time, but the point here is that back in the days of Babylon, it took a day's labor to produce, to pay for, 10 minutes of lighting. A day's labor to pay for 10 minutes of lighting. And as a result of that, most people had no artificial lighting in their homes. It's not the sort of thing that you could afford. You might have a fire to keep yourself warm at best, but not real lighting where you could do something.

And so mankind was really set to living from sunrise to sunset. And the way that people would live their lives would be they would deal with everything that they were going to do during the daylight. And when it was dark, they were essentially not able to do much of anything productive. Now, once the cost of lighting came down because of whatever you would come up with, whales at one point, then kerosene, and eventually electric light, the ability to have light completely revolutionize the way that we live our lives.

You know, you hear stories of Abraham Lincoln way back when and how incredible it was that he would sit by the firelight and read books. And that showed an amazing amount of dedication that we don't really think about today, because if you've ever tried to read a book by the flickering light of a fire, it's a very difficult thing to do. And it showed the type of dedication that he had as a person to try to learn and to read and even use those hours of darkness in a productive way.

And that's really all that they could afford in his home in order to read by. Nowadays, we simply flick on the light switch and we have it there. That's enabled us to do things like produce goods in manufacturing plants day and night. A lot of manufacturing plants run three shifts, right, 24 hours a day. And that often started during the Industrial Revolution. Lighting itself changed the way that we live our lives. Not only that, but you look at street signs, you look at traffic lights, you look at the backlight on your smartphone.

All of those things depend, in the end, on that core idea of electrical light. So why am I spending so much time talking about this idea of disruption? We don't probably think about it usually in religious terms, but God's plan, culminating in the return of Jesus Christ that we just thought about during the feast, is the ultimate disruption that's going to be experienced by mankind.

Now, we've talked about this before, the fact that, like we read in Deuteronomy 16, 16, when we read about offerings often, it talks about three times in a year that we've come before God. And those three times represent three phases, really, of God's plan. The Spring Holy Day is what happened in the past when Jesus Christ gave his life as a sacrifice for sin. Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came, the time that we live in today with access to the Holy Spirit, and the other time to come that we just celebrated at the feast, the future that we look at when Jesus Christ will return. Think about how disruption was at the core of each one of those things that happened. What was it that happened when Jesus Christ came, when he stood up in front of the religious leaders and everyone else in that day and said, I'm the son of man. I'm the one who was prophesied in the Scriptures. Was that disruptive? You bet it was. People went after him, and there were multiple attempts to kill him before he was finally crucified and died. What about in the Day of Pentecost? We look at what happened in Acts 2 when the Holy Spirit came. All of the physical disruption that came, the wind and the fire as the Holy Spirit came, as well as what happens then within our lives, the people who have the Holy Spirit. Because in the end, what's the Holy Spirit about but disrupting our lives? Changing the route of our human lives the way that we would go without that Spirit, and completely turning it so that we're following his way. And of course, when Jesus Christ returns, we read all the accounts in Revelation, the prophecies of the things that will happen. Humankind, as a whole, will fight Jesus Christ when he comes, because of the disruption that his return causes to everybody's day-to-day way of being. Now, I mentioned earlier how every disruption has things at its core. And that's where I'd like to spend a little time now to think about. What is at the core of God's disruption? Because if you want to understand a disruptive idea, you go back to the core, you understand the things that lie at the very heart of that disruption, and the more you can understand about that, the more you can embed that in the things that you do, the more you can continue to develop and grow on that central theme, on that core. So let's look at that. We'll look first at a few clues at creation. We go back to the very beginning. What would you pick out as being at the center of God's disruptive plan? If you turn with me, please, to Genesis 1. We'll read verses 1 through 3 of Genesis. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters, and then God said, let there be light, and there was light. Now, if we go to each one of the next days of creation, what's going to be the common theme at the beginning of every one of those next verses about creation? God said. God said. Let's turn to the Psalms, which puts it a little more clearly in terms of what we're trying to get at today. Psalm 33. We'll read verses 6 and 9.

Psalm 33, verses 6 and 9. Psalm 33, verse 6, By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. For he spoke, and it was done. He commanded, and it stood fast. So what's that central element of creation? Everything came into existence by his word. Psalm says it very eloquently, by his word where the heavens created. We only have to get to the third verse of the Bible when we see God saying things, speaking words, and those words caused the creation. It was by the power of his word that the heavens were created. Now let's fast forward all the way to the end of the story and see what clues we have when we look in his kingdom. What else can we find as far as what's at the center of disruption when we look forward to his kingdom? We'll turn to Isaiah 2. The Scripture is probably familiar to most of us as we were listening to sermons at the feast over the last few weeks, and probably heard this passage read as well. Isaiah 2 and verse 1. Let's look at what the condition is, what is the description in the millennium, and what is included here in the center of it. The word that Isaiah the son of Amos saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem. Now it shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established on the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills, and all nations shall flow to it. Many people will come and say, come and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. He will teach us his ways, and we will walk in his paths, for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

One of the key elements, the key descriptions of what happens in the millennium, is the word of the Lord going out from Jerusalem and being available to everyone. So again, we see this common denominator coming together of the word of God. Let's go to Isaiah 11, another passage that you probably came across during the feast just a couple of weeks ago. We'll read verse 9 of Isaiah 11. Again, looking at what's at the core of God's disruption. What is it that powers it?

Isaiah 11, 9, They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. So of course we know that the knowledge of the Lord, the knowledge of God, comes through his word.

And so really what it's saying is that his word is going to be available as the waters cover the sea. It's going to be everywhere, two-thirds of the earth covered with ocean, as we can see when we fly in an airplane between the continents. I'd like to focus here in this verse too, because it's a familiar verse for so many people, so we tend to just kind of blast through it. But let's focus right in the middle of the word for. What is it saying here, They will not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord.

There's causality being talked about there, right? Because the earth is full of the knowledge of the word of the Lord, because of that reason, they will not hurt nor destroy in God's holy mountain. This verse is pointing to the fact that the availability of God's word and the ability to understand that word is going to be what helps to cause those conditions of the millennium. So at the center of what we see in God's kingdom, again, is God's word. I'm not saying it's the only element. I'm not saying it's the only thing. But at the center, just as we saw it, creation is God's word.

So when we look at God's entire plan, the way that he's disrupting, disrupted the world, is disrupting our lives, will cause the ultimate disruption with the return of Jesus Christ. The thing that we see at the center of all of this is the word of God. Now let's not stop there and let's look a little bit further in the middle. We'll just look briefly here at a few other sections that continue to bring this out all the way through the span of God working with mankind.

Consider the Ten Commandments, for example. What do we read in Exodus 20, verse 1? God spoke these words. If we remember what was happening in Exodus, at this point in time, the children of Israel were moving across to go to the Promised Land, and they stopped there at the foot of Mount Sinai, and God was going to speak to them.

They had to hold the people back, there were thunderings and lightnings in the mountain, and God came down, not visually, but they heard, they saw the lightning, they heard the thunder, and they heard him speaking the words of the Ten Commandments. And he laid down, he codified that law for the children of Israel. And of course, we understand that that's an expression of God's mind.

We can see the Ten Commandments expressed in other ways, long before the time that they were given here, as these commandments to Israel. But here they were given to Israel by his word, from his very mouth. Again, the word of God going out to human beings, as he was calling the children of Israel, for part of his purpose.

Let's fast forward to when Jesus Christ came to the earth. How did Jesus Christ identify himself? I find this very powerful in terms of this topic, because Jesus Christ specifically referred to himself as the Word, or in this case, John talking about Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John, starting in verse 1. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him nothing was made that was made.

In him was life, and the life was the light of men. And in case there's any doubt that that's talking about Jesus Christ, verse 14 says, The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. The Word of God is so central to the way that he works with us and the way that he identifies, that Jesus Christ himself identified as the Word of God, the Living Word. Because everything that he did, the way that he lived his life, the way that he treated people, everything that he did exemplified in the way that he lived God's Word, God's way of being, the way that God wants us to be.

That's why Jesus Christ, we view him not only as our elder brother, but our example as we try to walk like him, because he was the Word living, exemplified, showing the way that God's way of life.

And then what happened of the biblical times? The written Word was left for us. Let's turn to 2 Timothy 3. We'll read verses 16 and 17. 2 Timothy 3, starting in verse 16.

Here Paul, writing to Timothy, says, All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and it's profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good word or every good work. So as we know, this is talking about the Scriptures, again, the Word of God, in this case in written form, and it says here that this word that we have, the written word, is complete in terms of being able to equip us to learn how to live God's way of life. Now, of course, we know that doesn't mean it's good for everything that we're going to need in life. We can't learn how to be a plumber. We can't learn how to be an electrical engineer by reading the Bible. But we can learn the more important thing, which is how we need to live as godly people in everything that we do in this life. And God's Word is completely able to equip us in all of that. We're told that it is complete in that way, and the only thing that we need in that sense, in order to know how to live our spiritual lives. So looking back at what we've covered so far and talking about disruption and God's disruptive change that's happening, creation came into existence through God's Word. A distinctive feature of God's Kingdom is going to be the abundance of His Word, and throughout history, God's Word has been at the center of how He deals with mankind. Whether it's His spoken Word that was codified in the Ten Commandments, Jesus Christ as the Living Word, or the Scriptures that were left for us. But at the center of all of this, all of God's plan, is the Word of God. How often have we considered that fact? The fact that when you go back to the very core, God's Word is what sits there. It's something that we need to understand if we really want to understand all of the disruption that needs to be happening in our lives and will happen in the future. So of course, now the very important point, who cares? Why does this matter?

This is whenever I am trying to put a sermon together, the most important question that I ask myself, which is, so what? If I can't answer the question, so what? I probably shouldn't be giving the message. Why is it important to us? What is it that we should do about it? Let's backtrack a bit and talk again about the light bulb and think a bit about inventions that happen.

Now, the first light bulb was actually invented in 1802. I don't know how many people knew that. The light bulb didn't end up being brought to market until the late 1800s, 1880. What is it that happened in that span of time and why did it take so long for the light bulb to get to market? The fact is that back in 1802, people figured out technically how to build a light bulb, but it was too expensive, and the filament burned out too quickly in order for it to be marketable.

If you were going to make a filament that would last long enough, it was so incredibly expensive that you couldn't sell it to anybody, and nobody would use it. There were years and years of time that were spent as different people tried to iterate this idea of the light bulb and come up with different ideas and thoughts and ways of doing it. Actually, Edison didn't even come into the picture until people had been at this for like 75 years.

Other people had gone through and tried to work with the light bulb, different types of filaments, different types of glass, how you put a vacuum inside of that glass in order to make it work, how you deal with the power going in. And they couldn't quite get there in terms of getting something that was going to last long enough to be commercially viable and be inexpensive enough that people could actually buy it and use it.

And that's what Edison, after his thousand, and that's a round number if you look back at history, but roughly a thousand different tries at different ways to go about it, finally came up with the design of the light bulb that we generally have known today until LED lighting came up. So it's amazing to think, you know, we've gone over a hundred years using the basic design that Edison came up with in 1880. But the point here is it took a lot of work, a lot of time and energy to go back to that core element of electrical light, filament inside of a vacuum, inside of a vacuum glass tube, in order to actually turn it into something that would be usable and that we could work with and that would change our lives ultimately.

How many people know when the digital camera was invented? How many people would guess that it was more than 10 years ago? Okay, how many would guess it was more than 20 years ago? How many would guess it was more than 30 years ago? How many would guess it was more than 40 years ago? Wow, okay. 1970s. Eastman Kodak Company invented the digital camera in the 1970s. Similar to the light bulb, it wasn't practical at that point in time because none of us was going to lug around a computer the size of our car in order to take a picture.

And there was an element there of the fact that it would disrupt their own business, you know, selling film, if it was going to be brought to market. And digital photography went through the same sort of process, where it took a number of years before it finally became what it is now, where we all have cameras in our pockets and so many pictures, we don't know what to do with them. Whereas in the past, if you can remember, when you bought a roll of film, I mean, you were very careful, right?

How you took the pictures, that you had the lighting just right, that you were thinking about your shutter speed, because every time you clicked that shutter, you knew it was going to cost you whatever, 50 cents a dollar, between what you paid for the film and what you would pay to develop the film.

Now it's free. You just click away because it's electronic. Completely changed. This is an interesting book that I read a few years ago called Outliers, written by a guy named Malcolm Gladwell.

He put forward an interesting premise in this book, and said that anyone, he was studying in the book Outliers, he was studying statistical outliers. So he was studying people who were able to perform at whatever they did, athletics, business, academics, in a way that was complete outlier from the usual span of where people performed.

And what he found as a common denominator was what he called the ten thousand hour rule. People who were able to perform way beyond anyone else, Bill Gates, great athletes, the Beatles as a band, he found this ten thousand hours as the common denominator that he focused in on.

And his view in the people that he studied and the groups was that it takes ten thousand hours of concerted effort in order to really gain mastery at something. Now, this has been a bit controversial because I think we all understand intuitively it doesn't apply across the board, right? So if I go play basketball for the next ten thousand hours, the next five years or whatever, I spend all day long playing basketball, I'm not going to be the next LeBron James.

We can guarantee that.

But people who have the physical attributes that you need and the basic skill that you need, if they apply those ten thousand hours, will have the ability to reach mastery. We're all built in different ways in terms of what we're able to do. But it's very unusual to find somebody that can excel at that kind of a level, if you keep with the example of LeBron James, without putting in the time.

You look at any great athlete, you look at any great musician, you look at anyone who's got mastery in any sort of different area. And typically people will come up to them and say, hey, you're really talented. And yeah, that's part of it, but I can guarantee you virtually every single one of those people will turn around and say, you have no idea how much time I have spent trying to learn and to master this area. And I see a few people smiling out there who have incredible talent and have spent a lot of time trying to develop it. Because that's the way it is. You need both of those elements. There's no way to get around that investment of time unless you're that one in a million type of person that is just so good at something. And those people do come along, but it's very unusual. Tom Brady is another guy you can think of as an athlete. I think he's 41 years old, still playing at the top of his game as a quarterback in the NFL. But if you look at the training regimen that Tom Brady has, how careful he is about the things that he eats, how often he practices, how he trains physically, there is no doubt that the investment of time there is incredible. And that's what's helped him and made the difference in being able to get to that point where other people who have not been willing to work that hard at it have not been able to make it. So if God's word, going back to the topic, is central to his plan and significant time is required to gain mastery in any area, what should we be doing?

Duh, would be maybe a good way to answer that.

But that's the point here, right? We've looked at disruption. We've looked at God's disruption. We've seen that at the center of that disruption is his word. We've seen that if you want to gain mastery in any area, time is required to get in there, to take it apart, to understand it, to develop it, to let it work in any area. Why would it be any different in our Christian lives? Why would it be any different with God's word? We have that word. We have to get into it. We have to handle it. We have to understand it. We have to dive into it. We have to learn it in order for it to make that disruptive change in our lives.

I'd like to visit a couple of points along those lines to encourage everybody to think about today. Let's start in Matthew 4.4.

Matthew 4.4. This is a passage written in the Gospel of Matthew about the temptation of Jesus Christ. Most of us probably remember having read this at some point in time. Matthew 4, verse 4. Jesus Christ being tempted by Satan answers and says, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. We should live by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God. Now, that's pretty plain on its face and makes a lot of sense. But I'd like us to think about something. That is that we cannot live by a word that we don't know.

We can't live by a word that we don't know. Now, I'll use an example of a story I read on the Internet, which I've later proven is false. But it's a great story, so I'm still going to tell it. So the urban legend goes like this. A guy back in the 1980s, when cruise control was pretty new, goes to an RV dealership and buys a recreational vehicle. And the person selling it says, fantastic vehicle, it's got the newest cruise control on it. This thing can basically drive itself. The guy buying it says, love it. I got myself an RV and it has autopilot. And as the story goes, the guy gets in the RV and he starts driving down the road. He's off driving down the highway in the middle of Arizona someplace. And he's getting a little tired and decides he needs some coffee. Well, I'm driving this RV, got my coffee maker in the back. There's a kitchenette back there. This thing can practically drive itself. So let's kick in cruise control. I'm going to get up and go in the back and make myself some coffee. And of course, as the story goes, as we would all expect, a curve in the road comes. The RV goes off the road. And according to the story, the man survived. Now, again, I went and corroborated the story. It's not true, but it makes a great illustration. Because what was this guy doing? If you think of the words of the instruction manual for his RV, was he living by the words of the instruction manual? He didn't even know what was in the instruction manual, did he? Some guy told him this thing can practically drive itself when it's on cruise control. And without bothering to go to the instructions, he kicked it in and thought he had autopilot going.

Now, as we look at ourselves, we have to think about the same thing when we consider God's Word, don't we? How often do we live our lives based on what people have told us they think is in the Bible? How often have we used impressions of what's in God's Word to govern the way that we live our lives, rather than going back to the source, going back to His Word, going back to the core of the disruption that God is trying to cause in order to make sure that we understand what's in that Word so we can live by it?

We cannot live by a word that we don't know. Studying God's Word, and I want to make sure I'm clear about this, does not make a person a Christian. Just like you can't take 10,000 hours shooting free throws and become LeBron James, you can't simply read the Bible and become a Christian and have your sins forgiven.

We know that Jesus Christ's sacrifice is required, we know that there's repentance, we know the Holy Spirit, and all of these elements are there. But I would also hold out that we cannot be Christians without studying His Word, because we can't live a Christian life without understanding the Word of God and then living by that Word, and always coming back to God and asking for His strength and His power through His Holy Spirit to guide our lives in His way.

So I want to make sure we understand, I'm not saying the Holy Spirit doesn't have an apart in this, I'm not saying Jesus Christ's sacrifice doesn't, but at its core, if we have His Holy Spirit, if we repent it, that Word needs to continue to develop and to live within us. For the second point I'd like to make, let's start in John 14. John 14 will read verse 26.

Carrying on the theme of the Holy Spirit and what it does, John 14 verse 26. Here John recorded the words of Jesus Christ as He was nearing His crucifixion. He was talking about some of His final words that He had with the disciples before He was taken captive. And in John 14, 26, Jesus Christ says, The Helper, the Holy Spirit, will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you. What I'd like to focus on here is the second part of that verse, bringing to remembrance all the things that I said to you.

And the simple point I'd like to leave related to this is we can't remember something that we haven't learned. Now, it does say in that verse, the Holy Spirit will teach us. I believe what that means is that people inspired by the Holy Spirit speaking and teaching God's Word, I believe it means the Holy Spirit working within us as we read that word and as we take it in us and as we think. Now, I know we've got lots of Disney fans here in the room, but I think one of the things that we often have a difficulty with is mixing up Tinker Bell and the Holy Spirit.

And what I mean by that is that we often expect that God is simply going to come like a fairy, go bink with a magic wand, and something's going to change in our lives. That's not the way it happens unless we look at some rare instances in the Bible where God specifically performed a miracle. What is it that we read about in the Bible as things are happening, as God, through His Holy Spirit, is working with people?

We see time. We see difficulties and trials. We see time to learn. We see a whole expanse of things that happen as people are trying to learn about God, apply His way, and mature and develop as people. We see very few situations where God, through His Spirit, simply comes and blanks somebody on the head, and they go off and do great things. I've used this example before, but the Apostle Paul, approximately 15 years, most people think, between the time that he was blinded on the road to Damascus and the time that he really fully began his ministry.

15 years? That's not a fairy boinking him on the head and turning him into the greatest evangelist who ever lived. 15 years in between. What about Moses? He spent 40 years in the wilderness before he returned to Egypt to become the human Savior that God used to take the children of Israel out of Egypt. Many more examples like that, if you look in the Bible, the people that God has worked with, the amount of time and that process of maturing, just as we see inventions going from that core idea to a fully built invention, taking often decades before it's ready to go, is the way it is in our lives as well, as God's Holy Spirit works within us.

The other point I'd like to make here is also along the lines of what the Holy Spirit does and doesn't do. The Holy Spirit doesn't simply implant knowledge in our heads. It gives us the ability to understand God's way of life. But we have to study it. It talks in this passage in John about the fact that God's Spirit will call things into remembrance. Now, for something to be called into remembrance, we have to have at some point taken it into our brains in the first place. So, I was talking with somebody about a week ago, and they were talking about getting together with an old friend who was telling stories about their time growing up.

And apparently the friend said to my friend, hey, you remember the time you were hit by lightning? And the person I was talking to said, I don't remember ever being hit by lightning. But apparently this old friend of him did remember that happening, and he was trying to reconcile those stories, which I'm not sure have ever been fully reconciled yet. The point being, if something hasn't happened to you, if you haven't done something, you can't remember it. Right? Because it's not in your experience. It's not in your brain.

That's the way it is with God's Word as well. You know, kids who are in school right now, when you came back from the feast, you probably had some tests to take or some homework to catch up on.

And probably, hopefully, you prayed to God about it as well, that he was helping you with that. But that prayer, if it's like the prayers I've always asked before my tests, is, help me to remember things I've studied. Help me to be able to draw those things out and express the fact that I've learned them. In my experience, God does not implant knowledge simply into our heads. We read the Bible, we experience things in life, and through His Holy Spirit, He pulls into our memory things that we've read, things that we've learned from His Word, to apply to the situations that we're in, to gain wisdom, and to gain understanding.

But it's powered by His Word, the things that we've hidden and taken within ourselves. So the challenge in the world that we live in today is that we're in a society that's geared towards quick impressions, right? Videos that are a few minutes long at the longest in order to teach us something or create an impression. I remember talking to one teacher, and they said, the way that we read things today is like the letter F.

I said, what in the world does that mean? He said, well, look at the letter F, right? It's broad across the top, and it has a long staff and a shorter line horizontally across the middle. So that's the way most people read these days. So you pick up an article, most people will read the entire first paragraph. That's like the long part of the F. And then they'll just start skimming down. About halfway through, they'll say, hey, I haven't been really reading anything, and they'll read like half of another paragraph, and then they'll skim down from there.

And I know when I look at myself and how I tend to read things, it is kind of like the letter F, actually. And I often have to go back and say, wait a second, I'm not sure I really know what I just read. I'm not sure I really understand what the premise is. I need to go back and understand this critically and take it apart. That's the kind of world we live in, though, because we get so many things fired at us, so many quick impressions. We learn things from memes, little pictures with four or five words on them, and they create this whole impression in our minds that might or might not have anything to do with all of the underlying facts. And unless we take the time to dig through, compare, understand, think critically, it's difficult to synthesize all of that. I think we all have to reflect, I know I do, at how those pressures and those ways of thinking and taking in information today impact me in reading God's Word and understanding it. And I have to think, when I do my Bible study, do I do my Bible study like the letter F? Just kind of browse a few lines, you know, go up and down a little bit, and, okay, I got it.

Or are we thinking thoroughly through it? Are we taking the time to let that Word work within us through the power of God's Holy Spirit to really learn and embed itself in us?

Turn with me, if you will, to Romans 12. We know Romans 12.1 pretty well, I think. Our body is giving ourselves as living sacrifices to God.

To me, Romans 12 verse 2 is kind of the payoff scripture, right, where it all comes home in terms of what we need to do.

Romans 12 verse 2, it says, Again, in talking about disruption, talking about the fact that we need, on a continual basis, be transforming, disrupting our lives into something different than the stream that everyone else is going along.

And the way that we do that is we have to spend the time with God's Word, the centerpiece of His disruption, in order to continue to understand it and grow in our ability to use it in our lives.

So we need to go to the source of that disruptive power, and we need to fill ourselves with it.

So a few practical suggestions. None of these things are blockbusters, but just a few things to think about, and as you consider ways to maybe apply this in your life, set aside formal time to study God's Word.

You know, that's something that many of us have done in the past. Do we continue to do that on an ongoing basis? It's kind of easy sometimes to start reading a passage, and I've read this 20 times, already know what it says, and just start kind of skimming through it, and not really focus and concentrate on what it's saying.

Some quiet uninterrupted time to read and reflect is incredibly powerful.

We've talked before about what about the idea of a daily Bible reading program? I know some of the others who've spoken have asked the question before, when is the last time you've read the Bible from cover to cover? Have you read the Bible from cover to cover? If not, or if it has been a while since you've done it, it's a great way to go in and just take in God's Word.

And nowadays, a lot of us spend a lot of time in our cars commuting back and forth, or perhaps we have downtime at home if we're not working.

Audio Bibles are a great way to do this as well. Just about every smartphone, you can download YouVersion or another Bible program, and you can play this audio Bible as you go, whether you're driving back and forth to work or to the side.

You can use time that you already have, and turn off sports radio or music for 10 or 15 minutes, and listen to the Bible for 10 or 15 minutes instead.

Just looking for those extra ways within our day-to-day lives that we can continue to take God's Word within us can make a huge change in our lives.

So redirecting some of that time that's in our schedule. Another thing, taking 10 minutes before bed. Just taking a little bit of quiet time to reflect, read a verse or two in the Bible, as we think back on the day, and before we go to bed, can also be a good way to embed God's Word in us.

Those are just a few practical ideas for those who are interested. I'm sure as you're thinking about your own life and things that are going on, we can all think of other ways to put this into use in our lives.

So in conclusion, there's no more disruptive change going on than God's plan, whether it's His plan within us as individuals or His plan for the world as a whole and how it's going to change it.

God's Word is the central element to the disruption that He's created, as I think we've seen today. He initiated creation by His Word.

Jesus Christ lived among us as God's Word. The Scriptures were given to us, fully able and profitable, to equip us in our Christian lives.

And as we've seen in God's Kingdom, the availability of His Word for everybody is the defining point of what changes when God's Kingdom is here, so that people can not only access but also understand His Word.

If we're to live the ideals of God's Kingdom today, we need to continue to hide His Word within us.

So in this upcoming year, as we sort of reflect and get ourselves started again after the feast, I'd encourage everyone to look for new ways to take God's Word within us in order to continue disrupting our own lives.

Let's end with a Scripture in Psalm 119. We'll read verses 9 through 11. Psalm 119 verses 9 through 11.

How can a young man cleanse his way? By taking heed according to your Word. With my whole heart I have sought you, O let me not wander from your commandments, Your Word I have hidden in my heart, that I might not sin against you.

Wish you all happy disruption in the weeks to come.