Church is Messy

Church Is Messy, 04-01-2026 Ep139
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Svea: Good morning, Rick. We're back for another church's messy podcast episode. Looking forward to today.

Rick: Yeah. I feel like our podcast is appropriately named. We walked through a pretty messy passage, this past weekend. That's what we're gonna talk about.

Svea: Yeah.

Rick: Uh, today. But, uh, we're not like in the dumps or anything.

It's just. Someone described it as a rugged road.

Svea: Rugged road.

Rick: I thought that's, that chapter is kind of a rugged road. It's a little bumpy. Yeah. But, but it's worth walking.

Svea: Yeah.

Rick: So at least in my mind

Svea: it's First Corinthians has had a few rugged roads in them.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah. Do you remember, early on I just said, Hey this, sometimes reading this book feels like getting a colonoscopy and a financial audit all at once.

It's so good. But it's like in your face with real confrontation about things that were happening in that church, what we may not be guilty of, but we've got some vulnerabilities too. And so it's worthwhile to talk about it, and I think it really holds out a vision of a good life and a fantastic church experience.

If we can kinda make our way through some of these passages that are like. Oh man.

Svea: Yeah. Yeah.

Rick: That's how, that's all I know how to describe it is, I don't even have a word. And I guess this kind of relates to what we talked about. It's, I have a, it's

Svea: groaning,

Rick: a non intelligible, an unintelligible sound, but you know what I mean?

Svea: Well, that's a good illustration of chapter 14.

Rick: Yeah.

Svea: So, yeah. So last weekend we were walking through the rugged road of mm-hmm. Chapter 14 with the primary focus on orderly worship.

Rick: Yeah.

Svea: And how speaking in tongues impacts that.

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Svea: Then there's this subtle little clause about women being silent in the church.

I'm so glad I still have my job after the Exogesis unit.

Rick: Yeah. You know, you know, I got started studying, I was wondering, I'm like, I wonder if Faye's gonna make it after, you know. Are we gonna have

Svea: no, very relieved to

Rick: see the employee here. This is a passage I've been studying for a long time.

I mean many years.

Svea: Mm-hmm.

Rick: And it took, it took years to get to a place where I felt like I understood what was going on.

Svea: Mm. Well actually that ties in very well with the first question that I was planning to ask. Okay. Uh, 'cause when we get to passages like this, that maybe has some stuff in it that. At first glance is either difficult to understand

Rick: mm-hmm.

Svea: Out of our comfort zone. Yeah. Out of our range of experience. Something that maybe it's hard to relate to.

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Svea: What are just some kind of initial handholds that you could recommend to the person who hasn't necessarily been studying this for years and years?

Rick: Hopefully people will remember this one. Always interpret the unclear in light of the clear when you get to a verse.

You get to a word, you get to an entire chapter and you're like, I, whoa. This kind of threw me for a loop. I feel like a rug was pulled out from under me. I don't know what to do with this. Okay. I want you to grab a hold of what you do. No, I want you to grab hold of what's clear and start with that, and then let that be a filter through which you.

You begin to think about this particular passage that feels a bit unwieldy.

Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Um, false teachers, con men, hucksters liars, they, they make their money in blurring the lines of what's clear and emphasizing and amplifying what's unclear. Mm-hmm. We don't wanna do that.

We absolutely don't wanna do that. We want to emphasize what's clear and then we wanna honestly and rigorously. Engage what's unclear and gain as much clarity as we possibly can. And it's okay for that to be a long and slow process. It's gonna require turning to scholars. It's gonna require cross-referencing, okay, where are other, where's this subject talked about in other places?

Lemme go look at those places and let those also kind of inform what I'm reading here. Lemme stop. I don't wanna just ramble on. I have that tendency, so help me out. It's fa

Svea: Well, okay, so here's what I'm thinking. I had a fun conversation with some people when we were talking about the sermon, and we very quickly realized we're actually not talking about the content of the sermon from this last weekend.

We were talking about kind of the way that you were subtly teaching us to do hermeneutics.

Rick: Yeah.

Svea: And how to study the Bible. And you were bringing that out and what you're just saying in the way that you answered the question that I threw out there is doing the same

Of helping us to see the importance of, you know, hang your hat on the things that are not disputed Yes.

That are clear.

Look at the context. Mm-hmm. Look at the immediate context. Look at the surrounding context. Um, that these are just very sound principles for interpreting the Bible.

Rick: Here's the thing, we all already know how to do it, and we do it all the time in life. We don't realize the genius we're already bringing.

Svea: Say more.

Rick: Okay. Let's say, so how many years have, have you and Steve been married? Now

Svea: This is 20.

Rick: 20 years. This year. Yeah.

Svea: Yeah.

Rick: That's awesome. Okay. Isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. 20 years. Way to go. So if someone said to you, Steve said this to me. And it's just like a weird phrase, right?

And that person didn't understand it well. You might not know what the context was, and you may not know exactly what he meant by how this person relayed. Conversation, accurate or inaccurate as it may be. Mm-hmm. But you know him.

You've got 20 years of, of life lived with him, and so you can bring that into the conversation with this person and say, you know, I don't know what was going on there.

I don't, I don't know what was in his mind, but I do know this about him. And so, you know, you could do that. People do that all the time.

Svea: Mm-hmm.

Rick: You know, like you get a, you get a text message that's weird. It's like. I must be misreading that. Like today, my, my email gets, I don't know what, it's not that my email gets hacked, but there are dummy accounts that look like it's email.

Oh, yes. And goes out to people all the time. Somebody texted me today a screenshot of this email and says, is this legit? I'm like, no, this isn't legit. Why did she do, she immediate? She's like, this feels a little funny. Yeah, this smells weird. Let me contact Rick directly. Let me. Go to a, take an angle of absolute clarity to understand this thing that seems a little murky.

Svea: Yeah,

Rick: we all do that all the time. Just do that when you're reading the Bible.

Svea: Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense. So speak a little bit more to just this experience when we get to passages mm-hmm. Like this, that have some things, especially, you know, like for me, obviously the line about a woman must be silent in the church.

Yeah. That, I mean, that's just gonna cause some friction.

Rick: Sure.

Svea: And, uh, and I love the Bible. Yeah. I love the Bible.

And I love to study scripture.

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Svea: Um, but when we get to things like that, that maybe feel uncomfortable or we feel inhibited from reading it out loud to someone else who maybe doesn't have the context or the understanding, can you just speak a little bit more to kind of working through some of that tension?

Because I liked how. As you worked through the message, you really were doing a great job of bringing us to the point of seeing there's nothing that we have to be ashamed of. No. Or squirm

Rick: no

Svea: our way through.

Rick: Let's normalize. Just acknowledging how we feel when we read something. So I hope No, I felt offended, and if they did, I, I think it's something they can work through.

But when I said we're gonna read some stuff today and maybe it feels weird, maybe it feels kooky to you. And if you love the Bible, maybe you don't like the idea of someone calling it kooky, which is not what I did. My impression is that this feels weird, kooky, wrong offensive, but you just say that and whenever you're reading it and you're like, oh, oh, I don't like the way that it just say I don't like it, and why don't I like it?

And what is it that I'm actually feeling? Okay. Now I'm gonna, I'm gonna dig in, I'm gonna try to, I'm gonna try to understand personally when I'm. I like to, almost all of my devotional reading is digital. I, there's an app that I use on my phone that allows me to look at. To look at stuff in Hebrew, look at stuff in the Greek, connect to commentaries, look at all kinds of different stuff, and has a lot of different fun ways that I can make notations on the text.

And I don't journal except I kind of journal because I can, I can leave notes inside of it. And it's fun as I'm going through to go back and read what I, what I wrote several years ago and see how that was impacting me. And anyway, I'm. Spider webbing. Apologize.

Svea: No, that's, that's

Rick: fun to hear. Um, so as I'm going through, anytime something feels weird to me, I underline it, I highlight it in purple, and I'm like, I gotta figure this out.

I do not know what this means. Uhhuh, this strikes me as weird Uhhuh. And then now it looks kind of on my app, it, uh, it's visualized like a. Like a sticky note.

Svea: Okay.

Rick: And so, uh, and I'll click on that and I'll I'll just type in like all my thoughts, all my questions. And it could it be this?

It can't be that. I mean, and then that becomes my launchpad for studying. And so I'm going to scholars and I'm looking, for people who address the questions that I have. And I don't stop until I feel like I get resolution on all the things that I'm wrestling through.

Svea: You know, as you're saying that, it's actually making me feel kind of excited to look for some more unclear passages.

'cause that sounds like a detective game.

Rick: Well, yeah so here's one we are probably sometime in, in the near future. We're going to, I think it's probably gonna be. The next winter series, we're gonna spend some time in the Sermon on the Mount. As I'm reading, I've been studying the Sermon on the Mount, just devotional Uhhuh.

The Bible Project has a great year long series on it, and I'm absolutely loving it. But I'm, as I'm bringing through it, this is, Jesus says, you are the light of the world. And I'm like, they are. Who's it? Like I've always read it. And I've always heard it talked about you as a follower of Jesus.

You're the light of the world. But this is pre crucifixion. This is pre resurrection. Mm-hmm. This is before. This is before any people are following Jesus. But you know, we're not in the new covenant yet. And I'm like what does that mean? Hmm. And how does that relate to the people who were there?

Svea: Fascinating.

Rick: You know, that they were the light of the world. Is it the same way that I'm, the light? What is all that? So anyway, I just highlight that in purple and I'm like digging into that.

Svea: Oh, I love that. Yeah. That's a fun way to read scripture, to just have that curiosity just coming through all the time.

Rick: Don't be afraid of saying you don't know and don't, don't feel like you have to pretend. That you don't know. I'm gonna try and tell a story from a conversation that I had with my daughter last night.

Svea: Mm-hmm.

Rick: And she shared with me about something that she read, something that was really well known.

And I said, I know the guy who wrote that. She's like, really? Yeah. I said, yeah, I met him, man. And I shared, I said, here's, this is just between you and me, but this is some, this is something that he dealt with in his life. Unfortunately he could never be open with his church about it.

She said, really?

Yeah. Yeah, it's something that he just had to carry alone or he felt like he had to, and we both had just a real kind of just honest conversation about how unfortunate that is. And that church should not be a place like that.

If we ever have a hope for having a church that is like that, where we can be real and honest about things that are in our lives and say, I wanna follow, I wanna follow Jesus, and I know that you're not gonna be intimidated by whatever mess that I might bring, it's gotta begin with.

We have to be that way with ourselves too.

That's why I'm reading this to be able to say, Jesus, I, I don't get it. I don't understand. This scares me a little bit. This feels weird. I really don't feel like I could talk about this out loud with anyone. Mm-hmm. You know, I. It's, I just wanna acknowledge that out loud.

I love recovery people. And I remember a recovery person telling me the power is in the secrets. Yeah. The power of addiction is in the secret. It is in the secrecy of it, not the addiction itself. Mm-hmm. And let's just like get it out in the light.

And then you realize there's nothing to be afraid of.

Mm-hmm. That the process of learning and discovering what the meaning is, discovering truth. It's not just that destination of going, oh, now I get it. But that whole process of getting there has a positive impact on the kind of person that we're becoming.

Svea: That

Rick: whole process helps to make us someone who's more like Jesus.

And so I wanna encourage people to lean into that. Don't be afraid of that. Don't be intimidated by that. And as we do that individually, I think when we come together collectively, we'll also discover that we're becoming the kind of people that help others vulnerably engage when they gather together with us.

Mm-hmm. So I love that. That's not too vulnerability, esoteric.

Svea: No, no, no, no. Not at all. I think that vision for. A congregation of people that are so safe mm-hmm. In Jesus.

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Svea: That they're able to be unsafe with each other. And I don't mean unsafe in a, in a negative way, but in that sense of like, I can let my shields down.

Rick: Shields down. Yeah.

Svea: And just be honest, be authentic, be vulnerable, be transparent.

Rick: And if anyone feels like we're kind of, meandering away from the passage, remember Paul said. Be considerate of. Mm-hmm. Be thinking about folks who have questions and who aren't believers. Be a safe place for those people to come in and to get clarity and to get understanding.

Mm-hmm. And to be welcomed in to people who are celebrating and worshiping something that's so different than anything they've ever known that they can experience, they can be in it and they can take whatever time they need to come to a place they go. God really is with you, and I want this too.

Svea: So we'll never arrive at that place of being this kind of transparent, authentic church if we are trying to be performative in our spirituality.

Rick: Oh yeah.

Svea: And that was a big part of this passage. That's a great connection. Yeah. Uh, culture was that they were using things like speaking in tongues to kind.

Mm-hmm. Elevate their spiritual experience. Mm-hmm. And to kind of establish, well, you know, look at me. I have got this special ability. So clearly I've been gifted in a way that's, uh, a little bit more significant than the rest of all you peons here in the church. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about that and how that impacted this passage and the call for us to be.

Self-aware of either how we might, in our current culture, use different ways of being kind of performative in our spirituality in a way that's not helpful to the church, but actually could be setting us back.

Rick: It's one of those times. I just wanna boomerang this question.

Svea: Okay.

Rick: How have you experienced.

Performative religiosity or performative spirituality.

Svea: Yeah. You know, the two things that come to mind right away, one of them is low hanging fruit. 'cause it's what you mentioned in the Yeah. In the message about mm-hmm. The way that people pray sometimes. Yeah. Can be very performative.

Rick: Yeah.

Svea: And you can kind of subtly tell the difference between someone who's praying a beautiful prayer because they just spend so much time with Jesus.

They're talking to him in this intimate, kind of highly relational, warm way.

Versus the person that knows all of the right theological terms and they're dropping things in there and they've got these mm-hmm. Quick little turns of phrases.

Rick: Yeah.

Svea: So I've seen that for sure. Sadly, I think there's also a performative nature to the way that people quote the Bible sometimes too.

Rick: Yep.

Svea: That you can just drop verses drop so it is said mm-hmm. In John two and

Rick: Yep.

Svea: And it's not always helpful to the con conversation. It's just kind of like a little bit of a flex.

Rick: Yeah.

Svea: And that's disappointing.

Rick: There's religious performance or spiritual performance to get attention and to also be to make sure you're not truly sing.

And that's an irony that, uh, or a, uh, a paradox that's easy to live inside of. I want attention and I want people to see me in a certain way, but I don't want them to really see me. This happens from time to time. The conversations are all about someone telling me what they know, and they're just regurgitating information.

But what it's not is connection. It's not really, it's not really talking to each other. It is. It looks like it is. But it's not, it's just two individuals occupying the same space.

But not really connecting. And it's easy to do in a church culture. Think about small groups, right?

You ask a question about an application oriented question about what to do with this. Somebody says, you know, I see that people do blah, blah, blah, and they always answer the question about other people. Maybe it's really insightful and maybe the things that they say are absolutely true. Maybe you learn something about what the person says, but they never talk about themselves.

Mm-hmm. Or they never ask. They never ask questions that are designed to better understand you and connect with you so that we can journey together in following Christ. Mm-hmm. Does that make sense? Am I being a little too. Too vague there.

Svea: No, I'm, I'm following.

Rick: Yeah. And so I think that's the kind of religious performance that in our church culture, that we're most vulnerable to.

I don't think people I don't see people around here, trying to get attention and applause for looking a certain way, but I think that the, I think it's hiding behind certain religious practices so that you look good. You're not actually seen and known.

Svea: Yeah.

Rick: And I, I think it's a human nature thing because we are all to some degree or another carry this fear of rejection.

Svea: So the kind of, the bedrock of this passage was, even though it was talking about speaking in tongues, the main point of it was order in worship and mm-hmm. It in the end, it wasn't really that the passage was about speaking in tongues. It was more about how speaking in tongues was becoming a distraction to people actually being able to worship.

Rick: Yeah,

Svea: with a sense of order with,

Rick: that's right.

Svea: We're able to focus on what's really important here.

Rick: Have you ever been to a, have you ever been to a church service where that sort of thing was on display? Or that sort of thing was practiced?

Svea: Well, kind of an extreme example of it would be some experiences in Ghana.

Rick: Okay.

Svea: Where there was a lot of tongue speaking happening. Yeah. And, uh, you know, and, and it felt even more heightened for me because there were multiple, literal languages being spoken as well. Mm-hmm. And, uh, and I vividly recall just kind of that feeling of being an outsider where I can't understand anything that's happening here.

Yeah. And it was, it felt like a nearly impossible place to worship other than to just kind of withdraw un into myself, you and me, Jesus. 'cause I don't understand anything else that's happening right now.

Rick: Yeah. Yeah. So I've, I have not had that experience. In another country. Uh, I have had that experience in churches in the United States.

Mm. And yeah, it was just, it was super, super weird. Just, I, I was like, yeah, I just kind of feel alone here. I can't engage with what's going on. I don't understand what's going on. This is, this is confusing. And I'll tell you, I was focused on what other people were doing. I was not thinking about Jesus and the truth, goodness, and beauty of who he is and the life that he gives.

Svea: Mm-hmm.

Rick: I did have this experience one time. I was, uh, so Paul talks about, if I wanna pray with my spirit, I also wanna pray with my understanding. If I wanna sing with my spirit, I also wanna sing with my understanding. I didn't have time to talk about this, and I'm not even sure that it would've benefit the sermon, but there was a time that I was in Guinea and everybody there speaks French and we were singing in French and there was a time I, the words weren't projected on the screen.

I just found myself. Singing along.

And I was singing the same words everybody else was singing. And I was fully aware of, I don't know what this is saying,

Svea: Uhhuh,

Rick: but I think it's good

Svea: Uhhuh

Rick: and I know praise Jesus and I, I don't know if it's just one of those songs that is so catchy. Even if you don't know the language, you could, you could sing along.

I can't explain to you how I was able to sing these verses with other people. Uhhuh never kn hearing the song before, but I had no clue what I was saying.

Svea: Yeah.

Rick: What do you do with that faa?

Svea: I, I have no words

talk about this idea though, of order. Yeah. And clarity and worship. Is there any risk of that becoming too restrictive?

Rick: Oh, sure. Oh, absolutely. Um, we could be. Too contained. And it's, it's dry, it's emotionless. It's joyless. It's passionless. Or we are, we're so ordered and structured that we don't allow genuine, authentic responses of people.

Svea: Yeah.

Rick: In the moment,

Svea: well, not only authentic responses of people, so let me just pull back the curtain a little bit. Mm-hmm. Here at Autumn Ridge, you know, we, we plan out the services to the minute on the Yeah. The sheet that we have that has our order of worship. Mm-hmm. On there, we have rehearsals.

Mm-hmm. We have run throughs. We've talked about. Of, transitions. Yeah. From element to element. Mm-hmm. So that things flow naturally and nothing becomes a distraction. Mm-hmm. Um, and I, I actually love that mm-hmm. About the way that we're doing church.

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Svea: Because the heart of it is to have nothing else that would distract anyone away from just being able to worship and to hear the gospel being presented.

I've been part of other churches in my past where they were not nearly as. As dialed in. And it was much more free flowing. Mm-hmm. You know, someone had an announcement and they would literally raise their hand. Yeah. And, uh, even walk up to the pulpit and mm-hmm. And, uh, share a prayer request and a kind of an open sharing time of the

The service and, you know, a much smaller church. Is maybe able to flex a little bit

Rick: more. There's a, there's a size dynamic where you can get away with that and it doesn't feel distracting. Mm-hmm. If you've got several hundred people in a room, then it's really confusing. It's like, what's going on here?

And so that approach actually promotes a disengagement instead of engagement.

Svea: Whereas as the size dynamic gets larger and larger.

Rick: That's right.

Svea: Yeah.

Rick: You know, um, let me give you an example. I was trying to, 'cause you brought this up, I was trying to think of something. Here's the only thing that comes to mind.

So like, you're right, we or we set the service order. We know the songs, we know about how long the songs are gonna be. We're trying to respect people's time and you know, we can't run over too long or the kids' ministry team will get mad at us 'cause they're ready for the parents to come get the kids.

And but there is one time I'm, I'm preaching and and. My conver, my style is conversational and I'm asking rhetorical questions and stuff like that. And sometimes I want the audience to, to respond. And I just kind of threw out a question and it's like, you ever wonder like, why do people do this? And and I'm moving on and there's a guy who just like, you could feel the authenticity of this.

He was just genuine. He was just like, yeah, why is that?

Svea: Mm.

Rick: And he just said it real loud just honestly and innocently. And I just turned, and I'm like, everyone is aware of this question and that this guy is just like, I need to know. So I just turned and answered his question. Right. Not in the sermon.

And, uh, not a part of what I had written out to share in the sermon. Mm. But in the sermon time, I had to stop it and address that. So, yeah, we just gotta, there is, it's, it would, I think it would've been wrong. To be like, Nope, we pre-planned to me. Only talk right now. Not to address this.

And so, yeah, I want there to be, I want there to be room. I've really,

Svea: so I hadn't planned to ask this, but since it's, it's on my mind and now I'm curious. So I know in your sermon prep methods, you spend months studying a passage. You spend weeks thinking about a specific message. You spend days writing it, and by the time you've gotten to Thursday.

You've got a full manuscript written out. And then I still dunno how you do it, but somehow you manage to memorize word for word your man manuscript and then preach it over the weekend. So you've clearly spent a lot of time in the text, but in that process of choosing every word mm-hmm.

Intentionally, mm-hmm. That you wanna communicate. Does that ever feel restrictive there in not leaving room for the Holy Spirit to kind of speak to you in the moment as opposed to maybe a preacher that that more has more of just a outline and is speaking a little bit more can extemporaneously.

Rick: Yeah, great question.

Having. Uh, knowing what I wanna say having a manuscript for me allows me to be flexible. I don't think it keeps me from being flexible. And typically somewhere. Around Saturday afternoon, I'm not gonna be tied to or restricted by the manuscript. I'm gonna have a little flexibility, a little freedom.

But there are some things that it's supportive, not a

Svea: shackle.

Rick: There's some things that the clarity is so important to me that I want to say it in this way. Some. Some guys are really great extemporaneously. I'm not so sure that I am, like in a q and a setting. I tend, I, I think I do okay in that, but to get up and, and preach without a manuscript, I'm not sure that it'd be great.

And sometimes I just don't trust my sense of humor. Anybody who's listened to this podcast know that sometimes I can spiderweb and writing it out helps me clarify my thoughts. I love the filter of the pin.

Svea: Hmm.

Rick: But I am reading the room. Mm-hmm. And there are times that I'll change from one service to a net to the next based on what I'm sensing in the room or by particular people in the room.

I wanted to talk about something related to a question about order and peace. And so Jesus' piece. So we should reflect. We should reflect him. And I said something in the sermon about it's not wild, ecstatic, unexplainable experiences that show the power and the presence of God. Clarity. And I wish that there was enough time in the sermon to connect these dots.

And there's just not. And I think every time we read the text, we ought to be thinking about how does this help me better see Jesus? 'cause the whole point of every word on every page is to better see Jesus. I think about the end of the sermon on the mound where people just marveled at how Jesus taught.

Both with clarity and authority without directly stating it. In an indirect way, if you'll spend time reading it over and over again, meditating on it, seeing how this fits into the grand arc of scripture, I think you'll see that if you understand what Paul is saying in one Corinthians 14, it shows us Jesus, there is power when God's word is shared with clarity.

And that's what Jesus embodied and that's what Jesus did everywhere he went. And when he had an opportunity to speak with people, they marveled at how authoritative and clear and transformative it was to hear him and then to act on what he had to say. And so I think we should long for the same kind of experiences when we engage this word.

Does that make sense?

Svea: It, I love it. I am processing it. I agree a hundred percent. And yet can I just push on one thing?

Rick: Yeah.

Svea: Because Jesus also taught in parables.

Rick: Mm-hmm.

Svea: That he knew intentionally would not be understood by everyone that he taught. So what do we do with something like that?

Rick: The point of the parable is to leverage the motivation that we bring.

To spend time thinking on it, processing it, because there are times that we need the process of wrestling through it. We need to go, yeah, but what about, or what does this mean? Or, okay, what do I do with this? Or what, how do I understand that? And. We need to engage that process. If it's, the Bible is not an instruction manual.

There are commands and there are instructions. I rem did you ever hear this? The Bible used as an acronym, basic Instructions before Leaving Earth. Mm-hmm. Well intentioned but just horrible. No, it's wrong. That's not what it is. There are some things you just gotta have to sit with and wrestle with and, and, and.

And that process of meditating on, I think Psalm chapter one, it is going to produce tremendous maturity and resilience in you. And I think, I think that's one of the reasons that Jesus sometimes spoke in parables. Maybe not the only reason.

Svea: But

Rick: I think it's one of them.

Svea: So connect that back to one Corinthians 14 mm-hmm.

And how that maybe impacted your approach to preaching through this chapter and how it informs what we should take from it.

Rick: Say it again. 'cause I wanna make sure that how, what all I just talked about informed how I, I don't know that it informed necessarily what the experience was for the person who was listening.

But I'm basically describing how I got to the point where I was comfortable standing up and talking about it. And my hope is, is that other people would not necessarily see the bullseye as just clarity, but the bullseye is also engaging the process that leads to clarity.

And that that process is good and there's nothing to be afraid of.

There's nothing to be embarrassed by.

Svea: So I see you offering us something to hang onto mm-hmm. As individual followers of Jesus as we're reading scripture. To be seeking. Mm-hmm. Just sound practices of interpreting scripture in light of scripture. Mm-hmm. In its context. Because of who the author is.

Mm-hmm. And, and familiarity mm-hmm. With, uh, with what the author is saying throughout scripture. Just good hermeneutical practices. I also heard in this message a call for us to be good ambassadors of Jesus. Yeah. In the way that when we're sitting in the church setting. Potentially in front of, behind next to mm-hmm.

Someone who's not yet a follower of Jesus. Yeah. And maybe doesn't yet have the tools. Mm-hmm. To be able to understand and interpret scripture. Yeah. That we're sensitive to how we are communicating and communicating in a clear way.

Rick: Lemme tell you about something that I didn't really have time to talk about.

You're always contributing something. Anytime you're here, you're contributing something. What are you contributing? When we're expressing worship to God through music, what are you contributing? You are contributing something. You're contributing something. If you're sitting down and unengaged, you're contributing something.

If you're standing up and, and highly expressive, you're, you're contributing something. If you're somewhere in between those two. What are you contributing and why do you wanna contribute what you're contributing and how you're engaging? Is it helpful to, uh, those around you? I think that's worth thinking about.

I think it's just worth asking, if someone was standing, sitting next to me, they just assume this person next to me must be a Christian and they're trying to figure it out and we're in the worship. What do they see in me? Do they see someone who believes this or do they, or they sense that it seems like the way that you're acting doesn't look like you really believe this and mean this, and so then I'm contributing something to that person's experience right then.

Svea: Yeah.

Rick: Does that make sense?

Svea: Yeah.

Rick: Okay.

Svea: So we're heading into Easter.

This weekend is Easter. Yeah. And chances are not small, that we will have many people with us this weekend who are still exploring what it means to follow Jesus. Absolutely. Do you have any, uh. Any dad advice for, for the church here as uh, we get ready to both worship our hearts out to celebrate Yeah.

The amazing miracle of our risen Lord Jesus. Yeah. While hoping that in the process of doing that, we're drawing others to see him in that way.

Rick: Never ask somebody to pretend to be somebody they're not. But, uh, what does it look like for you? To genuinely, authentically express your love for Jesus in all the ways that you engage, whether that be how you're, how you're approaching someone who you would like to invite for them to come with you.

And I hope you're praying about that and inviting folks to, to come with you. Is it, you could think about that and how you're singing, you can think about that and how you're engaging during the video testimony time. Or the, uh, or the sermon time and, and all of it. I mean, just think, alright, what I get to represent Jesus individually and collectively with everybody in the room.

And there's somebody here with me and I want them to see Jesus. And I'm kind of the wrapping P paper that they have to get through before they get to Jesus. And so what do I want them to experience as they are just adjacent to me watching me worship Jesus? And how could that help them? That's part of.

It's just part of what church should be.

According to Paul. If I'm understanding them correctly, it should just be normal church experience for those who are followers of Jesus.

Svea: Well, it'll be exciting thing to just maybe be even that much more aware of and energized by as we worship together this weekend at Easter.

Note on Easter. Mm-hmm. We are not going to be doing a podcast episode on the Easter message. So we'll be two weeks out before the next episode drops. Uh, so don't be, uh, wondering if we miss something. It's on purpose. Little bit of a rest break here. Uh, but we'll be back in two weeks as we. Picks back up with more first Corinthians.