Integration

Now grab your message notes that look like this. 40 days in the Word. This weekend we wrap up our fall series that's been all about the Bible. And as you take out those notes, let me tell you a story. A strange but true story about a mysterious woman in Manhattan who just recently passed away and led an amazing life.

This was her childhood home. At the time it was built, it was the most expensive home in America. A New York mansion right on Fifth Avenue. It had a hundred and twenty-one rooms for a family of four. Among the rooms were five private art galleries just for their family and friends, displaying works by Cezanne, this one by Degas, and others. This was another room in their mansion. The entire room was lined with gold just because they could. You put up wallpaper at your house; they put up wall gold.

Her father was copper king W.A. Clark, estimated by the New York Times to be the richest man in America. And when he died, he left an estate worth about three and a half billion dollars, of which she, his teenage daughter, received a fifth. She instantly became one of the richest women in America. She had the rather unusual French name of Uget. Although she was an American, her name was Uget Clark.

And Uget Clark owned not only this house and all of its attendant riches; she also owned this and even more luxurious home on the coast, on a cliff overlooking Santa Barbara, in the lower part of this picture. It still exists, by the way, kept in perfect condition. She also owned this retreat in Connecticut called La Belle Chateau. She also owned this apartment building on Fifth Avenue across the street from Central Park, where she lived in a 15,000 square foot penthouse suite.

And although she kept expensive cars and full staffs on salary, keeping up all her mansions and penthouses, she never used them. They all sat empty and unused, unoccupied by her for decades. Her story is told in the new book Empty Mansions, which has had me riveted the last week or so. But her mansions sat empty because although she was completely healthy and fabulously wealthy, Uget Clark moved from her penthouse to a hospital room, where she lived attended by a private nurse for the final decades of her life.

In fact, just to make this more poignant, this was her penthouse view from her place on Fifth Avenue across the street from Central Park. This was the view that Uget traded for this, the view from her hospital room. The richest woman in America spent her final decades looking at this brick wall and air conditioning unit. Uget died recently just before her 105th birthday, with an estate still worth over a third of a billion dollars. Yet not once in her final decades did she even take a single walk outside of this hospital room, not even around Manhattan, let alone to go see her mansions all over the country.

Now what do you make of something like that? Maybe you're thinking, that is really weird. Man, I would never do something like that. If I had riches like that, man, I'd be really enjoying them. But would we really? Because let me ask you this question: are you and I, every single person in this room, are we rich? Are we rich? I mean not just materially, you know, compared to the developing world, but we're also so rich in gifts that God lavishes upon us. Gifts of beauty, gifts of love, gifts of God's grace just poured on us from heaven.

Yet so often we trade a view of appreciation for all those wonderful riches for a view of all of our real or imagined anxieties and sorrows and troubles. And so what I want to do this weekend, the last weekend of our 40 days in the Word series and the weekend leading into Thanksgiving, is I want to talk about how to really enjoy all the riches that you already have.

As we wrap up the series, I want to talk about how for the rest of your life you can access and just revel in the riches that God has already given you. How? This next verse is a key. Psalm 119, David says, "Lord, I rejoice in following your statutes as one rejoices in what? Great riches." What's he saying? He's saying that the Word of God, the Bible, is a vault of riches. I mean the Bible really is. The Bible tells me about God's love for me; the Bible tells me guidance for life; the Bible introduces me to God's living word, Jesus Christ. And this 40 days in the Word series has been all about how to open up the treasure chest.

How to not just leave it on a shelf, but how to really daily enjoy it. I mean the Bible is how we gain access to how we gain lenses to see God's beauty that's just richly lavished upon us. And I got to tell you, I have loved the emails I've gotten from people here at TLC who said things like, frankly, René, I was so skeptical about this series, but I have loved taking the Bible off my shelf, opening it up. I'm getting into it. I'm starting to memorize verses again. It's enriching my life.

But now the series is over, and so the question I want to ask is how do I not shut my Bible now, put it back on the shelf? How do I keep on growing in the Word? How do I keep on reveling in the richness of God's Word and the richness of my life that God's Word opens my eyes to? And what I want to do this weekend is show you four very simple steps. These are all right out of the material by the author of the 40 days in the Word group study, Rick Warren. But what I want to do is show you how these steps are actually right in the Bible verses we've been memorizing for the last six weeks.

The first thing I need if I'm going to integrate God's Word into my life, not just put it back on the shelf but enjoy its riches daily, is I need to make a commitment to these four things. Number one in your notes: I need to build on it. I need to really build my life on the Word of God as my foundation for life. Now that may be kind of a no-duh thing to you, but I'll tell you, in my observation, a lot of people who claim that they believe that the Bible is God's inspired Word do not build their lives on the Bible.

When I was very, very young, I mean I must have been only 10 or 12 years old, I remember my mom, my Swiss German mom, and a relatively recent convert to Christianity. I was just starting to get into songs I was hearing on the radio. I was just starting to get into new speakers at church and getting into studying my Bible. My mom gave me some very great advice that has been advice for the rest of my life. She said in her Swiss accent, "René, it doesn't matter what I say. It doesn't matter what the pastor says. It doesn't matter what some teacher says. It doesn't matter what your friends say. It doesn't matter what you hear on the radio. The only thing that matters is what does the Bible say." And then she added, "Because it is healed to pump you up." No, she didn't say that part. Hans and Franz got that from her. That was her.

I love that because that's somehow become part of my DNA. And so even to this day, when I'm hearing somebody say something on the radio or here, I guess, speaker something, my mind naturally, because of her teaching, goes back to, okay, that sounds good. He's very passionate about it. She's very charismatic. But what does the Bible say? And I just got to make an observation as a pastor here. I get flooded by emails almost every day from people who want to tell me, oh, I heard, I saw this on the internet, and I heard some great teacher teaching this. I heard this thing on the radio. And so much of the time, it's actually unbiblical.

Would you be shocked if I told you that a lot of Christian speakers on the radio, Christian speakers in churches, Christian pastors, Christian books you can buy in the bookstore are pushing stuff that is actually not in the Bible? It's true. And that's why you need to make the Bible the foundation for your life. Just put it in your DNA. You're going to go back to the Word of God. You're not even going to take the things that I say, but take the things the Word of God says. This is what Jesus talks about in Matthew 7. He says this: "Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the what? The rock."

You know, we discovered this in living color here at Twin Lakes Church a week ago. You know, we're building a children's center here on our campus, and it's a huge dig. We dug down 15 feet to have a good foundation for our building. And you know what we found? You know what we found after all these years of drought? When we dug down 15 feet, Jimmy Hoffa? No, that's not true. But almost as weird, our soil has too much water in it. Can you believe that? And so what we had to do is we had to go to granite rock. We had to buy some base rock and put it in. Why? So that it compacts and creates a solid foundation for our building.

Now I got to tell you, I didn't like doing that. It took more time doing that. It took more money doing that. But for the building we want to build for the future, that was our only option. We have to have a good foundation to have a good rest of the building. And the same exact thing is true of your life and my life. Let me give you three common foundations that you don't want to build your life on: shaky foundations like pop culture. Popular culture, you know, I just do what everybody else is doing. But the problem is that whatever's popular today is going to be unpopular tomorrow, right? Whatever's in style today is going to be out of style tomorrow. Whatever's cool today is going to be uncool tomorrow, and I am always a day behind.

Right? And that's why God says this in Exodus 23:2: "Don't follow the crowd in doing wrong," because the crowd is often wrong. And then the second thing you don't want to build on is this: tradition. Tradition isn't necessarily bad. In fact, something becomes a tradition because it works. But no tradition lasts forever. Truth lasts forever, but no tradition lasts forever. And even Jesus says this in Mark 7:8: "You have let go of the commands of God and you're holding on to the traditions of men." And I know a lot of churches like that.

But the most important foundation to avoid is the third one, and that's this: emotions. A lot of people build their lives on a foundation of emotions. If it feels right, I do it. If it feels wrong, I don't do it. In other words, I do whatever I feel like. What's the problem with that? Feelings lie, right? They lie to you all the time. And if you live by your emotions, you'll spend your whole existence manipulated by your moods. And there's actually a scientific word for a person who lives manipulated by their moods: junior higher. No, seriously. But a lot of adults are basically living a junior high lifestyle because they've never learned that maturity is when you live your life according to your tradition, according to your convictions. That's very important.

The Bible tells us in Judges 21: "At that time there was no king in Israel, and people did whatever they felt like doing." And sometimes I think that could be a description of our society right now. And that's why you got to build your life on a firm foundation: the Word of God. But not only build on it, then you've got to go on and daily feed on it. There's a lot of people in this church, I would dare say, who did build their life on a foundation of the Bible but are not daily feeding on it. And here's why this is so important.

I have here a glass mug for coffee or tea, and I have some hot water here in this thermos, and I'm going to pour the hot water into this mug—steaming hot water. And this represents you. This is your soul right now. This tea bag represents Scripture. It doesn't have to be five chapters of Scripture; even just one little verse or section of Scripture daily. Now if what I do, if what you do is come into church and we just get exposed to a passage of Scripture in church, that's kind of like dipping the tea bag into the water one time. It probably made some kind of a molecular difference, but really not anything that's noticeable.

What you really want to do if you want tea, of course, is you let the tea bag soak into the cup. And that's kind of like when you and I go to the Word of God and we study it, we reflect on it, we do meditations in it every day, as we've been doing in this series together. We memorize verses. I love how people have been telling me, I forgot a skill that I had when I was 10 years old, and that is memorizing Bible verses. And so many people have told me it is awesome to do this thing I used to do when I was a little kid because the Bible verses come back to me during the day, and they call me and they guide me. It's remarkable the effect the Word of God is having in my life.

You do that. You read the Bible maybe for morning devotions, evening devotions, and you share with people in your life. You share with your spouse; you share with your friends, "Look at this verse that I'm reading. What do you think about this verse? This verse is really cool." You know what you discover? You discover that just as this tea bag is beginning to influence this little glass of water, pretty soon the glass of water, in fact, isn't a glass of water anymore, is it? Now this isn't a cup of hot water; this is a cup of what? It's tea. It's changed its identity. And that's what happens to you and me when we really soak ourselves daily in the Word of God.

Imperceptibly, it just begins to change us. And that's what this next verse is all about, another one of our memory verses: "Let the Word of Christ dwell in you what richly." Let me give you an example of somebody who discovered what happens when you do this. George Frederick Handel, famous as the composer of what? Christmas oratorio, the Messiah. That's right. A lot of people, though, don't know the story behind the Messiah. George Frederick Handel was a successful composer when he moved from Germany to London. But years later, before he wrote the Messiah, he was considered washed up. His career was over. He'd been rich, but a series of horrible investments had left him destitute. Most of his friends abandoned him. His health was shattered. He'd actually had a stroke, possibly brought on by the stress that had left him partially paralyzed.

And that's when one of his only remaining friends gave him some sheets of paper with verses from the Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures on them. They were all prophecies about the coming Messiah. And his friend said, "I love to read these because it's mind-blowing how the Hebrew Scriptures predict the coming of Jesus Christ." And he just thought George Handel would be interested in these verses. Well, Handel was in such a shattered state emotionally that he was desperate. And so he took those verses, and he became just infatuated with them. He locked himself in his upstairs room for 23 straight days, reading these words. His servant would come in and kind of slip food under the door, most of it uneaten.

And he became so entranced by these verses that he began to feel the inspiration bubbling up, and he started to write music. In fact, this is a picture of one of the original manuscript pages in his hand that he wrote during those 23 days. And when he emerged 23 days later, he had the Messiah almost completely finished. What did he discover? He discovered that when you immerse, when you soak yourself in the Word of God daily, what it doesn't do—and this is what a lot of people are afraid of—they're afraid if I soak myself in God's Word, it's going to make me legalistic and boring and dull. No, what it does is it brings out creativity and inspiration and motivation. And that's why daily you and I need to dwell in it.

Now how are we going to do that if this series is coming to a close? Some of you are like, this is great. We've had 40 days of devotions. Now what's next? Well, one of the ways we're going to help you dwell in it this Christmas season, starting next weekend, we're going to have available a brand new free book. This is the cover of it. It's called Advent Devotions, and Jim Jocelyn and Kim Bruniger and I just finished writing this. What happens is every day there's a Bible passage for you to read, many of the same passages as Handel read during those 23 days. And you light a little candle by yourself or with your family, and there's a few questions to make you meditate on that scripture. Why? To help you get ready for Christmas.

You know, you ever feel like Christmas arrives and you're not ready spiritually? Maybe you bought the book, the gifts, maybe you wrapped the gifts, but you're not really prepared for Christmas in a spiritual sense. Well, this is designed to help you get ready. This brand new book is going to be free next weekend because next weekend is the first Sunday in Advent. Advent is something Christians have been doing for centuries in the more traditional denominations to prepare themselves for Christmas. And this year, for the first time in my 21 years here as a pastor, we are, as a church, going to do kind of a traditional Advent together so that we can prepare for Christmas. This is going to tie into the music. It's going to tie into the sermons every weekend. It's going to tie to a new website we're putting together, all tied together so you can keep feeding on God's Word.

So build on it as your foundation, feed on it daily, and this is very important: number three, I need to stay open to it. Don't think you've already got it all figured out. Another verse that we memorized earlier this month is Psalm 119:18: "Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in your law." Now I want you to take your pencil or pen and circle the word open. That means being receptive. And Jesus told a whole story about this. It's in Luke 8, and it's called the parable of the four soils. And he says this: "A farmer goes out and he throws out seed, and the seed falls on four different kinds of soil, and it gets four different kinds of results." Jesus says some seed fell on a hard footpath, and the birds came and they ate the seeds up. Other seeds fell on shallow soil, and the seeds sprout quickly, but the plants wilt under the hot sun because they don't have any roots, and they die. Other seeds fall among thorns that grow up and choke out the tender plants. Still, other seeds fall on fertile soil, and they produce a wonderful crop. And then he says, sort of the moral of the story: "So let he who has ears to hear, hear."

Now what is that story about? I used to think that the four soils represented four different kinds of people. But you know, when you read it carefully, what it is is the four soils represent four different kinds of attitudes that you and I can have when we come to the Word of God. And I can have all four attitudes in one hour or in one day. Now I'm going to go through these real quickly, but this is super important. The first is the hardened soil, and the hardened soil represents a closed mind. When we don't even give God a chance to talk to us, our minds are made up, our hearts are hardened, we're not willing to listen. You know, I might read the Bible, but I don't want to hear what God has to say about my habits, about my decisions, about my lifestyle, or whatever. I've already got my mind made up.

And so the first action is this: I must cultivate an open mind. I have to cultivate an attitude that expects to be guided by God through His Word and have an open mind to it. That means I read the Bible repentantly and humbly and expectantly. And I don't just expect every time I open the Bible to have my pre-existing beliefs and behaviors confirmed. And then Jesus said the second kind of soil is this: the shallow soil, and that represents the superficial mind. Like when we go to church and we get excited, we react emotionally, we're moved impulsively, but we don't really let it sink in, and it never really penetrates the bedrock of our character.

And so what's the action step? Put down roots. Make time for God's Word to mix my metaphors. Make time to let the tea steep because you can't just glance at the Bible once a week and expect to put down roots. Then the third soil is the soil with weeds, and soil with weeds represents a preoccupied mind, where I receive the Word of God and it starts growing, but then other things choke its effects out of my life: worry, busyness, financial worries, job assignments, and all these other things. The available bandwidth is all clogged up in my life. So what's the action step here? Eliminate distractions.

And let me just say something that might surprise you. I honestly think the big sin of Christians in Santa Cruz County, and really even in the broader Bay Area, is not alcoholism, it's not drug addiction, it's not some kind of sexual immorality. You know what it is? The big sin, in the sense that it keeps us away from God's best for our lives, is simply this: we're too busy. Our life is crammed. We're the third soil in Jesus's parable—that is us. And as Jesus said, the worries and concerns of this life choke out the good plants. Don't you relate to that? And so you need to pray for wisdom to eliminate some things from your schedule and focus past the things that you can't cut back to remember the big picture.

And then finally, Jesus says there's a fourth kind of soil: the good soil is a willing mind. And a willing mind says, "God, I'm willing to learn. I am teachable. I'm humble. I don't approach your Word thinking I already know it all. God, teach me." And the action here is simply persistence because that is what it takes to grow a garden. You don't water it once; you water it daily. So look, I know I went through these super fast, but look at this list and honestly ask, what kind of soil am I right now? Do I have a willing mind, or honestly, am I preoccupied, superficial? Is my mind closed? And remember that what you need to do is have the foundation of the Bible, steep yourself in it daily, but you have to approach it with this open mind to what it actually says.

And then finally, I need to live by it. Right? I need to live by it. Another verse we memorized during the series was James 1:22: "Do not merely listen to the word and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says." Like they say, you only actually believe the part of the Bible that you do. Think about it. You only actually believe the part of the Bible that you do. And you know one thing I love about this church is they love to do what you see in the Word of God. As part of this series, we asked all the small groups to do what we called Micah 6:8 projects in the community, just shining the light of Christ, initiating friendship, ways to places where they maybe don't even know any Christians.

And I have seen so many great examples of this. This was in the paper just this last week. One of our small groups went to Soquel Elementary and did a lose your lawn project with them, where they replaced their water-hungry lawns. And you know who they did this in partnership with? Soquel Creek Water District. And they called them up and they said, "Hey, would you fund this project if we did this?" They called up Ecology Action and they got all these things together, and the small group did this amazing project for Soquel Elementary. Another one that just happened a week ago, one of our small groups went to a place that maybe isn't used to seeing Christians at their place, and that's the Diversity Center in Santa Cruz. They said, "You know what? What we want to do is we want to come and bless you. We want to paint some of your benches. We want to beautify your backyard, your garden, which was just a wreck." And they made some good friends and they shined the light of Jesus there, and really it was a wonderful experience.

And I'm so proud of these groups. In fact, so many groups did so much in our community during this series. Let's just give them all a hand because that was fantastic. And of course, another great way to live by it is the food drive that Mark mentioned earlier that ends next weekend. So I'd encourage you to pray about that and pray how you can contribute. The point is to apply God's Word. Look at Psalm 119: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light for my path." Let me ask you, are you ever in the dark? Some of you are going, I'm in the dark right now. I'm in the dark emotionally, or I'm in the dark in the sense that I don't know what to do next in my life. I don't know what decision to make. I don't know what to do about that situation. I don't know what to do about this relationship.

Well, when you're in the dark, what do you usually try to do? Flip on the light. Well, you could call this verse the Bible's light switch. This is a promise from God to you that when you steep yourself in the Word of God, when you stay open to what it really says, when you have it as the foundation for your life, He is going to guide you if you choose to live by it. Now, it's interesting, the wording here says, "Your word is a lamp to my feet." Why doesn't it say, "Your word is a lamp to my whole world"? Because these days you can buy halogen lamps at Costco that light up, you know, the entire county. Well, because in those days, that's not what lamps did. This is an actual clay lamp that I brought back from Israel. It's made exactly like the lamps were made when this verse was written in Bible times. You put a little bit of oil in it, and then you'd light the end, and a tiny little lamp would come out of the end, kind of like a miniature Aladdin's lamp.

Now how much illumination do you think this shed? It was a lamp for my feet because what this is designed to do is be kind of a night light. And at night, when you wake up, you've got to go somewhere, you'd hold the lamp like this, and it would give you just enough of a pool of light for your next step. And that's kind of the imagery in this verse. The Bible is not a fortune-telling machine. You don't go to God's Word or go to God in prayer and go, "God, give me every step I'm supposed to take for the rest of my life." What He promises is He's going to give you light for the next step. He's going to, in His Word, assure you this is the right thing to do for now with this decision. This is the attitude for you to have. This is the kind of person for you to trust.

And if you do these four things—build on it, soak yourself in it daily, take it seriously, and stay open to it, and choose to live by it—you will be amazed at how the Word of God and the Holy Spirit speaking through the Word of God leads you through God's Word daily. And so this is what I want to encourage you to do. I want to challenge you as we conclude 40 days of the Word to keep on doing what you've been doing and not to stop. Keep on reading the Bible daily. It's so—listen, this is not a bad dog sermon. Why aren't you reading the Bible more? This is not a you should be in the Word so that God blesses you more. He already blesses you with everything. What the Bible does is open your eyes to the riches and the guidance that you already have.

And I want to challenge you to stay in it. So how do you do that now that this study is ending? What are the next steps? Well, I invited my co-authors of that Advent devotional, two wonderful people on staff here, Jim Jocelyn, who's our pastor of community life and small groups, and Kim Bruniger, who's our director of women's ministries, to come on up and briefly talk about some of the options that you guys have for your next step. So let's welcome them as they come on up.

Thank you, René. Well, one of my main goals is to make sure that the women here at Twin Lakes Church have a chance to connect in any way we can make possible. So we've got lots of options for connecting with small groups. We have a Monday evening, Tuesday morning, Wednesday evening, Thursday morning, and losing my breath here, online Bible studies, as well as mothers of preschoolers groups that meet for studies. We have Resonate, our women's blog, which posts a response to the Sunday services by way of doing devotions for the services, as well as a Pinterest page. Now I know that doesn't seem like a great way to connect with the Bible, but I often get questions about Bible studies that we might recommend. So the Twin Lakes Church Pinterest page has a board that has all kinds of studies that we recommend for different ways to connect with groups.

Thanks, Kim. Well, the men's ministry, we don't have a Pinterest page, but we do have the two-by-four group and some other ways for men to connect in small groups. And the reason I'm so passionate about it is because I know for myself I would not grow the way I grow without that community, without that accountability, without that just when I stumble to have someone come around beside me and say, "Hey, it's alright. We can do this together." So it's all about doing life together in community, I believe. So we got small groups that are open to everyone throughout the county and in Fresno. So we have that one that you can go to if you're visiting in Fresno. It's alright, you can still be part of Twin Lakes out there.

And so we have that. We have Wednesday night classes coming up, a great opportunity to connect. My encouragement is to be like this tea: nice strong tea, fully immersed. And that really takes more than just coming on Sunday. It takes diving in, being known, and letting people know who you are and sharing. So I encourage you to do that. You can get in contact with me at Jim at TLC.org if you have any questions for men's ministry, small groups, things like that. And Kim, and I am Kim at TLC.org. And don't forget our websites. If you see these brochures around campus, they have the fall studies, but our website has all of the updated information for this coming semester and the Advent.

Hey, these guys do an amazing job. Let's thank them both for doing a wonderful job. Life is busy, and it's easy to say you need to cut back. But we all lead very busy lives. We've got work and family obligations. But you can see there's so many options, so many ways we try to make God's Word accessible to you as individuals, as groups, as families, in ways that fit into the modern lifestyle, even before you eliminate distractions, although that's important.

Do something with me. I want you to read this verse that's on the screen here. This is kind of a wrap-up to the series: Colossians 3:16–18. It says this: "Let me hear you. Let Christ's Word, with all its wisdom and richness, live in you." That's the bottom line. The bottom line is not read your Bible more. The bottom line is enjoy your riches. Don't let the Bible be like an unopened treasure chest. Don't let the riches here be like those empty mansions that we heard about at the beginning of this message. Avail yourself of all the riches that God has graciously given to you, and let's thank Him for those right now. Would you bow your heads in a word of prayer with me?

Father, we just want to thank you on this Thanksgiving weekend for the Word of God. I thank you that through it you calm our fears. Thank you that through it you enlighten our minds. Thank you that through it you strengthen us. Through it you guide us—all the things that you offer through your Word. And Lord, we just want to commit to being a part of an ongoing process of growth in your Word, of taking advantage of those riches. And Lord, help us as a church to be characterized as a church that is grounded in the Word of God and takes it seriously and lives it out in the world all around us.

But most importantly, God, I pray that if anybody's listening to my prayer right now and they've never yet invited Jesus Christ into their heart, that they would just say, "Jesus, I don't understand it all, but the idea of a guide that speaks to me through the Word sure sounds great. And so I open my life to you. I want to start that journey. I want to get to know you, and I want to know your purpose for my life. Thank you for your death, burial, and resurrection and living in me, for your love for me, for your riches lavished on me by your grace." And it's in your gracious name we pray. Amen.