Keep it Simple

"Undaunted" is what we call our message series in the biblical book of 2 Corinthians. Good morning. It is a beautiful first day of November on the Sunday morning here in Santa Cruz. Great to have you with us wherever you are joining us from in the live stream. My name is René, another one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church. Today, I wanna talk about how to keep it simple from 2 Corinthians chapter 11.

Would you agree with this? It is a human tendency to complicate things. Consider this. The Lord's Prayer has just 66 words. The Ten Commandments have just 179 words. The Gettysburg Address, genius, 286 words. The Declaration of Independence, world-changing, 1,300 words. US government regulations on the sale of garbage, 26,911 words. What's that tell you? We just love to complicate stuff, and the more you complicate it, maybe the less value it has. It's kind of funny, but it's tragic when it comes to our faith.

You know, this whole sermon comes from a very, very personal place in my heart. Today, November 1st, 2020, is my 27th employment anniversary here at Twin Lakes Church. And over all those years, one thing has surprised me as a pastor more than anything else. And it might surprise you. Would you like to know what it is?

I have walked as a pastor with many hundreds of people over those 27 years through sorrow and job loss and illness and death and addictions, adultery, betrayal, all kinds of tough times. And I used to think when I was a young pastor that the kind of people who would get through tough times with their faith intact, with their joy intact, undaunted would be the people who maybe attended church the most or knew the Bible the best or had the most sophisticated theological knowledge, right? But in my personal observation and experience, that is not true.

No, the people who stay undaunted through the really tough times of life, who go through those tough times with their faith and their joy and their love and their sanity intact, are the people who have a simple trust in the love of Jesus. They may not be sophisticated theologically, they may not be church veterans, they may be baby brand new believers. But what I've seen again and again is that simple, joyful faith in Jesus is really the key to staying undaunted through all of the ups and downs of the trials of life.

Now, since we know tough times are here, folks, it is 2020, right? And tough times are gonna come in life. Even if 2021 is the best year ever, tough times are still going to be in our future to some degree or another. So a primary objective of all of us should be to have faith like this simple, joyful faith in Jesus Christ, to keep it simple, to not complicate it. And the passage that we're looking at today is all about that.

This is one of the key passages in my own spiritual life. And what I'm gonna do is just read it through first, and then we're gonna dive back into it. I don't want you to hear this just chopped up into individual verses because there's so much passion behind this. The Apostle Paul says to the Corinthians, "I hope that you'll be patient with me as I keep talking like somewhat of a fool. At least bear with me because I'm jealous for you, but with godly jealousy. For I promised you as a pure bride to one husband, to Jesus Christ."

But I fear that just as Eve was led astray by the serpent's cunning, somehow you will also be led astray from your pure and simple devotion to Christ because you're being so gullible. You believe whatever anybody tells you, even if they preach a different Jesus or have a different spirit or come with a different gospel than the one we brought you. And I don't believe I am in the least inferior to these so-called super apostles because these people are false apostles. They fooled you by disguising themselves as apostles of Christ.

But I shouldn't be surprised; even Satan himself can disguise himself as an angel of light. So it shouldn't surprise me that his servants who do his bidding can also do it by pretending to be godly ministers. Wow, there is a lot of passion in there. And really the key phrase in that whole passage is a little phrase from verse three, which I just love, such a good grid for your faith: simple and pure devotion to Christ.

You know, I love classic movies, like really old classic black and white movies. One of the greatest, of course, classic movie directors was Alfred Hitchcock, longtime Scotts Valley resident here in Santa Cruz County. And he had a great saying. He said, "You know, there are two kinds of movie directors, complicators and simplifiers. The great ones are always simplifiers." And you look at that, and it's really true when you think about the movies that you watch, but there are also two kinds of Christians, complicators and simplifiers.

And the deep ones, the ones who last, the ones who make you want to follow Jesus too, are always simplifiers. And so let's talk about it. Let's talk about how to keep it simple, how to keep my faith vibrant and uncomplicated. It's so simple. There's really three simple points in the message today. Easy to remember, but maybe difficult to apply in this distracting world.

I tell you what, if for some reason people wanted to quote part of a message of mine at my funeral one day, I hope it's this message. This is that important to me. I think this is this important to our church. Number one, I just simply need to realize that Jesus loves me very much. We make Christianity so complicated. And really, this is the core of it. It boils down to this.

Karl Barth was a great Swiss theologian, go Switzerland, and he survived the Nazi era. Even that pressure could not corrupt his faith. And years later, in front of an American seminary audience, he was asked to summarize the gist of his vast, brainiac volumes on Christian theology. And you know what he said? "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." True story. And he had that right.

Look back at verses one and two of chapter 11. I love the message translation here because I really feel like it captures the emotion the apostle says. And I gotta be honest with you, I feel this way so much these days too. He says, "The thing that has me so upset is that I care about you so much. This is the passion of God burning inside of me. I promised your hand in marriage to Christ, presented you as a pure virgin to her husband."

Now wait a minute, press pause, marriage, husband, that's a unique way to think about Jesus, isn't it? The idea is simply this: Christianity is not a religion; it is a relationship. A marriage, a covenant relationship based on love and trust. You know, I saw a bumper sticker on a car one day that said, "Jesus loves you, everyone else thinks you're a dork." Kind of the basic idea behind this being Jesus only loves you because it's kind of his job description, but everybody else knows you're a loser.

The Bible teaches Jesus doesn't save you and listen to your prayers because it's his job. He does it because he loves you, you. Many, many times in the Bible, especially in the Hebrew scriptures, God uses an interesting word to refer to his people, to refer to people who love and trust him. He calls them my beloved. And in those days, this was a term of endearment between a husband and a wife in a marriage relationship. And you understand for God, that is you. That's powerful. No matter what your past, that's your story now.

You know, it's interesting, Paul describes these Corinthians as a pure virgin, pretty startling things to say about these characters, right? In chapter six of 1 Corinthians, Paul says, some of you, he says to the Corinthians, have been quote, adulterers, sexually immoral, thieves, drunkards, robbers, and cut throats. What a motley crew, right? And then here he says, you're like a pure virgin to Christ. Here's the point: if you ever think to yourself, I struggle to believe that God can forgive my past, do you see what Paul wrote about these Corinthians? God has cleansed them. And now on his side, they are holy and spotless and pure. And he loves them like a husband loves a bride on their wedding day. And this is how God feels about you, no matter what was in your past. I love that.

Are you getting this? Are you hearing this? Keep it simple, don't complicate it. Jesus loves you so much. I cry when I think about it, just because I love the core of that. And I worry as I see so many people, both Christians and non-Christians losing this, that this core of our faith. And that's why we need to number two, remain focused on him, remain focused on Jesus.

You've heard the saying, the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing, right? And that's exactly the point of this passage. Back to verse three, I'm afraid, however, he says, that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent's cunning, your minds may somehow be led astray, here it is again, great phrase, from your simple and pure devotion to Christ.

He says, just as Eve was led astray, that's an interesting line. Okay, how was Eve deceived in the Genesis story? Do you remember back to that story? The serpent does not say to Eve, "Here, take and eat of this forbidden fruit so that you can get high, or that you can have pleasure," or any of the things that we tend to associate with sin, right? No, what he says is, "Take and eat so that you have the knowledge of good and evil." In other words, you'll be like God. He isn't tempting her to be a devil; he's tempting her to be a God.

So when Paul says just as Eve was deceived, do you see the point that he's making with that comparison? What distracts you and me from a pure and simple devotion to Christ? We Christians tend to think, oh sin, of course it's sin, and those simple people, we can't be distracted by that. And of course sin can distract us from a devotion to Jesus, but in context, Paul is not talking about sin; he is talking about seemingly religious distractions, seemingly moral distractions.

This is mentioned so many times in the Bible; it was a major theme of Jesus Christ's ministry. In fact, I'm gonna show you some of the many times in the Bible, there are verses about things that can distract us from a pure and simple devotion to Christ. I can be distracted from Jesus by Bible study. Yeah, now I love Bible study, I love it, love it, love it, I never get tired of it, but would you agree with me on this? You can get so into, name it, name the Bible study topic prophecy, eschatology, the dimension of the temple, some other aspect of theology, some Bible code or something that you can lose your pure and simple devotion to Christ.

Jesus talked about this. Jesus said to the religious teachers of his day, "You diligently study the scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life, that these are the scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life." He's saying, the point is not Bible knowledge; the point is Jesus knowledge, getting to know Jesus.

Now, kind of my nightmare is that somebody's gonna watch this and say, "So René this weekend said that Bible study is evil, I'm not gonna study the Bible." No, do it, it's rich, it's valuable, but the main thing is to keep the main thing, the main thing. Be sure to see the point, see the big picture, see Jesus on every page.

Okay, I can also be distracted by service, Christian service, service to the church, service to the poor, service for biblical justice, biblical reconciliation, feeding the high; it can all be a distraction from a pure and simple devotion to Christ if I'm not careful. And the Bible talks about this a lot too. I love the story of Mary and Martha. They invite Jesus to their house, the Bible says that Mary sits with Jesus and learns from him, and Martha, it says, is quote, distracted by all the preparations that had to be made.

And so she gets upset and she tells Jesus, "Martha says, tell Mary to get into the kitchen and help me chop the salad and stop listening to you, the world-changing Messiah. Come on, Jesus." And Jesus says to her, "Martha, Martha, you're worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed." And he says, "Mary has found that, and it will not be taken away from her."

I've seen this happen in churches, at conferences, other places I've spoken where church pastors or conference leaders are often the ones who are at least often actually in the worship services. And so often when they're there, now they're not really there, they're not focused on Jesus, why? They are worried and upset about many things, distracted by all the preparations that have to be made, distracted by Christian service.

And of course what happens is you just burn out, whether you're preparing a message or serving the poor or doing some other kind of justice or reconciliation ministry, if you're not grounded in a pure and simple devotion to Christ, then you don't last in all those ministries because they can be so draining.

And I can be distracted from Jesus by Christian fads. Fads. Doesn't seem to you like there's a new one almost every single year, some new book, some new idea, maybe starts out well-meaning, but ends up being a giant distraction that people write about and talk about it or obsessed with more than they are about Jesus Christ. And it was already happening 20 centuries ago when Paul says in 1 Timothy 1:4, "Command certain men not to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies; these promote controversies rather than God's work, which is by faith."

To me that line promote controversies is kind of a litmus test. Is the speaker that I'm following, the teacher that I'm watching, the podcast or the blogger, is really basically their job description to promote controversy, theological, doctrinal, you know, political controversy, or are they about fostering a pure and simple devotion to Jesus Christ?

So much of what passes for Christian teaching these days to me is based on outrage. And outrage is a substitute emotion. Listen, what I've noticed is when people stop feeling a real passion and love for Jesus and for their neighbor, they substitute cheap anger for real, deep, godly passion because they've forgotten to keep the main thing, the main thing.

And of course I can be distracted from a pure and simple devotion to Christ by my own guilt and shame. I was thinking the other day, do you remember when we used to go to basketball games and maybe back in the 80s, there was sort of a trend at live basketball games? If somebody fouled out or the ref made a bad call, everybody in the crowd would stand up and shout, "You, you, you, you," right? Well, so many of us who are guilt and or shame-oriented, we beat ourselves up when we do something wrong and we feel like the whole universe is standing up and shouting to us, "You, you, you, you," right? You've done something wrong.

This is what David was feeling when he says in Psalm 51, "My sin is always before me." He wasn't looking at God; he was looking at a mirror, a magnifying mirror, and just seeing his sin. I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid. That's just another form of idolatry because you're looking at yourself instead of a God. Instead, we need to look at Jesus. It needs to be not you, you, you, but him, him, him.

And I can get distracted by fear. I love that great story of Peter who sees Jesus walking on the water. He gets out of the boat; he walks on water too. It says in Matthew 14, "Peter got out of the boat, walked on the water towards Jesus, but when he saw the wind, he was what? Afraid. And beginning to sink, he cried out, 'Lord, save me.'" He was okay when he looked at Jesus, but when his eyes got on the waves, he got distracted and so fearful.

Same exact thing I'm saying with a lot of us these days; people have their eyes on the coming storm, maybe Tuesday. And so they're filled with fear because of their distraction. Eyes on Jesus, everybody. And I can get distracted by politics. You know, Jesus had that great line, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and give to God what is God's." Now I could talk about that verse for days, and I don't have time to dig into all the implications of this, but you know, Jesus is saying Caesar has his place, but it's not God's place. And I really think we all need to hear this.

Now don't get me wrong, I hope you vote. I hope you vote with passion and conviction grounded in your faith and in prayer and in God's word, but I also hope you realize that some of your own brothers and sisters in Christ who have sought God's guidance and read scripture just as much as you have have come to different conclusions about the election than you have. And you may passionately believe them to be misled and wrong, but they're here in the family.

And by this time next week, probably some of us will be happy and some of us will be sad. And what our church will need next Sunday morning, what our community will need, what our nation will need, what your family will need to see then is people united in Christian love, not shattered by human politics, to see people worshiping together the one God who rules over Caesar and all human kingdoms and presidents and worship him by saying, "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

You know, I've told you before, I don't wanna be known as a red church or a blue church or even a purple church, whatever that means. I wanna be known as a red church and blue church and a purple church and a black and brown and white church bound together not by politics, not by race, not by any other human ideology, but simply by the fact that we're a motley bunch of sinners who have this in common and maybe only this: that we once were lost, but we now have been found by the amazing grace of Jesus Christ.

And even in the midst of all of our differences, we find ourselves unified by astonishment that Jesus Christ would love a sinner like me. That's staying focused, that's keeping it simple, that's pure and simple devotion and love for Jesus Christ. That's what I long for. So look at this list, Paul's so emotional, and I relate to where he's coming from in these verses because these sorts of things are, in the first century already as we've seen from these Bible verses, they were already distracting people from Jesus Christ.

And this is what he means when it goes on in verse four, "You happily seem to put up with whatever anybody tells you, even if they preach a different Jesus than the one we..." What do you mean a different Jesus? Well, they were making him into maybe a mere role model, a mere moral example, a mere endorser of whatever schemes that they were coming up with, or he says a different kind of spirit than the one you received. What does he mean by that?

I've been fascinated in recent weeks to receive a whole ton of emails debating me on a variety of issues, political and theological, and that's fine. I love to hear your points of view, and I think that when it comes to politics, there's nothing wrong with trying to passionately convince others in love, but what really fascinates me is the spirit of some of these emails, not all. In the last couple of weeks alone, I just cut and pasted these words from emails I've received in the last two weeks. I've been called, quote, satanic, dumb, deceitful, cowardly, and that was all from my sister. Just kidding, not really. My sister's awesome. I think she's probably watching right now up in Oregon. She would never say things like that, but I have received those comments from people in this church.

Now, please don't feel concerned for me. I am not offended. It would take a lot more than that to offend me. People are just wound up these days. I'm not offended, but I am concerned because that's a different spirit than the spirit of gentleness, humility, and patience, forbearance, and kindness that the Bible talks about, and a different kind of gospel where it veers into a works righteousness and a self-righteousness, and this is so subtle.

Let me tell you a story. I will never forget. Years ago, after I started here 27 years ago, Paul Spurlock invited me to the De La Viega Disc Golf Course to play for the first time, beautiful view, beautiful course, beautiful day, beautiful view of the bay, and it was one of the most humiliating experiences of my entire life. Now, admittedly, I'm not the most coordinated guy in the world, but I figured how hard could it be? It's Frisbee.

Well, I soon learned calling it Frisbee, big no-no. It's Disc Golf. Didn't know that. Turned out there was a lot I didn't know. Paul gave me a quick 10-minute lesson. "René, throw it like this. Do this with your shoulder. Grip it like this, not like this. Use this kind of disc for putting, this kind for right turns, this kind for left turns. Here's your big satchel full of all these different kinds." I thought I was gonna play Frisbee, not learn calculus. It was so overwhelming.

I got to the first tee and I'm thinking, okay, shoulder this, we grip this, we stand this way. I look like a human pretzel. The result, if there was a tree trunk to hit, branches to get stuck in, poison oak to land in, a canyon for the disc to roll down, I did it. I lost discs. I got lost looking for discs. At one point I was standing up there thinking about all the techniques that Paul taught me, and another guy came up who was just an observer, watching me just make an idiot. I forgot kind of the cardinal rule. When you're gonna make a fool out of yourself, do it alone. The course was crowded. I was embarrassed. Everybody was staring at me. Who's the idiot?

This guy comes up to me, and he's giving me more, so I'm thinking of Paul techniques now and this new guy's techniques, and I look like this. I'm all torqued, and my disc just goes wanging into a tree trunk and ricochets off the fairway into an oak tree and drops from branch to branch until it lands in another clump of poison oak. And Paul turns to me and says, "That's unbelievable, René. You have literally hit every clump of poison oak that's on the course." Did I mention when I got up there, it was a stunning day?

Now, did I have a good time? No, it was humiliating. All the beauty and all the joy of the game. It was absolutely lost on me after a few minutes because all I saw after the first three holes were the threats, the obstacles, the hazards. And so all I thought about were the techniques for doing it right and avoiding the dangers. And what I just described is many people's Christian experience.

I see this happening all the time. People are drawn to our faith because of the beauty of Jesus. Like, are you kidding me? I have been such a bad sinner, and I'm so lonely, but Jesus Christ loves me that much. God came to earth because he loves me, and he died for all my sins to pay the price for all my sins and then rose again to give me new. That is so beautiful, that is so awesome. Man, I wanna learn more, I'm drawn to it. And then slowly, we become focused on the techniques of the Christian life and maybe all the fads, and we focus on the hazards and the controversies and the politics and the dangers and the techniques to avoid the dangers. And the big picture, follow me here, the beauty, the joy of what drew us to it in the first place is now lost to us.

And this is why we need to get to number three. I need to recognize and eliminate distraction ruthlessly. And here is where it gets tricky, like really, really, really tricky because as Paul starts saying in verse 13, "These people are false apostles." They're deceitful workers who disguise themselves as apostles of Christ. They could look like Christian pastors or Christian bloggers or Christian podcasters, but they're selling distraction. They're selling controversy.

Paul says, "But I shouldn't be surprised, right? Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light." And so it's no wonder that his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. These guys and gals are gonna look like the most hyper-fundamentalist people that are out there. They're servants of righteousness, but they're distracting you from Jesus. Man, that's pretty intense, but it's been going on for 20 centuries in the church.

You know, today is the International Day of Prayer for the persecuted church. Please pray for your brothers and sisters in Christ, the world over who are suffering. There's vast persecution going on. I'll never forget visiting Romania, a beautiful country, of course, ravaged for years by the brutal dictator, Ceausescu. Christians were jailed and tortured horribly, yet miraculously the church survived and even thrived through all of that oppression and persecution.

Well, I went to church with a pastor I met there, this pastor, a couple of years ago, and then he invited me out to dinner with his family. It was wonderful. And he told me of times that he had personally been persecuted, been tortured for his faith and horrible stuff. And he's still a Christian pastor to this day. And then I asked, well, tell me about the state of the church in Romania today, now that you're free. And he said something I'll never forget. He said, "Where the devil failed through the dictator, he's succeeding through the Christians. There is now so much infighting that the church is being fractured from the inside instead of destroyed from the outside." Wow.

And this is exactly what Paul is saying in the Christian Corinthians, Paul's surprising insight. And here it is. The most dangerous distractions come from those who appear most religious. And here is where it gets very personal for me because this is my story. I believe I used to be one of these distractors. When I look back now with the perspective of time on my, especially my early ministry when I was an early pastor and youth pastor, I think so much of what I used to preach was basically, "Everybody, you need to trust in Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and savior. Have you done that? You're sure you've prayed the prayer? Okay, now just try harder to be better. Try hard to be holy."

And what I realized one night in this flash of Holy Spirit insight, I think it was God intervening by his grace in my ministry, suddenly I realized that the fruit that that kind of preaching was producing in me and in my church was not peace and it was not joy. It was tension and judgmentalism and fear. And I came to the realization that much of what I called Christianity was actually a distraction from a pure and simple devotion to Jesus.

And I remember just weeping with joy and with repentance and with a new appreciation of Jesus's love and grace. And it just changed my life, changed my life. I remember telling my wife, "Laurie, I feel like I've been born again, again." And yet, you know what I've discovered? Refocusing on Jesus is not just a one-time thing. Distraction from Jesus Christ happens again and again. And as Paul says, so insidiously disguised as angelic light even. And so I need to ruthlessly eliminate it.

So I urge you to always ask of everything, does this distract me from Jesus and his love for the Father and for my neighbor? Is this whatever it is making me obsessed with lesser passions or is it keeping me focused on a pure and simple devotion to Christ? I'll wrap up with a story. My grandmother was not a Christian for 99.9% of her life, but what a character. She was probably a genius, an artist who spoke five languages fluently. She smoked and drank and cursed like a sailor. In other words, a deep influence on my own life.

Now, she also had the biggest heart of any human being, I think I've ever known. All the while though incessantly mocking my faith and my mom's faith, and I loved her so much. Well, when she was elderly, she had a stroke and she lost most of her ability to move and even to speak. And my mom moved back to Switzerland for a while to live with her and to care for her.

And one day my mom drummed up the courage to ask her a simple question. She said something like this in Swiss German, "Would you like to receive Jesus into your life to be your savior and your Lord?" And my grandmother, after years of contentious debate, simply nodded yes. And my mom led her through a prayer that went something like this: "Jesus, I've gone my own way like a lost sheep, but I know you love me. And so please forgive me and live in me. And I look forward to living with you forever in heaven."

Now, here's what I want you to know. When my mother said amen, wondering how much of it my grandmother really understood or believed, my mother said amen and opened her eyes, and my grandmother was rocking back and forth, back and forth with tears of joy streaming down her face, a big smile. And she was saying, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus." Now, I described her to you. This was not a woman who was preconditioned culturally to have some sort of an ecstatic experience with Jesus, right?

But you see, she prayed that simple prayer and she met the real Jesus who really exists supernaturally. And in that divine encounter, this woman who'd never really given Jesus much of a positive thought her whole life met and experienced the love of Jesus and couldn't stop saying one word, "Jesus, Jesus, Jesus." It's really that simple. So my prayer is that you can rediscover that kind of simple faith in the Jesus who loves you so much. Let's pray right now. Would you bow your head in a word of prayer with me?

I want to encourage you to pray if it reflects the desire of your heart, perhaps the very same prayer that my mother led my grandmother in, something this simple: "Jesus, I acknowledge that I've gone my own way like a lost sheep, but you love me. And so come into my life and live in me and forgive me. And I look forward to living with you forever in heaven. Amen."

Now, many of us probably prayed a prayer something like that at some point in our childhood, if you're joining us today. For some of you, that was a first-time commitment. And we'd love to talk to you more about that and baptize you. But many of us have prayed a prayer like that but allowed ourselves to be distracted. So for us, I'm going to put a prayer on screen. This is a prayer that is several hundred years old. It's from a Puritan prayer book that somebody gave me. And I love this, but it expresses what I've been talking about. So I want to encourage you to peek and to look at this prayer as you pray these words out loud. And I'd love to hear from you.