Whatever is outstanding…

How joyful people think! That is the series that we have been launching and been investigating since the start of the New Year. Again, my name is René. I'm one of the pastors here at Twin Lakes Church and if you have your sermon notes you can follow along with me today and if you're joining us online you can get those at TLC.org/notes. And we are actually wrapping up the series this week. Next weekend we start a brand new series. This is going to take us up to Easter. It's seven verses Jesus loved. There were seven verses from the Hebrew Scriptures, the Bible Jesus knew. It's in our Bibles, of course, as the Old Testament that he loved from the very beginning of his ministry until he quotes one actually as he is dying on the cross. And if you look at those seven verses it really takes you through the arc of his ministry, helps you get into Jesus's head to see what he loved about the Bible, what he emphasized. This is a fascinating study. I can't wait. That's going to start next weekend.

But now let's talk about a fascinating psychology experiment. Some research psychologists at Harvard did an experiment to discover how your brain works. And yes, your brain works. Maybe not this early in the day, but it does work. And they discovered a phenomenon that's now widely known as the Tetris effect. And if you don't know what Tetris is, Tetris is a video game that you play and shapes kind of float down slowly from the sky and your goal as the player is to arrange them. Has anybody ever played Tetris here? Can I see a show of hands? Most of us have played Tetris. So what they did at Harvard was they paid a bunch of students in this research study to sit down and play Tetris several hours a day for several days in a row. And right about now you're thinking, "How did I miss these experiments when I was in college? I would have loved this." But wait until you hear about the side effects.

So these students spent hours on a screen looking for patterns. And when the experiment was concluded, many participants literally could not stop seeing Tetris shapes everywhere they looked. The luggage in their van, their grocery cart items, city skylines. It was all a test puzzle to solve. That is the Tetris effect. And that actually became the conclusion of the study. This is how your brain works. You see what you train your brain to see. You start putting together the patterns. Now of course none of us would ever spend hours on a screen training our brains to see patterns, would we? We all do that every day. You might be training your brain to see patterns of outrage. You could call that the outrage effect. Now you're gonna see stuff that outrages you everywhere. Or training your brain to see scandal everywhere you look. Or training your brain to look lustfully at the world. Or training your brain to see danger everywhere you look.

The point is you train whatever you see, whatever you train your brain to see. That is the Tetris effect. Say Tetris effect. Tetris effect. And this happens to you whether you intend for it to happen or not. This is absolutely inevitable. And of course what happens is these little devices in our pockets help us along. Right? You know I noticed this maybe two weeks ago I saw a little news story come up about an earthquake somewhere. And I clicked on it. Ever since then every single day I get at least two earthquake stories on my phone. Because it's like, "Oh you like clicking on earthquakes. Let me show you another earthquake. There's an earthquake in Sumatra. There was an earthquake down in South Africa today." And if I didn't know better what I would think is suddenly the earth is exploding with earthquakes. It's not any different than it was before but this thing is training my brain to see earthquakes everywhere I look.

And the same thing happens with your politics. And the same thing happens with everything else. You are training your brain perhaps to see this. The nation is decaying. Life is dangerous. I'm not gonna go to San Francisco. I'm gonna get killed if I go up there. Politicians are ungodly. Of course not your politicians, the other party's politicians. People are all, "Oh they're all out to get me." You train your brain to look for this. That is what you are going to see. It's just like suddenly there's earthquakes everywhere. No you've been training your brain to see this stuff. The point is are there earthquakes happening? Sure. But I was getting a disproportionate, askewed vision of reality because of the Tetris effect. Are these things true? Sure. But you're gonna get a skewed vision of reality if you're only looking for these patterns.

Alternatively you could look at the world this way. God is always at work. I am loved. Admirable people are doing praiseworthy things every day. The world is filled with beauty. You train your brain to see these patterns. You are going to see these patterns everywhere because this is also always true. Does that make sense? Now the funny thing is the people who wrote the Bible like the Apostle Paul, that first list, these things were true of their world in spades in their first century Roman world as Christians and most of them were Jewish. I mean this was majorly true for them and they acknowledge it in their letters in our Bibles. Yet how they frame this reality is the second list. God is at work. I'm loved. The world is filled with beauty. Admirable people are doing praiseworthy things all around me every day and really the best example of this is the Apostle Paul.

Quick recap on the series. Remember when he wrote the book of Philippians he was in a prison cell. This is a dark dungeon that you can still visit today in Rome. I mean it is depressing even today, even when you know you're only gonna be there for 20 minutes. It's astonishing that he wrote a book that has the words "joy" or "rejoice" in it 16 times and he never complains about his conditions once. Let me just give you some examples so you can feel this. He says things like, "I pray with joy because of this I rejoice. I will continue to rejoice. I'm glad I rejoice with you. Rejoice in the Lord. I will say it again. Rejoice. You people are my joy." And this is just not even half of the number of times. It's like Paul wrote this on vacation in Hawaii, not in a prison cell. What was his secret? Well he tells us in Philippians 4:8, which is the verse we've been zeroing in on in this series, and we've been trying to memorize this as a church.

Quick show of hands, how many of you, don't be afraid to brag, how many of you have successfully memorized this verse, this series? Awesome! Well the rest of you, this is your last chance in your life to memorize this verse. Let's read this out loud together. Let me hear you. "Finally brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things." One thing I want to make it clear about this series, we've been talking about this for six weeks. This is not just about positive thinking. This is not just a guide to optimism. It's not a positive thinking guide. It's the trauma survival guide.

Somebody last week who's been following this series online showed me this fascinating book. It's called The Happiest Man on Earth, The Beautiful Life of an Auschwitz Survivor. When the author Eddie Jakku released this book two years ago, he had just turned 100 years old. And he writes in the introduction, "I have lived for a century and I know what it is to stare evil in the face. I've seen the very worst of mankind, the horrors of the death camps, but I now consider myself the happiest man on earth." How? He says, "Happiness does not fall from the sky. It is in your hands. Happiness comes from inside yourself and from the people that you love." What he's saying that he discovered is that when it comes to experiencing peace and joy and happiness, you have agency. You are not just a victim of your circumstances.

All of us go through tough times and some of you right now may be going through a tougher time than the rest of us. You just lost a spouse. I was talking to several people here who are here at this service in preparation for the death of a spouse seminar following this service. Or maybe you just got bad news from the doctor or maybe you have a difficult relationship in your life. Those are terrible circumstances and the Bible never asks you to live in denial of those circumstances. But you are not just a passive vulnerable victim to those circumstances. You have agency about how you can experience life. And the Apostle Paul is a living example of this when he says, "This is how you do it." You frame your life. You look for these things which are also true in your life at the same time that you're going through those tough things just as they were for the Apostle Paul.

Now so far in this series we've looked at the words true and noble and right and pure and lovely and today as we wrap this up we're gonna look at three words together. The words admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy. Let's say those three words out loud together. Admirable, excellent, praiseworthy. Now if you're thinking right now, "I just can't do this. My life right now is just beating me up." I've got some really good news for you without denying that in any way. The Apostle Paul, remember his circumstances writing this, he says a couple of verses later, "I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation whether well-fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want." Here's a secret, I can do all this through him, through Christ, who gives me strength. That's the good news, it's not just up to you and your willpower. If you want to change the way you think, Jesus is in your corner.

Jesus has your back. Jesus is empowering you. Jesus is for you. And so that's how you know it is possible for you to change the way you think and learn how joyful people do it. Amen? Alright, well let's look at these three words in turn and then I want to ask some application questions. First, the word admirable, it's a great word, it's maybe surprising as a word, it's the Greek word euphemos. Euphemos, compound word, the word you in Greek means good. And we have this even in English today, like a eulogy at a funeral means good words about somebody who has passed away. So euphemos, what does famous mean? It means famous, that's where we get our English word, believe it or not. So eupheme means good fame. I wish we had a word like this in English because not all fame is good. It means being famous for the right things, being famous for moral courage.

So my question, my application question, is this the first one, is who do I admire for doing good? Ask yourself that question. Who do I admire? Who inspires me for the good that they have done? Who is good famous or at least who should be good famous? So I think this is important because these days we need to be very intentional about this because we're in a cultural moment right now, again where our news feeds, no matter what side of the political spectrum or cultural spectrum that you are on, you're being pushed to read stories of people who are bad famous from your perspective because that gets fused, that gets clicks. So very intentionally you need to think about people who are aspirational for you.

So when I thought about it this week, like who could I admire for being good famous? I've been reading this book that was recommended to me, it's called, great title, Priests de Resistance. It's about priests who are in the resistance during the days of Nazi Europe and other pastors and priests after that. And my favorite is this character, a French priest and pastor named Felix Kier. So for 30 years, pastor Felix, as a small quiet ministry in France, he serves in small churches in three successive cities and also he was a street evangelist but he was mostly known for really enjoying the food and the wine locally and to explain why he was known as kind of a gourmet, let me explain the three cities where he served as pastor, Chablis, Beaux-Jolé and Dijon. So you can't really blame him, it's like he was a pastor in Napa Valley.

But that's not why I admire him. Here's why. He is 63 years old when the Nazi tanks roll into Dijon. The mayor of Dijon and all the city councilmen take off, panic, so there's no leadership left. Pastor Felix sees the Nazis marching towards City Hall, they're about to take over leadership of the city and he sneaks into the City Hall chambers, plops behind the mayor's desk just in time and when the Nazis come in through the door he goes, "Oh yeah, I'm the mayor." Totally lies. And as the mayor, he schemes to outwit the Nazis at every turn with the power of the only thing they respect, bureaucracy. Like he forges official-looking documents, walks right up to local concentration camp gate and demands workers for vague infrastructure projects and they never get back to the concentration camp and he keeps going there saying, "Man, you know how it is, over budget and over time, they're living in tents over here, we're building that road." And instead he's helping them all escape to Switzerland. It's estimated that he saved about 5,000 prisoners that way.

So the next challenge was how to save the local synagogue from Nazi destruction because they were blowing up all the synagogues all over France. So he takes out all the religious items and hides them and then offers the Germans this fine building here to store your military supplies, they never realize it's a synagogue because he doesn't tell them and because the German forces are protecting this building, the synagogue in Dijon ends up being the only large synagogue in France the Nazis never destroyed because he worked this out, he tricked them and right after the war he gives it right back to the Jewish people in town, perfectly preserved. Another thing he does, shipments of arms meant for the German troops mysteriously go missing from warehouses. He has members of the resistance dump all this stuff into the river and when the Germans come in it's like we've been waiting for the ship and where is it he just kind of shrugs his shoulders with this Gallic shrug, "S'et terribles, the French workers, it's awful!" Right?

Well when the Nazis finally realize what he's been up to, he's so popular that they can't arrest him so they send an assassination squad to kill him at his house. They burst in through the door, he's struck twice by bullets, he hits the deck, realizes he's still alive and in a split second he comes up with this plan. It's all a true story. He cleverly plays dead because he realized that the assassins are gonna come right over him to check to make sure he's dead and he plays dead and then right when they're over him he suddenly pretends to rise from the dead like Jesus himself and they're so freaked out they run away screaming and he escapes to safety. He's like a cat with nine lives, yeah this should be a movie.

So he's hiding for a few months for safety but then allied troops roll into town and Pastor Felix hops on the first tank and rides it into town and he's so beloved by the city that by the time he dies at age 92 he's still the mayor. He never leaves office. And he's also still the pastor of that church. He serves that church for 65 years of ministry. To me that guy's good famous, right? That's good fame. So who's on your list? I put a little prompt there in your notes. Somebody from history, people you know personally, people in the Bible. It's good for you to think of these people. Check this out. Researcher Jonathan Haidt did a whole long study that he called "Witnessing Excellence in Action" about the effect of admiring a good role model. He says this, "Those responding to moral excellence were energized and wanted to work harder to reach their own goals. Admiration motivates self-improvement."

Now let me ask you to do an honest self-evaluation. Ask yourself who do I spend more time on the daily thinking about? People I admire or people I loathe? Who do you spend more time reading news stories about? People you admire or people that just tick you off? I know what it is for me too often and it's the latter. Think of the Apostle Paul, all the people he could have thought about with teeth gritted and loathing, starting with Caesar Nero. But he instead thinks about people he admires and that's all through the book of Philippians, by the way. He's praising people right and left. He praises Timothy, he praises Epaphroditus, praises the Philippians, even praises Euodia and Syntheke who are not getting along with each other in the church. He's full of praise. So you got to train yourself to spot that pattern.

And then the second word, we'll go through these next two very quickly. I love this one, "whatever is excellent." That's from the Greek "arete," used to describe excellence in skill and strength and intellect and virtue and even sports. And remember Paul keeps saying in this verse, "whatever falls into these categories." If anything is excellent, think about such things. So ask yourself where do I notice excellence all around me? So I decided to jot down like the first seven things that came to my mind in terms of like where I notice excellence that inspires me. So don't judge me, but here's the first things that came to my mind. Track and field, like in the Olympics. It's pure excellence. I ran track and cross-country in school and it's probably like, I look at these people, they are not human anymore. It's amazing.

I don't know if you notice this, but just yesterday a guy ran the 5k, which is over three miles, in New World Record 12 minutes and 44 seconds. A human being ran over three miles in around 12 minutes. That's excellence. Great surfers inspire me. Museums inspire me with excellence, like the Rodin Sculpture Garden at Stanford. It's free, you should check it out. His excellence inspires me. When I see great cinematography in a TV show or a movie, sometimes I'll just rewind just to look at the shot and how it was lit and framed. It just inspires me. When I hear a great recording, like when, not just the song, but when a song is recorded well, what I mean by that is when you can feel the crispness of the skin on the snare drum, or when you can feel the texture of the strings on a bass guitar, when we can almost smell the warmth of the guitar amp, I just want to shout out the excellence of that recording engineer, whoever he or she was.

How about the level of excellence that you see in the detail at Disneyland? These are the kinds of things that come to my mind. Excellence. And I want you to notice something when you think about what you perceive as excellence. Just noticing excellence is elevating. It lifts your mood. It's aspirational. And if you are seeking it, you will see it every day. If you are not seeking it, you will never see it. So what patterns are you training your mind to see? The Tetris Effect. Will you take time this week to go, "Man, that is really excellent," and then say something about it, and that leads to our final word, whatever's praiseworthy. The Greek word "epinas" just means deserving of recognition, honor. And you can really see, can't you, how all three of these words are really circling around the same idea. Good fame, excellence, praiseworthy-ness.

Paul's saying, "Think about outstanding things, not just vile crass and disgusting things." Right? So the third question is, "Who can I praise?" Not just in my head, but who can I walk up to and praise? Right? Who in your life right now is doing something praiseworthy that maybe has been going unnoticed? Praise them today. Did you know, study after study has shown this, praising other people, not just receiving praise yourself, but praising others raises your endorphin level. It makes you feel better when you praise other people. So that is completely within your control. You have that agency a hundred percent. And I love that Paul ends on this, because when nothing else is working, you can still try praise.

When nothing else is working on that list in Philippians 4:8, when you're too worn out by life to try to notice like what's noble, you don't know what's true anymore, you can always praise. And you can always praise God. Praise Him for something specific, like the amazing world He made, and something specific in the world, like the blossoms that are starting to come out on that tree on your street, or the raindrops on the other side of your window, "Thank God for the rain," or His unchanging virtues, or let your mind just get carried away with His amazing grace to you. That though you have messed up in life and you have been hurt in life, God didn't just leave you in your lostness, but He reached out to you, and He brought you to Himself, and He brought you into fellowship with other people who love you and love God too.

And He Himself came down to earth as Jesus Christ to pay the penalty for your sin so you can have a relationship with God with no guilt or shame because you're forgiven, and that Jesus Christ, the Bible promises, will return one day to redeem and to restore fully all that is broken in the world. Man, that is praiseworthy, amen? You think of Jesus, that's praiseworthy. Now, I want you, I want to leave you with a promise. It's a promise that comes in the very next verse after the verse we've been studying in Philippians 4:9. Paul says, "Whatever you have learned or received or heard from me or seen in me, put it into practice and the God of what? Peace will be with you." That's a promise that you'll receive peace, but it's a promise that comes with a condition, and the condition is put this into practice.

All these things that we've been learning in this series, put this into practice and you'll experience peace. Now, peace is interesting. Peace and joy, these are emotions we feel and you can't command emotions, right? You can't say, and I used to get messed up with this when I was a younger Christian, I was like, "The Bible says that a fruit of the Spirit is peace and joy and so I'm gonna feel peace now, feel peace, feel joy." You can't muscle your way into an emotion, right? It's kind of like this. Think of somebody down in Watsonville growing strawberries. Now, that strawberry farmer cannot create strawberries, that's up to God. She can't make them pop out of the earth, but she can create the conditions for those strawberries to grow, can't she? She can plant the right seeds, she can protect the strawberries, she can water the strawberries, she can do all the things creating the environment where strawberries are more likely to grow.

Well, in similar ways, I can't create the emotion of peace, but I can be a peace farmer. I can be a joy farmer. I can cultivate the environment in which these emotions are naturally going to grow and that's been the point of the series, that there is a direct link between my perspective and my peace. And I'll wrap up this series with one of the best examples of this I know. Paul says, "What you've seen in me, like, you see me do this and so do what I do?" Well, I didn't know the Apostle Paul personally, but let me tell you about somebody I do know personally. It's a young woman named Sarah Kritikos. Many of you know Sarah. Sarah was born with numerous life-threatening health problems as well as several developmental challenges.

Sarah has been in and out of hospitals at least 30 times that I know of with serious, serious things. 30 times. Sarah now stands somewhere around four feet tall, that's all. She has one arm that's about half the normal length and is missing a thumb. Now, I might be tempted to just give up and despair if I had her challenges, but Sarah knows something about how joyful people think. I'll tell you about something that I observed. Sometimes Sarah helps out up at Mission Springs Conference Center and I was helping out myself at a camp for people with disabilities and Sarah was serving there as well. And I saw Sarah walk up to a group of men who were there to volunteer or to work, I'm not sure which, on a construction project. And I saw her start talking to these kind of tough guys, right? And I was going on to something else.

So later that week one of those guys sends me an email and he gives me the rest of the story. He says, "Hi, my name is Ron. I met Sarah for only a moment but her impact on me was like a thunderclap. We sat down on the deck to rest and Sarah walked by and said, 'Can I ask you guys a question?' 'Sure,' we replied. She asked, 'What do you think is the most beautiful part of God?' Well, I'd never thought of that before. And then she said, 'Can I ask you another question? When you have troubles, who do you turn to?' And she smiled and shortly walked away. We were stunned that this tiny woman with a strange delivery but a beautiful smile could ask questions that made us grown men weep. Well, God used her voice and spoke to me through her.

He writes, 'Through my experience with Sarah that day, I had a conversation with God. In fact, this was my first experience with this. Sarah truly was an instrument of God in my life.' Sarah, to me, personifies this verse, Philippians 4:8, 'Sarah could think thoughts of self-pity or discouragement.' I mean, she's faced more trials than most of us will ever face. But Sarah is just...I mean, I cannot over-exaggerate how joyful Sarah is. And those of you who know Sarah know exactly what I'm talking about because Sarah chooses to think the way joyful people think, including that question, 'What do you think is the most beautiful part of God?' That's how Sarah thinks. That's how Paul thought. That's how joyful people think. And I hope it's the way I begin to think and you begin to think, too. Let's pray together.

Father, we thank you that you personify that verse, that Lord, we can look at Jesus and see truth and nobility and righteousness and purity and loveliness and someone who is admirable, excellent, praiseworthy, so help our minds to be trained to see these qualities, not only around us, but that they would be training us to actually see you all around us. And God, I feel like it's time for repentance today. We want to repent of allowing the false and the crass and the slanderous and the contentious and the less than admirable command our attention all the time. We want to train our brains to see the opposite of that, to see what will bring us and others peace. And we pray that as we radiate those things, people would be drawn to Jesus. And it's true that the world is broken and in disrepair, but it's also true that you are fixing it and will repair it and redeem it. So help us to dwell on that. In Jesus' name we pray, amen.