Reframe

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. Well, welcome, y'all. It's good to have you here. And it's good to be gathered together, both online and in person, for this, our last in the series called Replenish. And as Hunter mentioned, next week we start a four-week series on the Beatitudes. That's in Chapter 5 of Matthew, by the way, so you can start reading that portion of the Sermon on the Mount. Some of you might know them, like, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. So we're going to go through just four of the Beatitudes in the coming weeks and show that that is really the blessed life. That's what the blessed life is all about. But now, today, we're finishing off this series called Replenish with a focus on reframing. And I'll explain why this is maybe the one that brings them all together. I don't know if you realize this. You may. We live in a time and a culture that your faith and your values are asked to be put in the closet. You can have them, no problem. Just don't bring them out and let me have to hear about them. You can have them and let them affect your life, but don't bring them out to bear on anything that's going on in our society. You can have them, but don't let them affect the real world, whatever that is. Now, the acceptable framework to look at our world and how we converse today is in terms of economics almost more than anything else. It's how we make more, how we get more. The economy has become the end-all and be-all in our society. I don't know if you've realized that or not. And if it's not that, it's going to be politics or entertainment or science or nationalism or patriotism, for example, but not faith and not religion. Those subjects are now just in your private life. Now, we can go down the rabbit hole of exactly why this has happened in our society and Western civilization. And that could be a whole college-level course, by the way. So we're not going to go quite there. I'm going to give you an oversimplification today of why we are where we are on this. Number one, first of all, sadly, religion over the last 500 years has been used as the fuel both for racial tensions, for political means, for the reason why we dehumanize or objectivize others and treat them as things to be destroyed even in our society. Because God is on our side. Have you heard that form before? And that's been used. And so Western intellectuals, hundreds of years ago, saw how religious wars were ripping Europe apart and the world apart and said, We've got to get religion out of the public sphere because that's causing all the problems. Now, that was one reason religion has been kind of sidelined. Another one, though, is that the whole Enlightenment movement has really been a throwing off of every authority outside of the self. That is really the only thing I should use as my mind, my reason, my will, what I want. And the self has been elevated to the position of making all decisions and the only arbiter of truth. And so it wasn't just a noble cause because religion was used in the wrong way. By the way, there have been as many wars going on since religion has been sidelined as ever before. And atheism and nationalism and patriotism and economics and politics and ideologies have been used to do the same thing. You just it's not saying war is inevitable, but boy, we can justify it for whatever way we want. Right. And it's all about power issues. Right. So. But in the end, as a result, and that's an oversimplification of both the get religion out because it's causing conflict and get your faith and stuff back in the closet because I want to just make the decisions for myself and don't tell me what to do. We are where we are. The result is that now you're supposed to navigate this world and see this world through the lens of politics or economics or nationalism. Or some other framework. And so all the media basically uses those money, power, pleasure, something as the way they tell their stories. Now, another name for this, by the way, is this wonderful word hermeneutics. Can you say hermeneutics? Gee, I knew you could. Yeah, I know that's a long word, big word. It basically means the art of interpretation. OK, so one person, Jen Zimmerman, wrote this little introduction to hermeneutics and he wrote this. He said one is engaged in hermeneutics when everyone tries to grasp the meaning of something, be it a conversation, a newspaper article, a Shakespeare player, an account of past events. In other words, you're always asking the question, what does this mean? Anybody hear that one before? That's hermeneutics. Or the question, how does this impact me or what difference does it make or what how is my fate tied in with this or that account or this or that story? OK, so we're always asking those questions. You're always trying to figure out what does this mean and how do I fit this i...