A City On A Hill

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. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to Thrive. It's good to have you here today as we are in our second week of this series called Misquoted. It's a six-week journey at this point in time, and there'll be four more weeks later on in the summer after our vacation, and during this time, we're going to be looking at different Bible verses and how they've been either misapplied, misappropriated, or misquoted, like the guy in the video, using them to kind of justify all sorts of things, using them to usually exalt self or my opinions or my thoughts against someone else, but not use the way that they were intended in the first place. And I think through this series, I will probably become an equal opportunity offender. And what I mean by that is some point in time, I'm going to be stepping on your toes probably, and mine too, because there have been times I have used Bible passages, and then once I start looking at the actual passage and what's being said in it, go like, ooh, yeah, that's not the way I used it. It's too easy to do that. It is just way too easy to do that, and today, it just might be one of the times that I step on, well, I'm going to step in it, I have a feeling, okay? Maybe it's not on your toes, but I'm going to kind of get into it. And this is one of the touchy subjects, I think, that we're dealing with today. It's part of actually the course I'm going to be teaching this fall at Florida Gulf Coast University, Religion and Politics in America. And you might even go like, why are you teaching a class called Religion and Politics in America? That's like grabbing the third rail and just, you know, the two subjects that you're not supposed to talk about. But they're just too important, as well as underneath the surface, all sorts of things are being said, whether it's in our silos that we have on social media, you know how it is? So, I just kind of listen to people I already like and who like me about it, or whether we kind of infer it in different ways. These things need to be addressed, and the relationship between religion and politics needs to be handled. Not, in my opinion, for the sake of politics, although that's also helpful, but the sake of the faith, okay? So why are we talking about it now? Why are we talking about it at all? I've really, honestly, in the last decade or so, I've seen, and statistics bear it out, we'll get to that later, a lot of people are walking away from any religious label at all in the United States, but particularly organized Christianity and certain versions of it, because of this conflation of religion and politics that's happened, okay? So today, we're going to get to it, and like I said, I'm kind of stepping in it. We're getting to one of the more famous speeches ever given in the history of the United States, as well as what we're going to see that comes from the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount. Now, you'll see in this series, a number of times that we're going to be dealing with, next week as well, words from the Sermon on the Mount, and how some of the most famous words of Jesus can be misquoted or misapplied, okay? Next week, it's judge not, and ye shall not be judged. Have you ever heard that one misquoted? Yeah, yeah. For Jesus says, you are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden, nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven. So again, like last week, we're going to do, at least this week, the three-part division in the message that fits, first of all, what Jesus is not saying in these words, how it's been misquoted or misappropriated by some, what Jesus is saying in these words, and why what Jesus is saying, what Jesus is meaning is better, okay? So what Jesus is not saying, well, this is where I start to step in it. I don't think, it might have been about 2014, 2013, 2012, somewhere in there. I went to a Christian conference of pastors and church leaders in Orlando, Florida, and the guest speaker, one of the guest speakers was Rick Santorum. He had run for president, right, but lost the nomination for the Republican Party, and he got up in front of this group of all Christians, basically, and said, and I'm trying to quote it as exact as I can, he said, America is the last great hope of the world, and it is the light for all nations. And I heard that, and personally, I was a little taken back. You might go like, well, that sounds good. And a lot of people in the crowd of all these Christian leaders thought, okay, great. And I'm thinking, I thought that was Jesus. That's what I thought immediately, and it's like, gosh, I just, I have a problem when we put it on something else. Now Jesus...