Wonder | Wonder | Thrive Community Church

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. The Bible is much different of a world than the world we live in, in terms of the people in the Bible, the prophets, those who wrote the scriptures. Don't just try to figure things out. Like, they're not just curious. They're not just inquisitive. They're not just looking for information. The reason they explore and discover and live is to revere, to wonder, to be in awe, to live a life of awe. I think that would be something that we all can strive for. And that is what we're doing in this series. Why wonder? G.K. Chesterton said this. He said, The world will never starve of want of wonders, but only for want of wonder. Do you get it? I mean, right in this room, there's a lot of wonder. I mean, I'm just amazed. Like, just look at your hand. Have you ever considered your hands? I mean, really thought, like, Wow, they actually work? I didn't ask for this, right? I got hands that work and feet that work and a body that works and a brain that sort of works. But just the complexity of the human creature or the wonder that's in this room right now that I am using these weird syllables and you understand them? And you can read something on the screen and those things, those squiggle marks make sense? Do you understand how much wonder there is in this world? And we just pass by it all the time. The world is not starved for want of wonders. Every day you go outside, you can look up. You can look around at night. at every human being made in the image of God. And there are wonders abounding. It's just that we just don't wonder anymore. Our world has been reduced to a flatness of a screen like this one. Two minutes, and we're amused. On to the next TikTok. We're haunted by feelings of missing out in life. We always have to keep doing more, more, more, more, and fitting more and more in the schedule. We worry, that's for sure, but we don't wonder. We analyze things, but we don't stand in awe. We research at a university, but we're not in reverence when we do it. We review things all the time and critique, but we don't rejoice and celebrate the goodness. We are busier than ever, distracted and disillusioned. We seldom pause to marvel, to reflect on the beauty and glory of this creation all around us and the God who made it. Neil Postman, he critiqued American culture and his book, Amusing Ourselves to Death. What a title, huh? But in it, this is what he says. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, hmm, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainment, Hmm. When serious public conversation becomes a form of baby talk. Oh, yeah. When, in short, if people become an audience and their public business is a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk. A culture death is a clear possibility. Do you know when he wrote this? 1985. Can you imagine, 40 years later, what he would be saying? In this series, we're going to try to explore the surprising, relevant world of the Bible, as I mentioned it, a world of wonders, and to see the value of being people of wonder and reverence and awe. In fact, Abraham Heschel, an Old Testament scholar and rabbi, said it this way. He said, The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe, but a will to wonder. When we stop actually appreciating, enjoying, celebrating, worshiping our God, honoring Him, life gets totally just survival mode flat. Haven't you noticed in how many days are just, there's nothing to them in the end? You go like, wow, probably because I didn't wonder, I wasn't in awe. Today we're going to use Psalm 8 as the starting point to just introduce this series. It's during a season, by the way. I know it doesn't, technically, we're still in Christmas, okay? We're at, what, the 10th day of Christmas right now? Did you know that? Yeah, the 10th day of Christmas. Notice, though, Christmas is over. Like, we don't celebrate Christmas, we celebrate the Christmas during Advent, and we get over Christmas, we're on to New Year's, we're on to new things, we're just back to normal already. But it's a series in the Christian church over the years, they've developed what's called Epiphany. This series that we celebrate the coming of the Magi, which we'll celebrate next Sunday, and a reading from Matthew from that, and the fact that they, it says, rejoiced with exceeding joy when they saw the star. Do you understand that? When have you rejoiced with exceedingly great joy? So we're going to look at that. kind of started the thinking on this. The fact that it was the Magi, these people from the East, we don't know what they actually were, if they were astrologers or sages or what, but they're the ones who are rejoicing and celebrating and worshiping the Christ child, where the scribes, the people who should know the scriptures back...