Know God: No Chance! "What are the odds this whole thing is real? with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to Overtime.

My name is Clayton.

I am the lead pastor at MetaCurch and I'm the host of the Clayton Tiner podcast.

Overtime was started during a sermon series we're doing at MetaCurch called No God.

We are trying to leave behind some of the traditions of our pasts of blind faith.

Many church environments are raising Christians to not ask any questions, do not question God, just kind of blindly follow.

We don't believe in that.

We don't see evidence of that in scripture.

We believe we're meant to have a reasoned faith, a faith that can stand the test of time, that can stand, you know, accusations and arguments against our beliefs.

So we've really dug deep and we've gone through a lot of content because there's Sunday sermons where I'm preaching, I'm supposed to preach for 45 minutes.

I've been over like every week because it's a lot of content.

And that's why we're doing these overtimes, because there's just too much to say about all this.

You can get caught up online at metachurch.tv slash know God.

All the sermons, all the overtimes we have compiled there for you.

That's metachurch.tv slash K N O W G-O-D.

And today is going to be uh a little bit different.

I'm going to try to keep this brief.

Overtime has been running 45 minutes to an hour.

Now, uh, caveat, this could also go 45 minutes.

I really never know.

It feels like this is going to be a little bit shorter.

I also wanted to make sure at the top to invite you out.

If you're in the San Antonio area, come out to MetaCurch.

Our address is 1207 Richland Hills Drive, San Antonio, Texas.

We are on Google Maps.

So if you put in MetaCurch, M-E-T-A Church, all one word, you should be able to find us.

If you're familiar with San Antonio, we sit in this pocket kind of at the corner of 410 and Highway 151.

And this is very much a come as you are environment.

We are a grace culture, and it is a place where you for sure will feel comfortable and welcomed and loved.

And this is going to be our last Sunday.

So June 5th, we are closing out our No God series and really getting to one of the most fundamental reasons why people have rejected God.

And I think it's going to be an important conversation.

I would love for you to come out to invite any friends who might be interested as well.

This week we talked about prophecy.

And unlike other weeks, where we've gone through, you know, these big arguments, the uh, the the uh argument from design, the argument from cosmology, the argument from morality.

We've looked at major objections to scripture.

This week we looked at the prophetic words of the Old Testament, and we saw how Jesus, we didn't have time to go through all of them, but Jesus fulfilled hundreds of prophecies.

In fact, there really isn't a way mathematically to express the odds of Jesus, one person coming hundreds of years after these prophecies were fulfilled.

Prophecies given by not one person, but dozen of dozens of people uh over centuries of time, some of them living in like vastly different areas of the world, many of them not corroborating their stories together, all of these prophecies pointing to the same person, that same person coming centuries later and fulfilling some of these things, like down to the very, very detailed specifics, sometimes down to the very day called 450 years in advance.

And so there's no mathematical way to present the odds of that if it if it was unguided.

Now, if there is divine intervention and there actually is a God, and that God was speaking through those prophets, then the prophets weren't giving predictions, they were giving promises.

And that's part of what gives us such a strong grasp on our faith.

And it is why we really cling to our scriptures as these inspired ancient documents that have been collected and protected, um, so that we have that today to learn more about God.

The Old Testament gives us these signals and a seal of affirmation for who the Savior is that is coming.

And really, man, when you read the Bible just consistently as a whole, and if you read it open to the metaphysical reality that there is a spiritual realm and there is a God, and it's an involved God, a personal God who makes personal decisions, who actually cares about us, who went from a state of nothingness before the Big Bang to Big Bang to all of this and the cosmos and the universe, and that he has a plan for our lives, and that he is the seed of morality and justice, and he is a God of justice, so things will be just at some point.

And you know, if you see all of that, scripture becomes this unbelievably beautifully woven, indescribable, unimaginable tapestry.

And it's like really difficult to understand when you look at what the Bible is.

The Bible is not a book, it's a library of books, it's a collection of books.

It are it's a collection of ancient, ancient books, ancient scrolls, ancient documents.

And man, they are calling their shots.

They're saying, this is gonna happen.

And sometimes it's like this is gonna happen on this day, and then it happens, you know, hundreds of years later.

It really is wild, and it builds a lot of faith in the testament of the Jewish scriptures and the old testament and also what the New Testament is uh is telling us, the testimony that it actually brings, what it takes note of, and what it predicts.

And we talked a lot about confidence because none of us can really predict the future.

I mean, there are some things we can know with some level of certainty, but you will learn the longer you live that you do not know the future, you don't control the future, you cannot predict the future.

And sometimes these predictions, they man, they break us.

Things that we thought were gonna happen and they don't happen, marriages we thought were gonna last and they don't, children we thought were gonna love us forever and they rebel and cut us off.

And that can be really, really devastating.

And what happens is it chips away at our confidence in the future.

And when we lose confidence in the future, in a real sense, we talked about on Sunday, you just lose confidence because the future is all that's in front of you, right?

The the present is almost nothing.

It's like you're living in the present.

Well, what is the present?

It's like the passageway between the past, which is what just happened in the future, which is what's happening right now, and what will continue to happen out in front of me.

And you got to realize there's a you in the future.

And this is why the biblical idea of sacrifice is so important.

Because what you're doing when you sacrifice the proper things today is you are ensuring a better future for yourself.

So you're being the best friend you can be to future you.

So there's a you in the future.

And when you lose confidence in the future, what you're actually losing confidence is you in that future.

And so you settle into the status quo and you just start living like the world lives, and you look for the simple answers, and you, you, you, you trade in like the pursuit of actual spirituality for just uh ideologies, these little pithy statements that you can make that try to make sense of a very, very complex world.

And anyway, we learned about all of that and we talked about how we could have confidence in our future.

And part of how we can have confidence in our future is by looking to the same God who inspired the prophets of the Old Testament that came true and were fulfilled in Jesus.

That same God was speaking through Jesus in the apostles, making more promises, more prophecies about our futures that's still out in front of us, namely eternity and what comes after this life.

And we can have a great deal of confidence in what the prophets of the New Testament say about our future and have confidence in that, security in that, and live our lives in light of that, knowing what the destination is, we can trust that same God with the journey, even when the journey is incredibly difficult.

And we can put our confidence because we see these ancient documents from thousands of years ago and their prophecies that were fulfilled in the historical person of Jesus.

And really, the idea of prophecy ties together a lot of what we've been doing in this series because, you know, on one hand, we talked about what the Bible actually is and is it this legend, is it this fairy tale?

Because if you're just writing a novel, if you're writing fiction, then you can have a setup and a payoff.

Um, I just started watching the Obi-Wan Kenobi show, you know, and there are some things in in the Disney world right now that are just painfully predictable, you know.

Um, and I don't know if you're watching this, and so oh my gosh, should I say the spoiler alert?

Uh it doesn't matter.

Okay, well, in episode two, uh, one of the characters says to another character, uh, if you're really a Jedi, can you make me float?

Man, this is a big spoiler.

And you know what I'm doing, it I might be the worst person in the world right now.

But but as soon as she said that, by the end, I go, ah, she's gonna float, you know.

Like that's how it works.

It's uh it's a foreshadowing, and there's foreshadowing in all of literature.

And foreshadowing is much different than a prophecy because a prophecy isn't a fictional occurrence, it's a real life occurrence.

And we have seen with uh a lot of clarity and a lot of very powerful arguments and just the facts surrounding the ancient ancient documents, especially of the New Testament, that these aren't legend, these aren't written as fiction.

Someone didn't put this together as the greatest story ever told, even though it is the greatest story ever told, it's the greatest story ever told because it actually happened.

And uh these were written as historical documents, and so we can have a lot of faith in that.

And we can have confidence in our future because we've been told what our future holds.

Now, not every step along the way, you don't know exactly where we're gonna be in five years, ten years, but you do know what comes at the end.

You do know the destination.

So our confidence in the new prophecy is rooted in our confidence in the old prophecy, and it really matters, and it also brings together some ideas like we've talked about with justice.

And so we talked about the Bible and why we can trust it.

And one of the reasons we can trust it is because the old testament Jewish scripture, which is a really different set of documents than the New Testament Christian scriptures, and yet they affirm one another hundreds of times over.

And so you can have really strong confidence in the documents that make up scripture.

And we talked about justice.

How do we even know what justice is?

And one of the reasons we know what justice is, is because the Bible sits uh really at the basis of all documents in the West.

And some documents just have much more pool in culture than others, and that's why some authors are far more acclaimed than others, because their writings are cited and are influential across more people more often, and nothing is as influential as the Bible.

And the Bible sits at at the very base of our ability to have even the lens of how we view our world.

It does come down to the Bible.

Even if you're an atheist, it does come down to the Bible.

And so if you're an atheist, and we talked about this, like you don't believe that there's uh uh objective morals, you don't believe in objective ethics, objective truth, and maybe you do, but if you do, you're being very inconsistent with your atheism.

And so if you're a consistent atheist, then you don't really believe in those things because what is it objectively grounded in that's not just you?

Because if it's just objectively grounded in you, then either you're God or it's actually objectively grounded in all of us, which means it's not objective, it is subjective to our changing cultural whims and our changing worldviews and ideas.

So if there's something objective, it has to be outside of us.

And so if you're an atheist that believes in objective truth and objective morality, you're not being a very good atheist.

Now, at the very bottom of our perception in the modern world of things like justice and morality and what is right and what is wrong and rights, the inherent equal rights of all people and all places, sits the Bible.

That is where it came from.

It is the foundational document that, whether you know it or not, has infused and informed all of the other Western canon of documents that have led us to what seems to us to be a self-evident truth that all things are held equally.

And so prophecy matters because prophecy gives us great confidence in these documents that sit at the very basis of our understanding of how the world works.

So I don't have a lot more to say about prophecy.

I mean, it is what it is.

These guys called it and it happened, and it's very important and it's very affirming.

If you are a believer, it should be very affirming uh to what we believe in the documents where we derive our beliefs from.

And it should be very challenging to you if you're not a believer, of how exactly did this happen?

And you're going to be able to find people who nitpick all the prophecies to death.

And you have to ask yourself the same way we as Christians have to ask ourselves, are we holding this evidence um equally?

Are we handling it fairly?

Are we giving it its fair due?

Because if you want to set out to disbelieve the Bible, that's not gonna be hard.

There's gonna be people who help you do that really, really quickly.

But what you'll find is that they, number one, have usually closed themselves off to any metaphysical reality.

So if any part of fulfilled prophecy includes anything that is supernatural, above and beyond the natural or metaphysical, beyond the physical, then they are closed off to it.

There must, in their opinion, and just really dig in and pay attention, they're like, there must be another answer.

I won't even consider that.

And yet they will call the Christians closed-minded.

And some Christians are very closed-minded and we know that, and they don't actually have a reason faith, they have a blind faith.

Well, that's closed-minded as well.

So just try to handle things fairly.

And Christians, quit being afraid for people to actually dig into the truth claims that we make, because if you actually believe that God is real and he's the creator of all things and he is at the bedrock of science and logic and reasoning and math and everything else, then just trust that if people will dig into things truly with an open mind, that they will find God in the midst of it.

So I wanted to show you a couple things.

Both of these are from the infographic Bible.

Uh, they are infographs, which means if you're listening to this on audio only, uh it's you're not gonna get the full picture.

I I try to make podcasts generally where if you're on audio only, it's you know, a fair fight or whatever, you you get the full picture.

I'm gonna do my best to describe, but maybe later you can just jump either on MetaCurch's YouTube channel or the Clayton Tyner podcast YouTube channel and see these for yourself, or you can buy the infographic Bible.

It's by Karen Saury, S-A-W-R-E-Y, Sare.

I have no idea how to say Karen if I'm getting that wrong.

I'm very sorre.

That's a dad joke.

All right, moving on.

The infographic Bible.

I'm gonna share my screen.

I'm gonna we're gonna look at uh two different infographics.

I love infographics.

I'm not a visual thinker.

Um, you know, they there's like this seven-point scale of how well you can visualize things.

They show a picture of an apple.

And if you're a seven, then when you picture an apple in your mind, you see like an actual 3D apple.

You know, it's got different shades, it has shadow, it has like some water glistening off of it.

If you're a zero on the seven-point scale, then you see no apple, like literally no picture at all.

Somewhere in the middle, you have kind of like a cartoon apple, like what an apple approximates when a 12-year-old draws it.

And uh, you know, I'm probably like somewhere around a three, so I don't maybe lower than that.

I don't really see things, I think things like in words.

And so infographics are cool for me because it's a way to visualize highly visual view of these things that I think about.

And this is again is in the infographic Bible.

It's very cool.

These are just two of the infographics.

It's it really, it really is impressive to just show the cohesion and coherence of scripture.

And what this is, is an infographic about all the prophecies of Jesus.

And for those of you who are listening only, it is like this massive, massive rainbow.

And on the left side, you have the starting point of the prophecies, which is the old testament, the Jewish scriptures.

And then there's a break, and on the right side is the New Testament documents that detail the historical life of Jesus and the movement that he started.

And that is where all of the prophecies end up in the life of Jesus.

And it's really, really cool.

They give three, six, eight, ten, twelve, uh, three, five, seven, nine, eleven categories of prophecy.

Uh, what the Messiah will be, the lineage of the Messiah, the need for a messiah, his character, how he will come, how he'll be received, what he will say, what he'll do, how others will respond, how he will redeem, and how it will end.

And each of these has a different color, which gives this rainbow of prophecy, um, just this incredible explosion of color.

And then not only that, but the lines connecting the Old Testament to the New Testament, which they are, are hundreds of these prophecies of Jesus.

There's three different types of line.

There is a dotted line, which is affirmation by others.

So this is when one of the biblical writers points out the fulfillment of prophecy.

There is a dashed line, which is a claim of Jesus.

That's when Jesus actually makes a claim that fulfills prophecy.

And then the solid lines are records of an event.

So this is when Jesus actually acts in the New Testament documents that fulfills a scripture.

And you can just see as we kind of zoom in on this a little bit, all of these different lines spanning and intersecting each other and uh something that uh Jordan Peterson, who I know can be a controversial figure, but he's done a lot of thinking on the scriptures, and he he talked about the depth of any given text.

And the way that he defined it, because it's a it's an interesting question, it's kind of the question that sits at the base of postmodern thought.

And postmodern thought basically says that there are so many endless interpretations of any given text that you can't ever know what's actually true.

And one of the ways that you determine how true something is is the depth of it.

And the depth is how many times it is cited by other works.

And what this infographic shows is the depth of scripture, intra-scripture, that scripture relies on each other, that is all telling the same story, that these Old Testament Jewish scriptures are intersecting at hundreds and hundreds, hundreds of points with the New Testament historical documents.

And I do get that some of this is biased because I am a believer and I do cherish scriptures, and we are very careful to say that the Bible did not create Christianity, um, that the Bible is not the foundation of our faith, that Jesus and his resurrection is the foundation of our faith.

The Bible is a tool to affirm our faith, to grow our faith, to make us more productive, to move us closer to our purpose.

And when I see this infographic, this visualization of the congruency of scripture and the fulfillment of the promises that were coming about a savior who had come to earth, it really is just a beautiful thing to me.

And I want to show in that same infographic Bible by Karen Sare, sorry, I don't know her name, um, is just a different version of this.

And if we zoom in on it, well, I'll kind of take in the big picture if you're watching first.

You see all of these intersecting lines.

And if you zoom in, these are the same fulfilled prophecies, but it actually gives the text from the Old Testament and then the text from the New Testament.

And if you're just listening uh on podcast audio only, then this is like uh the test that you would take in elementary school, where you would have a left column and a right column, and you would have to draw a line from the question to the answer, you know, like a matching quiz.

And what this does is it gives the Old Testament prophecy about Jesus, and then it has uh, you know, lines, sloping lines, angled lines that connect it to the New Testament fulfillment of that.

And it's really interesting because this breaks down if you look at the first quadrant.

This is affirmation by others in canon.

So this is the first time that someone else explained that Jesus was fulfilling prophecy, and you'll notice that that's actually the smallest section of other people having to spell out, hey, this was a fulfillment of prophecy.

The second section is claims of Jesus that he actually made himself.

And uh, well, just I mean, for full clarity, that one actually might be slightly smaller than the first one.

But then you get down to the largest section by a factor of four, maybe.

And these are records of actual events in scripture, Jesus doing things, saying things, acting in ways that directly fulfilled scripture.

And so it is the same infographic put in a different form where you can actually see the connections a little more clearly and you can see the intersection of the connections across the canon of scripture.

And I just show you this and explain this to you to say that prophecy matters.

And we have to be really careful.

And like I already mentioned on Sunday, people get really weird about prophecy, myself included, because there are a lot of false prophets roaming the world today.

They are charlatans, they're heretics, they're hurting the faith, they're making money off of uh people who are usually uneducated and living in poverty, although anybody can fall for these schemes.

And uh, you just have to be really careful, man.

We don't uh we are the ambassadors of God on the earth, and we are ambassadors of God.

That's what Paul says.

And then he says, crying out to a lost world, be reconciled to Jesus.

So that's our job is to point people back to Jesus.

The prophets in the Old Testament were pointing people forward towards Jesus.

Now our prophecy is pointing people back to the events of Jesus.

That's that's really important.

Doesn't mean we don't get uh an impression of the Holy Spirit leading us to do something, or maybe even feel like we have a strong word to share with someone, and we're gonna do some messages on that at some point.

I've been thinking about that for a really long time, but we have to be very, very, very careful because um the Old Testament prophets played a very, very specific role.

And uh, and we see that now and we see the evidence of that.

So I hope you're encouraged uh by that.

If you didn't watch this week's sermon, um, I really felt like the message that God gave me was also important, not just to the idea of prophecy and the affirmation of that and how we can have a reasoned faith, and prophecy plays a role in the reasoning of our faith, but it also gave us a good word for how to handle the events that just happened um last week in Uvaldi, Texas.

And if you're watching, not from San Antonio, you may not know this, but San Antonio is very close to Uvaldi.

And in our congregation at Meta Church, and even on our staff, we have some very direct, very real connections to families in Uvaldi and even families who are affected.

And so it was a heavy weekend.

And I want to take this time and over time, and I know this is stepping outside the bounds of what we have been doing by addressing kind of cutting room, cut, cut, cutting floor.

Uh, what was that called?

Cutting room floor?

Is that I can't think uh the content that didn't make the weekend, that's what we've been doing in here.

Um, but I want to share a little bit about knowing God.

That's what we're doing in this series, and what that says for our reaction to tragedy.

And I am speaking really specifically to believers in Jesus at this point.

Um, everyone can listen.

I hope everyone will listen.

Um, but if you are a believer in Jesus, then what is our response?

And you know, I made some really strong statements about how when you look largely at the church world, spiritual influencers, and their reactions to what happened in Uvaldi, and you know, just generally our reaction to tragedy.

What is so heartbreaking to me is that so often our reactions don't look any different than anybody else in the world.

And so the people of God are tending more and more to react in the exact same ways as people who don't know God.

And the apostle Paul addressed this in First Thessalonians, and they were under severe persecution.

And, you know, this isn't in any way to diminish the very, very real, very visceral tragedies going on all around us, but it is just to draw a comparison that.

When scripture speaks to things, it has some expertise on the matter.

And, you know, there were not guns, so there weren't mass shootings and things like that.

Um, but the way of the world was very hard.

It was very brutal.

And we talked about that a lot in the series.

That this like caricature of the ancient world where everyone just got along and kind of sang kumbaya around campfires and the men hunted and the women gathered and everyone lived peacefully.

That is as far from the truth as you can get.

And so, you know, the the believers in Thessalonica, they were already living in an unbelievably divided and difficult world, a world where people died very young, where the infant mortality rate was massively high.

Like you were lucky to make it out of infancy.

They were living in a world where slavery was just the way things worked.

They were living in a world where women were second-class citizens, akin to property.

They were living in a very difficult world, and they were trying to do something new, and they were trying to integrate their faith into the realities of their world.

And as first century Christians, they were under persecution for their faith in Jesus.

And the apostle Paul is writing to them, and he says that they should not mourn like those who do not know God.

And we made sure to make a clear distinction that he doesn't say they shouldn't mourn.

Um we are allowed to grieve.

We should grieve, we should mourn.

I think God finds us in our grief, and we find God in our grief.

It's an important thing to do.

But we're not supposed to grieve exactly like the world.

A world who doesn't have hope, a world uh who doesn't have the ultimate confidence in what their destination is after this life.

And so how are we different?

Um, the first thing I want to point out is that you can be right and not be righteous.

I did a sermon about this uh last year sometime, that you can be right, like you can really think, or even maybe you are factually correct and not be righteous.

And we are not called to be right as much as we are called to be righteous.

And I see Christians, and the beautiful thing about Metachurch, and one of the things that makes me so proud to be the pastor there, is we have such a diversity of thought, we have such a diversity of people, and we have a vast diversity of politics.

And I know uh because I'm friends with a lot of you on social media, and I'm guessing many of you are not friends with each other.

Uh, I mean, you have a lot of friends in there, but there are some people who are very clearly on the left and very vocal, and others who are very clearly on the right and very vocal, and we're a large enough church to where y'all may not be on a life team together or a volunteer team together.

You may not be seeing each other.

Maybe you are.

Um, there's a big diversity of thought.

I believe as Christians, there is a way to have political convictions, to have social convictions, to try and live those out, to try and be good citizens.

Uh, the apostle Paul he leveraged his rights as Roman as a Roman citizen multiple times, you know.

Um, I don't think that we are called to be completely politically disconnected.

And I know there are some Christians who have that thought.

Um I'm not bashing them in any way.

Um, they think we should remain completely apolitical.

I think that's pretty difficult to do.

Um, one thing you might want to realize, and you know, Pastor Andy Stanley, who I really like, he just did a series about this and he just wrote a book about it.

I haven't read it yet, but I did listen to a series.

Uh I listened to it most weeks.

And he talked about how, and this is a sociological fact, most of us know this.

The number one indication of where you're going to fall politically is the environment you grew up in.

And so the person on the other side of the political aisle from you is not an idiot.

Um, they weren't born in your family.

Like that most likely is what has happened.

And so if we can approach things, and before we hit send on that tweet or that Facebook post, or before we snap back at a co-worker who says something that we don't think is politically correct, before we act in any way, if we just ran it through the most 90s Christian filter of all time, what would Jesus do?

Uh HWJT, oh dude, I am about to make some bracelets.

How would Jesus tweet?

Like, if we would just run it through the filter that is our filter as Christians, am I living and loving like Jesus?

That that is that is how we're called to live.

Am I putting others before myself because that's what Jesus did and I'm supposed to be a Christian, a little Christ?

Am I trying to tear someone down or make someone feel stupid because of a political idea that they hold to?

And am I so arrogant as to assume that I know all of the answers all of the time?

You can be right and not be righteous.

And if you are right at the expense of hurting or belittling other people, putting other people down, then sure, maybe you've made your political points, and the people who already agree with you are going to applaud you, and the people who don't agree with you are going to, you know, send you lots of hate and troll you and everything else, and you can feel like a real warrior out there.

Um, but have you done what you've actually been put on earth to do?

Have you been a light in a world of darkness?

Have you let your light shine before men so that they may see your good works, your good deeds, your good behavior, your good will, and they will glorify your father in heaven.

That's scripture.

Let your light so shine before men, that humanity may see your good works and give glory to your father in heaven, is how you are acting and interacting, pointing people towards God.

Or, like I'm seeing, many, many people who claim the name of Christ, are your actions actually pushing people further away from God?

Here's another thought I had.

I think this is true.

Highly complex problems rarely have simple solutions.

We talked earlier about how the Bible sits at the foundation of basically the Western canon of all of other literature.

It is the book from which all other books came.

It was the first book ever printed on Gutenberg's printing press.

And uh it has had more effect, it has more tentacles and more works than anything else, and we cannot get away from it.

And every Marvel movie that you go to is telling, retelling, or in some way fabricating, or maybe even sometimes perverting with the with the anti-hero craze, the essential message of the hero's journey as lived out in Jesus.

So it's everywhere, and you can't get away from it.

And what Jesus did is he came and he did the heavy lifting of all of the complexity of our world and our sin and our shortcomings, and he allowed his life to take the place of our life and our inability to, without missing the mark, over and over and over again every day, navigate this world.

And what we're dealing with in a situation like the tragedy we just went through is an almost unending number of problems.

And each one of those problems, if you were to pull it out of the list, is so highly complex that just one of the myriad of problems is almost impossible to understand.

And so the conversations we're having are around guns and mental health and families and communities and policing and education and schooling and the role of teachers, and what isn't the role of teachers, and building infrastructure and architecture, and I mean it's like off the top of my head, that's 12 things.

And each one of those has almost endless arguments you can make on almost endless sides of what to do about it.

Unbelievably complex.

And yet, if you were to listen to the news for one hour about what happened in Uvaldi, you would think that with three simple solutions, we could fix everything.

And that's what you're offered.

And that's partly because we live in soundbite culture.

So everything has to be a soundbite.

And, you know, people hire professionals in order to get their wording right.

This is what all politicians do.

You need to know this.

They spend millions of dollars to workshop these little phrases and these little words, and then they implement them and they send them out, and everyone says them together every time they're in a soundbite, and then you're hearing it from every angle from all of the people on your side of the aisle.

And it's so convincing, and it's been workshopped so well that to you it sounds like the solution that's going to fix the problem.

And if it's a simple solution, odds are it will not fix a complex problem.

And so what does that mean?

It means that complex problems require usually pretty complex solutions and solutions that are really, really thought about.

And it also requires really good data.

And really good data is really difficult to get, especially in both our instant media like social media, uh, which everyone can report so quickly and in their almost ferocity to get news out.

Um, a lot of news gets garbled up and and you get these different traffic jams of information and different stories.

And then you have the mainstream media, and we've talked about that before because they have an inherent conflict of interest, which is that their number one priority is to sell commercials, which means they have to have the most ostentatious news and they have to present it in the craziest way so that your eyeballs will go on their screen.

And if they can get your eyeballs on their screen, then they can get more money from their advertisers, and that's their number one job, and then maybe their number five job is to give you really accurate news.

Okay, so that's a problem because that's where we're getting our information from.

And great information almost never comes quickly, which is why it's like you know, James gives us great advice, the brother of Jesus, he says, be slow to speak, be quick to listen, be slow to speak.

That's really, really good advice.

And it is advice that almost no one is taking, including Christians.

We just want to be the first out the gate.

And here's the thing if you're first out the gate to share something from God, something from scripture, that's great.

To share peace, hope, understanding, that's great.

But to get to your political point, you know, it's like everybody's saying this, but then they just keep doing it.

To stand on the graves of children to win a political argument uh is sick.

And you know, sadly I expect it from our politicians.

I don't expect it from Christians.

I I don't believe in that.

And we should be better than that.

And what would be better would be to say nothing, at least for a while, at least until you have some really good data, at least until you've really thought through it.

You know, I don't know, and I don't pretend to be like a political genius or whatever.

Um, I think that probably there are some things that are being called for on the left side of politics that are right and uh possibly helpful.

I think there are things being called for on the right side of politics that are probably right and probably helpful.

And because we are so polarized and divided, um, one of the biggest issues is that if there is a good idea on the left, no one on the right can admit it.

If there is a good idea on the right, no one on the left can admit it.

So at some point, either someone on some side is going to have to demonstrate some humility, someone is gonna have to cross an aisle because highly, highly complex issues require high, high levels of collaboration from people across the spectrum.

It's almost like the puzzle pieces to put together to solve the issue.

Everyone across the political spectrum is given a certain number of puzzle pieces, and you're going, well, my side has more puzzle pieces than the other.

And maybe they do, but it's not a complete picture.

And so everyone kind of needs each other on most issues, and we won't do that.

And so, as Christians, we're like prioritizing politics above our actual mandate, which is to show people the real change in the world, which comes through Jesus Christ.

And so if you are spouting simple solutions, just know um it's not going to be effective, and you're probably not right.

You might be partially right, but it's probably a very small part.

And uh, and so be slow, quick to listen, get the correct data, put loving people in prioritization over being right.

Don't fall for the trap that winning arguments equals fixing problems.

Um, this is obviously advice that is being uh just brought on by this tragedy in Uvalde.

This is just good advice.

This is really good marriage advice.

Um, sometimes you get so stuck on your argument, you know, the old metaphor of you can't see the forest because of one tree.

You're so stuck on one tree that you're like, I'm gonna win this argument no matter what.

And winning arguments doesn't actually equate to fixing problems.

And if we actually want to see change in the world, we need to start fixing problems.

And so arguments aren't bad in and of themselves if you can argue with an open mind.

If when you're proven wrong, you can actually admit it.

If you can like move on and try and see other people's side of the aisle.

In logic, there and reasoning, there is what's called a straw man.

And a straw man is where you put forward a version of the opponent's argument that the opponent themselves would actually not agree to.

And this is mostly what politics do.

In a debate, someone strawmans their opponent and they lay out, well, here's what they believe, and then they say a bunch of stuff they don't actually believe, and then they go on to debate an idea that no one actually holds to.

A more appropriate way and a way to actually move the ball down the field towards some solutions is to steel man your opponent.

And steel manning your opponent is the process of understanding their side and their point of view to the point where you can articulate it and they would actually agree with you that you understand their side of the argument.

If you're able to do that, if you if you want to be in these arguments and stuff, at least have the decency to understand your opponent's arguments where you can articulate it and they will agree with you on it, because in that process, you might be actually able to see something from their angle that opens your eyes to a missing piece in your own thought pattern.

The bottom line is we've got to move slower.

And we have to be quicker to love, quicker to be like Jesus, quicker to respond, prompted by the Holy Spirit inside of us, and not anger, not division, not malice, not I told you so, not politics.

And we have to be different.

I mean, if our response as the people of God has no difference, if our disposition, if how we handle ourselves, if how we grieve, if how we stand in the gap for those who are hurting, if it is no different than the rest of the world, then what is our testimony?

What is our call to come and be a part of something different if there is no detectable difference?

And so, last, um, some thoughts on thoughts and prayers.

It seems like every time there's a tragedy right now, I see online a huge backlash on thoughts and prayers.

People don't want you to say this, they don't like it, don't send your thoughts and prayers.

And I understand that impulse because, you know, there are people who use thoughts and prayers as kind of a cloak for the reality, which is they're not gonna actually do anything.

Um, they're not gonna think through this.

They're gonna keep treating highly complex issues as if they can just throw simple solutions at them.

They're not gonna actually prioritize a solution.

Instead, they're gonna use this to win points, to win political points, uh, to get more donations to their party.

Um, churches are gonna use this to further divide.

Um, some are gonna use it to say God is, you know, judging the world and turn or burn, and others are gonna use it for whatever advantage they want to use it for.

And so it's like save your thoughts and prayers, you know.

Um, I just want to encourage those who are believers, um, understand that impulse, understand where it comes from.

It comes from hurt, it comes from inaction.

Um, but also thoughts and prayers, number one, means you're thinking about them, not you're sharing all of your thoughts in a stream of consciousness through a tweet of a thread of tweets.

So thoughts is internal, not external.

It's not speaking your mind, it's it's thinking.

Um, and we do need to pray.

And if we believe all that we've said in the series, we believe there is a God, a creator God who is spaceless, timeless, immaterial, all-powerful, personal, the perfect seed of morality, that he came down to this world in the person of Jesus Christ, lived a perfect life that we could never live, gave his life for us, rose again, and is coming back.

If we believe in all that, if we believe he sent the Holy Spirit to indwell in the life of all believers, and that we have a mediator between us and God, we don't, we don't actually need to go to another human, another special sacred human, that we can commune with God Himself, Jesus Christ, then we should be praying.

We should be getting on our knees before God, metaphorically or literally, however you want to pray, and you should be thinking and you should be praying and you should be praying and you should be thinking and you should allow God to transform your heart and your mind.

And if you're someone who's inclined to jump into the debates and the politicization of all this, you should stop doing that.

And you should really think and you should really pray, and you should make sure that your heart and your mind, your words and your actions, my heart, mind, words, and actions are lined up to God's heart.

And that we are showing the world who our God is.

We're showing the world what it means to follow Jesus.

And when tragedy breaks out and we react just like the world, I think we've missed a significant opportunity.

So that's what we're trying to do.

Um, I'm trying to do that in my life.

Uh, we are jacked up people, we're flawed, we're human, we live in our flesh a lot, but we're trying to walk more and more in the spirit.

So we are at MetaCurch.

All people are welcome from all walks of life.

Uh, you can belong at MetaCurch, even if you don't believe what we believe, you can be a part of our community.

You can serve with us, you can get around us, um, you can speak about it's a safe place to wrestle with the big questions of life and faith and spirituality.

I hope that you would uh visit us this week.

Um, I gave the address earlier.

Our services are at 9 45 and 11 30 a.m.

Our address is 1207 Richland Hills Drive.

That's in San Antonio, Texas.

Also, you can catch up on our whole series at metachurch.tv slash know god, all the sermons and all of the overtimes.

I appreciate those of you who are on here and you're listening.

If you want to help get the word out about metachurch, if you want more people to get in front of this content, um, you can like this.

Make sure you're subscribed to the MetaCurch YouTube channel.

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It's youtube.com slash Clayton Tyner.

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Share this information with a friend.

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If you don't live in town, we stream on Sundays on our YouTube channel, MetaCurch YouTube channel at 9 45 and 11 30.

I want to thank you again for being on overtime.

I love you, and I'll see you next week.