Hey everybody, good morning. It's great to see you this
morning. Still feels like we are settling
into this new year if we haven't had the chance to meet.
My name is Josh. I have the joy of serving as
pastor here at the Garden Church and I'm excited to be entering
this new series that Mandy was sharing with us today titled
Rewired by Love. And over the course of the
series, we're, we're, we're attempting to answer a
fundamental question, maybe the question that I think is, is
most important, at least to me, in the world, which is how do we
change? How do we become more like
Jesus? And in order to do so, of
course, we're going to be rooted in Scripture and also the
insights of spiritual formation, but we're also bringing that
into conversation with insights from neuroscience and
psychology. Most of you already know that I
was a nerd. If not, just a quick disclaimer,
I am not professionally trained in the domain theologically.
Yes, neuroscience and psychology are areas of passion and
interest. So feel free to vet things that
I'm saying with your local doctor and residence.
But, but I, I believe that these, these conversation that
we're entering into over the next few weeks is hopefully
going to be enlightening, but also, whether you're a nerd or
not, really useful to us as we think about what it looks like
to live in the way of love and to follow Jesus.
And this morning we're beginning with a question.
And that question is simply this.
It's why is it that so often we stop at information rather than
transformation? Like, why do we so often seem to
get stuck at what we know and then it doesn't follow through
into how we live? And this question is of course
raised here by Jesus story which we find in Matthew chapter 21.
In Matthew 21, we find a conflict which has been brewing
for a while in Matthew's narrative, a conflict between
the religious leadership on one hand and Jesus on the other.
At the very outset of chapter 21, there's this narrative of
Jesus entering Jerusalem to enormous fanfare and acclaim.
Everyone's excited to see him. They're they're, they're stoked
and and people are saying hail like this is the coming king.
This is the Messiah. None of which makes the
religious authorities happy. They were very content with the
status quo, with them being in charge.
This upstart for them is just a source of suspicion and they're
bothered by it. Then we move a little bit
further forward here in chapter 21 and we see the incident,
which many of you will be familiar with, of Jesus coming
in and throwing the money changers out of the temple,
right? He, he basically publicly
accuses the religious leaders of setting up a system that's all
about exploitation and, and capitalism and, and making money
and, and contaminating the spiritually holy place.
He publicly puts them to shame in front of everyone.
Of course, they're not big fans of this either.
And throughout this chapter, we see this conflict continuing to
escalate. Just before our passage today,
they come and they question his authority.
They say, hey, what gives you the right to do any of these
things or to say any of these things?
And it's in response to this question that we find our text
today here in Matthew chapter 21, where Jesus tells a story
about a father and two sons. The story is is pretty simple.
We see it pick up here in verse 28.
We see that the father gives directions to both of his sons.
He says, hey, go work in the vineyard today.
Now, while both of the sons receive the same instruction,
they respond in opposite ways. The one son, of course, we see
here in verse 29 flatly refuses. I will not, he says.
But later he changes his mind and ends up going and doing what
his father asked him to do. The second son, which is
recorded in verse 30, immediately commits to obey.
He says the right thing. Yes, Sir, he says.
I'm on my way. Got it.
Orders received. But then, of course, he doesn't
follow through. He doesn't actually do what he
has committed to do. And this, of course, it's a
rebuke of the religious leaders. The consequence of this is from
Jesus perspective, severe. He warns in verse 21, the tax
collectors and prostitutes are entering the Kingdom of God
ahead of you. Jesus thinks that there is a
problem here. He's saying essentially this.
The religious people of his day say all the right things, they
have the right answers. They profess correctly, but it's
not matched by their lives. There's no follow through.
Of course a lot has changed since the 1st century, but I
think we'd have to admit that this problem seems to still be
with us. Too often Christians in the
church, and honestly me too, like have a gap between what
what we espouse as correct, what we know to be right, and then
how we actually show up. I know I feel this tension like
at a cognitive level, I believe that that prayer is powerful and
that I can depend on God. But at a nervous system level,
when I'm like anxious about something, I still reach for
like over functioning and working really hard trying to
persuade other people or or pressuring someone.
My, my nervous system believes that these are more reliable
strategies for solving for my anxiety at a cognitive level.
I, I believe that when somebody shares their heart with me and
they're naming kind of what's at play for them, that, that I
would serve them best by listening with openness and
curiosity, that I'd ask great open-ended questions and be
emotionally present. But too much of the time I like
really want to give advice because I think I have a great
solution that will simplify this and, and kind of make the
problem go away. At a cognitive level, I believe
that Sabbath is essential and a practice that demonstrates that
that I am not in charge and that we can trust in God.
And then a lot of the time I get to that designated day on my
calendar, my task list is overflowing.
And I say, well, we'll have to try again next week.
Does anybody else here relate to the dynamics that I'm saying?
Hopefully it's not just me in this today.
After all, this is the time of the year for New Year's
resolutions, right? We're still early.
How many of you today in this
room have some kind of intention or resolution for the new year,
some kind of commitment that you've made?
All right, I see a lot of hands. We're not all entirely A cynical
bunch yet. I appreciate the resolve, the
the hope, the intention. I mean, many of us as we have
some time to reflect on the year, set these intentions.
We want to eat healthier or sleep more.
We want to save money or, or get more sleep.
We want to invest in certain relationships or or double down
on some new spiritual practices to develop our relationship with
God. If you've done this before, you
probably know how it typically goes.
The research says that 80% of us will completely abandoned these
resolutions by February. We're better at intentions than
we are at follow through. We're going better at knowing
the right answer than we are at living it.
As Derek Sievers famously said, if information was the answer,
we'd all be billionaires with perfect ABS.
I think that's funny. I don't know, maybe not anybody
else. Like there's a there is a gap
between just knowing what's right and somehow seeing that
information move to transformation in our lives,
right. And I don't know if this is
encouraging to you or discouraging to you, but this is
not a new problem. We see this throughout the pages
of Scripture as well. Paul names one of the things in
Scripture that I personally feel like I resonate most deeply with
when he says in Romans Chapter 7, I have the desire to do what
is good, but I cannot carry it out, for I do not do the good I
want to do, but the evil I do not want to do, that I keep on
doing right. Sometimes this feels like our
lived reality. So what is up with this?
Why the gap? And why do we so often stop at
information or awareness without moving on to transformation?
Well, I think there's a few answers to this question and I'm
probably not going to give a full accounting of it this
morning, but I think 1 answer we see from history, and there's
another answer that we can help make sense of things a bit from
neuroscience. The first is historical reason.
Everyone probably here in this room has been shaped in some way
by Western culture. Not everybody here is from the
global West, but but the assumptions of the impulses, the
traditions of the West shape us, certainly me, certainly our
church deeply. And of course, there's a lot of
good in this and there's also some challenging things.
One of the main shifts that we've seen really some from the
16th century all the way up and now till now, it is the shift
towards increasingly focusing on the mind.
Of course, in the Protestant Reformation, those of us who
would self describe as Protestants, we're a Protestant
church, that we are are heirs of the Reformation.
In the Reformation was this historical movement which placed
this great emphasis on Scripture, sola scriptura. the
Reformation leveraged the advent of the printing press and
growing literacy at the time to place the Bible in the hands of
everyday people and said we need to to not just rely on
tradition. We need to not just rely on
ritual or communal practices or what somebody else has told us.
We need to find the truth for ourself.
Of course, the schism with the Catholic Church also revealed
kind of the need for for doctrinal clarity.
Confessions became a big thing. We began to be very focused on
having the right answers. How do we solve for the problem?
What's the difference between this group and that group at the
For the first time in history, the center of gathered worship
in the church shifted from communion through the 1st, 16th
centuries to the preaching of Scripture from then up until
now. And so in many ways, the church
began to move towards learning, towards content delivery,
towards understanding, towards a conceptual grasp of the truth.
At the same time, the Enlightenment followed shortly
on the heels of the Reformation with its focus on reason,
empirical evidence in the scientific revolution.
Science, of course, at the time first began to really discern
maps and patterns and and make sense of the world.
And because of the ability to translate those insights into
words which could be published and sent around the world, all
of a sudden we began this building movement towards
greater understanding, greater conceptual control of of the
world and how it worked. At the same time, Descartes is
developing this metaphysical picture in which the mind is
central, an immaterial thinking substance distinct from the
body. He says, I think therefore I am.
So all of these trends, all of these tendencies move us from a,
a place of greater embodiment to a great place of greater
intellectual life and focus on the mind.
Of course, here in Boston, we are proud champions of this
tradition, right? The, the like academic capital
of the world. We, we got a we got a community
rife with pH DS in here. Like people love to learn and
grow and understand and grasp and look, I am myself a product
of this, grateful for this heritage, committed to the
reality of Scripture, right? Most of this, I believe, was
deeply good and necessary shifts things that brought us great
gifts. But is it possible to swing too
far? Is it possible to focus on one
kind of knowing as opposed to another?
See neuroscientist suggest that there are two different ways of
knowing. There's what we might describe
as knowing that, and then there's knowing how knowing that
is the kind of knowing that is familiar to most of us from
school, a Bible study, from sermons.
It's the kind of knowledge that we can put into words, we can
explain and argue for, we can write down.
It's the kind of knowing that remembers state capitals and
dates and histories, ethical principles and theological
commitments. This is knowing that or, or what
we might more technically refer to as explicit knowledge.
So yes, we know that that Jesus died and rose again.
We can say it, we can declare it, we can defend it, we can
teach it. But there's also a second kind
of knowing, a knowing that is not stored primarily in
sentences. And this is is knowing how.
It's what neuroscientists often call implicit knowledge or or
non declarative knowing. And it's the system that governs
the whole range of our relational life.
What we love, our emotional reactions to our surroundings,
our ability to calm ourselves and regulate our nervous
systems. It's where our habits live and
our reflexes. It's how we make sense of our
identity and who we are in the world.
And this is something that happens in a totally different
brain system that's not even accessible by way of language.
Our gut level sense of what's safe and what's threatening, who
we are and what we reach for when we stressed this is knowing
how the really important thing here is that these two systems,
these two kinds of knowledge can function relatively
independently from one another, right?
They're, they're related for sure, but distinct.
One way that we see this very clearly is in amnesia patients.
Amnesia patients will lose their explicit memory, right?
They may not remember a name, their birthday, who the
president was, but they continue to remember and often can
continue to gain implicit memory.
They know how to do things. They may still remember how to
braid their hair or drive a car, how to walk, or other things if
these brain systems were not affected.
And this is because you can store information and knowledge
you can know in more than one way.
So why does all this matter? Why am I taking the time to
break this down? It's because I believe that it
is possible to have a beautiful explicit theology, to be able to
explain what God is like in great detail and sophistication,
to have encyclopedic biblical knowledge, the right answers,
the right language, and to have implicit reflexes that still run
on fear, shame, avoidance, anxiety, and control.
This is a serious problem for us, according to Jim Wilder and
Michael Hendricks, that the Western church, because of these
streams that I talked about earlier, consistently
prioritizes and privileges knowing that over knowing how we
keep giving more and more and more information, hoping that it
will somehow simply result in transformation.
So more sermons, more Bible studies, more discussion groups,
and we get that, that that neurotransmitter which signals
that that this is good. We have fresh awareness.
We get a little dopamine hit that says this is great, I
learned something, I discovered something.
And then so often we stop precisely at that point with
greater awareness but without any transformation.
And I know I do this like sometimes, to use a non churchy
example, I'll find myself watching like reels and how to's
on the Internet. And I love learning things.
I remember a little while ago, I was watching this video where
these gymnasts were explaining the mechanics of a backflip and
they had lots of tips. They had lots of specific
structures. You do this, then you do that,
and this is how it works. And you got to tuck this way,
You got to rotate this way. And like, I think I know how to
do a backflip, but I very much do not know how to do a
backflip. You know what I'm saying?
Like if I attempted A backflip right now, we would be calling
911. It would be a serious, serious
problem because I have no idea how to do a backflip.
But I know a lot about doing backflips for no apparent
reason. And maybe you've noticed this
tendency in your own life too, right?
You read or or watch a documentary about something.
There's this flash of dopamine. Like, I understand this, I've
got this conceptually, but then does it?
Does it translate to anything different in my life?
I'm aware of the political realities, but do I show up in
any way in our community for my neighbors?
I'm aware of these these these insights about how to eat
healthier, how to work out, or how to structure my morning
routine or my habit stack. Does it translate to how I live?
Far to answer, I'm afraid that the answer is no.
We're told to pray without ceasing, but we're not.
We don't actually learn how to turn to God when anxiety wakes
us up at 2:00 in the morning. We believe that we should
forgive just as we've forgiven or been forgiven, but we haven't
actually developed the capacities to release the
resentment when our body keeps bringing up and rehearsing the
offence. We believe we should bear each
other's burdens and show up for one another in community.
Yet our default is self-reliance.
I'll take care of it myself. I don't need help, Friends.
There's a gap, a gap so often between information, between
what we know and between transformation, how we live.
And I believe that this is not a minor problem, that it is
actually an existential crisis for the church in the West.
It's a real problem for us. Just this week the news of
course broke. The popular Christian thinker
and author Philip Yancey confessed to an 8 year
extramarital affair. Yancey is just one more figure
in a long line of Christian leaders who were famous, who
were successful, who were looked to throughout the church as
people who are models of how we ought to live.
Somebody who understood the gospel at a deep level, who who
wrote about it for decades, and yet in his relationships it was
absent, Yancey said in his. Confession.
My contacts defied everything I believe about marriage.
It was totally inconsistent with my faith and my writings.
Friends, when these things happen for me, for you, for us,
for the church, it's an embarrassment to the gospel.
It suggests to people out there that that we're not really
authentic about what it is that we say to be true.
Friends, hypocrisy is such a problem.
And I get that sometimes there is an explicit, intentional,
conscious decision to deceive, to hide, to fake, to lie.
But I also think very often we simply haven't been formed in
the implicit systems. We know something to be true,
but we've never actually taken the steps to walk it out.
I'm suggesting that we have a problem, that we've tried to
distill church and spiritual formation into blocks of content
which could somehow be delivered to individual minds without
embodiment and results in transformation, and it is not
working. As my friend Dan White Junior
says, discipleship is more than a solo endeavor.
With the latest books and podcasts.
You cannot follow the way of Jesus and grow into likeness of
Him by yourself. It is not possible, see, because
so often we get this flash of new awareness, this dopamine
hit, and that's great. Like, I love awareness.
I am currently standing before you here as a preacher talking
about neuroscience, right? I clearly think the Reformation
is an OK thing, the scientific revolution is a good thing.
And I want to impart information to you, right?
All of these things are good, but awareness is not the end
point, it's the entry point. It's only the first step.
If we don't pass through the doorway, then what are we doing?
So often we consume information without putting it into
practice, and the result is simply spiritual bloat.
In order for us to become like Jesus, we have to move from
knowing that to knowing how. We need not only information but
also transformation. When we fail to do this, it can
leave us with the illusion of maturity without its substance.
And I think this is exactly what we see in the Pharisees.
The Pharisees are people represented in this text who
have extraordinary explicit knowledge.
If you want the people in this day, in this moment, in the 1st
century, who know the Bible best, it's these guys.
They have read it, they have memorized it, they can recite
it. They can give you chapter and
verse about everything. These are the guys with the best
knowledge of Scripture. Their explicit knowledge is
fantastic and they're implicit is a mess.
It's characterized by judgment, control, contempt, anxiety.
They're concerned about losing status and power.
They're reactive and ultimately they reject the living word
which is standing before them. This is where Jesus accusation
really lands. They are like the second son who
says all the right things and then doesn't go.
A living witness to the reality that knowledge puffs up while
love builds up. In contrast to the Pharisees
imagination and understanding of what it means to be spiritual,
of what it means to be mature by having the right answers, Jesus
points us in a different direction.
In the very next chapter of Matthew's Gospel, we see this
conflict is continuing to unfold between Jesus and the religious
leaders. And in the like most arrogant,
explicit, knowledge centric way possible, somebody who's
described as a quote UN quote teacher or expert in the law
comes to Jesus to test him. Their idea of a battle is we're
going to have a theology exam and see if you can pass the
test. So they come to Jesus and in
verse 37 and 38 of chapter 22, we read the question, teacher,
what is the greatest commandment in the law?
He gives him a hard one trying to stump him up.
But what Jesus responds is essential.
He says, of course, and you know this.
Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, with
all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.
Do you hear what Jesus is doing here?
Friends, this is so important. There's so much in these short
words. See, Jesus is repositioning the
very center of the Christian life from knowledge to love.
He says at the very heart of it is not how much you know, it is
how you love. And he's not dismissing the
mind. This is not a contrast.
It's not that the Pharisees are on team explicit knowledge and
and Jesus is on team implicit knowledge.
And he says, no, that doesn't matter.
The first thing he says about how we love is with our minds.
And he's not giving a theological anthropology of like
the different parts of humans here.
His point in aiming these component parts is rather to say
you need your whole self, all of it.
Your mind, your soul, your heart.
Everything has to be in play. The center is love.
You need everything you've got. And the direction that tell us
of this is a renewed relationship with God and with
your neighbors. This is what Jesus has to say
about what it means to be mature, about what it means to
follow him. If we are to follow him, we must
recognize that it's not that explicit knowledge is bad, but
but it's incomplete. It's only a partial answer.
And it's a partial answer that because of our particular
history and culture and place in the world, we are very tempted
to get stuck at. And Jesus insists that we move
on from explicit to implicit to holistic transformation and
seminary, which is like the home of explicit knowledge.
And I spent way too much time in there.
There's they use Latin words to talk about these 3 dimensions,
orthodoxy, which is maybe the word that you guys know.
It means right thinking, essentially having the right
beliefs about things. But you may also know there's
these other words, orthopraxy and orthopathy, which come from
the words praxis and and pathos. But our feeling, and basically
the idea here is that we need right thinking.
It's crucially important to think well, but it has to be
paired with right practice and even right affections, our
emotional state, the way we feel in relationship.
And I think for some of us who have done a lot of school, live
in Boston, this feels honestly kind of daunting because we're
like, I know how to learn stuff. How do I how do I change how I
feel about stuff? Right.
We tend to gravitate to these things that we know how to do.
We know how to control we're we're well practiced in these.
We get more knowledge and we feel confident about it.
But Jesus is writing us beyond yes, knowledge is apart, but
also our practice, also our feeling.
This is what we mean at the Garden when we talk about being
shaped by and sharing Jesus love.
We're trying to say that our mission here is is about more
than just understanding things. It's more than about cognitive
ascent to a particular set of propositional beliefs.
It's not less than that, but it is absolutely more than that.
To follow Jesus means being transformed by him, being
changed by his love, until that love becomes not just something
we cognitively know about, but something we experience,
something that shapes us. In the coming weeks in the
series, we're going to attempt to dig further into these
questions of how do we change? How does this all happen?
How do we get to be the kind of people who don't just have the
right answers, but go beyond into practices and and actual
affections? But this morning, I want to
pause. At this point, I want to stop
here and just invite you to consider what does this look
like for you this morning? Because if you're anything like
me, this is honestly kind of convicting.
Because I know it's, I've already said there are plenty of
places in my life where there's a gap between what I intend and
what is real, between what I espouses the way things should
be, the way we should be, and my ability to live that out, to
walk that out. And this morning I want to
invite you into a space of reflection to consider where is
that gap for you between what you know and how you live?
Are there ways this morning that as you inventory your life, you
have to admit that you look more like the second son than the
first? That you give the right answer,
but there's no follow through. You don't actually show up doing
what the father has asked friends.
The point of this reflection, the point of this awareness is
not shame. It's not to make you bad or to
call you out. It is rather to help us begin to
close those gaps. It's about growing and
integrity. And I have good news.
I'm full of hope as we enter this conversation, which will be
having over the next several weeks.
You can change the gospel is good news.
It's not just something that changes our worldview and the
way that we think about things in the world.
It can change your very life, your relationships.
Bottom up, whole picture from the inside out.
This is the promise and possibility of the love of Jesus
which we have received. Don't stop at awareness.
Notice the doorway and continue down the path as the band comes
and we enter into a space of reflection.
I want to invite you to pray with me and again to consider
where is there a space this morning that God might want to
highlight for you without shame, without blame, without guilt,
Just to notice that there is a, a gap in my formation.
I know something to be true on one level, but it's not
manifesting in my life on another.
I want to be more wholehearted. I want to be more connected.
I want to be more embodied. And friends, as we enter into
this, we're going to enter into a time of, of musical worship.
We're going to enter into a time of communion and friends.
The reason that we do these things, among many other things,
maybe you've noticed, a lot of what we do in church is
embodied. It's with our bodies, right?
We have relational and communal practices.
This can't be distilled and experienced over a Zoom screen.
And so as you enter even into these practices, as you reflect,
and then that you move into a space of worship, as you receive
communion this morning, I want you to pay attention to what's
going on with you, even physically to notice and to
receive to maybe maybe you're uncomfortable moving your body
in worship. Maybe, maybe, maybe put a hand
up, all right, maybe move your feet a little bit.
Allow yourself to come into the space which you are and respond
to the love of God and His invitation to become more like
Him.