Don’t sing in the choir…yet.

Steve Brown:
Don’t sing in the choir…yet. I’ll explain, on this edition of Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
If you’re sick of guilt and manipulation, and if you’re looking for an honest and thoughtful presentation of Biblical truth, you’ve come to the right place. This is Key Life, with the founder of Key Life Network, Steve Brown. Keep listening for teaching that will make you free.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. If you were listening yesterday, we talked about a great Proverb, Proverbs 10:12.

Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all sins.

That’s powerful. And you’ll find an illustration of that in Luke 7:47 when we took some time looking at that, where Jesus says to a prostitute.

Therefore I say to you, her sins which are many are forgiven. For she loved much, but to whom little is forgiven, the same loves little.

And we’ve spent a good time talking about that, but I thought of a great story that I want to tell you. I have a friend, his name’s Larry, and he was the, he had a PhD, by the way, and he was the minister of worship and music at a church, where I was involved. And he had a dynamite choir, and one of the best members of the choir was a guy who sang tenor. And he struggled with same sex attraction. And it was an awful struggle. Well, and I, and so did everybody else in that choir struggle with something. But, he was kind of public. And when he fell, and if it had been any other sin, the same thing would have happened, just happened this time, that it was somebody who was gay. And so, he did it, and he failed. And he did it publicly, and my friend, the minister of music, went to him and cried and said, I can’t, you can’t sing in the choir for a while. I hate it because you are so good, but you just can’t. So, you sit on the front row and save a seat for me because I’m going to sit with you. And that’s exactly what happened. It was so good, I can’t tell you how good it was, every Sunday when the choir finished singing, this PhD straight Christian with everything together who absolutely was brilliant, every time when the choir sang, he went and sat next to this guy who’d fallen publicly. And after a while, he was restored back to the choir, everything calmed down, and we did church. We did church the way you’re supposed to do church. And Proverbs reminded me of that.

Hatred stirs up strife, but love covers all sins.

We need to be reminded of that over and over again. All right, let me show you something about hidden agendas. And I know I’ve taught on that a lot. In fact, I wrote a book with that title. But this is what Proverbs says in a couple of places. Proverbs 10:18

Whoever hides hatred has lying lips, and whoever spreads slander is a fool.

Proverbs 26:23

He who hates disguises it with his lips. And lays up deceit within himself, when he speaks kindly, do not believe him.

Oh my, that’s very wise. Hidden agendas are dangerous, and they’re there for a lot of reasons, and you’ve got them, and I’ve got them too. The mask we wear was a part of the title of that book that I wrote on hidden agendas. And as a matter of fact, you can’t get through life without wearing some masks. I mean, none of us are to everybody that we know, open about everything we are, and everything we think, and everything that we do. It just doesn’t work that way. And if we did it that way, nothing would work anymore, and the social contract just wouldn’t work, and you probably wouldn’t have any friends. And so, you have to be careful when you remove a mask. And you have to do it very slowly, and you’ve got to be aware that if somebody rips that mask to pieces and stomps on it and then kicks you, you made a horrible mistake in choosing the one to whom to reveal who you are. And so, there’s a sense in which we all have hidden agendas. There is a sense in which I’m not going to be authentic, and I hate that word, but I don’t know a better one. I’m going to be authentic to somebody I don’t know because they are just not safe. I’ve said to congregations when I was being invited there to speak, Listen, I’d tell you my sins, and there are a bunch of them, but you’re not safe. I don’t even know your name. You scare me to death. So, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to talk in generalities, and it’s going to be the truth. You can do the same thing with me until we get to know each other. Transparent Self is a book written by a man by the name of Gerard. I don’t even know if he’s a Christian. I don’t even know if he’s still alive. It was given to me a lot of years ago by a nurse friend of mine. And he said, be careful. Trade off pieces of your soul, little bits at a time, until you get to the point of knowing you can trust your soul to somebody else. That’s Proverbs 10:18. It’s Proverbs 26:23. We have hidden agendas. Be careful of others who do. You think about that. Amen.

Matthew Porter:
Thank you Steve. That was Steve Brown teaching us today from Proverbs about the hidden dangers of hidden agendas and tomorrow in our journey through Proverbs we’ll delve into the reality that words can hurt us way more and way longer than any kind of physical pain. That’s tomorrow. Be sure to join us. Real talk. Do you ever find yourself distressed and distracted? Worried about the limits of your time and energy versus your mounting list of to dos? If so, then give me the next four minutes to share something that’s going to help you a lot.

Adam Ramsey: It’s the confronting reality of our limitations, isn’t it? We’re not as big of a deal as we think we are and our time in this world is limited. And so, I started writing the book just wanting to have a Biblical reflection on time. That’s how it began. I want to think playfully, Biblically, devotionally about time. And then place came into it because time and place kind of work together. They haunt us. They remind us just how creaturely we actually are, how not God, we actually are. And I think we’re always pushing back against the time we’re in or the time we have and the place we’re in and the spaces that we have within that place, wanting to be somewhere else or some when else, and the book is really coming back to this idea of what would it look like to, you know, in Wendell Berry’s words, to live the given life and not the planned, to live where you are and when you are, and not always be hurrying towards somewhere that you’re presently not.

Steve Brown:
Speaking of Wendell Berry and J. Bear Crowe, who was a barber, in order to make some extra bucks, cleaned up the little church in the town. And he would sometimes take a nap on the church pew. And one night he had a dream that everybody was sitting in the church, the prostitutes and the church women, the thieves and the honest and the dishonest, and he woke up crying. And I don’t know if this is true of Australia. But it’s certainly true of this country that almost everything, from social media, to advertising, to friends, to parties, everything in which we’re engaged is an effort to make us forget time and place.

Matthew Porter:
This is like right where I am. I am constantly trying to like, how can I get more done? I just constantly hear a clock or like the line from Hamilton. Why are you always writing like you’re running out of time. You’re like, cause I’m running out of time. I don’t know about you, I have an expiration date at some point in the future. I better get to it. But there’s more to that story. You had a line in here, and I wonder if you just kind of talk about it a little bit.

Fruitfulness over the long haul is a lot less about finding balance and a lot more about knowing what season you are in and living accordingly.

Adam Ramsey: Well, I think what I’m trying to get to in that line there is that life and our experience of time is one of seasons. And so, we often think, and I think we wrongly think this, if I can just find the middle ground in my life and get balance across all the priorities of my life, then, you know, I’m going to be fruitful, I’m going to flourish, I’m going to be satisfied. I don’t know if that’s fully correct. You know, you don’t say to a university student in the middle of exams, Hey, you need balance right now. It’s like, no, no, they need to study. Like they need to do the priority that they need to do. You don’t say to a mother going into labor, Hey, you just need to find some balance in your life. It’s like, no, no, she needs to give birth to a baby and everything else doesn’t matter. And I think when we understand seasons, a little more along those lines there, that, okay, the season that I’m in right now, this season is a limited edition gift. I will never have this season of my life ever again, and you can make that big at the macro level of the seasons of like, hey, my 20s, my 30s, my 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and so on. Or it could be the micro level of, hey, these moments that I’m in right now in my career, in my parenting journey, whether it’s, you know, I’ve got a baby that’s just come into the world, or you’ve just handed off a child in marriage, as I know George was talking about before. What does it look like to drink in that precious, beautiful, limited edition moment and simply receive it as the gift that it is? And I think when we do that, we start to find fruitfulness.

Matthew Porter:
Oh man, that is good stuff. And that was just a piece of our interview with Adam Ramsey on Steve Brown Etc. Get your free copy of that entire show on CD by calling us right now at 1-800-KEY-LIFE that’s 1-800-539-5433. You can also e-mail [email protected] to ask for that CD. And if you’d like to mail your request, go to keylife.org/contact to find our mailing addresses. Again, just ask for your free copy of the CD featuring Adam Ramsey. Finally, if you value the work of Key Life, would you support that work through your giving? You could charge a gift on your credit card or include a gift in your envelope. Or pick up your phone and text Key Life to 28950 and, as always, if you can’t give, man, don’t sweat it, but if you think about it, do pray for us, would you? Always appreciated, always needed. Key Life is a member of ECFA in the States and CCCC in Canada. And we are a listener supported production of Key Life Network.