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For heaven’s sake, use your noggin.

For heaven’s sake, use your noggin.

OCTOBER 28, 2020

/ Programs / Key Life / For heaven’s sake, use your noggin.

Steve Brown:
For heaven’s sake, use your noggin. Let’s talk on Key Life.

Matthew Porter:
This is Key Life here to let Christians know that God isn’t mad at them. Keep listening and you’ll hear that because of what Jesus has done, you’re welcomed home into the family of God, because of his radical grace, free from the penalties of sin and never alone in your suffering.

Steve Brown:
Thank you Matthew. We’re looking at the third chapter of Galatians in our ongoing study of Galatians. We’re seeing how Paul is saying, remember, just remember he is irritated, frankly. Galatians is the clearest statement, maybe with the exception of Romans of grace and salvation by faith in Christ alone, of any book in the Bible. And in both cases and this one in particular, he is battling a spurious kind of Christianity. Now don’t accuse me of encouraging sin. I don’t, I know how devastating it is, you’re not saved by being good, however, no matter how good you are, because you can’t be good enough. And Paul makes that very clear. And so, to understand that salvation by faith in Christ alone is the way you get to heaven, isn’t to say, you can go out and do whatever, well you can, but you won’t because of him. The Bible teaches us that we’re to be Holy, that we’re to be separate, that we’re to be different. And I’ve tried almost all my life to get there, and didn’t. Now, let me tell you how I became the spiritual giant, who is on this broadcast, right? If you believe that, you’ll believe anything, but I was closer. I got closer, because I discovered a principal and it’s one you should never forget. The only people who get better are people who know if they never get better, that God will love them, anyway. When I got that and I did, and the Bible is full of it, I found myself loving more than I had before. Still got a long ways to go. I found myself being far more obedient than I was, still got a long ways to go. I moved toward holiness when I didn’t have to, and that is the key to the Christian walk. And so don’t accuse me of saying that sin isn’t important, it is. And we are called to be holy, but I only know one way to get there, and I just told you that one way. At any rate, Paul is saying to these Galatians, who had been told they had to be good and pure and righteous. That they had to get circumcised, join a good church or synagogue and get involved, go to meetings every night, sing in the choir, serve, cook church dinners, go serve on as many committees as you can. And then Jesus will love you. Paul said, wait, that’s not what this is about. This is about freedom and forgiveness, that you can’t earn. It’s a given, you reach out and that’s by faith and you accept it. And Paul is saying to these Galatians, remember, remember, and we have seen that you can be deceived not only by forgetting the Cross and forgetting where he found you. You can be deceived by forgetting logic. Look at Galatians 3:3,

Are you so foolish? Having begun with a spirit, you’re now ending with a flesh?

Let’s center in on that word foolish. That means dummy. That means use your noggin. That means God gave you a mind, for God’s sake, use your mind. One of the great things about Biblical Christianity is that it hangs together. It really does. 66 books, of people that by and large didn’t know each other, but had the same message and the message was there is a God. He is holy. He’s scary, but he’s good. And he’s good, all the time. And he’s made a way, he’s made a way. And so when I read the Bible, I am absolutely astounded by its logic. The way, the pieces fit together. The whole post-modern age in which we live, well we’re beyond that, and the word is even passe, but the whole thing was there is no meta-narrative. What’s a meta-narrative, that’s a story that explains it, everything. And so post-modernist’s would say, that there is no meta-narrative. There are a lot of small narratives, many narratives, as you would say. And those are legitimate within the subculture where you live, but nothing explains it all. And I want to say, are you crazy? Let me tell you what explains it all, the Cross explains it all. When you look at the Bible and the plan of salvation and the story of redemption that starts in Genesis and goes through revelation, everything begins to fit and to come together. This is a logical faith. Now you can’t come to God with logic. You really can’t. I mean, everybody who has tried, has ended up seeming silly. And Paul said when he wrote to the Corinthians that this is foolishness to Jews and to Goyam, to Jews and Greeks. And that’s because it’s counter intuitive. But once you get there, then you see, and once you see, it all comes together and it works. Augustine said this, and this is a powerful statement,

The world says, seeing is believing and God says, believing is seeing.

And once you see you can’t unsee it. And so Paul is saying to the Galatians, listen to me, God gave you a mind, use it. Don’t be so foolish. Think. Think what this is all about and see how it fits and how it works in your life and how it changes everything. Use your mind. You think about that. Amen.

Matthew Porter:
Thank you Steve. That was Steve Brown, teaching us from Galatians three and challenging us to remember and to use our noggin. We’ll continue our exploration of Galatians tomorrow. Don’t miss it. Well recently on Steve Brown Etc, we spoke with John Eldredge. Now John writes a lot about how to be a man, but his newest book is for everybody, because it talks about caring for our souls about what to do when we feel burned out and empty. Take a listen to this clip and I’ll be back to tell you about a special free offer.

John Eldredge:
Well, it is about the world gone mad and what it does to us. I find myself doing what everybody does, spending way too much time on technology, running way too fast in the pace of life, way too dialed into the news. And it, you know, it was really beginning to fry me and I started doing some reading in that, but then to discover the data that no, this actually is frying me. You like, like the diminishment of our attention span and the stress levels, everybody’s running on cortisol. And just that sense of. I’m cooked. I’m cooked by the world. Well, it happened to me. I got cooked and I didn’t like it. I wanted to go get my life back. I never intended to write this book, by the way, honest, it wasn’t in the publishing plan. And, but I did, I did go do some things to get a little bit more sanity back in my life and get a healthier way in my, in my day to day. And it was so wonderful. It was so helpful. That then I thought, you know, this might be helpful for my friends, who read my stuff. So, then the book came, but it really came after for the process. I’ve been a Christian therapist for 30 years and I began to get really troubled at some of the data that was coming in, now there’s an overwhelming body of research that shows direct correlation, one to one correlation between rising rates of anxiety and depression. and people’s use of social media and I’m like, look we were already fragile human beings before, like why aren’t we doing this to ourselves? The good news is a lot of this, you can actually opt out. Like, we’re not, we’re not talking, talking anybody incarceration here for most of us, we’re not in camps. You know, these are lifestyle choices we’ve made, gotten sucked into, gotten addicted to, not only anxiety and depression rise directly with your use of social media, but so does envy. There’s like research on the power of envy and social media and so you say like, like why, why would depression go up with people’s use of Instagram and what? Well, it’s, it’s that? It’s everybody else’s life looks wonderful. So we’ve got to put this in some context. So I wrote all of this, all this data, all this research, this was free pandemic. And then, we just put the thing on rocket fuel, like we just stomped on the accelerator, because everybody is stuck at home. And so now, you know, instead of four hours a day on our phones, it’s 10 hours a day, you know, instead of an hour, maybe in the evening on Netflix, it’s bingeing, you know, four hours. Well, like we, we all, we all got stuck. Let me add one other piece to this perfect storm. So we live in the midst of a perfect storm. The perfect storm is designed to fry the human soul. The other piece is the news, negative messaging has a 20 time greater impact on the human psyche than positive messaging. Okay. So, and everybody knows this, right? You, you wear a new shirt into the meeting and you know, five people go, wow, man, that’s a nice shirt. You look good. And then the one person goes, really what’d you pick that for? What do you remember? The thing is, is during the pandemic now, daily negative messaging, you know, here’s the body count. And then we add in, the racial tension, you know, here’s the latest violence, here’s the latest, that is frying the human soul with more levels of anxiety and depression and fear and that sort of thing. So, we were over plugged in before the pandemic. We bought in this idea as a concerned Christian, as a responsible human being, you are supposed to know about the suffering of the world. And I’m here as a therapist to tell you that is madness.

Matthew Porter:
If you’re feeling burned out the way John was just describing, then we would love to put this whole conversation on CD into your hands for free. Just call 1-800-KEY-LIFE. That’s 1-800-539-5433. You can also email [email protected] and ask for the CD. If you’re mailing us. Send your request to

Key Life Network
P.O. Box 5000
Maitland, Florida 32794

If you’re in Canada, the address is

Key Life Canada
P.O. Box 28060
Waterloo, Ontario N2L 6J8

Just ask for the free CD featuring John Eldredge. And if you can help the work of Key Life by giving, boy we’d sure appreciate it. Just charge a gift on your credit card or include a gift in your envelope. And because it’s now 2020, you can also give the Key Life via text, just text Key Life to 28950, in less time than it takes to write out a check, you’ll be all set up. Key Life is a member of ECFA in the States and CCCC in Canada, both of those organizations assure financial accountability. And Key Life is a listener supported production of Key Life Network.

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