Provoked

All right, we are in a little series that we're calling Jesus First. This is, it's been a lot, and it's kind of a, I don't know how to explain this other than last week's sermon was, we're looking at maybe a 30,000-foot view of this idea of Jesus First. And this came from, right now I'm in school and this whole semester-long project, and this was like the best of all the bad titles I could come up with. of Jesus first and then shared that with our other churches in the Twin Cities of Olive Hope Community Church. And we, they were like, hey, let's, we should, we should preach this. We should talk about it. And so it's like, yeah, that's great. The problem is I've studied this a lot and I've read about this a lot. And so to take all the, all the voices in my head and make, make it small, I don't do well with that. So I'm trying my best. So last week though, I was looking at what do I mean by Jesus first and looking to Jesus that he's on the throne, that it doesn't matter who you vote for or who you don't for, and kind of looking at why is our— that no matter what happens, Jesus is going to win. He wins this thing. He already won. But then how, why as a culture are we so divided? I mean, over just everything, even things that just normally we wouldn't say, oh, it's— this is a political thing. It just has become this thing now. And why? And so that was kind of last week. This week, though, I want to take the plane down to about 10,000 feet where we're making our approach, getting a little bit more practical. But I want to look like Christ. How do we take— okay, the fact that Jesus is seated on the throne, how does that actually affect me? And so that's, that's kind of where we're going. Just to recap, I don't have— obviously, I can't re-preach that sermon. But let me just recap of at least the why the Jesus first thing. This quote from— this is from Amy Black. She's a professor at Wheaton. Amen. But she said this, this is what kind of made me, not made me, but this is what moved me in this direction of why this topic was so important. Half of Protestant churchgoers, if you're a member of Hope, you're a Protestant. If you're not Catholic, you are Protestant. So half of Protestant churchgoers reported preferring to attend a church where people share their political views. The research has consistently found that political activity is among the strongest drivers for both church growth And decline. And so, if you want to grow your church, you put a flag on the building. You pick a side. You choose which side are we going with here, and then you will attract those types of people. At Hope Lowertown, we have decidedly said, no, that's not us. We're going to preach Jesus Christ crucified, and there might be things that get political at times, but that's not our focus. And so that kind of pushed me into this a little bit. And then the Jesus First side, again, this was from God in the Dock, a British way of saying God on Trial from C.S. Lewis, says, every preference of a small good to a great or partial good to a total good involves the loss of the smaller partial good for which the sacrifice is made. You can't get second things by putting them first. You can only get— you get second things only by putting first things first. And so it's Jesus first, Jesus first. When we put him on the throne and that affects me as a fully devoted follower of Jesus, then these secondary things that are important, which we'll look at today, they're in the right place. But when we take secondary things, social justice, global warming, I mean, you fill in the blank, any issue, and we try to like, that's the thing, then we lose the first. That's what C.S. Lewis has said. That's what— there's a million quotes, and I said a lot of them last week. But then the Apostle Paul starts off with this in 1 Corinthians chapter 15, our oldest part of our New Testament, months after Jesus was crucified. He says this, for I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received. What's the first importance? Does Paul talk about politics? Yes. Does Paul talk about serving widows and poors and people on the fringes of society? Yes, he does. But what does he say is of first importance? that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the 3rd day in accordance with the Scriptures. Then he appealed to Cephas, or Peter, and then to the 12. That's the gospel. That's Jesus first. That's Jesus on the throne. So now, what does that, what does that do? So again, last week called Unpersuaded, looked at John chapter 6 and 18 of looking to Christ. He's on the throne. My vote doesn't dictate whether or not he wears the crown. He does. They tried to make him king. They actually, they physically tried to grab him and make him king. He had an army. He could have been a general. He could have kicked out the Romans in his homeland. And he said, no, I'm not about that. And Pilate asked him, are you a king? And he's like, well, yeah, but my kingdom's not of this world. He's unpersuaded by political power. This week, though, I've titled this Provoked. And again, we're going to look at this As looked, look like Christ. And we're going to be specifically looking at Acts chapter 17:16 through 34, and we'll get there in a minute. If Jesus First was made into a coin, it was a Jesus First coin, and the one side would be look to Jesus, the other side would be look like Jesus. And that will hopefully make a little bit more sense. It's two sides of the same coin. What we're going to see in this passage today is that Paul shows what a Jesus-first person looks like in a post-sacred city. We live in a post-sacred society, not just a post-Christian society or world. I don't mean people stopped going to church and they stopped, you know, giving money to their local church. That's not what I mean by— they're not— we're not post-Christian. We are a post-sacred society in that people just say there is no God. And the people that do hold on to that sacred and get our morality from something beyond ourselves is otherworldly. And we looked at that last week, and so I'm not going to get into all that, but if you want to talk more about that, we can talk about it. We're going to see here, though, that the Apostle Paul is provoked. Okay? It's this burning from within. He's provoked, but he's not hostile. He's interested in what they have to say. He's empathetic to learn from their poets or their pop culture. He learns their theology while at the same time being confident enough to call people to repentance, not just to get along with them. Well, I want to be a friend. I'm a Christian. I don't— I just want to be friends with them. No, that's not what he does. In 1 Corinthians 9:22, it says it very explicitly. I became all things to all people in order that I might save some. Right? I'm friends with them. I'm winsome. I get along with them. Yes, I use their references because I like those references too. I like watching movies. Oh, you saw The Odyssey? Cool, let's talk about it. I haven't seen it yet. We're trying though. Anyways, so what— okay, but is it— is the idea just to get along? No, no, no, that's not it. It is so that ultimately we might win some. That's, that's the point. And we're going to see this provocation here from Paul. Now, before I get into that, I kind of need to set the stage, if I can. One of the books that I've been reading this semester is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt. He wrote The Anxious Generation. Has anyone read The Anxious Generation? Yeah, several moms, which totally makes sense. And then, has anyone read this one, The Righteous Mind? Yeah, okay. This one, I've read it twice and I'm partially through the third time. It's intense. My brain just doesn't click this way. But let me just explain this a little bit. I'm going to give one quote from him and then kind of explain a couple of his things. This is what he says. And this book was written in 2012. Okay, so this is before COVID This is before Donald Trump and the political things that are happening now. If you read the book and you thought he wrote it in 2024, you would think he wrote it in 2024. So it's very, very interesting. But he says this, he's a psychologist, he's an atheist, but he says this, the mind is divided like a rider on an elephant. Huh? There it is. There it is. Like a rider on an elephant. And the rider's job is to serve the elephant. The rider is our conscious reasoning, the stream of words and images of which we are fully aware. The elephant is the other 99% of our mental processes, the ones that occur outside of awareness, but that actually govern most of our behavior. Let me break it down this way. You got an elephant. The elephant is the rider, the conscious verbal thinking brain. And you've got the elephant, which is the automatic, Emotional, visceral brain, the instant reaction. I've never ridden an elephant, but I can imagine if an elephant decides it wants to go right, it goes right. If you're riding an elephant, you can pull and prod all you want, but that animal is huge, and if it wants to do what it wants to do, it's going to do it. Right? That's the idea here, is that the elephant, the automatic, the gut instinct, is gonna just do what it's gonna do. And the rider, the thinking part of our brains, will try to react, but it doesn't work. He kind of uses this analogy that the rider is the press secretary that defends the policy that the elephant comes up with. Okay, the elephant comes up with the policy immediately, and then your thinking brain says, how do I defend that? How does my inner lawyer defend that gut reaction? Okay. Elephant is our intuition, and it can be, which can be manipulated by cleanliness or disgust, which is wild. In his research in 2012, he would interview people about political things, and he realized that the closer people stood to hand sanitizer, they temporarily became more conservative. Oh, wow. He also did the same thing in the courtyard and would spray fart spray into a garbage can before asking them questions, and they became more disgusted about no matter what you were talking about. Right? It's like, are we that simple? Like, are we really that easily manipulated? Oh, it's amazing, right? So what I want to do right now is we're going to have a little social experiment to prove what I'm talking about, what Haidt's talking about. And I think will hopefully make sense with the rest of the text of where we will get, I promise. Dude, I don't normally do this, just so you know, right? I don't normally do this kind of thing. We walk through a text. Okay, just everyone's on the same page. Let me do a social experiment with you though right now. Okay, I'm gonna put some words on the screen and I'll read them out loud at the same time. I don't want you to say anything. I don't want you to say anything. I just want you to notice on the inside whether your gut, your elephant, says good or bad. Okay, you don't have time to think. I'm gonna go too fast. You're not gonna have time to think about it, but notice how Fast. I mean, instantly. Even if, for those of you who, if you see it and then I say it, you might already say good or bad before I can even get the word out of my mouth, right? It's instant. So one word per slide, about a second each, no comment. No comment. Let me just get through. Let me get my notes in the right order here. Okay, ready? Here we go. Puppy, root canal, summer, traffic. All right? You're able to think of that, right? Good, bad. I'm assuming we probably all have good feelings about puppies, bad about root canals, good about summer, bad about traffic, unless you're like terrified of puppies, which some are. So I get that. But you instantly have a thought. Now we're going to try it again. Round 2. Same thing, good or bad. Here we go. Police, immigration, patriotism, social justice. Okay, what happened? Your gut, I mean immediately, Immediately can lean. Your elephant is going to go good, bad immediately. But what's your rider do? Right? Did you did you hear the second voice kind of starting to go? Huh? Well, why do I feel that way? Well, man, if I had to say this out loud, what would you do? Your inner lawyer would come out. Your your policy writer would would try to defend what your elephant just said. Right? Well, well, if and this is you're you're at church. Right? You're looking at me. No one sees the expression on your face. But what happens if it's a— when it's a Monday and you're talking to a coworker and he brings up immigration? What happens in those situations when someone can see my face, whether it's at a Thanksgiving table or whatever? Your elephant is going to lean. And then your policy is going to try to fix the room. So, I want us now, before we get into this text, last thing here is I want you to think of a person. Really, I want you to think of a person, not a party, not a group, a person, someone whose views on something that matters to you makes your stomach just get in knots. I really, I want, and this isn't because we were to think bad about them. I'm hoping the opposite happens by the end of the sermon. Amen. But I want you to think about that individual, right? Maybe they're at that Thanksgiving table. Maybe they're in your group text. I want you to get them and I want you to hold them there. What's wild about that person is you already know their position. You know their argument. Matter of fact, you could argue their argument for them, right? You know that. You know what their writer would say and they know what your writer would say. Did anyone ever take debate? I had to take debate in college. I loved it. I loved it. But, and I remember, and it was 2008, back in the day, that I took debate. And the topic of choice that year, because everyone across the country used the same topic, and the topic that year was immigration or specifically border patrol, border control. And you would argue, didn't matter what I might, what my, what I thought, what I believed. You had to argue for stronger policies or we need to lesser or weaker or whatever, right? Open borders, whatever. You had to pick a side and you had to argue it. Well, by the end of the semester, you know the arguments. It's so you could you could go up there and just with no notes and you would hear them say it and like okay and I counter with this argument and you go back and forth. That's exactly what happens. And I remember the last time we had to do it, my buddy and I well he's not my buddy. I don't remember his name. Oh, it's gonna bug me. He had one of those oh Geoffrey. It was Geoffrey Geoffrey. with a G. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Anyways, we had to present— we had to make a strong border. And we were like, this is— we've just been doing the same thing all the time. And let's just mix it up big time. Let's give them an argument they've never heard before. And so we came up with this idea and we did the math. We said, okay, if we take every cow that dies from disease and we line the border with it, all this ridiculous stuff, right? But it caught the other side off. So much. We ended up winning the debate only because they weren't ready. They weren't ready for that. They could—they had no defense. It was so dumb, right? But that's what we do. We know the other argument. We could argue it ourselves. That's—that's what I'm trying to say. So here's my question, though. What I want us to get at: Do you know their altar? Do you know their altar? Do you know why their rider wants to go that way? And their intuition then tries to help it get there. What are they— and you could ask yourself the same question— what are they afraid of losing? What are you afraid of losing? What are they protecting? What do they worship? Not what they— what do they post about on Facebook? What are they reaching for? What are they trying to change? And if you can't answer that, Then every argument that you've had with that person that you've been thinking about went straight to their press secretary, and you have never spoken to their elephant. Now, let's see this actually happen in a text because we're not just about sociology, which is helpful. Let's see it in the text. You're going to look at what Paul felt, what Paul saw, what Paul said, And let's see how Paul responds. Now, Paul was— this is starting in verse 16 in Acts chapter 17. Now, Paul was waiting for them at Athens. His spirit was provoked. It means a sustained inner burning within him as he saw the city was full of idols. This is Paul's elephant. His initial gut reaction walking into a city sees it full of idols, and his initial gut reaction was provocation. Provocation. Sorry, I need a cough. Excuse me. Full of idols. Do we know our neighbors' idols? As I mentioned, do we know their Altars. What are they willing to sacrifice in order to see that altar lit up, to see it be made much of? Okay, could be a policy, could be a sports team. I mean, what, what is the altar that they worship, that they want other people to be convinced of? But, but why is that their altar? Why is that their god? Last week, again, we looked at how Jesus is on the throne. He's first, whether we want him to be or not. This week, I want to make it clear, social justice issues, political issues are not the gospel. They're not the gospel, but they are not optional. I'm going to say that again. Social issue— social justice issues are not the gospel. Nobody gets saved and comes to faith by confronting injustices. They're not the gospel, but they're not optional. To someone who is a fully devoted follower of Jesus. The gospel of first importance is first, the gospel is, but it doesn't mean that the second things are not important. It just means it's not the first thing. They're very important. For example, let me— I think I mentioned this before, global warming. I was raised in a church or a culture that said they had this view of the end times when Jesus was going to come back. It's all going to burn anyways. Well, not my problem. Oh, they're clear-cutting the rainforest in the Amazon and we're pumping the atmosphere full of toxic gases. Who cares? Jesus is coming back. He's on his throne. He's going to make all of this right again. Matter of fact, if we pollute the environment even more, he might come back even sooner. Well, now from their position, are we— are they arguing Jesus first? Well, they're arguing that Jesus is on his throne. That's not the Jesus first I'm trying to talk about here. I'm talking about if Jesus is first on the throne, It should affect how I view second things like global warming or whatever it may be. All right, let me keep reading here. This is verse 17. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons in the marketplace every day with those who happened to be there. What's interesting here is that Paul doesn't walk away. He doesn't walk away from the problem. He doesn't shut down. He doesn't avoid the confrontation. He loves them, and he shows compassion, even if it might seem confrontational. Now, what I think we can get with the elephant analogy here with Paul, and this is— I'm not trying to read too much into the text. I understand I'm totally doing that right now, but I want to look at, hey, how to How does Paul represent these ideas that I'm talking about here? A provoked man like Paul here, who's this sustained inner burning, a provoked man who runs towards the people who provoked him, is a man whose rider answers to somebody other than the elephant. His logic, his gut, his initial reaction is, you're provoking me? You don't understand what I'm trying to say. And instead of saying, nope, I want nothing to do with you, I'm going to run away from you. No, he goes towards them. His rider is being influenced by something else. And I love what Haidt has to say about this, but there is something greater than himself in this text, than Paul, that is influencing him. Keep going here in verse 18, some of the Epicureans and Stoic philosophers who had conversed with him, then some said, What does this blabler— blab— boy, what does this babbler wish to say? Others said, he seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities, because he was preaching Jesus and the resurrection. Epicureans, they believed that gods were remote, uninvolved, and they sought to seek tranquility. Stoics thought, no, everything is divine reasoning and permeating everything. And we need to just live a virtuous life in self-sufficiency. There were 2 opposite poles on the spectrum. If we could think left and right, you had the Epicureans and the Stoics. But Paul diagonalizes them in his speech. He doesn't find a happy middle ground that we looked at last week. He's not trying to just say, hey, can't we just get along? He doesn't do that. He goes right after and he answers the questions that they're looking for and they're searching for better than they could if they were left to their own devices. And how does he do that? He preaches Jesus first. He preaches Christ crucified while engaging their second things. Verse 19, and they took him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, may we know what this new teaching is that you're presenting, for you bring some strange things to our ears. We wish to know therefore what these things mean. Now all the Athenians And all the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new. Luke here, the author, is just saying they were interested. They wanted to learn. Second point here, what Paul saw in verse 22. So Paul, standing in the midst of the Areopagus, said, men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. Very religious. No, no, no, we checked none on the census. We don't follow a religion. We're actually against religion. No, no, no, you may have said you don't believe in a god, but you have a god. You have an altar. You're worshiping something. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with the inscription, To the Unknown God. What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you, that the God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and of earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man, Jesus, every nation and mankind to live in all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods for the boundaries of their dwelling places, that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him. And find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for in him we live and move and have our being, as some of your own poets have said, for we are indeed his offspring. What happens here? He diagonalizes this. The Epicureans say God doesn't need anything from us, That's right. That's good. But they also say, but he's so far away. Paul says, no, he's right here. To the Athenians, they believed that they really, to boil it down, were racist. They thought that they had been sprung up from or formed from a better soil. Than the barbarians. And Paul says, no, no, no, we came from the same soil. We came from the same spot. They came from the same man as everyone that they looked down on. The same person that you thought of earlier, same soil. Same person you admire and look up to, Your pastor, same soil. That was a joke. Let's keep going. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and the imagination of man. What does Paul do here? He exposes their altars, knowledge, education, politics of their city-states, their view of their gods and goddesses. He shows them how they're seeking for right things, good things, You don't want to see people thrown in injustice and into prison unnecessarily. Hey, that's a good thing. That's great, but it's not the answer. That person that you thought of at the start, how are they seeking for the right things in the wrong place? And the answer isn't to win the argument. It's to show them Jesus. Holy cow, we don't have time for this. This is again from Jonathan Haidt. He talks about these 6 taste buds. Okay, so he did this whole survey and the whole book is really about this, in that you've got 6 taste buds, that you've got care, fairness, loyalty, authority, sanctity, and liberty. And basically, you've got 3 of them turned way up and 3 of them turned way down. If you are on the liberal side, if you lean liberal politically, Then the main ones are care and fairness. That that is like the the thing when you and you have a hard time tasting things like authority. Whereas if you're more conservative, you go no no no no authority is very important to me, and and care and harm those are important, but but that's not the most important thing, right? So it's very interesting. So his whole take on this, if I'll just let me just read this. is that if we start thinking about why are cities like Saint Paul, the one we are in, almost always, or always, usually more liberal than the surrounding rural areas? One thing that Haidt brings up is that people who live in the city, we like change. We like trying new things. We are willing to sacrifice maybe even our own comfort for diversity of thought. Whereas people that are in the rural context like consistency, right? They want safety. They want to know that I can leave my door unlocked and nothing is going to ever happen. They like status quo. They like having a roast every Sunday after church. Neither of the descriptions of a city dweller or a rural inhabitant is good or bad. That just is. Amen. But we're wired differently. So, when someone builds an argument on a receptor that you don't have working, it doesn't sound just wrong to you, it sounds insane. It sounds insane. When you are talking to somebody who has a high view of authority and you're going after them on a care principle, It doesn't even make— you sound insane. And vice versa, if you're high on authority and you're trying to argue fairness or whatever, vice versa, you know what I'm trying to say. It just doesn't make sense. Things are turned up and it's not because they're stupid. It's because you're tasting with different taste buds. And guess what? You didn't choose that. Height, at least for sure, hammers that. This— you were just born this way. There's nothing you can do about it. So the best thing we can do Possibly as human beings is just try to get along. We all think differently, we act differently, we have different taste buds, so I don't know, hold hands and get along. I don't think that's the answer. Let's look what Paul said. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. He doesn't— see that? He doesn't just get along. Repent. Because he has fixed the day in which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance, all by raising him from the dead. Points them to Jesus, calls them to repentance through Jesus Christ. That's first things. Now, when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked, but others said, we will hear you again about this. So Paul went out from their midst, but some men joined him and believed, and others also, Dionysius of the Areopagate and a woman named Damaris and others with them. I love this. There are people in this room that I think probably are all 3 of these, hearing me preach and just go, dude, what is that about? And you mock. And I would ask you to reconsider. But then there's some of you who might say, huh, I hear you, but I'm not there yet. I'd like to talk more about that. That's great. Let's talk about it. And there's some of you who'd say, yes, yeah, Jesus is King. Hyatt, his elephant, is essentially untrainable. The best thing that he can do is ask us to be gentler with each other or civil or a third way. Christianity, I believe, claims more. There is a new life in Christ. It is death to life. It is darkness to light. Paul's rider is not working for Paul's elephant. It's working for the Holy Spirit by the power of the Spirit of God. Amen. Over time, the elephant itself gets retrained by worship, by reading scripture, by the table fellowship, whether it's communion that we have or actually being in community with one another. Last night, Angela and I got to go to a Metro Hope gala. It's a— it's for people who are struggling with addiction and are being set free. And Metro Hope's thing is unapologetically get them, show them Jesus. And there are people whose riders, their gut instinct and their riders, sorry, their elephant and their rider are just addiction. And it's not just, well, let's just take that elephant and move it to a different environment and it will become a better elephant. Every single testimony that we heard was like, yeah, I tried everything and then I met Jesus. It's a, it's a, it's everything is different. That's what Jesus has to offer. Let me end with these quotes and then we're done. This is from James Davison Hunter, To Change the World. Christianity is not first and foremost about establishing righteousness or creating good values or securing justice or making peace in the world. Hey, those sound great. I vote yes. But that's not first and foremost. For Christians, these are all secondary to the primary good of God himself and the primary task of worshiping him, and honoring him in all that they do. And so the church, our church, Hope Lowertown or Hope St. Paul should be genuinely, consistently, and creatively present, enacting shalom, peace, and seeking it on behalf of all others in the practice of faithful presence. It is possible, just possible, that they will help make the world a little better. When we keep first things first, And we say, but second things are still really important, and we can have good discussion about it, and we can change based on the love and Spirit of God, then we can start to see the world around us change. That was the 10,000-foot view. Next year, hopefully we'll land and get a little more practical, and I'll stop, stop quoting books and doing social experiments with you on a Sunday morning. Let me end with this. Do you know that person's altar that you've been thinking about? Do you know yours? What is this thing that I just— man, if everyone just thought the way I thought, if everyone had the same taste buds that I have, then the world would be a better place. Similar to last week, but maybe a little different. Last week, again, was look to Jesus. He's on the throne. This week, look like Jesus. Does he take priority of my altars? Or do I have other altars altogether that aren't Christ? When we are provoked like Paul was, we tend to swing, argue, post, correct, that we might win the exchange and in most likelihood lose the person. Or we go quiet, we withdraw, we call it grace when really it's probably self-protection. Paul does neither of those things because Paul did something First, that we usually tend to skip. We know our neighbor's position. Do we know their altars? We know their argument. Do we know what they're worshiping? And how about ourselves? Do we think that we don't have any? Are we able to point? Are we able to see the grace of God in the altars so we can point them to Jesus? Because again, those are good things. The things they value, man, those are. How can we show that God is in those things and lead them to Christ? We're going to have communion this morning like we do every week. And we have a gluten-free option on my left, your right, if that's a dietary restriction. We've got the wafer that represents the body of Christ that's broken for you and for me, and the juice that represents his blood that is shed for us. As you take these elements, if you're a follower of Jesus, I'd love for you to take these elements. You don't need to be a member here or a member anywhere. But if you say yes, Jesus is on the throne, and I'm really passionate about these things. That's a good thing. But how can I love others even when I'm provoked? How can I move towards them rather than away or attack? Pray that as you are taking these elements, that you would just reflect on that. Think of that person you thought of. Think of a neighbor who you care about. Next week, I want to kind of open that up a little bit and look at our neighbors. of hope, St. Paul, and bring that a little bit more practical. And so I'm looking forward to that. This morning though, in this moment, we can take this time to reflect on what Christ did for us. This is first importance. We get to literally taste and remember the things of first importance. And when we remind ourselves of that, then the second things start to fall into order. Let me pray. And then worship team is going to come back up and sing 2 songs. And as they are playing, feel free to grab those elements and worship with us together. Heavenly Father, again, just thank you for our time together, together this morning. And this text, God, I pray that the text did more teaching and preaching than anything that I said or anything that Jonathan Haidt said or any of these quotes. Your Scripture is preeminent over everything and anything. And we see that, even if it wasn't obvious this morning, of seeing how Paul did these things. Paul maybe didn't write a book on the political divide that was going on, but he wrote a lot of other books that dealt with these issues thousands of years ago. And the main thing was the main thing, that it was Jesus Christ crucified, that even when he was in a moment of provocation, that he still moved towards, that he still pointed people to your Son. Amen. Would we do the same with our friends, our family, our neighbors? Would we do the same with ourselves? Would we dismantle our own altars in our heart and put Jesus first in his throne? We love you. And it's in the name of Jesus I pray. Amen. Amen.