[Gary Petty] The Bible is filled with a lot of remarkable truths, truths that can change our lives. Well, there is one truth that can change our lives. We know it, we've heard it, and we have to go back every once in a while and look at it again because it becomes a cliche. And when the truth becomes a cliche, we miss the power of it. Let's go to Proverbs 23. Now there's a story being told here in Proverbs 23. And there's just one phrase in here, is what I'm going to zero in on today.

Proverbs 23:6-7 "Do not eat the bread of a miser, nor desire his delicacies for as he thinks in his heart, so is he. "Eat and drink,' says he to you, but his heart is not with you."

Now the point of the story is that there are people that are so selfish that no matter what they have, they don't like to share. So they might be saying, "Here, I'll share this with you," but they're hating that they're doing it. And nothing good comes from it. But there's this one phrase that we're going to zero in today.

"For as he thinks in his heart, so is he."

One of the great truths of life is, what we think about is what we become. What we think about is what we become. Now we think a lot about a lot of different things during the day, don't we? But what do we generally think about? And he said, "Well, at the end of the day, 40% of my thoughts were on what?" What were a bunch of your thoughts? I always say, "Well, there was a thought about my work and I was doing this and about the traffic and there was..." No, but what was really going on in your head? We've been doing a series of sermons on 1 Corinthians:13, talking about agape as the very character of God. It's translated love into English, but it's a much broader word in Greek. And it describes the very character of God. This is how He thinks. This is how He acts. This is how He feels. And we have what Paul does in 1 Corinthians:13 is he breaks that down into this is what we must be growing to do. What's so interesting about 1 Corinthians:13 are the statements he makes at the beginning of the chapter where he says, "You can have all knowledge. You can understand all prophecy. You can even perform miracles with God working in you. But if you don't have this, it's not enough."

Now, let's go to 1 Corinthians:13. And we'll read through till we get to what we're going to cover today. I've been doing about a sermon a month on this. And we're getting close to the end. We only have a couple more to do. But it is a very important passage, a very important passage.

1 Corinthians 13:4-6 "Agape suffers long."

And remember we talked about here, this doesn't mean that you suffer long because I have a sickness or I lost a job, so I'm suffering for a long time. That's not what this means. All the things listed here are in context of our relationships with God and each other. The point is you're suffering because of other people. Agape is a willingness to suffer because other people are maybe hard to get along with or other people mistreat you. So you suffer long. The suffering comes from others. It's not just because you're having some trial of life.

"Love suffers long and is kind."

So we think about all these important things like tithing. That's important, it's commanded. Well, kindness isn't that important. Well, according to 1 Corinthians:13, if we do the other and not do this, we're missing something. So kindness is part of the heart and core of what it is to become Christ-like.

"Love does not parade itself."

It doesn't have to be the center of attention. Everything in life isn't about, "Look at me, look at me." It does not seek its, or is not puffed up. So there's a great deal of humility in love.

"It does not behave rudely."

How many times have people...they justify rudeness. Well, that's just the way I was brought up. And yet we're told here, this is not what the love of God produces in us. It does not behave rudely.

"It does not seek its own."

In other words, not selfish. It is not provoked. There is proper anger. But here it's talking about improper anger, which is most of the anger we experience is not good anger. It's not easily provoked.

"It thinks no evil."

That's what I want to zero in on today. It thinks no evil. Now, we can look at this and think that what is being said here is that, okay, this means that the love of God, we don't think about bad things. We don't think about violence. We don't think about hatred. We don't think about stealing from other people. We don't think about all these bad things. But actually, this is a little different than what this, the King James, New King James, they shorthand this. It actually has a little bigger meaning. And that's why almost every other translation tries to expand that out. The Moffatt translation, you don't hear that quoted much. That's an old translation. I always look for one old translation when I'm looking in translations of the Bible. The Moffatt translation says, "Love is never glad when others go wrong." The New International Version, "Keeps no record of wrongs." The New American Standard, "Does not take into account a wrong suffered." The Revised English Bible, "Keeps no score of wrongs."

So the Greek here is in relationship with relationships. It's not just talking about, well, you don't think bad things. It is about you don't keep a record of wrongs in your relationships with others. Now that seems easy. It's very difficult. In fact, human beings, it's one of the most difficult things we have to do. So we're going to work through that a little bit today. So it has to do with, we're just not always keeping score. Life isn't about keeping score. You win in the end, when what? You're, what's the score? I've got even with everyone. I got everyone back. What's the score here? What's the game? Now obviously, you know, think no evil in itself is a remarkable statement in the context of we become what we think. If you think about vengeance, if you think about sexual fantasies, if you think about hatred, if you think about envy, if you think about everything that's negative in life, you know what you're going to become. Negative. That's what you're going to become, what we concentrate on.

Now remember, thoughts come through our minds constantly. So you say, "Well, I'm never going to have a negative thought." Well, if you figure that one out, let me know. What we're talking here about is what we concentrate on, what we center on. But, you know, the truth is what do we center on? You and I live in a world where our minds are being bombarded constantly. Everybody wants a piece of your mind. Every advertiser wants a piece of your mind, right? The internet wants a piece of your mind. I mean, they have artificial intelligence just figuring out what you want so they can feed it to you. That's why [inaudible 00:08:25] will say, "Gary, did you look at this book? Maybe buy this book on Amazon or something?" Yeah, why? I just got an ad for it. I've never looked for that book. Well, AI figures that out. It's always trying to get your attention. Television tries to get your attention. Radio tries to get your attention. That's because everything is analyzed to try to get your attention. That's what everything's about.

I don't mean there's some evil genius someplace, "Oh, I'm going to control their minds." No, this is the way society and media goes. I mean, when there was just newspapers, what was the purpose of a newspaper? To get your attention. Everything's to get your attention. That's why there was competition between newspapers. Well, I remember the good old days when there was only newspapers. Mr. Walker may be the only one old enough to remember that, but there's a few people that can remember when there was only a newspaper. But you know what they were doing? Of course, he was in radio for years, so I can say that. They were competing with each other. You know, when I was in radio, what did I do? I spent all my time trying to figure out how to compete with other radio stations so we could get everybody's attention away from them. This is the way things work. But now we live in such a complex world that everything's trying to grab a piece of your mind. And the result is our minds are just scattered all over the place. Our minds are constantly scattered all over the place with all kinds of attempts. Your boss is making demands, right? It seems like everybody I talk to they say at work, everybody's making more and more and more demands. Everybody's making demands. Everybody's trying to grab a piece of your time, a piece of who you are. That's going on.

So what do we concentrate on when we do concentrate? Jesus makes this very obvious statement in Matthew 15. I say it's obvious. It's obvious to those who read the teachings of Jesus. It's not so obvious to others. Matthew 15. Now the context here is talking about eating food without going through the ceremonial washings. And they were accusing his disciples of not doing the ceremonies. And so He's responding to them, but I want you to see where He takes this. That's why I'm not going to go through the whole context. I want you to see where He takes it.

Matthew 15:16-18 "And Jesus said, 'Are you also still without understanding? Do you not yet understand that whatever enters the mouth goes into the stomach and is eliminated? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come from the heart and they defile a man.'" The things that come from inside. Now he gives a whole list of terrible sins here, and I want you to notice the first one. "For out of the heart proceeds evil thoughts."

This is where it all begins. All of our actions begin someplace with a thought. Now we do have reflexes. You know, sometimes we can do amazing things, you know, save someone's life and they'll say, "I didn't even think about it, it was just a reflex." But most of what we do in life is because our thought process leads us to the point where we take action.

So in reality we become what we think. We can become what we concentrate on. All too many times when people come into the knowledge of the truth and they see the Bible and they see what God's teaching and they see Jesus Christ and they believe, "Well, okay, all I have to do is say the magic words. and believe a few new things that the Bible teaches me and then I'm converted." That's, like, the baby step because conversion isn't God remodeling you. And that's what Paul says in 1 Corinthians:13. If you have all these other things, it's not enough. You have to have them. But it's not enough. It comes down to, God says, "I have to rebuild you from the ground up." God didn't look at you and say, "You know, all you need is a new coat of paint, maybe a new roof, and you're okay." God didn't look at you, say, "A few new windows and some foundation work and you're okay." God looked at us, every one of us, and said, "I have to tear you down to the foundation and rebuild you from the ground up." Conversion isn't remodeling, it's a new creation. It's a new creation. It's not remodeling. We're not here to be remodeled by God.

So, that's what 1 Corinthians is all about. We're here to be created into a child of God, which is a new creation. And there's numerous places in the New Testament, it talks about becoming a new creation. So, it's so hard to do because of how we think and all the stuff that goes on, and all the outside influences, and all the clutter, and all the noise. And here's what is amazing about the way the brain is designed. What you concentrate on the most, the brain is designed to make that memory more easily accessible. So, that's why some people will say, "You know, something terrible happened to me 20 years ago and I can't get it out of my head." Well, at that point, without a lot of help from God and some training and a lot of things that have to go on, you can't get it out of your head. It's there and there's a pathway to it and it's fascinating, the science. It goes and finds it. Your brain finds the associated memory and brings it out and brings it out and brings it out until you are what you think. So what we concentrate on, what we think deeply about over and over and over again, has to become what God wants us to think about. Psalm 19. Let's look at what David says here. Psalm chapter 19, and let's go to verse 14.

Psalm 19:14 David says to God, "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my strength and my redeemer."

He says, "Let my words become acceptable to you." But then this next statement, "The meditation of my heart." Meditation in Hebrew, it doesn't mean just, oh, you think about something. It means to think deeply about something. In fact, it could mean, and there's different connotations to it, that you actually are muttering what you're thinking about. In other words, you're talking to yourself. It's such a deep concept that you're talking to yourself. It's not like the sounds made in Hinduism, Transcendental Meditation, you know. It's not those kind of sounds. It's like you're talking. You're thinking so intently. You know, you're thinking in concepts and words and sentences. You could actually be saying it out loud. To think that deeply, now how do we do that? Because in our world, that's not normal. It's just not normal. We're too busy, there's too much clutter, there's too many other things. If you start, you know, some people will say, "Well, if I try to sit and think deeply for about a minute, after 60 seconds, I'm nervous." Yeah, you are. You're nervous. That's not the way we've been trained to think.

David said, "Make that part of your life acceptable to God." And we have to consciously do this. And this is going to be very difficult for many of us. It's going to be very difficult because prayer and Bible study are vital to our Christian growth. Meditation is vital. If you're doing those first two, you have to do the third one. You can't get there from here. You can't have God change what's going on unless you pray, study the Bible, and then you spend time thinking about how this works. And one of the problems we have is we keep score. 1 Corinthians:13, we keep score. And we're really going to talk about keeping score here in a little bit. But first, let's talk about what we have to do. you know, to think about what we think. What must we do to think about what we think?

Two steps we're going to talk about today. The first one. We must learn, and this is a conscious effort. You can't just want to do this. You can't say, "This is a good idea." You actually have to make time and consciously do it, and it will be difficult, and you have to start at little bits of time and move outward. And it has to happen more than once a day. You have to consciously concentrate and set aside time to consciously concentrate on God and His ways. You have to break the pattern of all the clutter and all the noise. You've got to stop this. You've got to let God tune that out or you can keep running yourself to death. You can keep beating your head against the wall, or we can keep being filled with just this hopelessness, or we can stop. and let God do some work in us. I mean, the question is are we so busy that we can't say, that we can't let God do His work? Oh, my work's so important, God, or my entertainment is so important, God, or my whatever, fill in the blank, that I can't take the time for you and I to work on me. You know, that's one of the great benefits of the Sabbath. On the Sabbath, you can take time to study and pray and meditate. You can't do that sometimes as much as you want to, but you can do it on this day. Now we should be doing it every day. In fact, the only way to really stay close to God is to do it every day. But this is a special time to do it is on the Sabbath. So we have to consciously do this.

There's a fascinating little statement. This is one sentence in Genesis chapter 24, where it says, "Isaac walked out into the fields to meditate." Now how busy was his life? He lived in a tent and raised sheep. But it was a busy life. And there were lots of people. He lived a part of a tribe, right? There's lots of people, there's kids running around, and there's this problem, that problem. And he walked out into the fields to do what? I need some thinking time. It would have been easier for him to go out in that field for half hour and think than it is for you and me. Part of the reason why we've cluttered our mind with so much stuff, when you start to think, what do you think about? We say, "Okay, I'm going to think, I'm going to clear my mind and think." What are you going to think about? Probably something not very good. Probably something that's causing you anxiety and hurt and worry and anger, right? Why? Because you programmed your brain to do that. We have to have God help us deprogram ourselves, or we'll keep score by the way, which is what this is all about, this or you'll keep score on what everybody's ever, ever done to you. Of course, if everybody else is keeping score on you, we're in real trouble, right? Because we're keeping score on each other. He says, "No, we don't keep score of wrongs."

So this would be an easy sermon if we were going to say, "Okay, just learn to forgive each other." But you know, learning to forgive has a couple steps that you have to do. So yes, not keep score, you have to learn to forgive, but it's bigger than that. You have to learn how to think. You have to learn how to think differently so that we are in contact with God because when you meditate and make that breakthrough, the first time you do it, I mean really do it, say, "Okay, oh, I've heard sermons all my life about meditation," okay, tomorrow morning when you get up, take your cup of coffee, or if you're not a coffee drinker, your cup of tea, if you're not a tea drinker, a glass of water, or just go for a walk, but go sit on a back porch and meditate. About what? Oh, I need to think about how so-and-so at church didn't say hi to me yesterday or I got to think about my Uncle Bob. That man gets on my nerves so bad. I hope there's no one here named Bob. My Uncle Bob, that man gets on my nerves so bad, he drives me crazy, right, or think about that person at work. My boss is, I think I...he's so evil, I think he's like Satan's right-hand man. And that's what you're going to think about.

What's the rest of your day going to be like? How are you starting your day? Oh, politicians. So you go out and you sit in a back porch and say, "I'm going to get my 10 minutes of meditation in and I'm going to think about politicians." Well, that'll ruin your day. I'm going to think about, no, no, no, no, no. We know what we're going to think about. God and His way. First of all, you have to have some Bible input to do that. But as you do that, you'll find yourself praying as you do it. And sometimes you have to walk. There have been a few times in my life I was upset over something and I walked five miles just so I could start praying. This old brain's too messed up. So I'm not going back home until I can talk to God a little bit. So you got to do it. We have to do that multiple times a day. And one other thing is we have to stop keeping score. It's interesting in Psalm 63.

Psalm 63:1-6 He says, "Oh God," once again, this is Psalm of David. "You are my God, early will I seek you. My soul thirsts for You. My flesh longs for You in a dry and thirsty land where there is no water. So I have looked for You in the sanctuary to see Your power and Your glory." So he's talking about searching for God. Then verse 6, "When I remember You on my bed, I meditate on You in the night watches." In other words, the night watches were every few hours. So what he's saying is, "Sometimes I can't sleep at night. When I can't sleep at night, what do I think about to find rest?"

What do you think about just before you go to bed at night? It's going to tell a lot about how you sleep. Do you ever have dreams because of something that you thought about? I can remember years ago, we were in Texas. I opened the mailbox. They had these lizards. Well, they had these lizards. I opened that box and that lizard jumped out at me and, you know, I swatted him just, you know, whoa, whack. And so I go inside and I said, "That lizard jumped out at me." Of course, Kim does what she always does. She said, "Oh, I'm sorry, honey." No, she just laughed. I have to be a big boy around her. But that night, because I remember, it just was a shock to me. And in that shock, that night, I had the most vivid dream that I walked out to the mailbox, I opened it up, and a cobra came out and bit me. No, that's what your brain does. It exaggerates everything, right?

What do we think about before we go to bed at night? What do you think about when you wake up? I had woke up not too long ago and I thought about someone who had been in the hospital. And I was going to call that person and I forgot to call him. I had written it down on my things to do and in the middle of the night, I woke up. Now it's 3:00 o'clock in the morning. I'm not going to call the person at 3:00 o'clock in the morning, but it took me 45 minutes to go back to sleep. Now that's not smart. All I had to do was get up and write down on my little things to-do list, "Call so and so this morning." That's all I had to do. I spent 45 minutes, oh man, I didn't do that, I didn't do that. And finally, you know what really settled me down was a thought of God and like, I'm not saying God talked to me, but because He doesn't, but there's this sort of thought, wait a minute, God takes care of people, not me. I can go pray for that person. And yeah, I'm supposed to call him, but I'll call him tomorrow morning. I right now should go pray for them because it's God who takes care of them. And all of a sudden I prayed for him and I went to sleep. So I'm worrying. But I don't have to, right? We do that all the time.

What do we think about? David said, on his bed, even as the night watches went by, and he couldn't sleep sometimes, what he found was a peace and rest in God. Now that's not easy, but you could learn that. If you have to, get up and read a Psalm. If you have to, get up and read the scripture. Pray. Probably all of you have had an experience where you've had to pray yourself to the point where you could go to sleep because God did something. God did something, and it changed what was going on. Okay, so if we do that, if we consciously take time every day to make ourselves not think about the negative and the bad and what other people have done and other people's sins, I mean, you'd go crazy. I can only watch so much news. I mean, I watched the news and I think, "I don't care what party you're in. Is there some kind of, like, unwise pill you have to take to be a politician?" I'm trying to be nice. You know, it's what do you have to do? It blows my mind. How can we have people that are so lost? Well, that's because they don't know God. You do.

That means you have to divorce yourself from the badness of this. If all you do is think about the news and the war and the coming recession we're in and this and that and the other and who's going to win the next elections and all of this stuff, you think about that long enough, and you're going to have real problems. You know God. You can step aside from the world. You can step away from it. And every day there should be times in your day when you step away from it of everything and you go pray and think about God and His ways and what He's done in your life and His promises and the scriptures. You go for a walk. You go out of the office. Everybody wonders, "Where's he go about twice a day for 10 minutes? What's he doing? He's sitting outside on the park bench looking at birds." That's okay, go sit down at the park bench and look at birds and talk to God a little bit. But let your mind have that healing that we need. The more you do it, the easier it comes. But it's not easy at first. It's not easy at first.

Okay, now if you're doing that, what are you doing? You're starting to take out all the bad we get, all the negative we get, and you're starting to do away with record keeping. I'm going to go to God now and what I'm going to meditate about is all the things people did bad to me this week. That won't work. Pretty soon you're not meditating about God. You're meditating about how bad you feel, and you're feeling worse and worse and worse, and your brain is storing the memories. The stronger the emotion, the easier it stores it. It's just storing the memories. So okay, by doing this, we're breaking the pattern instead of just thinking all the time about negative and bad, how bad the world is, how rotten my life is, how other people mistreated me. I'm not keeping a record of wrongs. But I'm going to give the second point.

Here's another way we keep a record of wrongs. And that is when we interact with other people and they do something or say something, since we do not know why, we do not know the reasons people do things, we don't understand all the time what's happening, we make up a story about what's happening. Someone down in Murfreesboro this morning said, "Oh yeah, we had a training class at work where they literally told us, 'If you're starting to have a disagreement with something, somebody say, 'Here's the story of my mind that I'm making up about what you're saying, so you better explain it to me.'" And that's a pretty good thing to do because what we do is we make up a story. You know, it's the person that comes to church and says, "Huh, that person over there, I don't like them. They're so unfriendly, that person hasn't talked to me in three years." You go talk to the other person, they say, "Huh, that person over there, they're unfriendly, they don't like me because they haven't talked to me in three years." Now they both made up a story and they're living this made-up story.

Husbands and wives do that all the time, especially when you're first married. You know, after a while, you just get to know each other more and more, and you don't do that. My wife in the car, we're driving here after Murfreesboro, she made the comment, she said, "Yeah," she says, "It's like when you're first married and because of your family background, you think, 'Boy, my husband's being mean to me. And then you realize, no, he's not." I said, "Yeah, I remember those conversations." And I'm looking at her and saying, "What are you talking about?" And it had to do something with the way with her family was. Oh! I had no idea, you know. And then you realize you're making up a story. It is amazing how we spend life making up stories. Now there's enough bad people, and there's enough people who treat us poorly, and there's, you know, I mean, there's enough bad in life not to make up more. But we keep a lot of wrongs that aren't that worth keeping, or they're not even real.

There's a perfect story of this in Joshua 22. What happens in Joshua 22, the Israelites have conquered the Promised Land, and the people from Reuben and Gad and half a tribe of Manasseh had said, "Look, when we go into the land, we want the land on this side of the river." And Joshua said, "Sure, there's no problem with that, but your soldiers have to come help us conquer the rest of the land for all the other tribes." They said, "Okay." So the soldiers of Reuben and Gad and half a tribe of Manasseh go with the rest of the Israelites, they conquer the land. When the war is over, they go back and they cross the Jordan. Do you know what they do the moment they cross the Jordan? They build a giant monument of rocks. And of course, they go to Joshua, the people that saw it. And they said, "You know what, those people crossed the Jordan and immediately became pagans. They're building an altar to a pagan god. How can they do that?" And Joshua said, "Well, we have to go find out what's going on."

You see what he did? They mobilize the army again. The war is over. They march out to the river, and they're about to have a civil war. And the leaders of Ruben and Gad and half the tribe of Manasseh show up and they say, "We're here because we're going to stop you from doing this travesty. and build an altar to a pagan god." And they said, "No, we built this monument because we want our children to know that the people... We're going to tell them, this is going to become a teaching point for all of our people, that we are brothers and sisters to the people on the other side of the river. They're our people too, and this will remind us, as long as this is here, it will be a reminder that we will pass on from generation after generation this is the monument to our brothers and sisters on the other side." Now you talk about a misunderstanding. You talk about making up a story. This is what I think is happening. Let's go kill them.

Now, that's just pure human nature. You and I do that all the time. We make up stories because we don't know what really happened. We don't know why somebody's doing something. We don't know why they're acting a certain way. We don't know why they're treating us a certain way. So without knowledge, we make up a story. You know, we do this with children. How many times do you ask a child why they did something and they say, "I don't know?" Now they may know that what they did was wrong, in which case now, they've just lied and they need punished. And that's true. But you have... I can see this, I'm going to make up a story, but I can see it happening. I can see my son doing this. He and some friends are in somebody's house and they have an old shed out back that is falling down. Nobody uses it, right? So they get some rocks and go break all the windows because they just want to see what would happen if you threw rocks through a window. And, of course, now, all the adults are going to punish them for this evil.

How dare you. You can't do that. You can't go break somebody else's property. You can't break windows. Why did you do that? They're like, "I don't know." No, why did you do it? We wanted to see if glass explode. We would never do it in a house where people live. And you start to realize, okay, I just made up a story that they did this because they were just pure evil. And the truth is they have an immature moral understanding. I wouldn't do it to a house where people live. Oh, okay, so you understand that under certain circumstances this is wrong. Yes. Well, it's wrong in this circumstance too because you don't own the property. You don't have the right to go break a glass in a window. And then you see the terror on their face like, "Oh, I did something wrong." Now they still may get a punishment, but it's not going to be the same punishment as if they did it just because they were being vicious, right? But see how we can make up a story as parents? Sometimes we can take a child and unload on them something that they did not intend or know, but we made up the story.

We do that with each other all the time. And what do we do? We keep a record of wrongs. Oh, I remember when you did this, this, this, and this. It'd be funny if you ever...if there's somebody in the congregation you feel like you've done eight things against me in the last two years and go up and ask them about it and they'll probably look at you and say, "Well, when did I do that?" You mean I've been upset over something you don't even remember? It happens all the time. We're living a lot of falsehoods. We're living stories that we make up. We're keeping records of wrongs. It's bad enough to keep records of wrongs of someone who did something bad to you because it ruined your life. It makes you unhappy. It allows you not...you just won't forgive them. But to do it simply because we fill in the blank, think about that.

Carl Sandberg has a…I've gone through so many different stages in life. It was my late teens. Carl Sandberg was who I was going to read. How many even know who Carl Sandberg is? Oh, a few. Okay. He, a Pulitzer Prize winner, he did a five-volume set biography of Abraham Lincoln. Probably the greatest research in the life of Abraham Lincoln ever done. He was a Pulitzer Prize winner. He was...one of the top Chicago newspapers, he wrote for them. He was an essayist. I mean, he really did a lot of amazing things in his life. He also wrote books of poetry. So I went through my Carl Sandberg stage. I don't know, I was 18, 19 years old. I was going to read everything Carl Sandberg wrote. And I started to read his poetry. Well, he was born in the late 1800s. He died in, I think, '67. So some of his early poetry is describing things. It's like, "What's he talking about," right? But I do remember this one poem. He wrote in free verse. It was like stories.

It was a town and there's this old man walking down the road out of the town and people come up in a wagon saying that this was early in his life because he, you know. He lived into the '60s, but people come up in a wagon, and they stop and they say, "Hey, what kind of people live in this town?" And he said, "Well, what kind of people lived in the town you came from?" "They were backstabbers, gossips, couldn't trust anybody, and the most unfriendly people in the world." He said, "Well, that's the kind of people you'll find in this town." So, "We're not going there." Another wagon come up behind him and said, "Hey, I'm looking for a new job. I don't know what to do. What's the people like in that town?" He said, "What's people like in the town you came from?" He said, "Well, they were friendly, hardworking. Everybody looked out for everybody." He says, "That's the kind of people you'll find in this town." And the point of the story was, a lot of times how we think is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You're going to find what you want to find. You're going to believe what you want to believe.

And that's where keeping a record of wrongs doesn't just mean that you don't forgive somebody. Now, we have to learn to meditate. We have to learn to think about God every day. We have to take time to consciously set aside, just like prayer and Bible study, to think about what we've read, to disengage from the noise, not think about the wrongs that people have done to us, and definitely not think about all the fiction we've made up. Go to God and seek truth.

I'm going to end with Philippians 4, another scripture that can be a cliche. Yeah, it's like I Corinthians:13 I've said is a cliche. We hear it sung so much at weddings. You know, 1 Corinthians:13 is a wedding song and it's sung at so many weddings. But, you know, it creates a nice feeling at weddings. I'm not sure it ever changes anybody's hearts and minds because why? It's becoming cliche. I'm not saying you shouldn't have it at your wedding. I'm just saying that the power behind it has lost. I Corinthians, I'm sorry, Philippians 4. Now, these two verses... I read so much. I just want to spend just a couple minutes looking, glancing at the depth here because there's a lot of depth to this. Okay, so we're just going to glance at it.

Philippians 4:8 "Finally, brother, whatever things are true." Now at the end of this, he says, "These things, meditate on these things," at the end of verse 8.

So we're going to go through verse 8 here. And we're going to look at what he says to meditate on. These are the things that you should...those breaks you take to think deeply about something should be about these things.

"Whatever things are true."

We should be searching truth. You know, what is... Where do you even find truth? It's amazing to me. Sometimes I sa, "I'm going to watch the news." So I'll go on YouTube, I'll find a story, and I'll watch CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Australian News, and the BBC, all on the same subject. At the end, most of the time I say, "I have no idea what the truth is. I got all kinds of ideas and opinions, you know." Well, there is one thing that I usually come to a conclusion is governments are the most inefficient organizations in the history of humanity. They don't work. Not human governments, only God's government. Christ works. That's the only government that will ever work. The rest of them don't work. So you sort through all this mess and you say, "What's the truth?" And you pick out bits and pieces and try to figure out what the truth is. So you know what to do when you don't know what the truth is? That's the truth. This is the truth. Go here, and you think about this. Don't think about, you know, the fights in Congress. Don't think about that. Think about this. Go here and think about God and His way and Jesus Christ and what He did for you and what He's doing for you now. Go there, think about it. Think about the truth.

The second thing he says is, "Whatever things are noble."

That's not a word that we use much anymore. I mean, I can't remember the last time I heard someone use the word noble in a conversation, right? Once again, this is a difficult word to translate. I looked up in four or five different sources, how do you translate this word into English? And it goes all over the place. And the reason why is it's a big thought. The best that I could find that really makes sense in this connotation is it really means to inspire dignity and respect and even worship. Think of the things that inspire dignity. That's not what we think about. Right? We think about things that inspire shame, the base things among human beings. Think about things that inspire dignity. Can you imagine when work is overwhelming you going off for a few minutes or when the day is too much and you can get in your car and drive down to a, you know, a little side street under a tree someplace and sit there and close your eyes and pray and think about things that inspire dignity and respect? Think about things that inspire worship towards God.

He says, "Whatever things are just."

Just has a connotation of things that are right. And that's why David said over and over again, "I meditate on Your law," because he looked at the law of God and said, "This describes justice. This describes what's right to do." And there's a lot of things in the law. I mean, we look at the Ten Commandments. You know, once again, if you don't... If there is a law, "Thou shalt not steal," that means everybody can own property and nobody else can take somebody else's property. But there's all kinds of principles in the ancient law that we can miss. And you say you have to have at least one witness to convict somebody? Yes. You go back and read why. There's a due process of law. And if you don't have due process of law, it is better the criminal goes free and God takes care of him, due process of law. It's all part of this. When you read that legal system in the Old Testament, all we read is, "Oh, they stoned people if they committed murder."

But, you know, they didn't stone people if they committed manslaughter. There were two different kinds. There was a reason for two different kinds. One was in the heart, one wasn't. That tells you something about justice, not that we stone people. The church does not stone. We don't have the power to do that, right? We're not a judicial system, but we learn from God's law. And that's why David said, "The more I study that, this is big. This isn't just a series of do's and don'ts. It is an understanding of what is just."

"What is pure, whatever is pure."

This word is often translated holy. Think about holy things. Much of the time we're thinking about unholy things.

It says, "Lovely."

I'm like okay. What does that mean? I'm just going by the King James. Lovely. You know, I've talked about agape, I've talked about phileo. That word lovely in Greek is a conjunction of two words, and the second word is a derivative of phileo. Think about things that produces brotherly love. That's sort of a loose explanation, but that's basically what it means. Lovely means things... The reason they use lovely, it means people will find this... What you're thinking about, they would find it good. They would find it pleasing to hear what you're thinking about. Because what are you thinking about? Brotherly love.

And then he says, "Whatever things are good report".

Whoo. Can you imagine if we had like a little neon sign up here and you could read each other's thoughts all the time? Yeah, you're thinking about it. Whatever you're thinking about is just good report. You know, I'd be standing up here thinking, "Oh, I see four people saying, 'Man, he's gone two minutes overtime. He needs to wrap this up.'" Johnny Johnson says, "Time for dinner." So it happens when you sit close, you always get picked. It's time for dinner. Actually, I said that this morning about, you know, Mark Smith. Most of you know Mark Smith. And I said, and Mark Smith is sitting out there, and it's lunchtime. So afterwards, I walked over, and after the service was over, he walked up to me and he said, "Yeah," he said, Neville and his wife said, "What were you thinking about?" He says, "I looked at her and I said, 'I was thinking it's lunchtime.'" I know you pretty well, Mark. I didn't need a neon sign up here to know what you were thinking. Aren't you glad our thoughts are not there for everybody to read? Because we're a jumbled mess most of the time. We just are. And we'll never get better until we recognize it.

And so what we have is a command here to not keep score. The only way you could not keep score is you have to change the way you think because you will keep score if you don't. It's just how we think. All you have to do is think about God and His way. We have to stop making up things about other people. And we have to just learn to forgive so we don't hold that in us and it eats us up like a cancer as we hold in. Somebody else was wrong. Okay, they were wrong. You can't hold into that. And you can have somebody do you wrong, and two years later it comes back, right? It pops back in. That's where we have to know, what do I do with this? Sometimes it'll wrap you up for a while, right? About five minutes later, you'll realize, "I am miserable. If I don't let go of this, I'm going to stay miserable till I do." And the problem is we don't. It becomes part of our identity. Nope, I need to be miserable because I was mistreated. No, let it go. That's that person's problem, not yours. Your issue is I got to be right with God because if I'm right with God, I can love. I can actually love other people. So that finishes another sermon on agape.The next one, which should be done probably in September, if not, it will be in the first of October, but the next one is on a really interesting phrase where Paul says," Agape does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth." And on the next agape sermon, that's what we'll be covering.