Mind Series

So hey there, good to see you and have you with us, that’s always true but especially true if you are brand new (to all of our online friends out there too) and we really do hope you have an experience with God here today that makes you want to come back and do this all over again with us real soon. If you haven’t been with us we are in the third week now of a series called Build Your Core chasing after making 2020 a different kind of year, a better year for each and every one of us. We’ve talked about how church alone is not the answer and neither is deciding to change. Nothing changes until we commit to change. Then last week we talked about how our actions, what we do really does reveal what we truly believe, how compensation and medication never lead to real change and transformation, and ended with a question. What’s one step I can take, change I can make when it comes to this physical body piece of the core of who I am? Hope you are staying with that question. See, God started telling his people thousands of years ago that they were to love him with all of their body, mind, and spirit. Jesus later repeated it and called it the greatest commandment of all. That’s a holistic core and that is what we are after in this series. So we’ve talked about our bodies. I want to spend our time together today talking about this mind piece.

ILLUST> So my dad was a volunteer high school basketball coach when I was born. If you know anything about basketball you may remember the name Wes Unseld. He was a force to be reckoned with in the NBA for years. My dad coached him when he was in High School in Louisville. Yeah, that didn’t go so well for my dad and his team. Anyway, from the time I was walking I was dribbling. I didn’t dig for the photos but there is a photo of me with my first basketball at Christmas when I was 6 months old and another photo of me dribbling at practice with my dad when I was about 2. So back about 20 years ago my dad was being recognized and honored for his coaching back in the 1960’s. The problem was he was living in a nursing home after having suffered a debilitating stroke and was battling dementia. So, Stacy and I went to our high school to accept the award on his behalf at halftime of a game. It was a small Christian school with a small gym that was packed that night. Hanging on the wall on one end of the gym to the right of the stage was a large sign that said this. This is straight out of the King James version of the Bible. As we were sitting there at halftime the gym got quiet as they started to talk about my dad. In a moment of silence, Sloane our 2nd daughter, who was about 8 at the time looked up at that sign and said pretty loudly “mom, what’s a ye?” Half of the gym busted out laughing.

Sometimes the stuff in this book is not all that easy to understand. If we hang around church world at for any length of time at all we begin to understand that it is important, but really reading it and understanding it can be a real challenge for most of us. Last week we read where God says that change comes as we renew our minds, as we learn to think differently about God and ourselves. A part of renewing our thinking is replacing those old thoughts with what God says is true. The best source is right here and yet the statistics tell us that even a high percentage of us in church world don’t devote much time to the Bible, much time at all to reading or studying this. That’s not judgment or condemnation, it simply points to this. A high percentage of us are missing a significant piece of our core, the very core that we have committed to building this year. So, let’s jump into this and spend the rest of our time together today talking about that.

If you brought a Bible we are going to be in Psalm 1 today. If you don’t have a Bible they are back on the back tables that you can grab right now if you would like if you close or on you can always grab one on your way out. As always you can hit our app or the YouVersion app too. Or you can ignore all of that and read along with me on the screens. So here we go Psalms chapter 1 beginning with verse 1…