Episode 289: Learning Time | Tim Henderson

Babbs, that was a marathon read right there. Alright you guys, as we continue our series—this little mini series we're doing on the why behind the what—I wanna show you a passage in Nehemiah. If you have a bible, open it up, go to Nehemiah chapter eight.

Generally in a word, what is Nehemiah about? You guys know? Rebuilding the wall, right? Everybody knows Nehemiah is about rebuilding the wall. But the thing is, the wall—that whole wall story is done by like chapter six, and half of the book continues to go on. We always look at the first half in Nehemiah, not the second half.

Today I just wanna look briefly with you at something that happens in the second half because something incredibly important happens. You might even say something incredibly important is invented in the second half of Nehemiah. Does anybody know what gets invented in the second half of Nehemiah?

Well, this thing is wobbly. We got to fix that. Or is it me? That's baby. Anybody know what gets invented in Nehemiah, the second half? Take a look, go to chapter eight. I'll read this to you. See if you can figure this out.

Nehemiah 8:1 says, "And all the people gathered as one man into the square before the water gate. And they told Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the law of Moses that the Lord had commanded Israel. So Ezra, the priest, brought the law before the assembly, both men and women, and all who could understand what they heard on the first day of the seventh month. And he read from it, facing the square before the water gate from early morning until midday in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand. And the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law. And Ezra the scribe stood on a wooden platform that they had made for the purpose." And then there's a bunch of names. Skip down to verse 8: "They read from the book from the law of God clearly and they gave the sense or the meaning so that the people understood the reading." — Nehemiah 8:1-8

What did they invent there you guys? Do you know what it is? It's a sermon. It's an expository sermon. This phenomena where the word of God is read and explained—this right here in Nehemiah 8—that's where it starts.

So there was this book and it was filled with treasures, filled with insights, things that the people needed. But the book had fallen into disuse. People didn't know what it said. And when they heard what it said, they didn't know what it meant. So in Nehemiah, the teachers read it and they explain it so that people can understand it. And this is a major pivot, a major turning point.

The Why Behind What We Do

Today we continue our series on the why behind the what. Our purpose is to help you understand why do we do the things that we do. When you come in here on a Sunday morning, what are we doing? You've already heard in the last couple weeks Quig and Eric talk about how and why we celebrate the Lord's death and resurrection and anticipate his return as we meet at the table. You've heard about why we worship God through song. And next week, Brian is gonna talk about the prayer aspect of our service and what the things that we do here.

And then the following week, not in this room but in my Sunday school class out in the fellowship hall, we're gonna answer a whole bunch of questions that you've been submitting online. We're gonna go through a lightning round. There's a lot of questions. We're gonna try to answer as many as we can, as thoroughly and concisely as we can. Because we do want you to understand why do we do the things that we do? We're in the sanctuary doing these big main blocks of things, but we're gonna kind of clean up everything we can in forty-five minutes in a couple weeks. It'll be, I think, June 4 Sunday school. So if you submitted a question or you're curious about some of the more particular things, you can come and get that.

Learning Time

But today, I wanna talk to you about the teaching portion here. Except I want to change the language for you. Teaching is what I'm doing ostensibly. It's what I mean to be doing, right? And who really cares about that? What we wanna talk about is not the teaching time, but the learning time.

My job is to teach. Your job is to learn. And I want you to think about from your perspective what are we really doing here. I wanna help you this morning to think about the particular thing that is your role as a learner. Because you're not supposed to just sit there and passively let the words kind of wash by you. I want you to think about what you're doing, why you're doing it, how you're doing it, and even what do you do then?

Like, so we're gonna have about a half hour together here. What do you do for the next one hundred and sixty-seven and a half hours until the next episode rolls around? Put another way, what's the purpose? What's the value?

Why do we build? Probably the largest single chunk of time when we come to worship is dedicated to your learning. Why? And how do we make the most of it?

I wanted to dispense with all the obvious stuff. You're supposed to lean in, pay attention, open your Bible, take notes, apply what you hear—we know all that. That's obvious, and telling you that doesn't really give you anything you didn't already have. So what I want to do this morning is stipulate all that and then go a little bit deeper.

In this half hour and in the several hours that follow until we meet again, I want you to think about what is your job? I want to suggest to you that you have three jobs—three things that are yours to do as we gather here. These are your jobs: you're a builder, you're a detective, and you're a fireman. But when we say fireman, forget what you think that means. I don't mean what you think it means. We'll cover that in a little bit.

Your Job: Builder

First, you're a builder. Here's what I mean. You have a worldview. You have a set of beliefs about the world and your role in it. You have a framework through which you make sense of the world. You have some paradigm of how you decide what is true and what is good and what is beautiful. You have some sense of what the world is for, and more importantly, you have some sense of what you are for.

You have a set of assumptions about what you ought to do, how you ought to do it, why it ought to be done. You have rankings in your mind. When you have two or twenty things competing for your time and your attention, your love and your service, you have some rubric that you rank them by. I'm gonna do this and not that. I'm gonna do these and not these.

All of these things together comprise your worldview. What is true? What is good? What is beautiful? What am I supposed to do?

I can tell you with a very high degree of confidence that for every person in this room, including myself, our worldviews are a mix. Some of it is spot on. There are things that you rank in the proper order. There are things that you believe that are true, that reflect reality, and that are good. Some of it, however, is reasonable given what you've learned, the things you've been exposed to, the things you've walked through, but it's a little bit iffy.

There are some parts in your worldview that are just incomplete—things you haven't really thought about, things that you've yet to be taught, maybe you haven't considered. There are blank spaces that can be improved. And I hope you'll pardon me for saying so, some of what you believe is just plain false. It's erroneous. It's not true. Maybe you've been lied to. Maybe you've lied to yourself. Maybe you've just misunderstood some things.

But all in all, for every human being walking on the earth, our worldviews are a mix. Some of it's right, some of it's not, some of it's in between.

And your job in the learning time as we sit together under the scriptures is to humbly listen to the word of God and to think, "Wait, what? You're telling me that is true? Because I thought this was true. And I'm not sure. I don't even know that."

Or your job is to say, "Hold on. Time out. This is a new teaching. I don't have this; this doesn't fit well in my existing framework and I don't quite know what to do with it. I didn't know that. That makes sense, but I didn't know there was a revelation about that. I'm gonna have to do some work, get out my hammer and saw, and go back and reconstruct my worldview."

This time right here is designed for that—for you to be actively, intentionally, thoughtfully building your worldview by which you make sense of things.

Now I know that process of changing your worldview is going to give you a variety of experiences. For some of you, the prospect of being shown where you're wrong is delicious to you, because it gives you the opportunity to stop being wrong and start being right. You're like, "Yes, I'm glad to move on from what I used to think to a better way to understand things."

For some people, nothing could be further from the truth. This process is highly threatening. Like, nobody talk to me, right? You hate being contradicted and you don't want to move. You just kind of like the way things used to be. You know, if you'll forgive me, there are within Christianity these pockets that are just so brittle—like the King James only crowd, right?

It's good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me, and there's no reason to ever move on from anything. There's this view that is very brittle, and for you, the idea of changing your worldview or challenging it is really unwelcome.

This guy named Thomas Kuhn wrote a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and he basically explains that we have this network of beliefs that is incredibly resistant to being changed. So what happens is you believe this is what's true, this is what the world is like, and then somebody shows up and says, "Yeah, well check this out. Did you ever notice this?" And we have this ability to look at that data and say, "Well, so what about that? It's just an anomaly," and we just ignore it. But then somebody else shows up and says, "Yeah, but hang on a second. What about this?" And bit by bit, people will hang weights on our network until eventually there's so many anomalies that the network collapses and we have to rebuild it with a richer sense of what's actually real.

The classic example of this in human history is probably the transition to a heliocentric universe. If you think about it, maybe one of the most obvious things in the whole world is that we are standing still, and that the sun is rising in the East and setting in the West. And then some yahoo walks up and says, "Now hang on a second, check this out. What if we're not standing still? What if we're spinning around ourselves and we're orbiting around the sun?" And we're like, "That's absurd. Because it is absurd. Just stand here. Do you feel like you're spinning?" Of course you don't feel like you're spinning, and it seems ridiculous. So your network sustains the anomaly.

And they're like, "Well hang on a second. Think about this. What if we weren't only spinning, but we're spinning around ourselves and we're tilted at about a 23-degree axis? That would begin to explain the seasons. Have you ever thought about why we have seasons?" And then, "What about the way the planets move?" And eventually the whole network collapses and you realize, "Oh my gosh, I'm wrong. I've always been wrong. Everyone's wrong." And now we move into a better understanding of things.

That phenomenon, to a certain extent, is what you had to experience if you've ever become a Christian. Jesus shows up and he begins to offer you things, and you're like, "I don't know about that. Maybe I'm fine." But eventually the network collapses. Some of you have been through that process enough times, and what you find is that every time your network collapses and gets rebuilt, it gets rebuilt better with a closer approximation of what reality is like.

That is what we're trying to catalyze here—that you would be humble people, that you would sit under the word of God, and that you would say, "Okay, okay, I didn't think that was true when I got here this morning, but I hear what you're saying. Tell me more." And you would lean in and you would let the word of God begin to change your world, because you're a builder and you're building a worldview.

I love it when I'm speaking, when I'm teaching in a small group, and somebody is squinting at me during a talk, and they're like, "I don't know if what you're saying is true, but I'm interested. So persuade me." I love that, because I don't want you to sit there and be like, "Who really cares? Let's go do the work." Let's lean in. I promise you that if I say something, I have good reasons for saying it. But it doesn't mean that I'm right. So let's do the work. Let's lean in. Let's go at it.

I hope that you will be bothered enough by the things that I say to you, by the things that any of us say to you, that you'll get out a Bible, you'll look it up, and you'll build your framework. That you'll consciously and intentionally build your worldview. Don't assume—please don't assume—that you have known everything there is to know since you were eleven years old. Let's be people that come to a deeper and a richer understanding of the things that God has revealed. We're builders.

You're a Detective

Number two, you're Sherlock Holmes. You remember this guy from Sesame Street? We are detectives. Some of my heroes in the Bible—there's a quick little mention, people don't maybe know about these guys—the Bereans. They're mentioned very quickly in Acts 17. Listen to what it says in Acts 17 about them.

The Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness, and they examined the scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. — Acts 17

That is what we're looking for. Be Berean. Examine the scriptures to see if what we're saying is true.

The word of God is the framework and your job is to build up this infrastructure of your mind. And in order to do that, there's gonna be work that happens outside of these thirty minutes. Your job is to go home and to be curious and to read a book, to look up the passage, to read some things, to have a discussion in the car on the way home, over lunch to have a discussion. Like we want you to engage and I even want you to disagree with me. I think the truth emerges when we're having an honest conversation, when we're going after things. So you are allowed, absolutely allowed to disagree with me. My preference though is that you do it to me, not about me.

Come to me, say, I don't know about that. You got a couple options. You can come soft, you can come humble, you can come low. And we'll have a great conversation. I promise I'll be nice. We could talk about this and I will try to show you why I think what I think and we can do that and I think that'll be delightful. You can also come high and hard and fast and I like that too. But if you do that one, if you choose option B, just bring your A game. And let's do the work and let's discover what's really true. Let's go after it.

If you don't wanna do it with me, that's fine, but do it with somebody. Build your world view on what God has revealed. Do not just drift about assuming that everything you've always thought is already true and do not just eagerly collect anything any yahoo says to you, including me. Don't just take whatever people are spouting, but investigate, read, learn, discover, discuss, talk about it in all kinds of settings. And let's figure it all out. We want the benefit. I will grow and I will learn to my advantage to hear your thoughts, to hear your disagreements. We can say, could I have said it better or was I just wrong? Let's figure out what's real.

When you leave here every Sunday, chase your curiosity. We intend to provoke you into thinking about things. We want you to be builders. We want you to be detectives. And then finally, we want you to be firemen. Now this is a different kind of fireman. We're not talking about a fireman with a hose that is keeping houses from burning down. I'm talking about the guy on a train who is shoveling coal into the furnace. He is also called a fireman because he feeds the fire.

Now it's imperative that you're provoking your curiosity, that you're doing all this work, and you're helping others to think about it. It's why we've done things like I taught on Titus here in sanctuary a couple weeks ago, and the hope was that you would go back and you would read Titus. You're gonna get curious, you're gonna chase all these things down. We're doing it in my Sunday school class. We're gonna do these one week. Every week I'm gonna pick one book of the New Testament and explain kind of the keys to it. But the hope is not just that you would hear the keys to that book and then stay there, but then having heard the keys you would then go and do your own work to just read it, to understand it, to ingest it, to come to a deeper understanding.

We could do all of that at a very heady intellectual level. But the reality is we want more than that. We're not just trying to win at bible trivia. It is absolutely true that the greatest predictor of maturity in Christ, if you're gonna grow in Christ, is when you become a self feeder. When you go from listening to someone else talk to searching out the scriptures yourself, to learning, to reading, to being curious, to being in control and command. You're not Gerber babies. We don't need to spoon feed you forever. Your job is to go do that. That is the key predictor.

But there's a risk, right, that if you do that, and if all you're doing is you just get smarter and smarter, more and more knowledge, and the point was never just knowledge. I want you to think about this whole process. It starts with the builder. You're building a world view. You wanna understand what's true, what's good, what's beautiful. You're a detective. You're gonna pull on threads. You're gonna learn. You're gonna be curious. You're gonna chase it down. You're gonna be a fireman and you're shoveling coal into that furnace.

But what I haven't told you yet is what is the furnace that you're shoveling coal into? And it is, without a question, the furnace of worship. The point of the whole game, this whole thing, is that we are trying to fuel our hearts' longing and need to worship. We are learning this information, we are pursuing this information, we're being curious and diligent because we want to worship the true and living God.

He is good, he loves you, and he wants good things for you. All this stuff builds up so that we will not merely be smarter sinners, but so that we will worship in a richer way.

Some of you might know that this week a great man named Tim Keller passed away. Tim Keller used to pastor a church in Hopewell, Virginia, a little tiny church in a little tiny town. And then he moved to Manhattan and he planted Redeemer Presbyterian Church. He has been, in this generation, one of the absolute greats—one of the finest expositors of scripture that's been on the world stage. An incredibly brilliant, gracious, wise, and good man. He passed away this week from a four-year battle with pancreatic cancer.

When he did, the Christian blogosphere erupted with tributes to the impact that Keller had on people's lives. And for me too, I'm one of millions of people who have been deeply marked by him. I have listened to hundreds of Tim Keller sermons. I remember specifically when I lived in State College, Pennsylvania. Kelly and I lived against this cornfield owned by the university. It's a beautiful place, and there's a path through it. I would load up my iPod back when those were a thing, with a little spinny dial, and walk through this field and listen to Tim Keller's sermons. He's always brilliant, always insightful, there's always great things that I would learn.

But there is this moment in a Tim Keller sermon that is like the prestige in a magic act. There's this moment where he does this reveal. It's a little bit like if you've ever seen stage performers that paint with their hands in this big sloppy mess—you don't know what they're doing—and then they flip the picture upside down and it's like Jimi Hendrix. You didn't see it coming.

That's a Keller sermon. I would be walking in the field listening to Keller preach, and then there's this moment where the reveal comes. Literally, I noticed to myself that I've been walking along, listening, and then it would happen, and I would stop walking because something about Jesus was revealed. It was so beautiful that it was arresting and captivating. And it's like all systems stop so that I could just pause and engage and worship. That's what the whole thing's about.

Can we come to the scriptures? Can we feed our hearts in such a way that we're provoked to worship? Now to a certain extent, it's Quig's job and it's my job and it's our job on stage to provoke worship. But you guys, it's your job to feed the fire. It's your job to say, "I want to be one where I'm gonna lean in. I'm gonna build a worldview. When Jesus contradicts me, I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt. I'm gonna let the word of God shape me. I'm gonna sit under it rather than sitting over it."

And when you find something and you're like, "Hang on a second, where does that go?" Pull that thread. Chase it. Be curious. Talk about it with people. Because if there's more to him—and there's always more to him—if there's some beauty, some glory, some facet that you've yet to appreciate, some way where if you were to submit deeper, if you were to obey more completely, he would reveal something of himself to you that you have not yet enjoyed. You want it. You don't want to leave it on the table.

That's the whole game: I want to get to the point where my heart is soft, and I am in love, and I am changeable, and I'm worshiping. That is what I mean by saying, "You're a fireman. Feed the furnace of worship that you might delight in him."

True Application Flows from Worship

Now I want to say one more thing. Because oftentimes, when we talk about sermons or teaching, the end goal is not framed as worship. It's framed as application. Go do something different. Go be something different. And I do think that there's a place for application, certainly. But rarely in the way that we tend to explain it.

The way we tend to do application is just like behavior modification, and that doesn't work. It doesn't last. It's kind of a waste of everybody's time. Real application flows out of real worship. If our hearts are soft, if we fall in love, if we're worshiping, then real application actually comes. If you're a builder, if you're an investigator, if you're a fireman, then the application will result naturally. Genuine worship produces real application automatically.

I don't want to change your behavior for twenty minutes. Who cares? I would much, much, much rather reorder your loves. I want to change the way you think about the world deeply.

I would rather that you develop habits of digging into the scriptures yourselves, having thoughtful conversation with the people around you. I would much rather incite your imagination to begin to think in a different way, a fresh way, how extraordinarily complete and wise and holy and good and surprising and courageous and fascinating and challenging and satisfying Jesus really is. Because if we're doing those things, we catalyze worship, we get everything else for free. Real and lasting application of what you love, what you think, and what you do will pay far better dividends than jumping through a hoop ever will.

Again, as I've said a thousand times, the word is filled with treasure, and you can find it. We want to help you. My job is to help you find it, but your job is to join the hunt. Partner with us. Reframe this time. This is no longer the teaching time. It is the learning time. It is where the builders and the detectives and the firemen get to work. So build your worldview. Stoke your curiosity. Fuel your worship. Do it in this half hour. Do it all week. And then come back. Let's get together again next week so that we can catalyze that process all over again, over and over and over again.

I like who I am better when I'm daily in the word. I like who I am better when I'm chasing things down or I'm placing Jesus at the center of my heart.

Response Time

Normally, what we do is we invite you all to come down and respond to the Lord, and you can always do that. In fact, we'll have folks here to pray for you if you want to do that. But really what I want to ask you to do, if you're willing, is I'd like you to sit in this for just a minute. I want you to think about all that we've said, and I want you to do a real quick system check. In fact, if you're willing, I'd love you to just talk about it for thirty seconds with the person sitting next to you.

Think about this. I want you to think about it. You can talk about this with your friend or your parent or your spouse or somebody sitting next to you. Unless you really just don't like them at all, in which case, don't talk to them. But now they're gonna know and that's gonna be insulting, so you should probably talk to them.

What's the reality? Are you a builder? Are you a detective? Are you a fireman? What's the reality for this whole thing, presently for you? What do you wish were true? And what maybe could you change? What do you need to do? I need to dial in on this. Or I'm gonna make a resolve to do this. I recognize that's hoop jumping application right there. So for those of you that need that, there you have it. But really what we want is the heart change, that you would fall in love with Jesus in such a way that all these things will work together.

If you want to take a minute, I'm gonna pray for you. You can just take thirty seconds, sixty seconds. What's the reality? What do I wish were true? What do I need to change to make it differently?

Prayer

Jesus, it's all about you. You are the one that the sermon in Nehemiah eight centered on. You are the great fulfiller of the law. And, Lord, every good sermon that's ever been preached has at its center, you. It is your majesty, your splendor.

And, Lord, sometimes we see you clearly, and sometimes all kinds of clouds come in and block our view. There's all kinds of things that we say to ourselves that just aren't true, experiences we've had that fill us with more fear and doubt than faith and hope. Lord, we ask you that as we gather here in this learning time, week after week after week, you would pull back the stuff that blocks us from seeing you. You would strengthen us and deepen us, that we would see more clearly how wonderful you are.

You'd reorder our loves, that you would be chief in our hearts, and that we'd worship you. We acknowledge that even when we don't, you are worthy of it all. But you give us the grace to give you more and more and more of our hearts because you are so great. We love you. Amen.