WYC 2008: Something Better

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GYC West

WYC 2008 Morning Devotionals

Cosmin Ritivoiu

The Courtyard: Better Than Genius

Tim Taylor

The Holy Place: The Better Lifestyle

Eric Nelson

The Most Holy Place

Our gracious Heavenly Father, we come to you this morning thanking you for the silence that we have available here, that we can spend time praying for our friends, praying for each other and praying for ourselves.

Lord, we often lose sympathy for others around us and we forget to pray for them.

And this morning I ask that you would help us to regain the meaning of sympathy in our lives.

Many of you don't know me, So for those of you that do not know me, I want to begin by telling you a little bit about my name.

You probably saw the name Cosmin Ritivoiu and you thought, I can't pronounce that, so I'm not even going to worry about what exactly his name is.

My name is actually Romanian, and my first name comes from the word cosmos, meaning outer space.

And then my parents decided to give me a flower middle name.

And that was because I had 2 older sisters and the oldest sister she Got a middle name that was a flower and then the middle sister got a middle name that was a flower So when I was born they wanted to keep the tradition going So they decided they'll go with the most masculine sounding flower in Romanian, which is Edie's and Then my last name Ritivu you They don't really know what it means.

But the closest thing that they could get to is beating stick So I guess that would mean that I'm like outer space flower beating stick.

Your schedule says that I'm going to be talking about the outer court.

But if I could put a title on my talk this morning, it would be better than genius better than genius When we're thinking about the outer court, what is the main thing that happened in the outer court?

What was the main focus of the outer court?

Now I want to talk about What has caused us to lose a lot of the meaning of Jesus' sacrifice?

In our culture today, wisdom is very prized, and especially genius.

And maybe I could put it in a different way and say it's actually information that is really, really prized.

When you think about genius, there's 2 different types of genius.

1 type of genius is the type of person that is really, really good at 1 thing.

They're just an expert at that 1 field and they can really pinpoint that 1 field.

And then on the other end you have people that are good at everything.

They know a little bit about everything or they know a lot about everything And those people are called polymaths.

The dictionary calls that a person of encyclopedic learning.

That means you could ask them a question about anything, and they know.

An example of this would be Leonardo Da Vinci.

He was really good at many, many different things.

It seems like today we all need to be polymaths.

And the reason I say this is because we're bombarded with so much information.

We're surrounded with so much information that in order to be able to discern and to put every piece of information that we receive into its right place, it seems like we all need to be polymaths.

In fact, the way that our culture is going, it seems like we look to information to solve all of our problems.

If we could just have enough information, if it could just come to us quickly enough, if we could just have better technology, then maybe we could solve our problems.

But since the dawn of all this new technology, and since we started getting information quickly, a lot of problems still remain.

And yet, we can download a video of a starving child on YouTube.

We could put, we could watch a video of starving children in Africa on our high definition flat panel TV, hear them crying as they die in our surround sound, and perhaps if we follow this line of reasoning, we would need a hologram of a dying child in our living room floor before we did anything about it.

But that's not the only thing that comes in through all this technology.

Isn't there a lot of other different information that we get?

I want to read the definition of confuse.

The verb of confused is to make indistinct, blur, to mix indiscriminately, to jumble, to fail to differentiate from an often similar or related other.

The adjective of confused, indistinguishable, being disordered or mixed up.

So the side effect of all the technology that we have received is that We not only hear news of disasters, but we also get other stuff We've been overflowed with information about anything and everything an example of this I Was looking at the news the other day and I was thinking why do we really need to know that Kobe Bryant jumped over a swimming pool full of snakes?

I mean, is that really something that's related to our lives?

What are we going to do because we know that?

And I was looking at a Yahoo news page a few weeks ago, and I saw the headline.

And the headline was, American Idol breaks the record for the most hits in the digital songs chart.

I believe it was like 17 hits and then 4 lines later no picture just headlines 4 lines later 2 commuter trains collide in Boston now what happens when you mix the serious and the trivial When you mix the serious with the trivial, you trivialize the serious.

All of a sudden, it's not as important anymore.

What has God offered us that is better than the genius of this world?

You know, God was kind of going through the same thing in Samuel's time.

And I want to first talk about how the loss of meaning leads to a loss of sympathy.

This is the first point that I want to make.

The loss of meaning leads to a loss of sympathy.

I want you to turn in your Bibles with me to 1 Samuel, chapter 15.

And I want to first look at how meaning is lost.

First Samuel chapter 15, and I'm going to begin reading in verse 20.

First Samuel chapter 15, And I'll begin reading in verse 20.

And Saul said to Samuel, but I have obeyed the voice of the Lord and gone on the mission on which the Lord sent me and brought back Agag king of Amalek.

But the people took of the plunder, sheep and oxen, the best of the things which should have been utterly destroyed to sacrifice to the Lord, your God in Gilgal.

So Samuel said, "'Has the Lord as great delight "'in burnt offerings and sacrifices "'as in obeying the voice of the Lord?' In this conference, we're looking for something better.

"'Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, "'and to heed than the fat of rams for rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft and Stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry Because you have rejected the word of the Lord.

He has he also has rejected you from being king So here's Saul and he's Supposed to destroy the Amalekites and he destroys them But he keeps some of the things and says oh, I'm gonna sacrifice these things to the Lord And I want to read a quote from patriarchs and prophets.

The messenger to the remnant explains this passage, and she says something very interesting that I want you to think about in your own lives.

The sacrificial offerings were in themselves of no value in the sight of God.

They were designed to express on the part of the offer penitence for sin and faith in Christ, and to pledge future obedience to the law of God.

But without penitence, faith, and an obedient heart, the offerings were worthless.

When, in direct violation of God's commands, Saul proposed to present a sacrifice of that which, listen to this line, God had devoted to destruction.

Open contempt was shown for the divine authority.

The service would have been an insult to heaven.

Yet with the sin of Saul and its results before us, how many are pursuing a similar course?

While they refuse to believe and obey some requirement of the Lord, they persevere in offering up to God their formal services of religion.

There is no response of the Spirit of God to such service.

No matter how zealous men may be in their observance of religious ceremonies, the Lord cannot accept them if they persist in willful violation of 1 of His commands.

Now I want you to think about, is there something in your life, is there something in my life that God has devoted to destruction?

Perhaps it is music, perhaps it is a job that you're hanging on to, a hobby, and you're trying to worship God with it.

Here Lord, here's something that you don't want, but I'm going to give it to you anyways.

Here comes Saul and he doesn't want to let go.

And so he gives a kind of a false whiny repentance.

Then Saul said to Samuel, I have sinned, for I have transgressed the commandment of the Lord and your words.

And if he would have just stopped there, then perhaps we could say, oh, maybe he's sincere.

Because I feared the people and obeyed their voice.

So you can kind of see that he's not really repenting because he's blaming the people.

Series

WYC 2008 Morning Devotionals

The Courtyard: Better Than Genius

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

WYC 2012 Plenary Sessions

Repentance and the Latter Rain

1h 19m

Breakout Session C

Reflecting Christ to Your Community as a Healthcare Provider

1h 7m

Gem Castor Weekend

Tis So Sweet

55m

Are You Sure You Are Lost?

43m

Restoration 2005: To The Point

Can God Feel My Pain?

35m

When the Truth Stagnates

19m

Carrying the Cross

38m

Breakout Session #2

Following Christ Through the Crisis

1h 20m

WYC 2012 Plenary Sessions

John’s Work, Our Work, Part 2

55m

FYI 2009 Plenary Sessions

From World-class Dancer to Word of God Preacher

1h

Fresh Manna by Steven Conway

An Unexpected Turn

40m

Final Events

06 Praying for the Latter Rain

1h 14m

Sound Doctrine