GYC Conference 2024: Wherever He Goes

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Learning How to Learn Faith

Tim B. Kwon

01 The Power of God

Father in heaven, Lord, we thank you so much for all the blessings that we've experienced at GYC so far.

And we know that you have more blessings stored for us.

So Lord, we pray that you will open our hearts to all the blessing that you have prepared for us.

And Lord, as we leave this place, as we leave Columbus in a couple days Lord may our hearts be full of Jesus and may our hearts be full of the gospel of Jesus Christ for all these things we prayed in the name of Jesus Christ amen.

Alright So the title of my first message is, Do You Know the Gospel?

My name is Tim Kwon and I am doing this for GYC, so I just wanted to let you know they need it for recording purposes.

But The title of my message this morning is, Do You Know the Gospel?

So if somebody came up to you and asks you, do you believe in the gospel?

I believe most of you will say, yes, I do believe in the gospel.

And if they were to ask you then, what is the gospel?

Do you have a clear definition of what the gospel is?

You probably do know that the word gospel means good news, but what is that good news according to the Bible?

Believe in Jesus, yes, that's probably part of it.

Being saved, yes, that's probably part of it.

What's that news that should bring us joy and so on and so forth?

So I want to start off with an illustration here.

And So we'll call this 0, and we'll call that speaker 10.

And this is basically your spiritual maturity or your spiritual level.

And let's say that if you're at a 0, you're basically the devil.

You're the devil, you're just so evil, and there's no hope for you or whatever.

If you're at a 10, let's say that people look at you and they ask you, are you Jesus?

So you're at that level of spiritual maturity.

So I want you to reflect on where you are from 0 to a 10.

And mentally, I want you to point, actually let's do it actually physically.

I want you to point where you are from 0 to 10 and I won't look at you.

So I'm assuming most of you are probably somewhere around here, and hopefully you're close to here.

But let's say you're trying to move this object.

And you want to move this object, which is here on a 1, and you want to move this to here, to a 7.

What do you need in order to move this thing from here to there?

In order to move this from here, I need that energy, I need that force to lift this up, and I want to move it over here, using the force, using the energy, to move it towards that direction.

It's the same thing spiritually speaking.

If we want to go from here, from a 1, to a 3, to a 5, to a 7, to a 9, what we need is power.

So what is that power according to scriptures?

Please open your Bibles or your Bible apps to Romans chapter 1.

I'll have most of the Bible verses on the screen, but I want to start off with actually looking at the scriptures itself.

Romans chapter 1, and we are looking at verse 16.

It says here, for I am not ashamed of the what?

Well Paul says, for it is the what of God?

So Paul is saying, if we want to grow in Christ, if we want to be saved, what we need is the power of God.

If we want to be justified, if we want to be sanctified, if we want to be glorified, what we need is the power of God, and what is the power of God according to Paul?

That is the power of God that will justify us, that will help us to be sanctified, that will help us to grow, that will be glorified.

If we want any of that to happen, we need the power of God, which is again, the what?

So, then the follow up question to that is, if we know that the power of God is the gospel of Jesus Christ, then what is the gospel of Jesus Christ?

Since we're on Paul, let's stay with Paul.

1 Corinthians is the New Testament, right after Romans.

So Paul says here, it's on the screen as well, it says, moreover, brothers and sisters, he says, I declare to you the gospel, okay?

I've already preached this to you, which also you received and which you stand, by which you are saved if you hold fast that word which I preached to you unless you believed in vain.

So he says, for I delivered to you, first of all, that which I also received.

So he says, I received the gospel and I delivered that to you and what is the content of that gospel according to Paul here.

Verse 3 he says that Christ did what for our sins?

So content of the gospel number 1 Christ died for our sins that's content number 1 of the gospel but he doesn't end there okay he goes on Christ died for our sins according to scriptures verse 4 and that he was what he was buried and that what's the next thing And that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures and verse 5, and that he was what?

Before we get to glorified, it doesn't mention glorified here, verse 5.

He was seen, and we're gonna get to that later on.

So Paul is summarizing the gospel in 4 contents.

He was buried, and then after being buried, what happened?

He was seen, He was seen by Cephas, He was seen by the disciples, and He was seen by many others, and finally He says that He was seen by me.

So again, let's summarize what we learned thus far.

If we want to go from a 0, if we want to move and grow in spirituality, if we want to grow in Jesus Christ, what we need is the power of God.

02 Science of Learning

Gracious Father in heaven, Lord, I just want to thank you for each and every person that is here.

We ask for your Holy Spirit to guide our minds and thoughts.

I know it may be a lot to swallow, a lot to think about, but Lord, we pray that you will give us a clarity of thought.

And at the end of it all, we just don't want to obtain more knowledge for intellect.

We want the message to transform our lives.

For this is our prayer in the name of Jesus Christ.

So we've ended with the quote on desire of ages, page 83.

And it tells us to spend that thoughtful time each day contemplating the life and the death of Christ and letting the imagination grasp each scene.

Now I'm going to shift gears here and you've noticed that the title of my whole seminar is Learning How to Learn Faith and what I'm going to get into now is very different from what we've been looking at, but we're gonna be combining these 2 things as we go forward.

So I get a lot of what I'm going to share from this book and actually many other books.

But this is considered to be 1 of the best books on learning.

So if you're trying to learn, this is not learning about the Bible necessarily, learning period.

So if you're a student, and you feel like you wanna be a better student, this is 1 of the best resources out there.

That's a book called Make It Sticks, The Science of Successful Learning by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel.

They're considered to be 1 of the best scholars on the science of learning.

And there's very little disagreement on what's being shared in this book.

You know, these are not hotly debated topics.

These are very well-established strategies for learning.

And I want to share with you some of the things that we can better learn and internalize the things that we're learning, not just in this seminar, but throughout GYC and in your devotional practices and when you're listening to sermons and so on and so forth.

So I'm going to list here a few strategies for learning.

So there's rereading, which is reviewing, underlining.

These are, by the way, these are random lists.

These may or may not be good or effective ways of learning.

But let me list them here for you first of all.

So re-reading, underlining, third, blocked practice.

You have to study science, you have to study math, and you have to study English, for example.

Blocked practice is where you're studying math for like 3 hours, you study science for 3 hours, and then you study English for 3 hours.

Mass practice, which comes after that, is basically cramming, cramming for an exam.

I've done that, all of us have done that, mass practice.

So you're just reading, you're not giving much thought to it, but you're just reading.

So I want you to look at that 5 list and categorize them between which are effective ways of learning and ineffective ways of learning.

I want you to categorize into what's an effective way of learning, what's an ineffective way.

Look at that list and categorize in your mind.

Just 2 categories, effective and ineffective.

If you've categorized, turn to the person next to you and share with the person next to you which you thought was actually an effective way of learning.

Which of those 5 were effective ways of learning?

Why do you think those are effective ways of learning?

So by the way, I teach a couple of classes at Andrews and I have this presentation before on the first day of class for each class that I do.

I didn't do it for my classes a couple years back.

It really does help because the effectiveness of the learning in classes has really skyrocketed since I've applied the things that I've learned in these books.

The reason that I've got into the science of learning was I'm doing a PhD at Andrews, and 1 of the things that I have to do for my PhD is there's something called a comprehensive exam.

And what they do is I have to take 5 exams over 5 weeks, and each exam is like 8 hours.

They give me about 80, 90 books that I have to read.

I'm being tested over those 80, 90 books.

I wanted to see what's the most effective way of not only being able to pass the test, but I want to be able to retain the things that I've learned.

So I've been, I've done a lot of research into the effective ways of learning.

I'm not a neuroscientist by any means, so I don't pretend to be so, but I'm trying to apply these to how we can learn about scriptures and grow in Jesus Christ.

So, of these 5, who do you think re-reading is an effective way of learning?

We have 1 brother here who loves cramming.

Passive reading, who thinks passive reading is an effective way of learning?

None of these are effective ways of learning.

This is not just 1 learning psychologist or 1 neuroscientist that's coming up with this.

This has been shown again and again that all of these methods are not necessarily effective ways of learning.

So let's think about rereading for a second.

Why is rereading not necessarily effective?

Let's say this is a textbook, this is a Bible that I'm holding in my hand.

Let's say you're reading a textbook and then you re-read.

What happens when you're re-reading is that your mind sees what is familiar, because you've read it before.

Your mind sees what is familiar and it mistakes thinking that it actually understands it because it actually is familiar with it.

But being familiar and knowing that topic are 2 different things.

And it does help to some degree, but it's not considered to be time efficient in terms of learning.

And I'm not saying that you shouldn't reread the Bible.

We should always read the Bible and reread it.

But in terms of rereading in and of itself will not be an effective way of learning because you'll think that you know it when you actually don't.

And students who do reread, they feel pretty confident in their knowledge.

So when you test a student who rereads, their expectation and their actual, their results, there's quite a gap there.

Underlining is not necessarily effective and so on and so forth.

So what are known to be effective ways of learning.

So if you've taken a picture of these 5, you can scrap that picture.

So let's go to get to things that are actually effective.

And I'm not going to be talking about all 5, But I will be spending quite a lot of time on retrieval practice.

03 Laying the Glory in the Dust

Gracious Father in heaven, Lord, we thank you so, so, so, so much for this GYC session, Lord.

We thank you for each and every person that is here and in the different seminars, Lord.

We know that you have a blessing in store for each and every 1 of us, and Lord, we want to receive that full blessing in its fullness, Lord.

So Lord, be with us, open our minds, open our thoughts, and may we be able to see Jesus a little more clearly today as a result of having been here.

All these things we pray in Jesus' name, amen.

So, today I'm not gonna be showing Bible verses on the screen.

Please open your Bibles to 1 Thessalonians chapter 1.

And before I start reading First Thessalonians, First Thessalonians is actually 1 of the first letters that Paul writes, actually 1 of the first New Testament books to be ever written.

And Thessalonica is a very unique city for Paul because if you read Acts chapter 17 it talks about what Paul does in Thessalonica and Berea actually 16 and 17 talks about what Paul does in Thessalonica and Berea and Paul was in Thessalonica for a very short time.

How many Sabbaths, does anybody remember how many Sabbaths did Paul preach while he was in Thessalonica?

So he was there for 3 weeks, 3 or 4 weeks at the most.

And while he was there in Thessalonica for such a short time, he was actually able to start a church.

I don't know if there are any church planters out there.

I don't know if I could start a church in 4 weeks.

But Paul starts a church in Thessalonica in 4 weeks, and he has to leave, he's kicked out of town, and now he's kind of doing a warranty service, if you will, by writing letters to the church.

And this is what he writes in chapter 1, verse 5.

He says, for our gospel, we've been talking about the gospel, so for our gospel did not come to you in word only.

Yes, the content of the gospel is absolutely important, true, but it did not come in word only, but also in what?

In power and in the Holy Spirit and in much assurance as you know what kind of men we were among you for your sake.

So Paul is saying, yes, I did preach the content of the gospel and it's a beautiful message and that was awesome.

You love the message, that's true, but that really was not enough for me to start a church there.

You heard the message, but not only that, you actually saw what kind of people we were.

And that was in some sense even more important than just hearing the message itself.

And before we read Romans chapter 6, I want to do a recap 1 more time.

According to Paul, what's the gospel again?

Okay, so let's come to Romans chapter 6 with that in mind.

Okay, whenever Paul says, do you not know, He's saying something that he knows that the church knows and he wants to emphasize it.

Do you not know that as many of us were baptized into Christ Jesus, were baptized into his death?

Therefore we were buried with him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in the newness of life.

Verse 5, for if we have been united together in the likeness of his death, certainly we also shall be in the likeness of his resurrection.

So yesterday we've learned about knowing the gospel, and that's important.

We need to know the content of the gospel, We need to know the spirit of the gospel.

But more important than just knowing the gospel, we have to think about the gospel.

Because having some knowledge somewhere in your brain, that's good, but that's not gonna actually affect you.

What actually affects us is what we think about.

So that's why we talked about spending that thoughtful hour each day on the life of Jesus Christ.

But when I started the practice of thinking about the life, particularly the death of Jesus Christ on a daily basis, when I read the Bible, when I read Bible stories, when I hear sermons, it touches me in a very different way.

And I've preached at this church, I was invited to this church twice over 2 years, and each time I went, I cried, and the pastor's wife's a friend of mine, and she asked me, hey, Tim, are you high on estrogen by any chance?

What happened is that I've been dwelling on the life of Christ and what it does is the stories of the Bible really touches me in a very deep way.

So it's important to know the content of the gospel.

It's important to think about the gospel.

But what Paul is saying here, it's not important, it's not enough to know the content of the gospel, something that happened 2, 000 years ago, to know that Jesus died first.

Yes, know that Jesus died, that's absolutely great.

Yes, think about the death of Jesus Christ, but here he's saying, yes, think about Jesus, look upon Jesus on the cross, but after that what we should be doing is we should be going up on the cross to die with Jesus, to join with Jesus on the cross.

That's what we should be doing on a daily basis.

He doesn't say, I think about Jesus daily.

He thinks about the crucifixion of Jesus daily, but not only that, he joins with Jesus daily on the cross, and when he does that, he's really, truly, truly dead, and what happens?

When he joins in the death of Jesus Christ, he joins in the burial of Jesus Christ, and by doing so, he joins with Jesus Christ in his what?

If we die with Jesus, we are resurrected with Jesus.

He says here, we are pressed, hard pressed on every side, yet not crushed, we are perplexed but not in despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed.

He says, always caring about in the body, in my body.

The death or the dying of the Lord Jesus.

When we die with Jesus, when I am crucified with Christ, what is the result of that?

That the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our body.

So when we die with Christ and we are buried with Christ, we are then risen with Christ, and then what happens?