Week 8: The Importance of Looking Foolish
I. The Importance of Looking Foolish
A. Avoiding the Herd Mentality
1. If you’re going to defy the odds, face your fears, reframe your problems, take a risk, and seize a God-ordained opportunity, you have to be willing to look foolish in the world’s eyes. Because, no matter how it might look, doing God’s will is never foolish.
B. The Fear of Foolishness
1. Faith involves a willingness to look foolish
a. Noah looked foolish building an ark in the desert. (Genesis 5:32 – 9:29)
b. Sarah looked foolish buying maternity clothes at ninety. (Genesis 11:29 – 23:1)
c. The Israelites looked foolish marching around Jericho blowing trumpets. (Joshua 5:13 – 6:27)
d. David looked foolish attacking Goliath with a slingshot. (1 Samuel 17:1 – 50)
e. Benaiah looked foolish chasing a lion.
f. The wise men looked foolish following yonder star. (Matthew 2:1 – 12)
g. Peter looked foolish stepping out of the boat in the middle of the lake. (Matthew 14:22 – 33)
h. Jesus looked foolish hanging half-naked on the cross. (Matthew 27 – 28, Mark 15 – 16, Luke 22 -24, John 19 – 20)
2. The greatest breakthroughs, miracles, and turning points in Scripture can be traced back to someone who was willing to look foolish.
a. 1 Corinthians 1:27
C. Divergent Spirituality
1. Divergent thinking is intellectual originality
2. Have you read the Bible lately? Lots of wild and wacky stuff! At face value, God says and does lots of things that seem awfully weird. He tells Ezekiel to cook his meals over dung for three hundred and ninety days. What’s that about? God uses a dumb donkey to speak to Balaam. That’s different. God tells Hosea to marry a prostitute. Huh? And what about speaking in tongues on the Day of Pentecost? That’s downright strange.
3. God loves variety. He speaks and acts in divergent ways. ….Normality is overrated.
4. Think of it this way. We are called to conform to Christ. And Christ was a nonconformist. So conforming to Christ results in nonconformity.
5. There never has been and never will be anyone like you. And that isn’t a testament to you. It’s a testament to the God who created you. Diversity is a celebration of originality.
a. Maturity doesn’t equal conformity.
b. One dimension of spiritual growth is simply coming to terms with who we are and who we’re not.
D. Play the Fool
1. Gordon MacKenzie story
2. Our inner fool may be shackled and caged by a world made to suppress it. But Jesus came to free the fool.
3. I’m afraid our version of Christlikeness is way too civilized and sanitized. I wonder if we’ve turned a blind eye to the zaniness in the Gospels.
a. Jesus touched lepers, healed on the Sabbath, defended adulterers, befriended prostitutes, washed the feet of his disciples, threw temple tantrums, talked with Samaritans, partied with tax collectors, and regularly offended the Pharirazzi.
II. Neoteny
A. Neos
1. Neos… means “new, fresh, or youthful.” Neoteny is “the retention of youthful qualities by adults.”
B. Example of Neoteny
1. Neoteny is more than retaining a youthful appearance, although that is often part of it. Neoteny is the retention of those wonderful qualities that we associate with youth: curiosity, playfulness, eagerness, fearlessness, warmth, energy. Unlike those defeated by time and age, our geezers have remained much like our geeks–open, willing to take risks, hungry for knowledge and experience, courageous, eager to see what the new day brings. (from Geeks and Geezers by Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas)
2. Matthew 18:3
a. Kids live in a world of limitless possibilities. They dream of growing up to become lion chasers. But we allow the enemy to steal, kill, and destroy those childlike dreams. The key to recapturing those dreams is becoming like little children.
C. God-Conscious
1. Matthew 18:4
a. The humility of children is disarming, isn’t it? There is no pride or prejudice. There are no inhibitions or hidden agendas. Undiluted humility.
b. The word “humble” comes from the Greek word “tapeinoo”, which in its strongest form, means “to humiliate.”
2. Let me hit the rewind button and take you all the way back to life in the Garden of Eden before the fall of man. It was a nudist colony. Adam and Eve wore their birthday suits all day, every day. And there was no shame. But something happened the split second Adam and Eve stepped outside God’s guidelines and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil: ”At that moment their eyes were opened, and they suddenly felt shame at their nakedness.” (Genesis 3:7)
a. Before the fall, there were no inhibitions in Eden. But the moment Adam and Eve sinned, they became self-conscious. In other words, self-consciousness isn’t just a curse. It is part of The Curse.
b. Now fast-forward all the way to the last chapter of the book of Revelation. Not only will we receive glorified bodies on the flipside of the space-time continuum, but we’ll also receive glorified senses.
c. I don’t think there will be any inhibitions in heaven. We’ll be far too enraptured with God to waste a single moment thinking about ourselves.
3. Now think of spiritual maturity as a continuum. On one side is God-consciousness and on the other side is self-consciousness. To become like Christ is to become less self-conscious and more God-conscious. The end result is the crucifixion of ungodly inhibitions that keep us from chasing lions.
a. Ephesians 5:18
i. Wine is the wrong way to lose inhibition. The right way to being filled with the Holy Spirit.
III. If You’re Not Willing to Look Foolish, You’re Foolish
A. David’s Dance
1. 2 Samuel 6:16
a. When you get excited about God, don’t expect everybody to get excited about your excitement. Here’s why. When the Holy Spirit turns up the heat underneath you it disrupts the status quo. Some people will be inspired by what God is doing in your life. Others will be convicted. And they will mask their personal conviction by finding something to criticize. Nine times out of ten, criticism is a defense mechanism. We criticize in others what we don’t like about ourselves.
2. 2 Samuel 6:20
a. I’m sure David was frustrated. It is the greatest day of his life, and his wife takes some of the joy out of it by criticizing him. But David sticks to his guns.
3. 2 Samuel 6:21 – 22
a. Another translation says it this way: ”I am willing to act like a fool in order to show my joy in the Lord, Yes, and I am willing to look even more foolish than this.” (NLT)
b. Part of spiritual maturity is caring less and less about what people think about you and more and more about what God thinks about you.
c. I think David gives us a picture of pure worship. Worship is disrobing. It is taking off those things outside our relationship with Christ that we find our identity and security in. It is a reminder that our royal robes are like “filthy rags.” It’s not about what we can do for God. It’s about what God has done for us. And that understanding produces the greatest freedom in the world: having nothing to prove.
B. Uncivilized
1. The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused Him of being a bore–on the contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him “meek and mild,” and recommended Him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.
2. John 2:15
a. This incident revealed a dimension of Jesus’ personality that they hadn’t noticed before: ”Then his disciples remembered this prophecy from the Scriptures, ‘Passion for God’s house burns within me.’” (John 2:17)
b. Christ followers ought to be the most passionate people on the planet. To be like Jesus is to be consumed with passion. The word enthusiasm comes from two Greek words, “en” and “Theos”, which together mean “in God.” The more we get into God, the more passionate we become.
c. Lion chasers aren’t afraid of conflict. They aren’t afraid of risking their reputation by chasing snakes out of the temple. And they aren’t afraid of risking their lives chasing a lion into a pit. They often look foolish while in the act. It almost seems like they have a death wish. But lion chasers have a life wish. They live a life to the fullest because they are willing to look foolish.
* This FOCUS Universtiy Ministry Bible Study is based on Mark Batterson’s book In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day. Direct quotes are initalics above.
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