Change
- Ashland Church of Christ
- Jan 26
- 15 min read
Updated: Feb 10
Guest Pastor J Cook
January 26, 2025
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Transcribed by Turbo Scribe
This is Colonel Sanders, and our sales have been terrible for the last three months. I was wondering if you'd do me a favor. The Pope said, well, if it's possible, I'll do what I can.
He says, will you change the daily prayer from give us, Lord, our daily bread to give us, Lord, our daily chicken? Well, the Pope said, I'm sorry, but that's just inappropriate. I wouldn't want to change God's word at all. So a month goes past, and the sales didn't get any better, and so he receives another phone call.
Hello, Pope, this is Colonel Sanders. He said, for $50 million, I would like to ask you to change the daily prayer from give us, Lord, give us today our daily bread to give us today our daily chicken. He said, no, I'm afraid I still can't do it.
It's a generous offer. Three months, finally, the Colonel calls and says, this is my final offer. He says, if you'll change from give us this day our daily bread to give us this day our daily chicken, he says, I'll give the Vatican $100 million.
Well, the Pope said, let me think about it. The next day, he's standing in front of all these bishops, and he says, good news, I've got some bad news. They said, well, what's the good news? He says, the Kentucky Fried Chicken has offered to give the Vatican $100 million.
All the bishops are there just cheering and carrying on. One of them finally says, well, what's the bad news? He says, well, maybe we've lost the wonder of the camera. Some things shouldn't change, should they? But there are some things that inevitably will change, and the church needs to learn a lesson from them.
There are certain things that inevitably, with life, do change. Methods of the church many times have to change. But nonetheless, there are some things that remain certain, bedrock, that shouldn't ever change.
Our text today is a single verse. It's found for us in Isaiah 40, chapter verse 8. I'm going to ask you to memorize it today. It's simple, and you should be able to remember it, because it's not only a universal truth.
It's an eternal truth that we need to understand as a church body, collectively, together. It goes like this. It says, the grass withers, the flowers fade, but the Word of God stands forever.
Do you believe that? I mean, it says, again, the grass withers, the flowers fade, but the Word of God stands forever. Will you repeat after me? The grass withers. Hold on, hold on.
We've got some madness over here. It's not far off. Hold on there.
Let's try it again. The grass withers. The grass withers.
The flowers fade. The flowers fade. But the Word of God stands forever.
One more time. The grass withers. The grass withers.
The flowers fade. The flowers fade. But the Word of God stands forever.
Now, let's do it, collectively, together. The grass withers. The flowers fade.
But the Word of God stands forever. of Isaiah 40:8. I think that if I translate that to us, it says that there are certain earthly things, grass, flowers, seasons, they all change.
And it should be that way. That's healthy for them to change. The unfortunate thing is that through the centuries, as snails have faced many times, things do change.
And the church is resistant to change when it comes to methods. And it's unhealthy for us to remain in a state where we just refuse to, we want to be so rigid. We remember the good old days.
Was it Barbara Streisand? I'm sorry for quoting Barbara Streisand. But she said that what's too painful to remember, we simply choose to forget. The good old days, they were good.
I mean, I remember being here as a kid, and quite honestly, it was really a good experience for us. One of the best ones that we had in growing up. The Hatfields and McCoys, we've all heard of them.
I'd like you to reflect on the fact that they were, I believe, 30 years of actively being opposed to one another. Lots of people died as a result. It started off, it's been questionable back and forth what started it, but two families got to arguing over who owned the pig.
And they argued, and they killed one another. Even in the early 1900s, there were spats that kept on coming back up. But I'm telling you, the church itself faced a lot of change and a lot of, well, it changed, it really faced a lot of personal feuding between Jewish people and Gentiles.
Now, if you were a Gentile, that simply meant a couple things. It meant that you were either half Jewish, one of your parents was a Jew, or you had nothing to do with Jewish lineage whatsoever. Anybody that was outside of pure Jewish lineage was considered a Gentile, and they fought for 550 years.
Keep in mind, the Hatfields and McCoys that we've all heard about is somewhere around 30 years. These people hated one another. As a matter of fact, in some of their early teachings, you had the refusal to do not assist a Gentile woman in bearing a child and giving birth to a child, because she'd be bringing another Gentile into the world, so it would be better off for her to die than it would be for you to assist her in having a baby.
They often said that Gentiles were good for one thing, to fuel the flames of hell. Terrible hatred that went on. And almost instantaneously, the church was faced with an inevitable truth, and that is, some things just have to change.
It's healthy, and it's good. As a matter of fact, you're going to find out that in Galatians the third chapter, one of the earliest books in the New Testament, it says there is no longer Jew or Gentile. Can you imagine some of them that were raised from a very early age as infants, that nothing was like being a Jew, and nothing else mattered but being a Jew? He says, now there is no longer Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus, and now you belong to Christ.
You are the true children of Abraham. You are his heirs, and God has promised that Abraham belongs to you. Whether we like it or not.
It's been said that nobody likes change unless it's an infant with a dirty diaper. That's about the only thing that likes change. And I'm going to tell you that the inevitable part of this world that we live in is the fact that our world is constantly changing.
You cannot stop it. You can't say, gee, I just spit on myself here. Do you have an alpha or a yellow black spring coming through here? Oh, thank you.
I might need that idea. I just spit on myself. I'm surprised.
Did you see it? Oh, you're just trying to not embarrass me. There you go. You look at the passage of Scripture that says that our world is constantly Our original text, hey, there are certain things that change.
Grass, it changes and it withers away. Flowers, they fade and they go back to the earth. But there's one thing that stands forever.
God's Word does not change. The unfortunate thing is that for many denominations that are out there, it seems that they feel that they have no liberty. I spoke one time at a general thing at the Illinois College where they had several different denominations and I think I was their token conservative.
And the one denomination said God spoke through the Bible, but he's still speaking. And I think what they're using that to say is that he might have said something about something years ago, but he might have changed his mind and he's still speaking today. The truth is that God doesn't change his mind.
When it comes to moral codes, when it comes to ethics, when it comes to certain foundational things that the church needs to stand on, you cannot say that God is going to change. Look at our world for the last hundred years. I think it's hard for us to see, to mentally catch how different a world we are.
Think about that. No penicillin back then. No computers, no cell phones, no nothing like that.
The average life expectancy in the United States, 47 years old. Only 14% of the homes had a bathtub. 8% of the homes had a telephone.
There were 8,000 cars in the U.S. and only 144 miles of paved road. 144 miles of it. Most women only washed their hair once a month and they used borax or egg yolks for shampoo.
Two out of every ten U.S. adults could not read. There were about 230, get this, 230 reported murders in the entire United States. It's incredible, the world that was a hundred years ago that we face today.
We've allowed, unfortunately, Washington, D.C. and the politicians to determine moral code for us. The churches remain silent for way, way too long, and as a result of it, they don't take us seriously because we vacillate back and forth. We let ourselves be influenced by Washington, D.C. In my house is a thermostat.
That thermostat, you can turn it up, the heat goes up. You can turn it down, the heat goes down. Outside there's a thermometer.
As long as the weather goes up, it'll go up. As long as the weather goes down, it'll go down. You and I have to make a choice as a church whether we're going to be a thermostat or a thermometer.
We allow ourselves many times to be just a thermometer. Wherever the moral level is in our country and in our society, we allow that to affect us all over time. We need to be, in this world, a thermometer that makes the climate, morality, and everything to change.
The world is constantly changing. I read a thing from 1957 where someone was bemoaning the fact it said something along the lines of, it's so terrible how expensive things are. It's going to be before too long that we can't get our groceries for 20 bucks.
Good grief, we've come a long way, baby. Our world is changing. Whether you like it, whether I like it, it doesn't really make any difference.
We live in a culture and society that is different than the one that we were born and raised in. We need to face that. The church needs to face that.
The church's methods, point in line. We have to realize that church is not what it was when we were kids. I mean, is it safe to say that the church that you were, how many of you were raised here in Asheville Church of Christ? Is it the same as it was? Now let me ask you, look at what I was here.
I remember that you went to church on Sunday morning and Sunday night. You weren't a Christian, just ask my dad. You weren't a Christian if you didn't come on Sunday nights.
The church or the school systems always shut down everything on Wednesday. Why'd they change that? Because they wanted to accommodate the youth groups and the types of things that met during that period of time. Schools honored that.
They had church revival every spring and fall. I don't think I see too many anywhere anymore. And if you had one that was particularly successful, it went two weeks and it was called a protracted meeting.
How they found success was the host preacher and the preacher from somewhere else went out every day, went out and knocked on doors of complete strangers and invited them to come to the revival. Well let me ask you, if two complete strangers came walking up to your house and knocked on the door, how well do you think they should be received? Not well. Not well at all? People came and listened to that.
I remember it was here and you were the first ones that led by moral decline. There was a lady that actually came up here and stood there and turned around and talked to the people and she was wearing a pantsuit. A pantsuit.
You would have thought that she was a pole dancer from a strip club. They were so angry that she would come and do something like that. I remember the first time that I reacted to one of our elders and he had on shorts and a pair of sandals and I thought, let him just think right.
There's something not right. Look at their worship style. I mean you've got such a free worship style here.
And look at what it was when we were teaching. You know, I see some of them raising hands. I think that's great.
When I first saw it, it wasn't so great. It took an adjustment for me. We came from a church environment that did not do that.
The only time you raised your hands was when the deacons were passing the offering plate and you weren't giving anything so they stuck a gun in your ass and put your hands up. That was it. I remember thinking, are they trying to be seen? The Bible even tells us that we lift up our holy hands to Him.
That was a change. It was a big change to us. Worship style.
Not just the music but the raising of hands. The translation of the Bible. We were limited in our options.
We had King James Version. That was it. Now, years later when I got to college, there was no American Standard that came through Pew.
We had semi-school warm-ups where people would walk forward. It was their birthday. They had a little plastic church and people put money.
There's Jesus now in that building. Communion was different. You know, today, at First Christian Work, it's a very faithful church.
It honestly is. But there's so many things that this next generation does that every now and then, I know I'm just an old fogey. I know that.
That it's so hard for me. Like right now, I went and I greeted the Jane at the church before we came over here. And they have now a raffle.
They're raffled to give away a black stone grill. And people coming in, come and buy it. Or they don't buy it to you.
They just give it to you. Give it to them. And before too long, they'll have a drawing and someone will win a black stone grill.
I'm not sure whether that came from Satan or Jesus. I'm not sure. It's so radically different.
It's a method whereby you get people to come and be a part of things. I've got to tell you, you look at the church from the very beginning, things change. In Acts, the second chapter, verse 46, it says, they worshiped together in the temple each day.
They had poems for the Lord's Supper and shared meals with great joy and generosity. Just a few years later, a short period of time, and we see where they've already adulterated that. It says, when you eat together, you're not really interested in the Lord's Supper.
For some of you hurry and eat your own meal without sharing with others. As a result, some are hungry while others get drunk. Don't you have your own homes for eating and drinking? Or do you really want to disgrace God's church and shame the Lord? What am I supposed to say? Do you want me to praise you? Well, I certainly will not praise you for this.
You realize that the early church probably first ensured that in the evening they didn't necessarily eat dinner. There were many slaves back then, and their slave owners weren't necessarily Christians, so they were forced to work most of the day, and after they did that, they had an opportunity to go to their church, and there they had another possibility. They didn't have to work, so they came early.
When they came early, they saw what was there at the potluck and decided that they were going to go ahead and eat and not wait for anybody. That's why it chastises them. It says, you're looking out for yourself and for your own belly.
You're not paying attention to the fact that you're part of a body of believers that has poor people here, too. The church was constantly having to fight those kinds of things. Communion was an issue in the church for a long period of time.
I remember at Figure Arkansas, my dad was preaching at Figure Arkansas. That was a time when the church was struggling with opinions as to whether or not we could have multiple cops or single cops. Single cops was what, of course, the elderly, more conservative people wanted to have, but there were a lot of young ones that were saying, hey, I don't want to go ahead and work for somebody else who's drunk.
And so the argument came to where one of the deacons decided to try something sly, and he bought communion instead. And the way that they did communion was they covered the emblems with a rag, or not a rag, but a mic of some kind, until it was time to go ahead and do it, and they'd pull it back. Can you imagine the surprise of some of the older folks when they pulled the blanket back? It was multiple cops.
One of the elders said nothing, went to pick it up, walked to the open window, and dropped it outside. And it might be Christian in our response to other people's change and differences. From the first century of church, I can tell you that the church's methods have always changed me.
Grass roots, did I mention that? Flowers, faith, earthly things, methods, they change. And you know what? Almost in every change, I personally am met with skepticism. I think, is that a method, or is that something that we shouldn't be changing? And most of the time, it's a method.
But most generally, I can tell you, it's my opinion as to the way that I was raised. The message never changes. That's my last point.
Listen to God's word again. Heaven and earth will disappear, but my words will never disappear. Malachi, the third chapter, verse six, the Lord does not change, so you, descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.
Hebrews, the thirteenth chapter, verse eight says, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. I don't know, but I think that the only reason that people hang on to so many memories so tightly and so long is because those memories are the only things that don't change, even when people do. There's some things that we can't afford to ever think about changing.
There's God's word that doesn't change. You can go ahead and try to change your opinion about it, but it still stands forever. You'll be judged by the principles and the establishment of the God of this place.
You know, the major denominations now, these days, over 75% of them don't teach that there is a hell anywhere. There's just heaven, no hell. I love that.
You know, I really do not like being encumbered by the idea of my personal responsibility keeping me so that I can go ahead and do whatever I want to because there's no hell, there's no punishment. God's word says that there is. As a matter of fact, it speaks more of that than it speaks of a lot of topics.
Four things the Bible says that do not come back. The spoken word, the spent arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity. A few years back, Jane and I went to our daughter and our son-in-law's, his family's summer place, I guess you might call it, up on Lake Michigan.
There's a beautiful little cabin. We spent about a week there. When we got home, it was important to me, we were going straight down through where, when we moved from Ashland, my dad moved to St. Joe, Michigan.
And so we went there and I, it was my hope that we could find the place where we lived. I remember the address was 300 Lake Court. We were able to find it.
And I remember pulling into that little drive, the house that I once thought was probably one of the neatest parts. It was a beautiful two-story thing, had a big bull porch on it, and you look over about 100 yards to the west, and you'd find that there was the stair steps going down probably 100, 150 feet. And right there was the Lake Michigan.
It was wonderful to look at, a beautiful thing to look at out on our property. It was beautiful except during the winter months when there was that snow effect, and it packed our once porch into nothing. I mean, it was totally closed up.
We had to tunnel our way out. But I remember the colors of everything of that house, how we appreciated it. We lived in a pretty dismal one in Ashland, but I remember it was so neat, so pretty, I can remember everything about that house.
And now I was facing not a white house, but there was the gray house with the white trim. It didn't have a porch like it once did. It had a balcony on the second floor so that people who were vacationers could go up there and overlook the lake there.
Nothing about that old house. And there was this part of me, if I'm honest, that wished it was like it was when I was a kid in the 80s. Even though that experience was not one of the biggest mistakes ever was leaving Ashland in the first place.
And when you did, you regretted it. It was not a successful ministry up there. The one thing that was good there, the one thing I remember, that house and how much at that point it's such a beautiful, serene place.
There are lots of things in life that quite sentimentally you hold on to and wish they'd never change. You're biting the edibles there. Things will change.
Methods in the church change. They have to. The church is to survive.
The word of God stands forever. Say it with me one more time. The grass lives.
Now that was about the most half-hearted thing I've ever heard in my life. Let's try it one more time. The grass lives.
The grass lives. The flowers play. The flowers play.
The word of God. The word of God. Stands forever.
Stands forever. I thank you, Father, that you've given us midroth that we have to build our faith on that does not change your teaching, your word, your promises, your son Jesus Christ, and hope exclusively for him. May we hold on dearly to those things that are so critical and so important that we can never change the church, nor would we want to if we were building on anything but Jesus Christ, the cornerstone.
So bless our lives today, Father. Help us to hold on as a church family, not to pass away.
' The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. '
Isaiah 40:8 https://www.bible.com/bible/59/ISA.40.8
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