Why Easy Christianity Leaves You Spiritually Weak | Weight by Ps. Richard Rubi

2 Corinthians 4, we'll go there.

In the Word of God, I read an excellent book, uh, a while back that was, uh, recommended to me.

It's called Range, and the book is filled with, uh, illustrations.

Pastor Gutierrez preached, uh, some thoughts out of that book, uh, in the Prescott Conference.

And there's an interesting story there that caught my attention, and it comes from the Air Force Academy.

You know, uh, to, to be in the Air Force, you gotta be smart, but to get to the Academy, you really have to be sharp.

They have a very rigorous, uh, uh, program in educating every one of these cadets, and it requires them to take three years of high math.

And so the article or the chapter was talking about how some economists decided to look into, uh, the results of the, of the professors and the students over, I think, a 10-year period.

And it was very, very interesting because they said that they noticed a pattern, and the pattern was that there were certain professors who taught first year, uh, calculus, um, and, uh, they were, they were very successful.

Those, those classes these professors taught, these, uh, first-year students did very, very well.

And, uh, and, uh, you know, it looked like these, these professors are doing a great job.

But as they began to look over, they studied the professors and then they followed the performance of the various students as they moved on to their second or third year of calculus, and they found out something, and that is that the students who scored so well with these professors in the first year began to struggle in the second and the third years.

And the reason why is they were scoring high in the first year because their professors weren't challenging them.

And math is something that is foundational.

If you mess up on the foundation, they're never going to get it the second or the third year.

Listen to the quote from the book.

It says, "The economists suggested that the professors who caused short-term struggle but long-term gains were facilitating, quote, 'deep learning' by making connections." What they found out is the professors who were harder on their students in the first year prepared them to excel in later years.

The professors who decided that they were gonna go easy on them the first year actually harmed them and frustrated their development.

Now, we're gonna hear a lot about glory this week, and I want to examine it, but I'm gonna look at it perhaps in a different way that you may expect, um, because too often when you talk about the glory of God, it's tur- it's mystical.

It's some sort of strength.

You know, it's just gonna come down and we're gonna sing the right song and bam, the glory of God's gonna come down or we're gonna all be hit with an emotion.

I want you to consider what Paul, I believe, was speaking about.

I want to preach on weight this morning, W-E-I-G-H-T, the one you don't want, amen.

[laughs] And the one that if you hang out at the donut line, you might get.

[laughs]