Creekside Church, Sunday, October 16, 2022
What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Weaker?!
Locations & Times
Creekside Church
660 Conservation Dr, Waterloo, ON N2J 3Z4, Canada
Sunday 9:00 AM
Sunday 10:30 AM
Christians should be students of culture so we can engage and influence and speak into it
When you become a follower of Jesus you are no longer of the world but you are for the world.
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Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
**series is not an endorsement of the book, it’s premises, or it’s conclusions
---
Peanut Butter Allergies Illustration
Simple example of a good intention and a bad idea
You can observe problems and come up with the wrong solutions
---
The authors suggest that western culture has increasingly become a culture of safetyism
"When children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay “emotionally safe” while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient. The end result may be similar to what happened when we tried to keep kids safe from exposure to peanuts: a widespread backfiring effect in which the “cure” turns out to be a primary cause of the disease." – The Coddling of the American Mind
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Cultural Myth #1
What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
The great untruth of fragility.
---
Anti-fragile
“Some things benefit from shocks. They thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors. Depriving complex systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them. They will weaken, die, or blow up.” - Anti-Fragile, Nassim Taleb
"When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent. MENG TZU, fourth century BCE1, Chinese Confucian Philosopher
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Where have you experienced that you are anti-fragile?
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If humans are anti-fragile, imagine what that looks like when we're infused with the Spirit of God?
2 Corinthians 4:6-18
6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.
7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.
8 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. 10 We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. 12 So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.
13 It is written: “I believed; therefore I have spoken.” Since we have that same spirit of[c] faith, we also believe and therefore speak, 14 because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself. 15 All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.
16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. 18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
---
When you get us altogether – the church – well we’re about as anti-fragile a people group who have ever existed.
Early church father Tertullian said it this way, “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.”
---
What’s your mentality?
Are your political views fragile?
Is your self worth fragile?
Is your faith fragile?
Or can they grow stronger when faced with stress, uncertainty, volatility?
Coddling of the Canadian Christian
Introduce some Chaos Monkeys
Where are you avoiding hard things?
Challenge your mind
Challenge your body
---
Taleb opens his book (Anti-fragile) with a poetic image. He notes that wind extinguishes a candle but energizes a fire. He advises us not to be like candles: “You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.”
When you become a follower of Jesus you are no longer of the world but you are for the world.
---
Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
**series is not an endorsement of the book, it’s premises, or it’s conclusions
---
Peanut Butter Allergies Illustration
Simple example of a good intention and a bad idea
You can observe problems and come up with the wrong solutions
---
The authors suggest that western culture has increasingly become a culture of safetyism
"When children are raised in a culture of safetyism, which teaches them to stay “emotionally safe” while protecting them from every imaginable danger, it may set up a feedback loop: kids become more fragile and less resilient, which signals to adults that they need more protection, which then makes them even more fragile and less resilient. The end result may be similar to what happened when we tried to keep kids safe from exposure to peanuts: a widespread backfiring effect in which the “cure” turns out to be a primary cause of the disease." – The Coddling of the American Mind
---
Cultural Myth #1
What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker.
The great untruth of fragility.
---
Anti-fragile
“Some things benefit from shocks. They thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors. Depriving complex systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them. They will weaken, die, or blow up.” - Anti-Fragile, Nassim Taleb
"When heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on any man, it will exercise his mind with suffering, subject his sinews and bones to hard work, expose his body to hunger, put him to poverty, place obstacles in the paths of his deeds, so as to stimulate his mind, harden his nature, and improve wherever he is incompetent. MENG TZU, fourth century BCE1, Chinese Confucian Philosopher
---
Where have you experienced that you are anti-fragile?
---
If humans are anti-fragile, imagine what that looks like when we're infused with the Spirit of God?
2 Corinthians 4:6-18
6 For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.
7 But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us.
8 We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. 10 We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 11 For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. 12 So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you.
13 It is written: “I believed; therefore I have spoken.” Since we have that same spirit of[c] faith, we also believe and therefore speak, 14 because we know that the one who raised the Lord Jesus from the dead will also raise us with Jesus and present us with you to himself. 15 All this is for your benefit, so that the grace that is reaching more and more people may cause thanksgiving to overflow to the glory of God.
16 Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. 17 For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. 18 So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.
---
When you get us altogether – the church – well we’re about as anti-fragile a people group who have ever existed.
Early church father Tertullian said it this way, “The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.”
---
What’s your mentality?
Are your political views fragile?
Is your self worth fragile?
Is your faith fragile?
Or can they grow stronger when faced with stress, uncertainty, volatility?
Coddling of the Canadian Christian
Introduce some Chaos Monkeys
Where are you avoiding hard things?
Challenge your mind
Challenge your body
---
Taleb opens his book (Anti-fragile) with a poetic image. He notes that wind extinguishes a candle but energizes a fire. He advises us not to be like candles: “You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.”