Kyle Dingus – Audience of One
Today we listen to Kyle talk about what an audience of one is. Below is an excerpt from today’s talk.
https://www.fourthavenue.church/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/100823WorshipWEB-1.mp3
Excerpt from Audience of One
Good morning, loved ones. It is so good to be with you all. I just want to echo what Nick said. Welcome, any visitors. Thank you for being here. And to echo what Gary said, we are super excited for Erin Owens joining us and our team. We think she’s going to be a great gift to this church. She’s already downstairs helping out. So we’re really happy about her being here as well. Before I get into this sermon, I just want to start with a prayer over what’s going on in our world right now. There’s a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff, a lot of fear happening in the Middle East and everywhere. So let’s give that over to God.
Lord, we come before you today and I mean, I can’t even imagine what it’s like to have omniscience on days like today. And how your heart is so heavily burdened about all the stuff that’s going on and all the violence and people who are your own in your own image that are attacking each other. And Lord, we pray that there be peace. We pray that your peace reign over all of the world and where there are wars, we pray that those end. And we pray that your kingdom come here on earth as in heaven and heal our world. And Lord, we’re praying in Maranatha.
Lord, come quickly. Let me pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
Spiritual Excercise
One of the spiritual exercises that I have been going through through my spiritual direction training was praying through my earliest memories.
And one of the things that I noticed whenever I started doing that, especially my younger years, I noticed this weird trend of how I would make these very strange lies to my friends. And they were pretty elaborate.
For example, I lied to a bunch of my friends in elementary school that I bungee jumped down a volcano. And most of them believed me. because they’re in fifth grade. But I also, that same year, lied to my friends and said while I was riding my bike home from school one time, I started petting some deer that were running next to me.
I lied to my friends
That was, they ran close to me, but not close enough for me to pet them. And I also lied to a group of my friends that I was the starting quarterback on a fake football team in the same league that they were in. And most of them believed me, and then they got mad at me when they found out that wasn’t true, turns out. But as I reflect on things like this, I noticed this sort of ugly part of my heart as to why I was doing those things. It was because I was caring so deeply, and I would do whatever it took to get it, but about the approval of other people. I wanted it, I craved it more than anything. And I think our culture pumps out a lot of people like this.
Whether it’s like me and you, exaggerate a bunch of stories about yourself to impress people, or you do good things intentionally so other people will notice it, or maybe you do something that is unwise, or perhaps illegal just to get a few laughs, or how we take all the credit whenever we know that we don’t deserve it, or how we spend hours to look more and more attractive so we can look like the Photoshop Perfect People on Instagram, or how we spend so much time on social media trying to create this image or brand for ourselves, and we get deflated whenever we don’t get the amount of likes or followers that we want.
Approval Addiction
We gauge our worth based on that. The approval addiction is rampant in the human heart. There is such a hunger for people to find their worth in the approval of other people. And I would wager that everybody in this room has either struggled with this or is currently battling this on a daily basis. And to be clear, there is a human need to be loved, to feel worthwhile, to have approval and find approval in other people, that what I am and who I am, it matters, and that I’m significant. We all want to find and feel these things, but our problem is that we are looking for that approval in all the wrong places.
What I’m describing today is the forgotten vice of Vainglory. And Vainglory is probably one of the most powerful vices in my life. I would imagine that most of you in here have not heard of this word before. It’s kind of archaic, but I think we should kind of bring it back because Vainglory is the sin of our time. Breaking down the word Vaing, meaning false or fake, and glory meaning something good that has been revealed. So it is a fake, revealed goodness. As Rebecca DeYoung in Glittering Vices, she defines it, Vainglory is the excessive and disordered desire for recognition.
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