Dennis R. Wiles
First Baptist Arlington
June 8, 2025
Pentecost Sunday
Flourishing Together
First Baptist Arlington
2025 – 2030
2025: Flourishing Together: Rooted in Christ
1 Corinthians 2:6-16 (Gospel Guide: Matthew)
SUMMER 2025: You Are Here!
June 1 – August 2, 2025
Psalm 1
Humanity’s Glory
Psalm 8
I’m going to use the vocabulary test from Children’s Camp – so we can put the word on the screen first – and then add the definition when I call for it:
ALAMAK - Expressing surprise, shock, dismay, or outrage.
SPELT - A species of wheat, once much cultivated in Europe and the Middle East until superseded by common wheat but now again being grown for its different agronomic and nutritional properties.
PROCRASTIBAKING - The act of baking or cooking as a way to avoid doing something else, usually tasks that are less enjoyable.
GENERATION ALPHA - A term used to describe the generation of people born between the early 2010s and the mid 2020s and following Generation Z, noted in particular as the first generation to be born in the era of widespread use of online communications.
Theme for 2025: Flourishing Together: Rooted in Christ
Theme for Summer 2025: You Are Here!
HUMAN FLOURISHING: One of the domains currently being researched in the Global Flourishing Study is Meaning and Purpose.
Two Questions from Human Flourishing Measure (One Slide)
-Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile?
-I understand my purpose in life.
“WHAT EMINENT PEOPLE HAVE SAID ABOUT THE MEANING OF LIFE” – Journal of Humanistic Psychology:
1. Life is primarily to be enjoyed and experienced. Enjoy the moment and the journey. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cary Grant, Janis Joplin, and Sinclair Lewis
2. We live to express compassion to others, to love, to serve. Albert Einstein, Mohandas Gandhi, and the Dalai Lama
3. Life is unknowable, a mystery. Albert Camus, Bob Dylan, and Stephen Hawking
4. Life has no meaning. Joseph Conrad, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Bertrand Russell, Jean Paul Sartre, and Clarence Darrow-Darrow compared life to a ship that is "tossed by every wave and by every wind; a ship headed to no port and no harbor, with no rudder, no compass, no pilot, simply floating for a time, then lost in the waves."
5. We are to worship God and prepare for the afterlife. Desmond Tutu, Billy Graham, Martin Luther King Jr., and Mother Teresa
6. Life is a struggle. Charles Dickens, Benjamin Disraeli, and Jonathan Swift
7. We are to create our own meaning of life. Carl Sagan, Simone DeBeauvoir, and Carl Jung
8. Life is a joke. Albert Camus, Charlie Chaplin, Lou Reed, and Oscar Wilde - Charlie Chaplin described life as "a tragedy when seen in close-up but a comedy in the long shot." The rock star Lou Reed said, "Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony."
Where can human beings find ultimate meaning?
PSALM 8 – “This psalm is an unsurpassed example of what a hymn should be, celebrating as it does the glory and grace of God, rehearsing who He is and what He has done, and relating us and our world to Him; all with a masterly economy of words, and in a spirit of mingled joy and awe.”
-Derek Kidner,
MAJESTY AND GLORY – Everything starts with God!
MANKIND – Created in God’s image, crowned with God’s glory, and chosen as God’s co-rulers!