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Open up your bibles to Ephesians 3. We've been doing a series in the
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book of Ephesians for a series of months, just going verse by verse through this book.
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And what Paul's been doing is he's been unpacking this idea, this massive idea that there's all of these mysterions. And so what he's been doing is kind of upending the way that we think about the world. We kind of function in our lives. We go to the grocery store and we continue going to school or in our marriages or going to work or whatever. And what Paul has been saying is, there's the things that you see, but then there's the world behind the world that you see. There's a react. Things are not as they seem. And so you might be looking at your circumstance going, man, I'm getting sick, or people are dying, or I don't have hope.
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But he's going, man, pull back the veil. Because behind the veil, there's a mysterion. There's something else in this world. And so he says in chapter one, there's a God, and he made everything, and he is sovereign over all things. And he takes things and he plants them exactly where he wants them, and he's in control, and he made everything, and he created you so that you would be in relationship with him. So he's saying, you look at the world around you, but things are not as they seem. You think that you get preached at that Caesar is Lord. That's the context of Ephesians, is they're living in a world where Caesar is Lord.
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Here's how I think about life, here's what I think about sexuality, here's what I think about money. And he's saying, let me just break you open. All of you living in your post enlightenment Canadian culture on the west coast have a particular worldview. So you come in here, everyone's got a worldview. It's constructed through all kinds of different things. Your parents, your media, your education. And you come in here thinking things about the world, thinking things about God and yourselves. And Ephesians is coming at you, and it's gonna challenge you to question everything.
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Do you know why you value what you value? Does it even make sense? Is it consistent? If your story is we grew evolutionarily out of primordial slime, then why morality? All right, that's gonna be a contradiction as you go down the road of why you would ever come up with a moral schema that would say, this is good and this is Bad, because,
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I mean, I was listening to the
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radio the other day to a couple
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sportscasters, and they were talking about how
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Mark McGuire shouldn't be going into the hall of Fame.
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Cause he was juiced up.
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Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens, Lance Armstrong, he's corrupt, he's a con artist, he cheated. These guys should not go into the hall of Fame at all. Two seconds earlier, they were talking about how you can just sleep with anybody you want. Who cares? Ha ha. It's funny. It doesn't matter what you do with your life. And I'm going, how did you move from this to all of a sudden your Mother Teresa, all of a sudden Lance Armstrong's immoral coming out of what story? I mean, if the evolutionary story's true, who cares if you juice up? That's the way you advance. That's the story.
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That's the way you leave the weaker behind is you get pump, you move forward and you hit 300 home runs in a year. Whatever. Like, Barry Bond's head is like this. Like, ah, that guy's not juiced up. So, I mean, who cares if there is no God? If that's your story, then why are you contradicting yourself by saying it's okay to do this, but you can't do this? Like you're the moral arbiters all of a sudden of our culture. You're gonna lay down, the police, say, this is right, this is wrong. There is none of that. You need a God to tell you that, to put that in your heart, to put that in your mind, as Paul says in Ephesians 2, to give you a conscience.
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So what is your worldview? Paul's gonna come at your worldview and go, man, you live in a culture
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that is preaching to you about your values, about your life, about sexuality, about
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money, about your identity, about all of these things. And the struggle is, man, how do I get connected to Jesus? How do I get Jesus worldview on
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this and this and this?
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How do I give my life to Christ? Walk in power, walk in a new identity in the midst of a world like this?
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It's got all these pressures for me to conform all the time.
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And we don't think Canadian culture has this.
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We think, oh, you know, the Roman Empire. Boy, that was really. It's just as hard today. We got just as many. We're preaching priorities and values all the time. Who's got a five dollar bill that they could lend me? Who's got a 5 Rosemary Heights? Don't worry about it. You're good.
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Who's got a five dollar bill here? The one with the kid playing hockey.
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All right, first one, nothing.
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All right, all right, all right. So in the ancient world. In the ancient world, what they would
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do is they'd say, if I want to preach a message, then I'm gonna
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put it on my currency. Because everybody handles the currency. These are our priorities, these are our worldviews. Caesar is Lord, Caesar's the Son of God, Caesar's the Savior. It's all in the coinage. So Canadian culture, on your $5 bill,
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the one with the kid playing hockey, on the back, there's small print. The top is French, so no one reads that. But then at the bottom it says, the winters of my childhood were long, long seasons.
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We lived in three the school, the
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church and the skating rink. But our real life was on the skating.
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What this is on our currency. All right, so we're preaching a message. Here's our priorities. You got education, God, hockey. Woo. Let's do that. All right. And this is Canadian culture at its finest.
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This is what we preach. This is what you're supposed to value. This is what you're supposed to live by. This is your identity. What our real life, our real identity is on the skating rink.
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Thank you, by the way.
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This is the world we live in. And Paul writes the book of Ephesians
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to people like us and goes, man,
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how do you break out of that world?
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How do you make Jesus, Lord, in the midst of a culture going, you gotta make hockey, Lord. You gotta make this, Lord, you gotta make that, Lord. And Paul is writing this and saying, I gotta give you a new vision on reality. And he says, what I hold onto is the gospel. Look at verse the end of verse six, he says through the gospel. What he's saying is this story that
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we talk about every week, that God,
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I mean, it's the Christmas story, it's the peace story. It's that God became a human being because we were in the garden. He made us to walk with him and serve Him. But that wasn't enough for us.
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We wanted to be him. And so Satan came at us and said, if you know good and evil, you will be like God. And we said, that's what we want. I'm not happy serving him, walking with him, living under him. I want to be him. And so we went at that and we tried to get that power, but we don't have the ability to actually take that authority. So we started killing each other. That's Genesis 4.
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We started killing our brother. We started deceiving one another. We started cheating, we started lying. We started the kind of perversion that is in your life that you don't tell anybody about. And we started down that road, and God said, what am I gonna do? And that's what this whole season of Advent is about. It means Advent means the coming of the arrival of Jesus the first time, and then we look forward to the second time. To bring what? To bring last week hope, this week, peace. He comes to do that.
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We substituted ourself for God in the garden. So on the cross, God had to come and substitute himself for us to reverse what we had done. And Paul's going, that's the gospel. That he died for our sin, that he rose again from the dead, that he can give us new life. That's the thing that I hold onto, that gives me purpose in everything. It breathes hope into the world that I'm living in. I mean, he's sitting in prison, he's
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bleeding out for this. And he's saying, all I have is the gospel. All I have is this message, man. Without this, I just die and go nowhere. I talked to a family in our church this week whose brother just got diagnosed with leukemia.
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He's got a young 30s, a wife, two kids.
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The gospel goes, that's not the end of that story. That there will come a day when everything sad will come untrue, that the earth will be filled with the glory of God. That there will come a day will be no more tears and no more death and no more sickness and no more pain, because there'll be a new creation.
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That's what the gospel just breathes hope into your life. And Paul's going, this is all I have. This is all I hold onto, is this message, this gospel. Even when I'm in prison, this is all I've got. And they put him in prison for
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the power of that message.
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He's saying, this is my value. This is my priority.
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The message of Jesus.
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And so he says, picking up in
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verse 6, this is what we're looking at.
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He says, this mystery. Now he's gonna unpack a series of mysteries. In this book, he uses the word mystery six times. We already talked about one a couple weeks ago, that the mystery, the purpose, the reason for your existence is Jesus is a person. He said it already, the mystery of Christ. So you're looking for your purpose, your reason for existence. Why am I here? It's not a religion. It's not some obligation.
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It's not 10 steps to a better. It's not Value systems. It's none of that. The reason you exist is Jesus. The reason you were built was to connect into Jesus. That's the logos, the logic. According to John, chapter one, the reason, the mysterion for your very existence. He's already said, is Jesus, that you would connect into Jesus.
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And now he's saying, let me give
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you a second mystery.
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He's gonna go on to explain more mysteries. He's gonna get into chapter five and he's gonna say, marriage is a mystery. And we all go,
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yes, yes, Paul,
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that is a mystery. How the other night my wife, all right, my baby, my 18 month old
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baby started puking in the night, all
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right, how my wife just picked up that baby all night long, let that thing just puke all over her. That's a mystery to me, all right, because I got one smell of that thing, I was out. Oh my goodness. But she just take that all night. I love you, baby, I love you. I'm like, that's a mystery. All right. Paul's going, it's a mystery how this is going to work.
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And so when he talks About Mysteries,
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verse 6, this mystery, remember what he means. He doesn't mean it's a mystery that's still covered up. A mystery to Paul in that culture was a mystery that is now made known. It's an open secret. It means Christianity is no longer vague, it's no longer gray, it's no longer like, oh, I don't really know about it. It's open, it's revealed. And so you can't stand before God one day, as Paul says in Romans chapter one, he has made himself known and you can never stand before him one day and say, I didn't know, I didn't have a clue. Paul says in Romans 1, men will be without excuse because in creation, God was constantly preaching to us.
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He says, he was saying, I'm here, I exist. I built it into the stars, I built it into the DNA. I put it in your value system that would always get you to come to me. That you could never stand before me and say, well, I didn't know. What do you mean you didn't know? I put it in how you think. I gave you rationale so you would never say, nobody times nothing equals everything is the way to logically exist. I gave you chance after chance to follow the evidence of this thing to land on me. Your issue, if you're here and you don't believe in God, Paul would say from Romans 1, your issue is not the lack of evidence, it's the suppression of it.
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He would tell you that God has been preaching to you, wooing you and calling you your whole life, through everything around you, through the way he designed you. And what you have done is you've pushed it down. And he would say to you, why? Because you want to live life how you want to live it. You want to think how you think. Live like you live. Do what you do with no accountability. But one day, Paul says in Romans 1, you will stand before me and give an account, and I will not let you off the hook with. You never gave me enough evidence.
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You took the evidence and you skewed it. And he goes on in Romans chapter one to say, the problem is you're just following your own desires down the path. And the worst thing that God can do would be to say to you, just go. You can do whatever you want. He says he gave them over to what they wanted to do. Sometimes the worst thing God can do is give you exactly what you want.
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And that's a point of judgment where he says, you know what? If you're gonna go down that road, fine.
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It's like my kids. My kids would eat ice cream for
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every meal for the next 30 years if I let them.
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And it would be judgment of me to allow them to do that as a father.
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Yeah, go ahead. Ice cream, sure. And that's what God at some point, will allow.
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If we continue down that road, continue to suppress, continue to walk away, continue to deny, sooner or later, as we're
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gonna read you let that go and you'll become your worst enemy. And so he says, there's a mystery, and this is it. 6 this mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body. Now, you and I are kind of like, yeah, whatever, like, all right, we get it because, you know, most of us are Gentiles here. But recognize what he's saying. He's saying, don't lose the potency of this.
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That. Remember, Gentiles, they didn't have the Ten
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Commandments, they didn't have Sinai, they didn't
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have all of these things. They weren't in relationship with God. And so what he's doing is he's answering the question, how does a Gentile like me and you become part of the people of God? How is that possible? Historically, Right? We're not, you know, by flesh children of Abraham. So how are we going to possibly become the people of God? And he's saying, listen, the mystery is
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that the Gentiles, they're fellow heirs.
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Now Members of the same body. We're one Jew and Gentile, which to a Jew, that was crazy. There was. In their world, there was Jews and there was Gentiles and Gentiles were dirty. Gentiles were people where they would pray
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and they thank God I'm not a Gentile. Every morning, Jesus, we gotta just pray, thank God I'm not one of those dirty Gentiles. Does that make you feel nice? And what he's saying is, you know, all that history, if you accept Jesus, guess what? You're the same family now, right? Picture this. I mean, a couple weeks ago, there was a war between Israel and Palestine, right? Years and years and years of hating each other. When I was in Israel, we were on a bus. And, I mean, we had a Jewish guide, right? So I'm spending all week with this Jewish guide, right? His name's Abraham, of course. And so we're hanging out, me and
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Avi, and talking about theology and God
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and this and that all the time. And then we got on this bus and we had to go into Palestine because Bethlehem is in Palestine. And so we pull up to the wall, and he's like, I can't go any further. I'm like, what's up, Abby? Where you going? And he's like, I can't go any further.
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He had to get off the bus
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and a Palestinian guide had to get on the bus and lead us through
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because these guys hate each.
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What Paul is saying is, listen, you
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know all that pain, you know all that hate that you have for one another, if you've believed in Jesus, if the gospel is true, guess what? You're brothers now, so figure it out. Now we go, hey. Ha, ha. Paul. Aha. All you Jews, all you Gentiles, you gotta figure your stuff out.
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What about this room? There's unforgiveness in this room. Some of you, you got people that you don't like. You got people who wronged you years ago. Somebody cut you down. Somebody made fun of you. That Christmas dinner went bad a few years back and you haven't talked to them since. You know what Paul's saying. You're fellow heirs.
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How can you hold that against them? You got people that you don't like and you refuse to forgive them. To this day, you don't understand the gospel. And that's in this room. And there are people who don't like you.
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Crazy.
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I know.
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You know, when Jesus is teaching on
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the Sermon on the Mount, he says some crazy stuff. And if I just said something that he says in the Sermon on the Mount and didn't cite him, you would think it was heretical. So let me cite him. When he finishes teaching the Lord's Prayer, he says this. If you do not forgive the sin
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of the people around you, your heavenly
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Father will not forgive your sin. That's Jesus.
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There are people in this room that are harboring things that somebody did to them, and you're not understanding that. You can't just move on with your relationship with God thinking that. That horizontal doesn't matter. You are fellow heirs. You are one body. This is a family. And what Paul is saying is, Jews and Gentiles are together. You, there's people you hate, there's people you don't like, there's people who wronged you.
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You can't go another day without going to them and reconciling. That's the power of the gospel.
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So when I entered church, I was 19 years old, and I went in and there was a youth group, and it was already set up. And I went in, and I wasn't like them. I was different.
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I didn't have any church culture.
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I didn't know anything about Jesus freak.
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I didn't know who Petra was.
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I'd never had Iwana bucks, all right? I never got badges and sons. I just didn't know what was going on. So I walk into this church culture and this youth group culture, and there
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was a guy, and he didn't like me.
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It still blows me away, but
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he didn't like me.
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And I was like, why doesn't he like me?
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Cause I didn't know the culture of the language. And so what started to happen is he just didn't like. And he would make fun of me, and he started to get this crew of guys, and they would just cut on me all the time. So then I started to put a crew together, all right?
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And this was like, youth group gang stuff, all right? So he had his gang, I had my gang. Me, another guy and
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I had started dating. And I think probably the girl, you know, my wife. And probably he didn't like that, all right? Because he probably liked her. And so it was me and this guy. And Aaron was in the gang, too. So there was the three of us,
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then there was them, all right?
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And there was this. I mean, we were just kind of going like this, and we didn't like each other. We make fun of each other. I mean, it was bad. It was getting bad. I mean, you know this.
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And then we went away to a retreat, and the guy got up and he preached the gospel and he preached about reconciliation. He said, we're going to do communion now. And some of you people sitting here, you got people that you don't like.
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You got people who don't like you, and they're even in this room right now. And you think that you're gonna come and partake of the body and the blood of Christ. You're a hypocrite. You have to either not partake or reconcile now.
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And I'm sitting there praying, the Holy Spirit's kind of doing his thing. I'm like, I hate this guy,
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but
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I gotta do this. Cause if I gotta partake of the body, I mean, Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, how can you leave your gift at the altar? And you go and you reconcile with your brother before you come back and try to do this vertical thing.
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How can you worship God when you have vertical relationships that are messed up? You can't.
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And so I'm just breathing that, all right? And I open my eyes and I go to leave the row, and Jamie's
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standing right there
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like, what's up, bro? No, I didn't say
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we hugged
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and wept.
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He cried.
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I didn't, but wept. And there was this reconciliation that happened, all right, as we went and partook
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of the body and the blood of Christ.
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That's the image. Paul's using your family, your one body. This is what it means to be the body of Christ. You're one family. Now, we're a church that we're meeting two separate campuses, but we're one family. We've got one budget, one leadership, one mission, one vision, right?
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That's where we're going.
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We're one family together. And you start. See, what begins to happen is Paul's
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saying, when you're a family together and you're on mission, then what you're doing is you're actually accomplishing the mission and you're looking forward versus looking at each other. Because if you start looking at each other and you're not on mission toward the enemy, if you're not at war towards Satan, sin and death. Here's what happens to the church. You get lazy and you start to look and kill one another. I love you. I love serving with you. I love this church. I love watching you guys connect to
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Jesus, serve one another, get in community
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groups, get into each other's life. That's an amazing thing. This is a family. We're building a family.
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I talk to pastors who are like, man, my church. There's people in My church, Who stand out in the parking lot and picket our church because of something that happened
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in a business meeting 10 years ago. It's amazing that people would become so off mission, not going towards Satan, sin and death to start and turn and divide and gossip and slander one another.
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If you find yourself doing that in life, you gotta ask yourself, am I doing anything for the Kingdom of Christ?
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Am I going after Satan, sin and death? Who's the true enemy? Or have I become lazy, incompetent, irrelevant to that mission? So I'm trying to fill time with this.
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Why did you look at me like that? Why'd he say that? What do you think he meant by that? I don't know. You're going forward. You're in the battle. You're not going to turn to your brother and kill him. And Paul's going. You're a family. I want you guys to connect to Jesus beyond connecting to Jesus. My heart is that you would connect with one another.
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That's what we're doing here this time. All right?
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It's not meant for village church. It's not meant for you to show up here, sing a couple songs, listen to a message, get your coat on. As the last song is, get out to the car, jump in your car, leave. Because you got stuff to do. That's not what this is. This is a family. Meaning take 20 minutes, all right? Go out there and meet some people, shake some hands. Maybe not this time of year.
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Cause you might get sick, but say
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hello, get into their life, talk to strangers, ask them what they're doing. How can I hook them into a community group? Can you come to my community? What's your life about? Tell stories, have a laugh, build relationships. This is what the body saying. You're one body. You're members of a family. That's what this is. And some of you are like, I can't do that. I'm not an extrovert.
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That's an excuse. Ask Jesus to make you an extrovert for 30 minutes. I'm telling you, think how hard it would have been for Jews to accept Gentiles. They're dirty, they're nasty, they don't have a history. They don't know the Ten Commandments. I mean, I can't hang out with them.
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Do you know how hard it would have been them to just. All right, let's do this. Let's invite them to our community group. But he's a Gentile. I know, I know, I know. But he believes in Jesus. So let's go he's dirty. I know, I know.
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Let's go, let's meet, let's talk, let's build a relationship.
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I can't imagine now that I have three daughters, what my father in law saw the first time he saw me
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wanting to date his daughter.
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Oh, you have to understand, I showed
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up to the door, I had a
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backwards hat on, baggy pants, all right, A chain to my wallet, as if anyone was stealing my wallet. A cigarette hanging out of my mouth, and it's like I'm at the front door, what's up? I'm here to take her.
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You're here to what?
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You know what he saw, Fellow heir. He went, man, I'm not seeing your past, seeing where this could go. You're part of my family now and we're going to take this slow, but let's see where this goes because you're. How do we function like that? A family recognizing we're one through the gospel. This is the beauty of what he's saying. I was meeting with a guy last week in the office and he said, man, my mom had me when she was a teenager. She's gone, my dad's useless, abandoned me. I got these structures of family in my life.
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I don't know how I'm ever gonna function in a way to be a husband, to be a father. I just got no construct for that. How's that ever gonna happen?
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I mean, I'm reading Deuteronomy and Deuteronomy's going, you got the sins of the father that are gonna go down three, four generations. And man, I'm telling you, that's true. I watch people and those sins of the father and the failures of the father and the mother, they trickle down three, four generations. And I watch that constantly in life. And I mean, I did young adult ministry for six years and people come
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in with me and they.
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My 22 year old has walked away from Jesus. Why?
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Let's unpack your life for the last 20 years. What do you do on Sundays? Well, we have soccer, dance, baseball. So we would really try to get to church. Maybe one out of four. Okay, let's stop. So your life is so busy that
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the day where you're the people of God, gather to worship Jesus, proclaim the gospel, connect and build relationships that last for a lifetime. You're playing soccer and you're wondering why your kid walked away from Jesus. That's collateral damage for your sin. You taught them that, that playing that sport is more important than walking, loving and serving the God of the universe. And now you're in my wondering what to do.
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That's the sin of the father, of the mother getting passed down.
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So this guy's like, man, what do I do with that? Is there any hope for that?
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Yeah, this is the beauty of the gospel. Jesus can come in, he gives you
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new life, he makes you an heir. And when he makes you an heir, guess what happens?
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You get a new father and you
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can break that cycle and you get
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a new life in Jesus, that makes you a new person and you no longer have to feel the effects of the sins. I've told you about my father. He was a mess, couldn't keep a job. Didn't even tell me he was dying of cancer.
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So a 15 year old kid has to deal with the death of his father standing over his casket, hey, dad, what about a phone call? Is that going to affect me for the rest of my life? Could have.
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But I became an heir. I got a new identity. Everything shifted. My main identity, my identity as a priority now is not in that world. Jesus, you get a new birthday. It's the beauty of the gospel. He's saying you get an inheritance, you get to become an heir and get all these riches of stuff you didn't deserve.
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You become an heir of God, you
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get inheritance from God, like my family. I'm not getting a lot of money from inheritance, all right? I don't have a rich family, all right? So I'm not banking on that. This guy walked up to me a few weeks ago and he's like, hey, I just want to let you know I put you in my will. I'm like, sorry. He's like, I know you don't know me. I put you in my will. I'm like, are you sick? He's like, no, no. I'm like, shoo.
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Are you sure? He goes, no, no.
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I might have another 30 years, but I want to let you know that you're in there. I don't deserve it. I don't even know you.
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That's what he's saying. He's saying you become an heir of
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God by his grace, not because you earned it. He gave that to you. That's his will for you.
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That's what he was doing. Now how do we actually walk? How do we actually function in a way where we can live out what God has for us? It's part of this mystery. He says this. Look at verse five by the Spirit, verse seven, he says, which was given me by the working of his power. You know what he's saying? See, some of you have read Christianity like I read the Bible. And it tells me to do this, this, this, this, and this. And it crushes me every time. And it will, because it sets you up and says, here's the life you're supposed to live.
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But by the way, you don't have any power to actually live that out on your own. What Paul is saying is, this is not. That's not Christianity.
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Christianity says, yeah, you're supposed to live
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this thing to the glory of God.
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But let me tell you how you
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get the power to actually do that.
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It's by his spirit. It's by his spirit that you get born again. It's by his spirit that you get new life. It's by his spirit that he empowers you. So you gotta walk in the spirit, live in the spirit. He's gonna say in chapter five, don't quench the spirit. That's how you actually have power to live any of this stuff out. Because he's gonna say some crazy stuff he's gonna say in chapter five.
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Husbands, love your wives. As Christ loved the church. Do you know how difficult that is? Do you have any. I mean, as Christ loved the church, I gotta lay my life down for my wife. What about. Man, that's hard. Guys. Fellas.
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Is that hard?
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Don't say it out loud.
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It's hard to love your wife sometimes. When she sets that trap and you walk into it and bam. And you're like, what? Just. How did I get here? You set me up with two options. I chose one. And now this. Everything's falling apart. Our whole weekend's done.
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That's entrapment. It's hard to love my wife out of that trap. Ladies. It's hard when he's not pulling his weight, when he's not doing what you've asked him to do, when he can't see that thing that's right there, he can't see it. It's hard to love him out of that. It's hard to love him when he just can't read your mind. Jerk. How do you possibly love somebody?
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You know how. See, here's what Paul's saying. Think of the way economics works. It's hard to be generous unless I have money in the bank, unless I've put deposits in the bank. It's hard to be generous. Normal, average, everyday marriage counseling would tell you so. Here's what you have to do. You gotta deposit.
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You gotta deposit. You gotta deposit because they're gonna love you out of what you've put into them. Here's what Paul's saying. The craziness of the Gospel is. Listen.
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Yes, if you're functioning totally according to the world, you got no spirit, you got no transformation, you got no power. Then all you're gonna really be able to do is love your spouse as much as they've poured into you. But when they stop pouring into you, that dries up.
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What he's saying in Romans 5 is, through the Spirit, the love of God gets poured into your life in such a way that even if they're not loving you, even if they're not making deposits, you're able to love them. Not out of this as a resource, but what God's doing in your life,
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that through you, you're experiencing the love of Christ, and you're able to love people out of that love versus only loving them on what they've been giving you. This is the secret that Paul is talking about. You want transformation, you want life change through the Holy Spirit, through the power of the gospel.
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He says, gentiles, this is how you
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become the people of God. We oftentimes forget how powerful. This is the question of how you and I would ever become the people of God. We've got no 10 Commandments. We got nothing. How would we ever become the people of God? I was sitting with a Muslim lady last week, and she was asking this question. I know about Jesus. He's a prophet, but I don't know how I would ever get God as a father.
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How would I ever become part of the people of God? I'm a Muslim.
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Here's what he's saying. They become members of the same body and partakers of the promise. That's the language. That's Abraham language. The promise was given to Abraham.
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God came to Abraham, remember, when he
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had no kids, and he says, I'm gonna give you descendants as much as the sand and the sea, the stars in the sky.
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And Abraham and his wife, who are 100 years old without any kids, laugh at God. And then God goes, what did you just do to me?
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Okay, you're gonna name your first son Isaac, which means.
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He laughs. Why? Cause I want before you at all
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times how dumb you are,
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man. If I'm God, like, just check this for a second. Let's hypothetically say that God exists.
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Like, let's just pretend
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if God actually exists and he shows up to you and goes, hey, I'm gonna make you pregnant. Don't laugh, even if you're a guy. That just dawned on me right there. And I may Regret that one later. Cause that might not make any sense going forward. But God can do. The point is this. He can do whatever he wants.
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He can do whatever he wants. He can make whomever he wants pregnant. And so when he comes to Sarah, he's like, I'm. But I'm 100 years old. He. Oh, yeah, that's what you're naming him. So it's in front of you all the time.
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Here's who I am and here's how silly you are not to trust me.
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How do we become the people of God? How do we partake in this promise? How do we ever get into the covenant people? How do we ever do it?
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He's saying it's through the gospel. And then we become partakers of the promise in Christ. We become part of the people of God. That's how we ever get born again. That's how we ever have new life. And some of you,
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You're in an
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angst right now about this entire question. You're investigating Christianity. You don't know what to do with it. I had a meeting the other day with a guy and he said, look, my past, I've done this. I was in jail for this. I was addicted to this. I was this. I was this.
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And now I'm here and I'm asking questions. And I know here's where this is going for me. I know that I'm gonna end up believing in Jesus. I feel it. I'm already on that road. I just. There was a university kid who, back in the day, he wrote to C.S. lewis, who was an atheist, and he said, I'm really struggling because my friends are talking to me about Jesus and the Bible and my whole Worldview's unraveling.
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And Dr. Lewis, I know you used to be an atheist, so what should
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I do about it?
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And CS Lewis wrote him back three lines in a letter. He says, I think you are already in the meshes of the net. The Holy Spirit is after you. I doubt you will get away. Right? That's the reality of this thing.
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Now
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you're going through convulsions. You're starting to wonder, do I believe this? Do I give my life to. What do I do with this? Here's the big question. After all this, you got the power of the Holy Spirit. You got the identity shift. Now you're an heir. Some of you are asking this question. I want to spend the rest of our time on it.
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You're asking the question that you ask at 2 o' clock in the morning when you're staring at your ceiling and you're saying, my life is a mess. I feel no power. Heaven is brass. I don't really believe I'm saved. I don't even believe I'm filled with the spirit. Everything that guy just talked about is not me.
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I have no power. I'm not transformed. I don't understand this identity shift. So then you start to doubt it.
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And Jesus answered this very question. So go over in your Bibles to Mark chapter three. I wanna spend the last few minutes of our time in Mark chapter three, where Jesus answered this question.
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What do you do with yourself when
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you start to go down that road? I don't know if I'm forgiven. I don't know if I have power. I don't know if I have the Holy Spirit. Because here's how Jesus uses the question. He talks about whether somebody has committed what he calls a blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. We'll get to that in a second.
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But basically, the point of the question is this. It would get raised even if we
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didn't have Mark chapter three.
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And it's this.
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It's that, could I do something so wicked could I do?
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So could I live a life so wicked and sinful that I would fall outside the forgiveness of divine love? Is there anything that I could do? And you know, you've all asked it, is there anything that I have done? Is there anything I could do that makes me fall outside that God wouldn't forgive me of it?
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This is what Jesus is addressing in Mark, chapter 3, verse 22.
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And the scribes who came down from
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Jerusalem were saying, he's possessed by Beelzebub, that was Satan. And by the prince of demons, he casts out the demons.
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And he called them to him and
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he said to them in parables, how can Satan cast out Satan?
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If a kingdom is divided against itself,
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that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. Here's the power of unity.
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If you divide, if you gossip, if you mess, if you. If you pull down each other, behind each other's back, even the Church, if there's disunity, you're going to be weak, you're going to be weaker because of it. A house needs to be together, pushing forward, pulling toward a vision, being on mission. Don't divide. If Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but is coming to an end. But no one can enter a strong man's house and plunder his goods unless he first Binds the strong man, then
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indeed he may plunder his house.
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Here's what he's saying. I've come. This is him. He's the thief who comes into a house that all of us are in. We are hostages. All right, this is the image. Satan has us as hostages. He's coming in in his ministry and he's healing people and setting people free.
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And he's saying, I'm coming in and I'm binding up the strongman who has power over you. He convinces you of guilt and sin and shame, and he's got you totally hostage.
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And I come in and I tie him up and I defeat him and I set you free. That's the image Jesus is using. Free from the guilt, free from the shame. And then he says this. Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man. And whatever blasphemes they utter, look at how willing God is to forgive all sins.
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All right. That thing you did that nobody knows about. All right. That woman you hit years ago. That greed, that theft.
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Look at how willing God is to forgive all sins of men. He's gonna forgive them.
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God is that willing, that loving, that pining after peace, he would forgive.
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But then he says this. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin. Here's what he's saying. Verse 28 is about. Scholars tell us it's more about external sin. I did this. I did this. I did this.
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Verse 29. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. The reason it's not forgiven is because it's an inward posture toward Christ, in your heart, toward Christ and the work of the Spirit where they start to
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convict you and you deny and you
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deny and you deny and you deny so many times that you actually go over a cliff and you come to a place where your heart becomes irrevocably hard, where you will never come, to a place again in your life where you will want to repent.
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See, if your heart is a heart of repentance, God will forgive it.
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What he's saying here is you're gonna become the kind of person who will never wanna repent and never want forgiveness. So if you're someone who's feeling that man, I don't wanna miss out on what God's had for me. You haven't committed this sin. This sin is done. When we continuously deny, deny.
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It's the job of the Holy Spirit
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to convict us of sin.
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That's what he does. John 16. He will convict you of sin, righteousness and judgment in the Christian life. This is normal. A couple years ago, I was at my house. The doorbell rang. I went downstairs. There was a guy standing there sweating buckets.
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It was the middle of the summer.
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He was hot. He was trying to sell me something.
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I can't remember what he's trying to sell me.
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And he said, can I have a glass of water? My wife was sleeping. My two kids were sleeping. I pictured him coming in and slaying me.
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So I said, no.
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He said, what? I said, no. He's like, I'm thirsty. I'm like, I can see that, but no. So I shut my door and I went upstairs and I went to the sink, and I started messing around the sink. And then I started. The Lord started going, hey, remember that Bible study we did last night? Yeah. When was that?
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You remember Matthew 25?
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There was sheep and there was goats.
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Remember the goats, how they acted? Yeah. When people were thirsty for a drink of water, they didn't give it to them.
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That's straight out of the Bible right there.
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I did that in my community group the night before. So I'm sitting there going, oh, yeah, good point.
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You're acting very goat like. Now the goats in Matthew 25, they go to hell. So now I'm going, okay. So I just start to tap. I get some ice. This is 10 minutes later. I walked around my whole neighborhood looking for that guy, right? I just walked around. Finally I found him.
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Like, hey, dude, here's some water.
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He's like, what?
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I'm like, take that.
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You keep the cup.
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Keep the cup.
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We're good.
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We're good. Awesome. Thanks, man.
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Okay, so that's the Holy Spirit convicting. He's saying, hey, don't act like a goat, act like a sheep. Serve people. They want water, give it to them. They want clothes, give it to them.
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That's the conviction of the spirit. What he's talking about here is a conviction that leads to life. It's a conviction that goes, listen, don't be so naive to think.
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Don't have your view of God be so sentimental that you think that you can just keep sinning and keep sinning, and I can go so far down this road that don't worry about it. One day I'll turn back around and this text is a warning to you. And it's saying, don't think that's true. Because one day you will go so far down the road that your heart will be irrevocably turned and the Holy
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Spirit will flee from you forever. And so in this moment, if you're feeling the angst, something's welling up inside of me to give my life to Jesus, to recommit my life to Christ, to be baptized.
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Whatever it is, man, don't put that off. Don't listen to those voices that give you a thousand excuses not to do that.
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Cause he's saying, be careful how much you toy with sin, how far down the road you think you could go before your heart just gets cold. And 10 years from now, I'll see you, and you won't even care. You won't ask the question about whether you've committed any blasphemy of the Holy Spirit, because you won't care. Here's the image Jesus is giving, and I'll leave you with it. One of the great gods of our culture is, we want to do this ourself. We want to earn this ourself. Because we are told continuously from every TV channel and billboard and whatever that
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you got it in you. You can earn it. You can save yourself. You're the man.
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You're the woman. You know what this story says? There's a thief that needs to come in who's not you tie up the strong man that has you hostage and save you. You need Jesus. Not as friend, not as leader, as savior.
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And if you don't, come to a
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place where you recognize yourself in deep need of Jesus. I got three little girls. So I watch a lot of Disney movies, all right?
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We watch Tangled.
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All right? Rapunzel movie, she's up in a tower. She needs a prince outside of herself
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to come to save her, to slay the woman who's got her hostage to die himself, rise again in order to free Rapunzel from this tower. Now Disney is moving away from all things princesses. They're done with it. Feminist critique is like, forget this. Damsels in distress, men saving women, co dependency. We don't want any part of that. And I get that as a father of three girls, I'm trying to teach
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them that stuff all the time.
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You don't take your identity from a man. So I get that.
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But I think there's a deeper reason. I think our culture hates the story of somebody outside of ourself needing to come in and save us. Our culture hates the story of a man who has to come bind up the strongman in order to save us from ourself. And if you don't buy into that story about a savior who needs to come and save you, what this story is saying is you will live the rest of your life and you will never have forgiveness because you will never repent and you will never ask him to save you. But if you are the kind of person who would say, I need a savior man, he is ready and willing to forgive all the sin of men. So let me pray to that end, Father. It is my deep, honest prayer that even in a moment like this,
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that
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your spirit would work in such a way to free people who have a hundred excuses why not to give their life to you, why not to respond to the pulling of the Spirit on their heart and their mind, why they would resist dedicating their life to you,
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rededicating their life to you, standing up in front of the world and being baptized. Whatever they're working through right now, and they keep pushing it off and denying and denying and denying.
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Let this story work as a warning, as a convicting warning that you gave them this moment, that even in this moment you might change them on the spot. That they would relate to you as the Savior that you are, humble themself and receive you as Lord, as Savior, as treasure. And those of us who already know you, that we would walk in humility and power, we would live out what it means to be an heir. Because to be an heir and to join this family, there's a spirit driven responsibility to reflect you out into the world in godliness and holiness and to never settle and to never be content with where we are in this moment. Don't let us, those of us who are sitting here totally content with our Christian life, just shake us up. Don't let us be comfortable. And as we worship you, as we give of our resources so that this mission can go forward, we can reach more people in our city for Jesus as we sing that this moment would be sacred, they would mean something and you would change us, conform us to, into the image of your son.