John 10:19-21 (Godly Division)

The Shepherd's Church

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Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church Podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon. We pray that as we declare the

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Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who

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Christ is. May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you.

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If you were to ask me what one of the most misunderstood concepts in the Bible is, I could probably list a few of them, like eschatology, the study of the end times.

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That's pretty misunderstood, and not very many people agree on that, and baptism, topics like the

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Holy Spirit, and how He gives gifts and pours out His Spirit on the people. You can talk about things like creation.

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You know, is it a young earth? Is it an old earth? Is it, you know, middle earth, as Tolkien says?

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But today I want to talk about the topic of division, and division itself is actually a fairly divisive topic because I think it's entirely misunderstood in the church.

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For instance, as if we're not tired enough of hearing COVID examples, I promise they'll be over soon, the church has been very divided over how to respond to the pandemic.

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We've seen that. There are some churches that have entirely locked their doors and are just now, two years later, starting to reopen.

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There's churches that have had mask mandates that have maybe even, I don't know of a church that's done this, but I'm sure there's a church that's done this, that's even asked for a vaccine card before you come into the door.

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They've claimed that it's divisive to claim a religious exemption against the vaccine.

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If you have a sincerely held religious belief that you're not supposed to take it, maybe they've claimed that that is divisive, that it's divisive to defy government because government gets to tell us whether or not we can go to church, almost giving you the idea that you're a grandma killer if you actually attend worship.

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And then there's other churches like us, that remain to open the entire time, that don't mandate anything, we're not going to bind your conscience on those things, we want you to come and worship the

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Lord. When the government, we want to honor the government, we want to obey the government, but when the government tells us to do something that God has already told us to do, or to stop doing something that God has already told us to do, we obey

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God, not man. The Bible says that we're to gather, we're not to neglect the gathering.

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So we're not going to neglect the gathering, but that's a different response, that causes division. Now, one of the things that I want us to accomplish today is

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I want us to see that not all division is bad. That's going to be sort of the overarching point, is that not all division is bad, because I think that continuing to stay open is not divisive at all, it's biblical.

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We're supposed to meet, we're supposed to gather, we're supposed to worship, we're not supposed to compromise in God's Word.

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Again, we've had enough of the COVID examples, so they will be finished soon.

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I think the reason this topic is so misunderstood is because the topic is very complicated in the scriptures. It's very hard to understand, especially when

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I line up a couple passages in front of you. In Proverbs 6, 16 through 19, it says

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God hates the one who causes disunity in the community. It says that it's an abomination to cause division in the church.

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That's pretty clear. But then you go to Luke 12, 51, and it says, this is Jesus speaking, Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth?

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I tell you no, but rather division. So in Proverbs, it says that God hates division.

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Jesus says, I came to bring division, but yet it says that God loves Jesus. How does that all work together?

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How does God love Jesus if Jesus is doing the very thing that it says in the Old Testament that God hates?

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How does all of that work together? How do we reconcile it? How do we understand a passage like John 10, 19 through 21, which we'll be covering this week and next week, where it says that Jesus, as a result of his preaching, caused division among the crowd.

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How do we reconcile these things? Was Jesus in sin?

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For being divisive? Absolutely not. Does God hate the one who brings disunity in the community?

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The Bible says that very clearly. So there must be something underneath the surface of these passages that binds them together so that we can understand what

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God is saying. But again, the topic is complicated. And you'll see a myriad of different responses in the church where you'll see some who say all division is bad.

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Then you'll see some churches who are ready to fight over everything. All division is good.

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And then hopefully there's a biblical position that we can cling to in the end. Today, I want us to simply develop a theology of division.

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I want us to go sort of systematically through the Bible and talk about what division is, why division is, and then in the end, next week when we actually go through the text of John, we'll have a framework for how to view what

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Jesus is doing. So that's my goal. I was going to try to do all that in one week, but out of love for you,

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I decided to break it over two. I didn't want to cause division. Let's read the text together.

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This is John 10, 19 through 21. A division occurred again among the

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Jews because of these words. Many of them are saying he has a demon and is insane.

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Why do you listen to him? Others were saying these are not the sayings of one who is demon possessed.

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A demon cannot open the eyes of the blind, can he? This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray.

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Lord, it is clear all throughout your ministry on earth that you brought division. People had divided responses.

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Some loved you. Some hated you. Some followed you for sinful, fleshy reasons, like they wanted to see another miracle.

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They wanted more bread. They wanted someone to be healed.

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They wanted a demon to be cast out, but they didn't want you. Lord, there's all kinds of divided responses.

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You came to bring division to the world. You came so that father and son would be divided, so that mother and daughter would be divided, so the siblings and families would be divided.

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You came, Lord, to divide the world. Lord, I pray that we would understand why and how and that we could worship you.

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And even, Lord, I pray that we would be able to learn what role division might play for us today and how we could do that faithfully.

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In Christ's name, amen. Now, in order to build a theology, we have to go back to the beginning.

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It's sort of one of the things that I really enjoy doing is looking at a concept and tracing it from Genesis to Revelation, because I think you get a framework for how

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God views that. That's called biblical theology. So how does division begin?

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Division begins with God before sin. Now, that may be shocking to us because we think of division as sin.

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We think of something being divisive or breaking things apart as sin, but God actually employs division all throughout the narrative before sin actually comes into the world.

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For instance, God divides material reality from immaterial reality.

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It says, in the beginning, the world was formless and without void. That's voided material. That's some sort of matter that we don't understand today.

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So he took that and divided that, and he made material, both invisible material and visible material.

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He made immaterial and material. He divided these things. Why? So that he could bring life. When God divides things, he brings life.

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And he divided material from immaterial reality. He separated or divided the day from the night.

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He said, it says, in the beginning, God spoke and there was light because he commanded it. So God divided the light from the darkness.

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He divided the day from the night. He divided these things in two. Why? So that he could bring life. Without the sun and without light and without photosynthesis and all of these things, there is no life.

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God's division brings life. That's what we see all over the pages of the beginning of it.

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He divided sea and dry land, it says. He divided the earth and the sky, and it says that he set the sun to rule over the day and the moon to rule over the night.

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And he put all of the stars and astronomical phenomenon in the sky to rule over it, but he divided the sky from the earth.

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He made a division. He divided things. And he divided things because that was necessary for life.

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He even divided the days, it says, in the first day and in the second day and in the third day. God was very loving in the fact that he divided those days because he's setting up for us a paradigm where we understand how he even divided work from rest.

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How often do we misunderstand this? As Christians today, we say, the Sabbath doesn't apply to me.

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I'll mow my yard. I'll do whatever else. The Sabbath is not a part of the law.

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The Sabbath is a part of creation. The Sabbath exists still today for the people of God. Jesus divided from the

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Pharisees, speaking of division, because of their misunderstanding of the Sabbath, not because the Sabbath was abolished.

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The Sabbath still exists. What is the Sabbath? The Sabbath is a blessing to the people of God.

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For six days, God divided out a portion of time for us to work and for us to do our labors, for us to mow our yards and paint our walls and go pay our bills and to do all of the creaturely things that have to be done in this life.

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God divided out a space of time for us to do that, but by grace and grace alone, he gave us an entire day to worship him.

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He gave us an entire day to serve him. Now, that doesn't mean that we go home and we take a four -hour nap and eat

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Cheetos on the couch because we're not allowed to get up and walk to the refrigerator. That's not what the

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Sabbath means. You know, no one in this room has ever done that, right?

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The Sabbath is still work. It's a different kind of work. Jesus says, my father has been working from that day until now.

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It's not inactivity, because God is entirely active on the Sabbath. The Sabbath is a different kind of work.

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It's not physical work, it's spiritual work. It's not doing the things that we normally do. It's a day dedicated to worshiping

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God. You'll hear Christians say, well, you know, I just don't have time to make disciples. You were given an entire day.

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You know, I just haven't developed the habit of reading the Bible. Start on Sunday. That's the

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Lord's day. It's his day. Everything we do on his day is for him.

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And how often do we shortchange God? That's a whole different sermon. We give the

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Lord the Lord's hour. We don't give the Lord the Lord's day. It was for grace that he gave it to us.

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He divided it out for us as a gift. The point is that God brings life through division.

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He separated the animals from man, so that animals were now under human beings, and human beings would rule over animals.

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That division brought life to the world. He separated the garden from the other regions of the world. It says that God himself planted the garden, and God himself put the man inside of the garden, but it doesn't mean that the entire world was a garden.

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God divided it out. He gave a paradigm for his people, so that when they followed him and obeyed him, they would take the garden paradigm, and they would multiply it, and spread it, and make the whole world a garden.

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God divided out a region called the garden for a purpose to bring life to his people.

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He divided up the trees, so that not all trees were good. The tree of life, and then all the other trees that they could eat from, and then the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

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God is bringing division to the world. He separated man from woman, so that Y -chromosome is not

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X -chromosome. I know our culture's confused about that. God permanently divided male and female, so that they're different, they're equal, they're distinct.

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They have different roles, but they have an equality where they're both equally person, but yet different. He separated body and soul.

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He separated humanity apart from all of the other creatures, and he put them as the rulers and the vice regents over creation.

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To the human beings alone, he said, you shall be blessed, and fruitful, and multiply, and subdue, and rule, and have dominion.

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God divides to bring life, and to advance his good plan. But human beings don't divide that way.

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Human beings, because of sin, unleashed a kind of plague on the world. A division that doesn't bring life, a division that doesn't advance

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God's goodness, a division that cripples, and paralyzes, and wounds.

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With sin, division became irreversibly complicated, because now, it brings pain and devastation into the world that was never a part of the original design.

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For instance, when sin came into the world, the most important and awful division that happened immediately was that God and man were separated.

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There was a chasm that was created between human beings and God that we cannot bridge.

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Not with the best engineers, not with the best, strongest metal, we cannot build our way back to God, because the chasm is too big.

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You think about some of the most godly men that have ever lived. If it were based on their human effort, they may have gotten one inch closer to doing it than we did in a million mile race.

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We can't, as human beings, by our own strength, get our way back to God. We're divided from Him because of our sin.

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Man himself is divided. His body now produces in ways that it was never supposed to produce.

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His cells replicate in ways that now cancers are unleashed upon man and woman.

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His body atrophies and decays. No one in here has ever experienced that, but I'm sure it's awful.

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Arthritis comes upon human beings now. His mind is now divided so that he can't think the thoughts after God.

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Man sometimes wants to think thoughts after God, but he can't because his mind is now consumed with sin and with lust for power and with all different kinds of things.

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His mind is divided. Sin has brought a destructive kind of division upon the world. His emotions are divided.

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There's days where we're up and we don't even know why. There's days that we're down and we don't even know why, and there's days that we want to be up, but we can't, and days that we're down that we want to be up.

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We are confused and broken people because of sin. Men and women have been divided against one another because of sin.

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Get married. I love my wife, but there are days I just don't understand what she's saying, and she doesn't understand what

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I'm saying, and that's on a good day. We're broken.

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You look at the history of culture, how cultures have ebbed and flowed between patriarchy, and has actually happened even though it's not happening today.

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Today, there's cultures where men have become abusive to women. There's cultures where women have become dominating and abusive to men.

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Male -female dynamics have been permanently broken because of sin. Today, we live in a feministic culture where men are treated like garbage just for being men.

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You can just share your opinion and you're mansplaining. You can just say one thing, and you're a part of the sinful patriarchy that's trying to bring down women.

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I just shared my opinion, you asked. Eventually, it will swing again, and we will be in a different sort of culture where men are glorified and women are not, and on and on and on it will go until Christ returns.

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Division between parent and child. If you don't believe me, it's because you don't have kids. Even your babies, as beautiful as they are with their little fat rolls, they have these razor -thin nails that are like daggers, and they just, they grab hold of your face, and you go to work, it looks like you got into a fight with your wife, and you're like, no, it was my baby.

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Votie Bauckham calls them vipers and diapers. I think that's a fair assessment. Our children fail, our teenagers yell.

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There's conflict and division that's set into every aspect of the family. Sin brings the kind of division that's destructive.

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There's a division between man and his work, where now the earth doesn't produce like it used to produce.

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And maybe there's no one here that are farmers and have to literally, by blood, sweat, and tears, have the land produced, but you're in industries.

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You're in jobs where you're trying to produce things, and they just don't produce. You have to fight to get your job to actually be productive, and if you wait for a moment or take a lazy day or take a season off where you're just gonna kind of slack off on your job, chaos will ensue.

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Your boss will probably bring you into the office, or you'll be fired, because our work doesn't just come naturally to us.

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We have to fight and work hard. By the sweat and blood of our brow do the thorns and the thistles and the chaos get put away.

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You ever notice how the hours that you're at work almost never go down, how the demands always go up?

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It's because sin has brought division into this wonderful thing called work. We were commanded to work before sin, although most of us think that work probably is a part of the curse.

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Work was originally a blessing, and it's no longer a blessing. Women were divided, even in their own bodies, so now that infertility has been plagued upon a woman's womb, so that pain and delivery, pain and sorrows and miscarriage now are realities that were never supposed to be a reality.

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We were supposed to be fruitful and able to multiply easily, but now all kinds of damage has happened to the human condition.

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There's a division between humanity and the beast. Other than dogs who love us, look at a cat rung.

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They hate you. They wanna kill you. If cats were big enough, they would eat you.

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Look at snakes. You don't wanna get near them because they're afraid of you, and they will bite you, things will sting you, things will poison you.

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It's because the animals are afraid of us. There's a division, a sinful division that's come upon the fabric of this world that's broken everything.

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There's a division between us and our produce. Think about the most beautiful rose and how it has a thorn on it so that when you reach out to grab it, it stabs you because it hates you.

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It's not accidental. These beautiful berries in the forest, and you're hungry, and you're like, oh,

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I'm gonna eat those, and then you're sick for two weeks. These berries hate you. You think about the earth, right?

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The earth rebels constantly because of sin. The earth didn't used to have hurricanes when

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God created it. The earth didn't used to have earthquakes, and volcanoes, and all of those things. These are a result of the fall.

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Humans sinned, and the earth fell with it. Now the earth is, it tremors in earthquakes.

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It has sandstorms, and snowstorms, and bomb cyclones, whatever it was that we had a couple weeks ago.

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No. Think about it this way. The owner of this building is also the owner of a paving company called

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Allied Paving. If he paved the parking lot, and then left it alone, and never did anything to it, in 100 years it'd be a jungle.

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Why? Why doesn't the asphalt just stay? Why do cracks happen in it, and why do plants grow up from it, and why does the earth eventually rebel against that parking lot to where it overtakes it and replaces it, and it looks like it was never there?

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Because it is only through effort and hard work that we are to subdue the world.

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It's not effortless like it used to be. Division has crept in to the fabric of this world. We were called to rule, and now everything underneath us rebels against us.

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Everything. From family, to industry, to our food, to the earth itself.

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Now, you may ask yourself the question, how did God decide to fix all of this?

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What was the story that God was writing? There's a couple different options that God could have taken. He could have said that there would have never been a fall, so there would never be a need for redemption, but that's not the story that God decided to tell.

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That's not the one that brings God the maximum amount of glory. He could have said yes to the fall, but there's no redemption that's needed, which that would make

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God an unjust God. That would make God not care about a standard of holiness, so therefore, that one doesn't actually work.

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God could have seen the fall happen, then he could have annihilated human beings right off the bat, but that's not the story that God wanted to tell.

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God wanted to tell a story through history of human beings falling, and human beings scratching and clawing, showcasing that we can't save ourself until finally, at just the right time, his son came, and his son saved us, and his son did what we could not do, so that God can get both the glory in our fall and in our salvation.

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That is the story that God wanted to tell. Now, before we get to that part of the story, there's a lot of Old Testament history where more division set in.

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It doesn't just happen in the garden. As soon as they're cast out, divided away from the garden, meant to wander the barren land.

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We see in Genesis 4, right in the very beginning parts of Genesis 4, this is right after they're kicked out of the garden, now brothers are divided against each other.

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God has a great love for Abel's offering, but for Cain, he has no regard, so Cain is divided against his brother, and out of jealousy, he kills his own brother.

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Now you have sibling rivalries right in the very beginning. You have greater division in marriage in a different way.

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In the middle part of Genesis 4, we're not very far along, a man named Lamech is the first man to ever take two wives, bringing lots of devastation onto the family, destroying the family, destroying marriage, and he treats his wives like they're property, and he's a wicked man, but yet, even some of the most godly men in the

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Old Testament follow after his lineage, like Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon. He had hundreds of wives.

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Again, bringing division between the family. Not very long after this, you have the division of languages, where human beings gather together, and they say, we're gonna build a tower up to God.

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We're gonna work our way back to him. We're gonna do this, and God, we're gonna do what Adam and Eve could not do.

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When they reached for the fruit, and they said, we wanna be like God, we're actually gonna do that. God laughed at them. He came down and confused them, divided them, and now the world is broken along these ethnic lines.

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Racial hatred began in Babel. Racial confusion, division, ethnocentrism, those things began at the

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Tower of Babel, which means confusion, division. Sin brought death.

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Sin brought devastation and division. You think about God separating out for himself a people called

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Israel. He divided the world and made one people his own people, and yet Israel was the one who constantly rebelled against him, and divided themselves against him, and worshiped idols against him, and God himself was very patient with them, but sin brought division again, and again, and again, we see it.

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When Israel was stuck in Egypt, they were divided against the Egyptians, so now there's class struggle, there's slavery, there's all kinds of sin that's being injected upon mankind, there's division in worship.

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When Israel is finally free from that, they act like Egyptians, and they worship, and they make this golden calf because they are so broken and irredeemably flawed that they can't even imagine what it means to worship

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God in spirit and in truth. In Israel's history, there's division in leadership, like between David and Saul, where Saul's trying to kill

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David, and David's just trying to survive, and then David's son tries to kill David, and all of David's offspring are either moderately good, either kinda good, or they're wicked.

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There's so much division in the Old Testament, from the beginning of it until the end, to where Israel itself is divided into two nations, a result of the fall.

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One of them goes completely away, one of them barely makes it to the New Testament, and that's only by God's grace alone, because God wanted to bring his son through the line of the

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Jews. Had God not chosen to bring his one and only son through the line of the Jewish people, they also too would have perished.

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When we get to the New Testament, division exists. The rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer.

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Taxes at the time of Jesus's life were somewhere near 80%, which you can barely imagine how you could even survive, and yet the

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Pharisees were feasting in wealthy people. The Jews were divided against the

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Gentiles, the Jews hated the Romans, they hated the Samaritans, they were a divided people. From the top of their society to the bottom of their society, division had injected devastation into the fabric of their civilization.

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And when we get to the New Testament, we see that the greatest division of all still exists. Man is separated from God.

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And that's where the beginning of the story of redemption happens.

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That's where God is going to end the division and bring about his gospel healing.

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Now, we know that he did not come to heal the division and the brokenness and the sin in all of the world.

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What I mean by that is that he came to save his people. From the beginning of the foundations of the world, he chose a people for himself, he elected a people for himself, he draws a people to himself.

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God is saving his people, and there are people that God is not saving.

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That's Romans 9. There's some that he appointed for honorable use and some he appointed for dishonorable use. So there's some people that God will not heal their brokenness, he will not heal their divisiveness, he will not heal their division, he will leave them in their sin.

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We know that. That's hard, but we know that from the scriptures. And we also know that Jesus didn't come to permanently and perfectly heal every brokenness in us yet right away.

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He will. In heaven, all the curse will be lifted. Every part of our brokenness will be healed.

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But right away, Jesus went about the first task. He didn't heal everything, but he healed the most important thing, and that was the division between us and God.

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On the cross, Jesus healed the vertical division, that's what I would call that, division between us and God.

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He crucified that on the cross, he defeated that on the cross, and for his people, all our sins were paid, as Galatians 2 says, we were crucified with him on the cross and we have salvation because of him.

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He came for his own, and he took away our sins, not just our past sins, and not just our sins before we confessed

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Jesus. He took all our sins, past, present, and future, crucified them on the cross, nailing the permanent division that existed between us and God, and he was the only one who could do that.

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And that's called the great exchange, where Jesus took our shame and he gave us his honor. He took our guilt and he gave us his righteousness.

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He took our fears and he gave us his power. He took our defeats and he gave us his victory.

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He took our crimes and he gave us his spotless record. He took our chains and he gave us his perfect freedom.

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He took our brokenness and he gave us his healing. He took our curse and he gave us his blessing. He took our estrangement from God and he gave us nearness to God.

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He took our death and he gave us life. And all by free gift of his grace.

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When you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror, you look at someone who didn't deserve it. You look at someone who could never earn it.

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And in the scriptures, you look at the only one who ever could. We deserved his holy fury for our sin and yet we got unimaginable grace so that every moment of our life should be infused with this sort of gratitude.

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Let someone talk about us and say something wicked about us. Let them say, oh, I hate Kendall. Great, Jesus loves me,

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I don't care. I need to live like that because I often don't live like that.

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But why don't I live like that? Why don't we live like that? If Christ really does love us, then why don't we?

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Why do we worry what other people say? Now, if we understand that, we're about 33 % of the way towards understanding what division really means in the

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Bible. Jesus healed the division between us and God that we could not heal on our own. That's about 33 % of the story.

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There's also horizontal division that happens between us and man. There's division between us and the world, division between us and the flesh, division between us and the spiritual world.

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And Jesus has not fully and permanently healed those things yet. For the unbeliever, he will never heal those things.

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For the believer, he is healing those things through his spirit, but not perfectly permanently yet. Those will happen in heaven.

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So all the things that we spoke about earlier, the internal dividedness of the soul, the division between genders, parents, children, between man and neighbor, between community, town and nation, races, ethnicities, rich and poor, class and culture, humanity and animals, the physical creation and crops and produce and languages and governments and citizens and all of that, that still exists today.

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We'd be ignorant to say that it doesn't. But by the power of Christ, he is planning to heal those things in his church as an example of the power of his gospel and permanently in heaven forever.

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That's what we're looking forward to. Now when we get to the New Testament, we know that division still existed.

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Again, we would be silly to think not. The book of Romans was written because division still existed in that church.

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You had a group of Jewish Christians on one side who said, we're better because we came from Moses. And yet a group of Gentiles on the other side that said, we're better because we didn't worship idols like you guys did.

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Well, they did, but you know what I mean. That whole book was written because there was this great division between those people.

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And Paul was writing to them and saying that you and you are on equal playing field because all have fallen short of the glory of God.

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That's Romans three. And that there's no one righteous, not even one. And the wages of sin is death, except for the free gift that comes to both

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Jew and Greek, which is Jesus Christ our Lord. That's what the book of Romans is all about. So there's no condemnation between you and you in Christ.

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Christ is the great uniter. But that book was written because there was division. There was division in the

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Philippian church. The book that we say is all about joy. There was a lot in that book that wasn't joyful. There was these two women named

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Yodi and Sintike who were at each other's throats. And Paul writes

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Philippians four, especially addressing that. And he's saying, be of like mind.

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The God of peace, the one that unites us all together will bring peace that surpasses understanding instead of all of this brokenness and division.

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The book of Philippians was written against that context. The Corinthian churches, Pastor Derek's been telling us, was divided along party lines.

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Some said, I follow Apollos. Some said, I follow Paul. Some said, I follow so -and -so. And others would say,

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I follow Jesus. That was the ones who tried to one -up everybody. They're like, I follow Jesus. That book was written against the context of division.

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The Galatian church was written against the context of division. You had Jews who were saying that Gentiles need to be circumcised in order to come into God's kingdom.

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And Paul says that you're preaching a gospel that's damned, a gospel that doesn't actually save.

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The church struggles with division. The church struggles with that sinful, devastating kind of division.

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And we know it, we've grown up in the church. We've seen pastors who cause division because they're foolish.

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We've seen gossip that breaks apart churches because it's foolish. We've seen division in the church.

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If you've been in the church, even for a short amount of time, you've seen sinful division that breaks apart the church.

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It's no different than in Rome, in Corinth, in Galatia, Philippi. There's some division that's destructive.

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There's some division that we have to stamp out, snuff out, get rid of, like it's cancer.

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Jesus says, get rid of the leaven. That leaven's the entire lump. There's some division that we just absolutely need to get rid of or it will destroy us as the church.

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Now we're about 66 % of the way there. But there is a kind of division that's good.

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There is a kind of division that's necessary. There is a kind of division that we must have or we will be thoroughly compromised as the church.

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We will lose our lampstand. We will lose our witness, and we will be just as pagan as the world, and there will be no reason for us even to exist if we don't adopt the necessary kind of division.

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Again, this is difficult for us because we see in Proverbs that God hates that, or he hates division.

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We see in Jude that those who created theological divisions were called false prophets and reprobate. Paul calls them noisy gongs in Corinthians.

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They're dogs who mutilate the flesh in Philippians. They're foolish in the book of Galatians. Paul tells Titus, those who bring divisions in the church need to be kicked out of the church.

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All of that's true, but if we understand that in isolation to the good kind of division, we'll get the false idea.

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We'll think that all division is bad. It is not. There is a division that is good, and that's what

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I want us to close our time today with, a division that is necessary for the church. We are not called ever to remain in unity when it compromises the truth.

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We are not called to unite in error. We are not called to remain united in a false gospel, and that is something that we must divide over.

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We must divide over heresy. Whether we read the scriptures and we say that God hates division, we know that's true, but we must divide over things that break the gospel, because if we don't, we have no gospel.

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Paul says in Galatians 1, six through nine, I'm amazed that you are so quickly deserting him who called you by the grace of Christ for a different gospel.

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Paul, in some churches today, would be called divisive. Paul would probably be put under church discipline in some churches because,

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Paul, you're ruffling feathers. He said, which is really not a gospel at all.

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Only there are some who are disturbing you and want to distort the gospel of Christ, but even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to what we have preached to you, he is accursed.

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He's damned if he preaches another gospel. We've said before, so I say to you again, if any man is preaching you a gospel contrary to what you have received, he is accursed.

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Oh, how narrow -minded of you, Paul. We divide over false gospels.

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He says to the Colossian church, see to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy or empty deception according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world rather than according to Christ.

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That's why verses like this that we care so deeply about things like critical race theory, which actually is a false gospel because it has a false sin, it has a false salvation project, and it has a false savior, which is wokeism.

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We rebel against that because that's a false gospel that has infected churches, that has broken churches, that has gotten to the minds of pastors and caused them to spout all kinds of fake gospel nonsense.

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We rebel against that and we divide against that because it's a false gospel. That's just one example. Pagan philosophies that come into the church and do damage.

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Christ wants us to divide over those things. He even says that pastors will be accounted faithful if they point these things out in 1

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Timothy 4 or 6. He says, in pointing out these things to the brethren, that's the church, you will be a good servant of Jesus Christ, constantly nourished on the words of faith and on the sound doctrine which you have been following.

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The problem with American Christianity, one half of it, is that pastors need to grow a backbone and share the truth.

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And that pastors need to stop placating sin and stop telling people what they want to hear and stop saying all of the different token phrases of the world and just preach the text.

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That's half the problem. The other half of the problem is that the rest of the church needs to grow a backbone and we all need to do this work.

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That's what John says in 2 John 9 -11. Anyone who goes too far and does not abide in the teaching of Christ, anyone who has wandered their way outside of the teaching of Jesus, does not have

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God. The one who abides in the teaching, that's the gospel teaching.

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He has both the Father and the Son. But if anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, that's the church.

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If anyone comes to you and does not bring this teaching, do not receive him into your house.

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Do not give him a greeting, for the one who gives him a greeting participates in his evil deeds. We grew up in churches,

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I did at least, where people would use this verse and they would say, that person's not welcome in my house.

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And that felt very hurtful to me. That felt hard for me to hear. What do you mean that person's not welcome in my house?

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Well, when you understand the holiness of God, when you understand the gospel, when you understand that this is serious, that a little leaven leavens the entire lump of bread, then you understand that John's words are true, even if we don't, even if they chafe against us, even if we have a knee -jerk reaction against this,

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John's words saying that if you welcome someone who is abandoning the gospel into your home, you are participating in their evil,

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I know that's hard, but it's scriptural. Will we have the courage to follow that or will we have, in our weakness, follow what makes sense to us?

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The clear and obvious point is that we are to work for unity in our families, in our churches, among brothers and sisters in Christ, but we are also to fight ferociously against false gospels and not receive them and not welcome them, forbid them because they're cancer to the body of Christ.

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That's the first thing that we divide over is we divide over false gospel. The second one is we divide over false converts.

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The Bible is clear that those who profess allegiance to Christ and who claim that they know the God of heaven but live a life of hell, we divide over that.

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We know verses like John 3 .16 and Romans 8 .1. We know those verses and we love those verses and we celebrate those verses, but I want to share with you some verses that you may not have heard in the

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New Testament because no one has dared ever preach them to you. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5, 9 through 10,

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I wrote you in my letter not to associate with immoral people. I did not at all mean with immoral people of the world or with the covetous and swindlers or with the idolaters for then you would have to go out of the world, but actually

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I wrote to you not to associate with any so -called brother if he is an immoral person or covetous or an idolater or a reviler or a drunkard or swindler, not even to eat with such a one for what have

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I to do with judging outsiders, those in the world? Do you not judge those who are within the church, but those who are outside God judges?

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Remove the wicked man from among yourself. Paul is saying that that kind of wickedness will corrupt you, will tempt you, will eventually taint even your walk with Christ so that if someone claims to be a

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Christian and yet they live in this sort of way, do not associate with them. I know that's hard, but this is what the

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Bible says and I'm responsible to tell you what the Bible says. Paul says in 2

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Thessalonians 3, 6, "'Now we command you, brethren, "'in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, "'that you keep away from every brother "'who leads an unruly life "'and not according to the tradition which you receive.'"

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This is not a suggestion from Paul. This is a command from Paul. This is something that if a church is unfaithful to do it, then they will be unfaithful, not just to the words of Paul, but to the

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Holy Spirit of God who inspired these words. And it's not just Paul.

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Again, it's the Holy Spirit. 2 Timothy 3, 2 -5 says, "'But realize this, that in the last days, "'difficult times will come, "'for men will be lovers of self, "'lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, "'revilers, disobedient to parents, "'ungrateful, unholy, unloving, "'irreconcilable, malicious gossips, "'without self -control, brutal, "'haters of God, treacherous, reckless, conceited, "'lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, "'holding to a form of godliness, "'although they have denied its power, "'avoid such men as these.'"

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Now, the first thing, we can probably find ourself on this list. Disobedient to parents.

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Any kids in here listening? Unloving? Unholy? We can find ourself on this list.

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Now, I think it's important to understand that Paul is saying that you've made a habit and a pattern of this kind of behavior.

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This is not the regular ebb and flow of sin in the life of the believer that we repent of and we turn to Christ.

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This is talking about believers, so -called believers, as Paul says, who live in their sin, who continue in their sin, who rest in their sin, who don't repent of their sin.

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He's saying, avoid such men as these. But the second thing that we need to understand about passages like this is there's a call to holiness in the church and we are called to help each other be holy people.

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Far too often in the Christian church, holiness is thrown in the trash can for two different wrong philosophies.

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One is that because God saved me and his gospel is so powerful that I can do whatever

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I want. I've heard people all my life espouse that heresy. The other is that I can be holy on my own and that God will accept me in my own effort and my own ability, and that also is heresy.

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As Christians, the holiness that we have was given to us by Jesus Christ as a gift to steward, to grow in, to be sanctified in, and we are to bear each other's burdens and help one another to grow in holiness together.

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That's why church membership, we just did a church membership class yesterday, that's why membership exists in the church. Membership is not a foreign concept.

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Membership is a concept where people are committed to the doctrine of the church. They're committed to each other and they're committed to helping and walking alongside of one another in fidelity and truth because these verses, this could be us if we don't follow

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Christ. Thankfully, the spirit of God holds us and keeps us, but this could be us.

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There's a call to holy living in the church. It says, avoid such men as these. Women as well, it's not just men.

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That word is gender, but it means all people. Jesus himself commands this in Matthew 18, 15 through 17, where he says, if your brother sins, go and show him his fault in private.

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If he listens to you, then you've won your brother. I love the phrase you've won your brother. Sin is so devastating that his brother was in jeopardy of being lost.

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I know that theologically, we know you can't lose your salvation, but look at the severity of the language that Jesus is using.

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But if he does not listen to you, take one or two more with you so that by the mouth of two or three witnesses, every fact may be confirmed.

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And if he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a

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Gentile and a tax collector, which is Jesus's way of saying, let it be as though you do not know them.

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We work for unity in the church. We work for unity among brothers and sisters in Christ.

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We love each other, care for one another, and we work to help each other and bear one another's burdens. But we divide over false doctrine, and we divide over false converts.

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The church cannot be faithful if we allow false conversion to fester in the church. The church cannot.

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Its lampstand will be taken from it. Its witness will be perverted. There's one more area that we divide over.

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And that's what the Westminster Confession is. The Westminster Confession calls good and necessary implications of the gospel. There's a lot of verses that we could share here, but I'm gonna share one where Paul demonstrates this for us, where Paul rebukes

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Peter to his face. It's in Galatians 2, 9 through 13. And recognizing the grace that had been given to me,

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James and Cephas, Cephas is Peter, and John, who were reputed to you as pillars, gave me and Barnabas the right hand of fellowship so that we might go to the

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Gentiles and they to be circumcised. They only asked us to remember the poor, the very thing

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I was also eager to do. But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face because he stood condemned.

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For prior to the coming of certain men from James, he used to eat with the

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Gentiles. But when they came, he began to withdraw and hold himself aloof, fearing the party of the circumcision, and the rest of the

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Jews joined him in hypocrisy with the result that even Barnabas was carried astray by their hypocrisy.

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What Peter had forgotten in that moment, the Jews were all about circumcision.

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So all the Jewish Christians, some of them struggled with this idea. Do we still have to be circumcised as a

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Christian? Do we still have to follow that part of the law in order for God to love us? If we're not circumcised, can we even be saved?

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That's the question that they were wrestling with. And Peter, for a moment, this man who saw this vision from heaven where this great tarp was dropped down and all of the unclean animals were pronounced clean, and he recognized in Acts 10 that God is the one who names things clean and unclean and that both

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Jew and Greek have been made clean in the gospel of Jesus Christ. This man, Peter, forgot for a second that the

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Jews are not more clean than the Gentiles, and the Gentiles are not more unclean than the

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Jews. And he stood up in awkwardness and he walked away from the Gentile table because of pressure coming from the

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Jews. And Paul says that small act of treating someone else in the body of Christ as if they're inferior, that small act was compromising the gospel.

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And Paul opposed him to his face. And Paul wrote about it so that everyone would know that he opposed him to his face.

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Which is a bold move on Paul's part. He's like, I'm recording this. But Peter was behaving inconsistently with the gospel and Paul divided with him over it.

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You see, division is necessary when we're talking about false gospels, when we're talking about false converts, and we're talking about living inconsistently with the gospel.

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We divide over those things. We work for unity, we work for truth, but the truth divides.

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And for the church to be faithful in this century and the centuries moving forward,

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I think the church has to remember that sometimes division is necessary. We don't wave rainbow flags because we divide from the world.

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We don't support abortions because it's the murder of infants. We divide from that. We don't support immorality in the church.

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We pray, we repent, we turn from our wickedness. We don't enable it.

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There's things that we need to divide over that are still worth dividing over and the church of Jesus Christ has to divide over or else we will not be faithful.

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For us today, maybe there's sins in our life that need to be divided over. Maybe there's something in your life that is down in your heart, no one else knows about it, you've not told anyone else about it, but you need to separate violently from that sin.

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I pray that you would have the courage to do that. There's things maybe that you're supporting that you need to separate yourself from.

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I pray that you would do that. There's things that are gonna take courage for us to divide over in the days ahead.

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All the battles are not done. COVID is over, it's over. But there'll be new battles.

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The church will face new opposition and the church must have the backbone to stand and we are the church, which means we must have the backbone to stand.

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Amen? Let's pray. Lord Jesus, we thank you that your word can be understood if we dig into it.

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We thank you that sometimes the simple reading, the easiest reading is the one that lifts our heart to the heavens and we proclaim the excellencies of Christ.

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And Lord, we also thank you that sometimes we need to dig into the whole Bible to understand the concept.

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In order to make sense of something, in order to really know it and live it.

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Lord, I pray that your church would not be divisive in a sinful way. Lord, I pray that this church would not ever feel enabled to be sinful in the way that we approach the topic of division.

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But Lord, I do pray that we would have the courage to divide over the things that you would divide over.

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Lord, I pray that we would have the courage to cling to the true gospel. Lord, I pray that we would have the fidelity and the love and the care for each other that we would love and support each other in truth and that we would not allow each other to live in error because that's unloving.

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Lord, even if like Paul, we have to oppose each other to our face. Lord, I pray that we would protect each other and care for each other and build each other up even if sometimes that means dividing.

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Lord, help us to do that with wisdom and care and love and grace. In Christ's name, amen.