Romans 15:16 - Our Offerings to God, Pt. 2 (08/07/2022)

Park Meadows Church

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We need to have a short business meeting and a vote to never allow Nancy's name to be mentioned in this building again.

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Not even as a joke, please. But that was awesome. You did well,

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Dave. You're braver than I ever knew to do that. That's fantastic.

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Yeah, and to not ask me to do it. You're a hero for the whole church as well, because I don't know who comes after Nancy.

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That would be me, whoever that is. So good to see all of you today. I was thinking about Dave as we went into our prayer session.

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I was thinking about the heavenlies already. And then as Kenner started playing, I'm sitting over here always watching, and she gets to that big part.

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And she gets a smile on her face while she's playing. And I was thinking about Brother Otis and Miss B, who used to sit right there on the second pew.

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He was the greatest teacher our church ever had in the history of our church for 13 years. Now they're in heaven, but I was thinking about them watching down and seeing you play this morning and rooting for you and all of us.

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And then when Maddie was playing, I was thinking about her great -grandma, my mom. And I've been kind of just starting to ease into a book a little bit that Brother Larry gave me by Stephen Charnock, who wrote in the 1600s.

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That's the kind of books I like to read, but it takes like five years to read the books because of the old grammar, the old

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English grammar. But it's beautiful. It's like reading the Bible. But I was thinking about this while Dave was leading us in prayer in Mark chapter 14, verse 62.

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And he mentioned this in part of what I was reading about the power of God, where Charnock speaks about the power of God.

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He likes to talk about the characteristics of God in his book. So I'm at the power of God in particular, but he talked about how in that particular verse in Mark, it talks about Jesus, the son of man, being seated at the right hand of power.

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It doesn't say the right hand of God. It says at the right hand of power, which means God is synonymous with power.

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It's the same. That is who he is. So all the power for all the prayers that just went up from this church lie in that place, but it's ultimate power.

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And it's mixed with ultimate omniscience and ultimate love, all mixed with that ultimate power.

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So when we pray, we should not take it lightly because there is all of the power of more beyond even than the power of the universe, because the father is outside of that.

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All of that power is behind your prayers. Think about that next time you pray. Well, we're gonna be in Romans chapter 15 and I'll review just a little bit.

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Welcome to all of our folks. And we have a good group of visitors today and we'll warn you once you visit twice, you're no longer a visitor.

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So you got to stay for lunch at that point and which we have every Sunday. And so welcome to everyone.

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And all you guys out there across the country, always welcome you. Romans chapter 15,

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I'll just review a little bit. In that chapter, it begins to speak about some imperatives and that's in the

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Greek grammar as well as in English, but in the Greek in particular here, any time you see these verbs in the imperative, it's a command.

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And a lot of people talk about legalism and we're not an Old Testament church, we're New Testament church.

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And if you've been here for a while, you know, we're not into legalism. This church started that way. The founding pastor was that way and Charlotte and myself were founding members.

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We were 20 something and didn't know better. And then Raymond and Sharon came along and they were a little older than that and did know better, but they put up with it because when the founding pastor would leave, he'd let me preach and Sharon liked my preaching.

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I don't know about Raymond, but Sharon loved it. No, they stayed because God left them here, kept them here all through those years.

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And then God was teaching us about legalism and how what that amounts to really is people who don't believe the

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Holy Spirit has the power to change other people. They just don't believe it so they try to change by making rules, change them by making rules.

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That is not a good place to be. And every great denomination that's ever existed goes around a cycle.

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It starts out away from that where God is sovereign, God's in control, moves around where humanism takes over and now you've got bunches of rules.

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You can look at the oldest denomination of Roman Catholic Church and it started there, but every group has gone through that cycle.

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And you have to watch even your local church and not allow it. But that being said, legalism is when men make up rules that God didn't make up and then put those on other men, right?

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And women. And the women always take the brunt of legalism, by the way. I've seen so many fundamental independent

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Baptist churches where the men go around wearing Bermuda shorts and the women have to wear dresses down to their ankle and cover up their chin.

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And it's just, the women always take the brunt of it. And look at Islam, look at across the board, it's that way where legalism is.

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Jesus Christ was the first in the history of the world to free women, to bring women true freedom.

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And to say there's neither June or Greek, neither male nor female. So Christianity sets everyone free once they come to know the

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Lord. And that's a beautiful thing. I wish the world knew that, but it doesn't. But there are imperatives and an imperative is a place where God did say to do it a certain way.

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So legalism is when we try to make you do something God didn't say you have to do, but imperatives are where Jesus in the

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New Testament is saying, look, none of these imperatives save you because you're saved by grace, which means

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Jesus' blood plus nothing. That's how we're saved. But once you are saved because you love me, live this way, live that way, treat each other kindly.

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You know, don't be so transparent that you're rude to people that you love, your brothers and sisters, your family.

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Be kind, be gentle hearted. All of these are imperatives. Well, in chapter 15, we're going verse by verse through Romans.

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And I think we started the year that I met Ashton. I now have four grandbabies in that family, but we go slow.

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But we're in chapter 15 and there were several imperatives we've already covered like bear the infirmities of the week.

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That's in verse one. You know, do things that build up other people rather than tear them down.

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That's in verse two. These are just Christian imperatives. This is how we're supposed to live.

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Verse five was interesting, was it said be like -minded. And when you put that in the context that it's written in where Paul is the apostle to the

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Gentiles, but he always preaches to the Jew first and then the Gentile, you always have a mixed room. So you got the

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Jews sitting over here, Gentiles sitting over here, and Paul is telling them to be like -minded, which the

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Jew does not like that because they don't even think God will save a Gentile. So Paul's always working with them on that.

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And this is just one place where he says, now the God of patience and consolation grant you to be like -minded one toward another according to Christ Jesus.

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So he's teaching them that. And then you come all the way down to verse seven, very similar, it says, receive you one another.

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You got the Jews over here, you got the Gentiles over here, Paul's saying receive one another as brothers and sisters, as connected by family because we've all been re -gened, haven't we?

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We've all been gene with the genes of God. And then that brings us all the way down to kind of where we are now.

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And if you look at verse 16, chapter 15, verse 16, it's an amazing passage when you understand the context of the

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Jew and the Gentile in the room that Paul's preaching to, amazing. That opens the whole thing up, helps us understand everything

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Paul's talking about here. But he says here that I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the

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Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that's the good news of God. What is the good news, by the way?

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Let's stop a minute. What's the good news? What is the gospel? What is good news? Because the gospel, by the way, has always been changed in the modern church today.

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The gospel today is, come down this aisle, I'll teach you what to pray, and if you fall out of your knees, here it is, come on up and say amen.

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That's the modern gospel. What is the Bible gospel? Well, it's the good news.

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It means good news, right? It's the good news that you don't get saved by doing religious stuff. Now, I always, this happened once.

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One of our older members who's in heaven now, I said that the first time I ever said something like that from the pulpit, and he quit coming to our, sometimes we have coffee with some of the men in the church and talk about the

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Bible. He quit coming. So after about the third week, I called him and asked him why. He said, I don't think I'm part of it anymore.

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And I said, why? And he said, because you said, if I come down and the preacher says, pray this, here

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Jesus come on up and say amen, that that doesn't save you. And he said, that's what I did. So I must not be saved, in a way.

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That is not what I meant. But so it took me like two hours to look. And I told him this when everything was okay by the end of the conversation, because you can't lose your salvation because of some stupid thing a preacher like me would say, right?

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But I said, look, from now on, when I ever say that, I'll always follow it up with this, is if a preacher gave you a formula that can't really save you, neither can it unsave you.

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Because you got saved before you left your pew and walked up here. That's the point. Because in the Greek, if you ever want to read it in Greek, it's even more interesting.

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Romans 10, 13, for whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. You know what it says in the

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Greek, if you understand the grammar? For whosoever desires to call upon the name of the

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Lord shall be saved. So once that desire hits you, when you're out there in that pew, you're saved. You come down here, the preacher just teach you how to be religious.

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Isn't that interesting? So that's the modern gospel. But the point is, what is the true gospel?

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Exactly. He died for his own, right? He was buried with his own sins in his body, all of his own, all throughout human history in his body.

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And he rose again so that they might have life. We might have life. That's the good news. So it's all about Jesus and what he did on the cross and what he did in the resurrection and what he's doing now for us, right?

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Past, present, future tense of salvation. It's all about Jesus's work. So it's so cattywampus today, even in Baptist churches, unfortunately.

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And I grew up Baptist. We finally took that off the sign out here. How many years ago was it, Sharon, when you gave me permission?

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I remember Raymond and Sharon, we wanted a hundred percent vote to do that. And they said, no, we want to leave it on there.

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And I'd say, okay, we leave it on another year. Well, that went on about three years. Finally, they said, take it off. And why though?

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Because we're more like Spurgeon, you know, back in the, I don't know, starting in the 1600s and moving this way a little bit, with Charles Spurgeon and people who were like that, who were

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Baptist, than we are like the modern Baptist. And so it becomes confusing. So we're just part

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Meadows Church. But the gospel that Paul is talking about here is being muddied up.

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It's going around the cycle. Every great denomination's done it. They'll say, well, yeah, we believe it's

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Jesus, but you gotta, dot, dot, dot, right? Yeah, we believe it's Jesus, but you gotta.

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And you add anything there, you messed it up, right? Because you say, well, you gotta believe.

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Well, let me tell you something the Bible teaches. The Bible teaches, unless you're called by the Holy Spirit, you won't believe and you can't believe because you are, by definition, an unbeliever.

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You're born that way. There's none that seeketh God, the scripture says. Not one. So this modern gospel is wrong, but you only have to go back about 150 years and read what the people of God always believed.

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They never believed it this way. They believe it this Bible way. And that is that the Holy Spirit moves in on a person, opens that person's eyes and ears where they can see

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Jesus for who he really is. And he becomes irresistible because once they see him, they're a sheep, he's the shepherd, he's got the food and they're hungry.

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And that's the end of it. And so what do they do? They receive him as their personal Lord and Savior. Therefore they're saved by grace.

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Grace means it's a free gift. Even the faith that saved them was a gift that they were given.

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It's Jesus' faith, not their own. They own it now though. Once we have it, it's ours.

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And that's how salvation works. But boy, you gotta go back 150 years to see people writing about that.

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But that's how it is. So when Paul talks about this gospel, that's the gospel that he's talking about.

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That I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel, the good news of God about salvation.

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Now listen to this, that the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable being sanctified by the

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Holy Ghost. And that's what we've been talking about that last little phrase, that the offering up of the Gentiles.

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Now when we're talking about offering up, we're talking about Gentiles being able to give offerings to God that are acceptable because before Jesus Christ came, unless you were brought into the

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Jewish family, it was totally unacceptable. You had to go through their system because they had the offering system that pictured everything about the

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Lamb of God, right? But when Jesus came, he was the antitype of the type.

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He was the real thing that all those pictures pictured in the Old Testament.

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And he died for the sins of his own, which includes Jews and Gentiles and some from every people group in the world.

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And so once that happened, that is the gospel. Now Paul said, look, you Jews that are sitting over here, these

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Gentiles are saved the same way you are. There's neither Jew nor Gentile now because it's all by the blood of Jesus.

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And your scriptures in Isaiah and other places said that Messiah would come for the

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Gentiles. Do you remember that? And they'd have to go, yeah, we remember that. Okay, so you do believe it, right?

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Yeah, we believe it. So go over here and hug them, right? Go give them a hug. They're just like you are now.

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See, that's what this is all about. So now he's telling them, look, even the offerings that they offer up are as good as the offerings that you offer up.

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So that's what we're talking about is why is that? And last time we just started talking about what some of the things are we can offer now on this side of the cross.

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Because we don't offer bullocks, do we? We don't offer birds, pigeons. We don't offer goats or sheep.

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Well, what do we offer? Well, last Sunday morning, we talked about Romans 12, one which says we offer up our bodies as a living sacrifice.

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That's the first one. We offer up our bodies to serve the Lord and to work with him in his family business, which is what's going on on the earth today.

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This is God's family business. Jesus was his first child and he came into this family business. And Jesus said, everything

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I say and do is because I heard the father do it. And then when he left, he told us, he said, even as I was sent by him, so sent

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I you. So now we're part of the family business. And the first thing we have to offer for God to work here since Jesus is seated at the right hand of power this morning is he has to, through us, work here.

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So our bodies is the first offering we can get. Now, you can't offer your body to God if you own it.

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Ever thought about that? Well, I guess you can. You have to own it first, but then you have to offer it.

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So once you offer it, you recognize at the moment anyway, that our body is his body, right?

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It belongs to him. Marriage is the picture of this, the male and the female in marriage.

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That's a picture of Christ and the church. So once we're born again, our bodies are his body.

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He's the groom, we're the bride. And so when he wants to do a particular work, if we're offering our body as a sacrifice, we offer it to him and say, yes,

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I will do that with you right now. We'll go do that. What do you wanna do? Do you wanna go visit this person? What do you wanna do?

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And that's what this means. So when you do that, number one, it's a good work and you get rewards in heaven for that because Holy Spirit led you to do it.

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That's Christ doing it with you. That's you yielding the body to him to do the work he wants you to do with him.

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It's not that he wants to go do it by himself. He could, we talked about power. He could speak it into existence.

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He doesn't need us, but he wants us. How many of you have children?

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Raise your hand. All right, how about grandbabies? It just gets better and better, doesn't it?

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All right, so would you rather just go off and do something by yourself or take them with you? In general, I know sometimes we get older, we gotta rest a little bit, but you wanna take them with you.

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And we get that love from God. He wants to do what he does with us and he chooses to do it that way.

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So we have to offer him our body. So our body is not our own, the Bible says.

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It's been bought with a price. What is the price? The blood of Jesus plus nothing.

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It's the blood of Jesus and he owns us. And we, as a bond servant, which is a servant who serves the master because we love the master.

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And in this case, even better, we're children of the master. So we serve because of our love.

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Second thing we talked about, well, that's also in Romans 8, verses three and four, talks about that a little bit.

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But then we went to Philippians 4, 18, and we talked about love offerings. So we can give a love offering to any of God's work, anywhere in the world, and that is a sacrifice that we can offer as Gentiles.

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It's pleasing to the Lord because we are saved. And the third one we talked about was in Hebrews 13, 15, praising

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God. We can offer praise with our lips, and that is a sacrifice. But only as the

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Holy Spirit leads us. Remember, it has to be us working with him for this to be operative in the proper sense.

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You can't fake it. You can't work it up with music, although we tried today, good job. You can't make yourself spiritual through anything you do in a service, which the modern church didn't understand that either.

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It has to be God coming in on you and saying, let's do this, and you'll sense it, and you'll know it, and you do it, and you do it with him.

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And that's how praise should be. Now, praise is different than thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is thanking him for the things he has done, is doing, and will do.

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Praising him is praising him for who he is. All the characters of God, thinking about them, the names of God, I'll talk about his characteristics, all those things, we praise him for those things.

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All of that is an offering we can give up. Now, I'll show you a new one today. Turn with me to Hebrews chapter 13, verse, why don't we look at verse 16?

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And we're kind of taking a trip out through the scriptures to look at something that, this little topic that's named in Romans chapter 15 today for us.

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Hebrews 13, 16. But to do good and to communicate, forget not.

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For with such sacrifices, God is well pleased. So that is a sacrifice or offering that we as Gentiles can offer up to God.

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And it lists two things, doing good works, but also communicating, and that's an old

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English word here. If you look at the Greek, a more modern English word for that would be just giving to others that have a need, giving, giving to others that have a need.

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So by doing good works and particularly giving to people that have needs, and now there is a lot of teaching in the

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Bible about that. There's an order to that. The order is first, your family, anyone in your family that has need, because the

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Bible teaches us in Timothy that if you don't take care of your family financially, you are worse than an infidel and have denied the faith.

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So first is your family. If they have need, you take care of that. Next is your church family, brothers and sisters in Christ.

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If they have need, you take care of it. And when you do, it's offering to God. Isn't that something? And then beyond that, if you have accumulated enough wealth to do it, then you share with others in need around you, your neighbors, just people that the

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Holy Spirit leads you to help. All of those are spiritual offerings unto the

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Lord, according to Hebrews 13, 15. Now, turn to 1 Peter 2, 5, and we'll look at another one.

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And this is just giving you some of the surface teachings on what sacrifices we have on this side of the cross.

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But next Sunday, Lord willing, I'm gonna take you, I'm gonna dive down deeper with you and show you something that the

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Lord showed me many years ago. I was probably in my thirties. I'm gonna share it with you,

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Lord willing, next Sunday. Where basically what it does is it goes in and looks at the priest in the

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Old Testament, the Levitical priest. All of that is a type or a picture of the believer priest, which is us.

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And you won't believe what you can see if you understand that it's a type or a symbol of the real thing, which is what we're doing now.

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It just shows you all the different things God has done and has for us to do. And it's really pretty cool.

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So we'll do that hopefully. But we're just looking at some of the obvious places right now that speak of sacrifices for us in this day and time.

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So 1 Peter 2, 5, ye also as living stones are built up a spiritual house, storm out the church, save people, a holy priesthood.

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Now, what did the priests do in the Old Testament? What did they offer up? Sacrifices. So this is telling you that what they did was a picture of the spiritual things we do now.

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Those were physical pictures, like physically killing a lamb, right? Is a physical picture of spiritual sacrifices that we do now that are more powerful than that, that are more important than that.

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And that we as believer priests are called to do. All right, so this one says, we are a holy priesthood to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God by Jesus Christ.

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Now that sounds very much like the verse in Romans 15 we just looked at, that it's made acceptable.

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We as Gentiles can do this too, not just the Jew. We can do it too because we're in Christ.

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It is what the passage in Romans taught us that we launched out from a minute ago. So now we're talking about worshiping

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God as a spiritual sacrifice, not a physical sacrifice, a spiritual sacrifice.

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So 1 Peter 2, dropping down to about verse nine, it kind of continues, it says, but you are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, which means you are king priests or queen priests.

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You're a female, I guess. King priests, think about that. So you are a chosen generation.

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Now, by the way, chosen means God chose you, you didn't choose him. You did choose him, but you chose him because he first chose you.

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You did love him, but you loved him because he first loved you. You get that from scripture, right? Now, modern theology does not teach this anymore, but the

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Bible has taught it. If you go back 150 years ago and then move back for 2000 years and you read what your brothers and sisters of Christ thought that this book meant, you will see this is how

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God's plan works. So when the Holy Spirit calls you, it's because before the foundation of time, the

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Lord knew you were his child. He knew you as his child before he made anything. And Jesus said, no man comes to the father, no man comes to me, he said, unless the father draw him.

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That drawing, that's the calling of the Holy Spirit that I'm talking about or mentioned a little bit earlier.

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And so when he calls us a chosen generation, you need to not fight that. I mean, most

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Baptist church today just hate what they call election and sovereignty of God and predestination, they just hate it.

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Like it's gonna divide the church. Listen, if the church is studying the scripture, nothing like no truth will divide the church.

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That's for churches that don't study much. They can be divided over anything. We joke about the color of the carpet and I'm colorblind.

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So I would never fight about that. Well, I do actually. I argue with my wife about what color things are and she thinks that's really funny.

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I just do it to be funny. Anyway, so we're a chosen generation.

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God knew you with love before he made anything. And in time, in your lifetime, he called you to himself, opened your eyes or you never would have believed, but you always were going to.

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He just had to know when you're, God knew when your spiritual birthday was. And that spiritual birthday is just as much out of your control as your physical birthday was.

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How much did you have to do with your own birth? I would ask you. Why did Jesus call it being born again?

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Because that's a type of picture of how spiritual salvation. I've had claps before, but I never had a cymbal go off on my bridge and that's awesome.

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Amen. You know, you had nothing to do with your physical birth and Jesus said to Nicodemus, spiritual birth works the same way.

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The parents had to do with it. You just took advantage of it when you got born. Same way, physical, spiritual salvation.

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That's why he calls us a chosen generation. And by the way, the word generation is the same

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Greek word that regeneration comes from. And it means we've been re -gened. We're not supposed to live after the old man that has our physical parents genes because we will mess up when we live that way.

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We're supposed to live after the new man, which is God's genes. We've been re -gened. We're all part of a different race now.

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That's why colors don't matter. I mean, you look at this church right now and think maybe it matters, but we're not like that.

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It doesn't matter what race you are because that's your physical parents. The new race, we're all the same people.

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Bible teaches it through and through. And Paul was struggling with that with the Jews and the Gentiles, wasn't he? Same thing.

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And so we are a chosen re -gene people that have been anointed to be a royal, kingly priesthood, a holy nation.

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And by the way, the word nation there in the Greek is ethnos, which means ethnic group, which means you're not black, white,

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Mexican. My son doesn't allow me to say oriental anymore. What's the new word for that?

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Katie, come on, help me out here. Of Eastern descent. Is that acceptable in today's language?

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Yeah, like none of that matters when you're born again because you're brought into the family of God, you're re -gened into God's family and you're made a holy ethnic group.

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Did you know what meant that? Isn't that something? So race is not an issue in the church.

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It's only an issue among the lost. And most nations of the world, I mean, think about it. Jesus said, few there be that are on their way to heaven.

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So most of the peoples of the world of every nation are lost. No wonder we have racial problems and we're still gonna have them.

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You're not gonna solve that with legislation. You solve that with salvation. You know what I mean? Anyway, that sounded pretty good.

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I like that. So a holy nation. Now, what does holy mean? Does it mean we're perfect?

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Stick around here for a few more Sundays. You'll figure out that's not what it means. What does it mean? It means set apart.

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It means set apart from something unto something. We're set apart from the worldliness of the world in the bad sense of that.

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And we're set apart unto God as his now. He owns us. Remember the sacrifice of our body was the first one.

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He owns us. He bought us with a price, his precious blood of his own son. And so now we are holy.

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That's called positional holiness. We are holy because we are connected to the offering, which was

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Jesus, and whatever touches that becomes holy. Remember that in the Old Testament? So we are holy positionally, but we're supposed to be holy as I am holy.

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Like Jesus said, we're supposed to attempt to live like the Lord. What is that doing? That's keeping the imperatives we talked about at the first of the session this morning, where Jesus said, hey, live, be kind to each other.

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And you don't have to be so, what's the modern word everybody loves?

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They're even teaching this in churches, which just drives me nuts. They teach the young married couples to be totally transparent.

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That will destroy a marriage. It will, I've seen it happen. I do a lot of counseling.

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I've seen marriages destroyed by transparency that was taught at another church, two young couples in a class.

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They don't even know what they're talking about. You need to be transparent with Jesus who can forgive you and forget your sins.

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People don't ever forget them. So be really careful when you're transparent about that. Listen, if it's something you can take to the

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Lord and He can work it out of your life with you, just leave it there. Does that make sense?

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This is a great rabbit trail. It'd be really helpful for all of us. All right. There are times when you have to be transparent.

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I understand, but you really, really make sure the Holy Spirit's leading you to do that and not some human told you to do it. So anyway, here we are a holy nation.

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Now it says we're a peculiar people. How do you like that in the old English? It's kind of true.

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We are peculiar to the world, aren't we? Dave was talking about that at Sunday school quite a bit in his lesson this morning.

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Peculiar is another way of saying we're holy. We are different. We're not perfect, but we are different. When the world needs help, they should see a difference in us enough where they know they can come to us for help.

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So we can't just go live entirely like them and do everything they do and still expect them to know who we are.

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And there's so much in the modern church that I don't like, and I don't want to get legalistic at all. But I mean, there's stuff that the

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Bible says do and don't do that church people are doing all the time now. And it's just become acceptable because Hollywood's doing it or whatever.

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I don't want to name them this morning, but I'm thinking of them. And it's just not, it does not allow you to be a peculiar, a different person when you do everything that the world says it's cool to do.

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So I'll leave that with you. Let the Holy Spirit deal with all of us on whatever that means to Him.

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So now it goes on and says, why is all this true? Why is it that we've been chosen? We have been in time called and regenerated, given birth by God, not something we could do.

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Something got done to us. And then we awakened and everything was changed.

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God did about 33 different things to us in a nanosecond when He saved us, including giving us Jesus's faith, giving us a heart that wanted to repent, giving us a heart of love for Jesus for the first time.

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And before that, there was none that sought Him, not one. And we were one of those. And He changed all those things in a nanosecond.

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And now He makes us where we want to serve Him. And so now we can.

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He made us part of this regened group, this royal priesthood, this holy nation, this peculiar people.

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Why? Next phrase says why. That you should show forth the praises of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.

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So perhaps the second highest sacrifice we can give other than our own physical bodies is the praise of our lips.

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Just as we go about our lives out there in the world, where we have to go to the store, to sometimes our offices, unless you work in a company that's got

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Christians in it, and hopefully, you know, sometimes that happens, sometimes it doesn't. But wherever you go, when you see

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God has done something good in front of you, in front of those people, praise the Lord for it, and don't worry about what they're gonna think about you.

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Just do it. And that's what we're called to do. That's why we're here. You don't have to go down the street, soul winning, as they used to call it, knocking on doors.

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That's the least effective way to lead people to Christ. I mean, they don't want you at their house. That's the least effective way.

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I'm not against it, but it's least effective. The best way is wherever you walk with Christ during the day, wherever he takes you, be a light.

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If you see an opportunity to say something and you think the Holy Spirit wants you to, then say it, but otherwise, just be it.

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Just be a Christian, right? Be helpful, be kind. Don't do the first thought that pops in your mind, because if you're like me, it won't be nice.

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You know, realize that's the old man. Let the new man have time to take control and be spirit filled, which means let the new man link up with the

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Holy Spirit, and then let the Lord show you what he would do in that circumstance, and then do that. And it can change the world when enough people live this way.

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It's done it before, it can do it again. So we should show forth.

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By the way, in the old English, a lot of times where you see the word should, it means would, so that we would show forth.

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And you look at the Greek, you'll see that too. The praises of him doesn't mean we ought to, it means we will do it.

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You see the difference? That we will show forth the praises of him who has called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

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You know, if you just contemplated what he's done for us, we wouldn't have to think about living for him, would we?

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You kind of think about the darkness you were in before you knew him, and think about the difference it's made since you became born again, and you'll serve him.

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You don't get saved by serving him, but you serve him because he took you out of that darkness and you're thankful.

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And, you know, I always like to say this, if the old, or I should say the new way of doing it, where you tell people a little prayer formula to pray, and it gets them saved, if that's not how it works, how does it work?

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How does it work? Well, I want you to think about it. I'm gonna go back to Romans 10, 13 in the Greek.

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Whosoever desires to call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. You cannot naturally have that desire.

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I know the world teaches that you can, but you can't. You won't. If that were true, why didn't you get saved five seconds before you got saved?

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Because you didn't want to. Why didn't you get saved a week before? You didn't want to. The Holy Spirit had to change your want to, right?

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So if you see yourself desiring that, or if you see yourself caring for your soul and where it goes when you die, that's not something goats do.

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Sheep do that, but there can be lost sheep that just aren't saved yet. And so if you have those things in your mind and your heart and those desires, that's a really good sign.

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And whosoever desires to call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. And as soon as the Holy Spirit opens your eyes to Jesus and he becomes irresistible, you just receive him because you want to.

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And it'll feel like you did something, that you caused it all to happen, won't it? That's how I thought, didn't you?

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When you first got saved, look what I did. And that's fine because you did do it, but you did it because you wanted to do it.

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We always do what we want to do and God holds us accountable for it. When people, the human race get to heaven someday and the great white throne judgment happens, all the

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Lord's going to do is say, what'd you do with my son? And people are going to say nothing and they're going to hell, or they're going to say, well,

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I wanted him. So I received him and they're going to heaven. And that's it, that's the gospel. So here we see that he's called us out of darkness into his marvelous light, which in time past were not a people.

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That means we were lost, especially the Gentiles, right? We were lost, we were not a people of God, but now we have been made people of God.

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That is something God did to us, but are now the people of God, which had not obtained any mercy in the past, but now have obtained mercy.

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What a change, what a change. So I'll give you one more and we'll stop for today on this idea of spiritual sacrifices.

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In John chapter four, verse 22, it brings us back to an old theme that we've seen all through Romans, where it talks about two requirements for salvation.

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I should say ingredients, and that is the water and the spirit.

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You must have the word of God, which we call the gospel, that part of the word of God, and you must have the

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Holy Spirit or you will have no salvation. Now notice those are things, not things that you did, those are things that you have access to, that God provided.

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So that concept of the water and the spirit, the water being the word of God and the spirit, the

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Holy Spirit, that themes all through this chapter in Romans, but look here in John chapter four, verse 22, you worship you know not what.

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Jesus said, we know what we worship. The Jews know what we worship because we have the oracles of God.

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We know the true God. For salvation is of the Jews. And he's talking to the woman at the well, a

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Gentile woman, half Gentile, half Jewish, actually is what she was. You remember that story? And he says to this woman, but the hour comes and now is, because why?

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Because he was standing in her presence, God standing in her presence. The hour comes and now is when the true worshipers, in other words, not people that are religious people, like the

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Pharisees, like religious people that go to church to keep the rules, but they may not be born again.

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Not people like that. Not hyper -spiritual people, but people that really actually know the

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Lord. It says, true worshipers shall worship the

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Father. And look at this, in spirit and in truth, same two components. Do you see it?

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The spirit is the Holy Spirit. The truth is the word of God. You have to have both.

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Not only do you have to have both to be saved, you gotta have both to grow after you're saved.

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To serve the Lord, you have to have that. If you ever stop staying in this word,

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I know you may be too busy being in it every single day. Some people do it every morning and every night at bedtime.

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That's awesome. King David did that. Some people will read it for six hours on a Saturday, but as long as you're in it now, in the present in your life, not back five years ago when you got saved or 20 years ago is when

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I read the Bible, but now, as long as you're in the word now, you have the Holy Spirit and you will grow.

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Your growth is directly proportional to the amount of time you spend in this book with the

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Holy Spirit teaching you. And I don't mean here, I mean at home in private. All right, so here it speaks of this.

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The time comes when those that worship, true worshipers, will worship the Father in spirit and in truth.

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For the Father seeks such to worship Him. Who does the seeking? Us or God? No man seeketh

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God, not one. God does the seeking. So just always the way it's been for 2000 years of history up until the last 75 years where it's changing, right?

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So now God is a spirit. I'm sorry, it says, for the Father seeketh such to worship

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Him. And look at verse 24. God is a spirit and they that worship Him must worship

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Him in spirit. That's Holy Spirit. And truth, that's the Word of God. Same two components.

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So that teaches us how we equip ourselves to offer up spiritual offerings to God, which predominantly is the praise of our lips, walking a thankful life.

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You know, if you look at Romans chapter one where it talks about a lot of topics people don't wanna talk about, such as homosexuality, shows what

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God thinks about that. But you know, it lists 21 sins, not just that one. And I said, well, that's not a sin.

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I was born that way. Then why is it a sin? Because it's listed in the midst of 21 other sins or 20 other sins in Romans chapter one.

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But you know what the cause of all those sins is? If you go up to the top of the chapter, you'll figure it out in the context, being unthankful, having an unthankful heart.

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In other words, you don't give God the credit for everything you have. That's where it starts. Every sin starts there.

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So on the other hand, those who walk with the Lord offer up spiritual offerings of their own body, spiritual offerings of the thanksgiving of their lips and praise from their lips.

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It's all spiritual. You can't see it, but the world will see it if you're a people that walk that way.

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Let's stand and have prayer together. Lord, thank you so much for your word.

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We love it. We stand in awe that you breathed it into existence and that you preserved it until the last generation and for all eternity.

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And we thank you that you've given it to us, that you've also given us the Holy Spirit to help us to understand the scriptures, to make the scriptures clear and to teach us line upon line at the time we're supposed to learn something.

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Each of us learns individually at the right time when we're supposed to learn something. Thank you for that. Lord, help us to offer up spiritual sacrifices to you as we live our lives this week in this world and help us to be the salt and the light that you called us to be.

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Go with us into our time of fellowship now. Bless the meal we're about to have in Jesus' name. Amen. All right, if you're visiting, we'll ask you to stay if you want to.

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If you don't have plans, we bring enough food for everybody. We have a meal every week here and fellowship together.