Book of Romans - God's Governance of Man | The Law of Love, Pt. 2 (01/23/2022)

Park Meadows Church

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And I guess we've got to do a little bit of Bible because Bill taught us in Sunday school that telling stories and stuff doesn't do much.

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He was quoting a preacher from Boston and I was sitting back there going, man, that's right.

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You know, I agree so much. And how many times have I heard Myron say, Brother David, it makes me so angry.

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These preachers think they need poems. They think they need stories. Don't they know that every page of the

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Bible has got a sermon in it with three main points and a whole bunch of sub points, preach the Bible. You know,

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I can hear Myron saying that, but that's kind of what the guy you quoted was saying. He's like, if you don't get in the script, sorry,

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I got to hurry. So let's do it. Romans 13 is where we are. We're talking about how God governs in the actions of men.

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Do you remember? It's been a while. And I tried to save paper and I printed two slides per page and they came out like that.

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So I'm trying to see that. So could stumble a little this morning on just trying to see it.

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Next time I'll print one per page. But Dave's got the PowerPoint for you guys.

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So you guys out there have a little bit of advantage. You guys have to use a Bible, all right, or a phone or something.

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And so there are four main points in this chapter. First of all, the Christian's relationship to human government.

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We've already covered that. Secondly, reasons Christians should obey their earthly governors. We've done that one.

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And now we're on the third thing that we see and it's called the law of love or sometimes it's called the law of Christ.

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And that's what we're talking about. And we'll end up actually, believe it or not, the last point is the second coming and how preaching about that, how that affects men and how that has to do with God governing men.

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So that'll be the last point. But today we're still on the law of love. So we sort of have had at least two

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Sundays, I think, to sort of introduce this concept and get going into it.

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But it's really so, so important because you've heard me mention, and I'm sure you've noticed it, but I see it around a lot that there are a lot of modern day

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Judaizers, people, and a lot of times they are part Jewish and they wanna bring law into the church.

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And they want you to worship on Sunday rather than, I'm sorry, on Saturday rather than Sunday, because they'll say

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Saturday's the true Sabbath. And they like to bring all types of law into the church.

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Have you seen the billboard coming back from Dallas? You guys go to Dallas, it says true Christians obey.

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Have you seen that one? Well, that's a Judaizer. It's a subtle thing, but I mean, because it is true, true

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Christians obey. Sometimes it's what I would have put on the billboard. True Christians try to obey.

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I might've put that. Or true Christians feel bad when they don't obey. Maybe I put that. But I would never put true

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Christians obey because that's just not true, because we don't. We don't obey much. So this whole thing and their whole concept is that if you're not obeying, you're not even saved, right?

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So guess what? The guys who put the billboard are probably not saved. Because Jesus said, if you think you gotta be circumcised plus believe in Jesus, then

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Christ availeth you nothing. How much is that gonna help you get to heaven if you have no Christ? He's not helping you at all, you see.

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But people, it's all around, and it's gonna get worse as the end time would go on. It's gonna be more and more legal.

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The Antichrist will actually, when he first rises up the first three and a half years, he will use the most legalistic church in the world to his advantage, which is the

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Roman Catholic Church. And then he'll turn on them and kill them too, the last three and a half years. But he'll use them to kill us the first three and a half years.

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You get that? Not so much, you think, well, that would never happen in this day and time.

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But the only reason it's not already happening is we have laws to protect us. We have secular laws that protect us from murder.

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I don't know if you think that sounds crazy, but just read Fox's Book of Martyrs, all right?

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The Roman Catholics killed more born -again people than Rome did. So I'm talking about that in the

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Roman government. So think about that. So that's something you have to be aware of moving into the end times that the world at large and all religion that is legalistic will hate you and will persecute you.

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Some of you've heard me tell the story about two Mormons that walked in and wanted to debate me once in my office. And I got tired of it.

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So I finally just said, look, it's just the blood of Jesus plus nothing. It's the blood of Jesus, the only thing that can save you.

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And it's none of this stuff that your church has invented. And one of them literally got up out of the chair, reached across and tried to grab me and pull me over and punch me.

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And the other one stopped him and sat him down. They hate it. Look, if you just say, look, it's just only

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Jesus. And he did it all. You don't do nothing. Even Christian people will hate you for that.

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People in churches all around you, if you tell the Christian people in these churches around us, right here in Corsicana or any other place, if you tell them that, look, it's like, you didn't do any of it.

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Your church didn't do any of it. Your pastor didn't do any of it. The altar, which is not even a

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New Testament concept. I have it here just so I can step across and get the camera in the right place.

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It's not a New Testament concept. That's Old Testament. It came from Roman Catholicism. There's a reason Protestants have it.

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You tell them, look, it's none of that. It's like Jesus died for his own, not even for everybody, but for everyone he knew before the foundation of the world, he died for them because he's not gonna lose one of them.

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And he's gonna come and call the one. And he's gonna regenerate them before they do anything.

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And so it's all a gift. They will hate you. But not one thing

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I just said is false. It's all the gospel. It's the true gospel. And so now we have a false gospel going across the world, especially in America that, yeah, it's

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Jesus, but you gotta be circumcised. In other words, Gentile Americans wouldn't say that, but what they say, yeah, it's

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Jesus, but you gotta, you gotta do something.

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You gotta pray a little prayer. You gotta do something. Anyway, you get the idea, right? Well, this part of Roman chapter 13 is talking about the difference between people that preach salvation by law and those who preach it as a free gift of grace, which is all redundant because grace means undeserved favor.

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So it's a free, free, free gift. You can't pay for it. You can't buy it. You can't get it for your kids.

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You can't get it for your spouse. You can't get your grandkids saved. You cannot make them be saved by some method that you learned at some church.

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It doesn't work that way. They have to be called by the Holy Spirit, by God, the

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Holy Spirit. He has to move in on them. He has to open their blind eyes, their deaf ears, their cold, selfish,

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I'm God heart, and change it to, oh, I'm not God. I see God for the first time and He's God.

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Wow. And now they're saved. So yeah, so now they believe. Now they get baptized. Now they start to try to obey, but they're not very good at it.

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That's how salvation works. And you say, well, how would God, why would God make it that way? Because God ain't gonna make it the way you think it ought to be.

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That's why. He just doesn't work that His ways are higher than our ways. We would think it's like stuff we do to please an awesome

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God. It was just totally impossible because our righteousness is as filthy rags, the scripture says.

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And yet that's man's again and again. Every church goes through a cycle. Every church group in history, there's a very good book about it.

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I read it so long ago. I don't remember the title or who wrote it, but it was about church growth. And every church, and he studied, he tracked it all the way back to the first century.

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Every church and every church group has gone through a cycle of Jesus is their first love. And then they get around here, we get a little bit more mannish and then a little bit more government, human government in the church.

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And now we got to pull all the churches and be under that human government. And it goes all the way around to where all of a sudden it's totally humanistic.

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And at that point, Jesus says, I removed the candlestick, which it's not even a real church. It's just an institution with people in it.

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How many times have you heard me say it? I know it gets old. I need new people. Y 'all need to bring some more people that don't know this stuff.

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It'd be exciting for all of us, at least for them and me, maybe not you, because I know you get tired of hearing this, but I mean, listen, it's the only true gospel there is.

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Well, when you look at the vast difference between a plan of salvation that has to do with doing stuff and one that has nothing to do with anything you've done or ever will do, it is a vast, vast difference.

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And Romans chapter 13 gets into it a lot. And it'd take you out into other parts of scripture, though, all over the

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Bible that teach it so clearly. And so first we see it there.

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And the actual verse is verse eight, if you want to see it in chapter 13. It says, oh, no man, anything but to love one another for he that loveth another has fulfilled the law.

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Now in the Greek, that's very strong because it says he that has agape love for another person has already fulfilled the law.

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What does that mean? He has kept the law, this law that they say you've got to do to be saved, he's already done it.

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Well, why would you think that's true? Well, you think about it. There's not a single natural man, woman, boy, or girl that's just born into this world that has not been regenerated and called or called and regenerated by the

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Holy Ghost if they have not had that experience yet, which is something God does to you, not something you do to him or for him.

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But you have not had that, then you're a natural man or woman. There's not one single human that has agape love because that comes from only

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God. That is not a human attribute. You taught on that, son, still do. Walking all over my sermon again. But anyway, not really.

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But you mentioned the three types of love. Humans only have two of them. They got phileo, which means

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I can be your friend if you treat me right. And while you're treating me right, most marriages are built on that.

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That's why they break up. And then the other one is eros, which most marriages start with that one, you know?

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And it'll probably later don't have enough of it, but that's biblical, by the way.

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But the other one, agape, no human has that. So this scripture, listen, this

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Bible, these truths are so interwoven. If you look at it through a microscope, it is fantastically amazing because this verse literally says that if you have, and in Greek, it doesn't say love, because that could be eros or friendship.

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It says agape. It says, if you have agape for one other person, you are saved.

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Wow. And not only that, you fulfill the law, which means you're saved.

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So from the Father's eyes, you fulfill the law. Now, this little word fulfill is plero, plero, and listen to what it means, okay?

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So look what the scripture says in verse eight. Don't owe any man anything.

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I used to think that was a verse against debt. It is not. It's not saying don't get in debt.

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It has nothing to do with money. What it means is don't let any legalist ever come up to you and tell you, hey, but you've got to worship on Saturday, plus have

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Jesus. Don't owe him that. This is what this means in the context. Don't let him make you indebted to his view of theology.

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That's what this means. Does that make sense to you? Don't owe a man, don't commit yourself to any legalist where he says, well, look, you know, surely you don't want to eat meat that was offered to a false

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God. Say, well, you know, you got a point there. Now you owe him something, because you agreed with him.

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You see my point? That's what that means. You just say, you know, I'm not so sure you're right about that. Say that, that'll work.

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Now you don't owe him anything. So that's what the first part means. I think you're a fool.

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Now you don't owe him anything, except an apology, I guess. But all right, but the thing, but what

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God says through the Holy Spirit, giving this to the apostle, the greatest Christian who ever lived,

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Paul, who was an expert at the law, by the way, he says, I don't owe these

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Jews anything. I don't have to live like they do. And they get onto me for that. Like Peter maybe tried a little. Paul says,

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I don't owe him anything, because I love people now. And I never had the ability before. And Jesus came into my heart and I genuinely love the people

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I'm preaching to now. From all over the world, Gentiles too. Oh, that one got all over Peter, didn't it at first?

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Gentiles too, I don't care. There's no difference, Paul says. No difference between Jew and Gentile.

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Now there's a big difference between legalism and grace right there. Is you gotta not love all the races of the world if you're gonna be a law person.

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But Paul said, no, I'm not that way. I love people. And he said, by loving one another, we have fulfilled the law.

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And I look at this word fulfill here in the Greek, leveled it up. What does that mean?

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That's what one of the root meanings of the word means. We took the law and we put it all on the same level.

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And if we break any point of it, we've broken it all, but we've leveled it all up. And now we have fulfilled it, we're keeping it all.

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So it means to level up the law. It means we have satisfied the law. What does that mean? That means as God the

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Father looks at the true believer who's already been called and regenerated, you know, that means regained.

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You now have God's genes rather than your human parents genes. So God sees you as regenerated.

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You're now born again. And you have gape love in your heart that God put there and you love other people.

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And he sees you loving the other people. You don't even have to try, you just love them. I don't mean that we don't treat people wrongly.

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Sometimes we do, but that's the flesh, but the real us, the new born again person, loves other people, especially brothers and sisters.

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And so we satisfy the law completely by having been regenerated and having that love in the heart is what verse eight says.

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Also means we accomplished the law. Now you think about that because there's another verse coming here.

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Once we get to it, like next year, we'll get to verse nine, just a joke, but there's another verse coming that'll talk about that a little bit.

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We accomplished the whole law. Think about that. Then it also means we complete the law, which

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Jesus actually did that, but he lives in us and God sees him in us. And then to perfect the law, listen, what we preach and what we live and what we believe makes the old

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Testament law perfect. And without us, it would be imperfect. And yet the legalizer comes and says, well, you have grace and Christianity, but you're not perfect.

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You need to add the Sabbath on Saturday. You need to add this. You need to add that. You need to have this. I mean,

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I've had them tell me bizarre things. Some things I can't, wouldn't even, well, I guess there's no kids in here.

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Where'd they all go? Kids are gone. Dave's not even gone. Where'd they go? They're gone.

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So I will say it, but I won't say it. I'll just put it this way. I had one of them, a pretty close Jewish Christian friend of mine.

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And he said, brother David, you're a preacher. You should know, you can't be with your wife on Saturday if you're going to preach on Sunday.

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And I said, I ain't joining your church. Sharon liked that one.

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I do too. I mean, it's bizarre. It's bizarre things, but where'd he get that?

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He got that from the law of the priest in the old Testament. That was true for them, right?

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But they're under the what? Law. Law. That's just one good example. I don't know why that one came to mind.

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Maybe because I just spent 17 days with my wife. Anyway, so perfect the law.

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It's perfect. You don't need to bring law back to make it perfect. Now let's go to the next one. Look at verse nine.

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For this, thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. Now he's naming the law, isn't he?

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Some of the law. And he could go on and name all of it if he wanted to, but for space, he just names these. Don't covet.

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Don't covet your neighbor's wife, all these things. And if there be any other commandment that you can find from the

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Old Testament, it is briefly comprehended in this saying, namely, thou shalt love your neighbor, agape.

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Thou shalt love your neighbor as yourself. Love works no ill to the neighbor.

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Therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law. There it is. So there's how it works. So remember how one of those

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Greek meanings for the little word fulfill means to accomplish? You say, okay, that's all theory.

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That's all doctrine that the love is completed. I mean, the law is completed and it's perfect and it's kept because I'm a

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Christian now. That sounds doctrinal. It's all cool. But one of the meanings is how do you actually accomplish?

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How do you actually accomplish this life where you actually are keeping the law? Like the billboard says, true

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Christians obey. Well, what if you're gonna try that a little bit? How do you get to where you can obey?

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How can you accomplish the law? Well, you know what? You accomplish it by simply loving your neighbor as yourself and the whole law will be kept.

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Isn't that beautiful? And loving God with all your heart, mind and soul, that's the other component. And Jesus said that right there is the great commandment and the next one.

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He called them both the great commandment, but there were two. One, love your father with all your heart, mind and soul, and then love your neighbor as yourself.

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Jesus says in this, the whole law is found. That is not taught today by legalists.

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They don't say that one. They say, no, you need to keep all these law things to make your religion better.

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And the scripture so clearly teaches, hey, it's actually us living this way that perfects the old law is what makes it complete.

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So anyway, isn't that nice? I like that. So God governs, one of the ways he governs the actions of men, if he wants us as Christians to actually keep his law and obey him is he puts love in our hearts.

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We didn't put it there. He put it there when he saved us. One of the 33 things he did to us when he saved us, he gave us the faith of Christ, but he gave us the love of Christ for God's sheep.

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And because you have that, you are way less apt to covet your neighbor's wife.

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You're way less apt to steal something from your neighbor who you love, right?

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Do you see the point? You're not apt to cheat your neighbor who you actually love, like God loves them.

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And it just makes you fulfill the law. It makes you obey, makes you more and more obedient the more and more that love grows in our hearts.

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So we start to see this concept of the difference of the law of Christ between that and the law of Moses.

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And we talk about why it's important and what the differences are. So we mentioned last time in John chapter one, right there in the very first part of John one,

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I think it's so amazing how John chapter one sort of mirrors Genesis chapter one, don't you? I mean, it just kind of almost goes right with it.

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It says, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God. And it skips on down, you know, get down into like verse four and five right in there.

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And it says, in Christ, find out in the chapter that Jesus is the word. So we know we're talking about Jesus.

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In Christ was life and the life was the light of men. Now starting right here, and this can mimic

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Genesis one. So you can go the very first of the Bible or in what we might say, the most stellar beginning of the

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New Testament is John chapter one. The whole book of John is a great, I would start there, not Matthew. John is where I would start.

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And the first of John says that this word, which is, what is a word by the way?

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It's like a truck that takes information from your head, rolls it down the carpet to me.

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I pick it up and stick the truck and it puts it in my head. That's what a word is. A word can take what's in the real you, which is spiritual and invisible, put it in a form like a truck and haul it over here to me and then unload it and put it spiritual and invisible into my head.

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And now I sort of understand what your spirit is saying to my spirit, right? That's what a word is.

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And that's who Jesus is. He does that from the father to us. He brings from an invisible, powerful omnipresent God who knows everything and is everything.

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And he brings knowledge and information from that to our mind. That's why he's called the word.

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So he is what a word does. And in the beginning was Jesus, the word.

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He was with God and he was God. And in him was life and all existence, by the way.

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I mean, you can't live without a physical body, at least the way we understand life. You can't sit on a pew without him holding the molecules together.

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And as Bill's talked about so many times, the atoms in those molecules have more nothing in them than they have stuff in them.

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Like the distance between the electrons that are going all around the nucleus, the space in there is huge compared to the amount of stuff that's there.

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And so it's mostly nothing. And you're sitting on it, not falling through it. You can't tell me how much of this stuff would actually work without Christ keeping his hand on it.

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Right, none of it. And so your physical body, your brain, nothing works without him keeping his hand on it.

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And so we see he is everything, in him is life. Yeah, in him is life.

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There's nothing without him. There's no universe. There's no primordial soup if there ever was such a thing.

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There's nothing to blow up at the Big Bang. There's no heartbeat of a baby.

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There's nothing, no thought. No thought of nothing, Matt, right? Think about that for a few seconds.

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In him was life and the life was the life of men. What does that mean? That means, let me just say this.

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It's increasingly more difficult for me to live in this world. And I'm sure for you too, because this world is being humanized and their philosophies are so wrong and ridiculous that it's like listening to a child talk when they start talking these

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PhDs. It's like listening to a little child talk when they start thinking that there is some light that comes from the mind of a human out into the world and it brightens up the world and you wouldn't know about that human.

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Do you really think that calculus came from the mind of a human? Or do you think that it was inspired into that mind by God who invented it so the human would teach us when

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God wanted us to know it? Which way do you think it happened? Well, we know which way it happens. Same way with art, architecture, technology, all of it comes from God, not just the

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Bible, not this like Otis said, God wrote two books. Yeah, this is an important one, probably the most important one right here because this is the spiritual light, but he also wrote the universe and that's the second book.

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All the science, all of that is from God too. And so you start looking at this and you realize that Jesus is not only the life, but he is the light.

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That means the knowledge and understanding and wisdom of how everything works to the extent that God gives us grace by measure so that we can know some of that stuff for real.

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It's not imaginary, it's really real because it comes from the source of all life, which is

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God. Whereas every secular person that's alive in this world today, they get so much of their information from humans and no human from within his self or herself can bring true light into the world.

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New knowledge, new information, new understanding and wisdom cannot come from a human brain, which is dirt basically.

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It comes from God because God is the light. And that's what this means, he's the light of men.

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But now look at verse five. And the light shines in the darkness, there's humanism. The thoughts of man, the thoughts of human beings in their natural state from God's viewpoint is nothing but just darkness and filthy rags and nothing good in it.

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There's none that seeketh after God, not one. We've all gone our own way, we've all gone astray. And that's what that is.

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And it says, and the light came into this world, Jesus, and he shined like a bright resplendent light in the darkness and the darkness comprehended him not.

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There's your problem with law right there. That right there to me in my personal study, this is where Romans 13 arises from, is this great problem of natural men, women, boys and girls who haven't been regenerated yet, having a complete impossibility of comprehending one single bit of godly information, knowledge, understanding, or wisdom at all.

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So they get passed down to them, whatever their people around the fire while they were worshiping rocks and trees told them to believe, and it just gets passed down.

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That's what they still believe today. So law is based on that kind of knowledge.

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Grace is based on something that came from heaven that no human could have figured out. No human could have ever invented it.

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And so that's kind of where we start. Now in Matthew chapter 12, if you remember from last time,

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Jesus healed a man that had a withered hand and he did it on the

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Sabbath. Now, what does that do? That broke their law, didn't it? And he heals this man, but he does it on the

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Sabbath, Saturday, and he broke the law. And the Pharisees were infuriated. The religious leaders were infuriated.

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In that context, we see in chapter 12, verse 17 of Matthew, that it might be fulfilled, which was spoken by Isaiah, the prophet saying, behold my servant in whom my soul is well pleased.

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So when you go to the Mount of Transfiguration, when God, the Father's voice came through to Peter and say, no, don't build the tents to Moses and Elijah, because that typifies the law and the prophets.

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They are not on the same level as my son. Hear only him. That's the New Testament message. That's the gospel.

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Only build a tent to that. It is on a higher level. It's not on the same plane. That when

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God said that, Isaiah, some 600 at least years before that had prophesied that God would say that and we would hear it.

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Isn't that fascinating? So then if you remember last time, we went into Isaiah 42 and Isaiah 43, and we read that passage.

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Now, what's interesting about that passage is one of the things these Judaizers wanna do to us is make us think that you have to come under the law to be saved.

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You gotta keep the law plus believe in Jesus or you can't be saved. Because, you know, the way that the

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Gentile church behaves is just not complete. And yet when you read Isaiah chapter 43, let me just get into the last part of that down around verse five, the last part of this concept that actually started in chapter 42.

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And it says this, but in God is speaking to somebody and you gotta ask yourself, who is he talking to?

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Is he talking to just Jews or is he talking to his sheep of all races called the elect?

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Who's he talking to? So, but now, thus saith the Lord that created you, O Jacob.

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So that sounds like he's speaking to, at least he's speaking to the Jews there, right? And he that formed you,

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O Israel. So we know he's including the Jews here, isn't he? Fear not, for I have redeemed you.

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So we know that he bought the Jews by paying a price, which was the same price paid for us,

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Jesus's blood. They didn't get saved by the law that they kept. They got saved, that law included sacrifices, which pictured the true lamb of God who was yet to come and they had to believe in him or they were lost as a goose no matter how much of that law they tried to keep.

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Like the billboard said, a true Jew will keep the law. Yeah, well, none of them were able to. So the only way any of them got saved is by looking forward to the cross and believing in it.

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It's faith, all right? So he goes in here and he says, he's obviously talking to Israel at this point.

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And he says, fear not, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name, you are mine.

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Now that goes back to before time began. He knew you by name and you were already his. Ephesians chapter one teaches that and so many other places, all through the

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Old Testament. And then I'm gonna jump out here to verse five for the sake of time.

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Fear not, for I am with you, God says. So these persons on the earth who have always belonged to God and the ones that Jesus said of them,

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I will lose nothing, both Jew and Gentile, neither Jew nor Gentile, Paul said. They're just humans that God has chosen as his own children.

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They do not need to fear because God is with them, all right? He says, I will bring your seed.

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That's your children and grandchildren. I'm now looking out into the future, not just the people in Isaiah's time, some 2 ,600 years ago, but I'm looking out into the future and now

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I'm prophesying well out into the future, actually to the end of the world or as the

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New Testament word, age, aeon. And he says, I'm with you even till then.

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And he talks about it. He says, at that time, there's gonna be this thing called the rapture, the second coming in the rapture, which happened at the same time, by the way.

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And he says, look, I will say to the North, give up my children. I will say to the

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South, keep not back my children, let them come to me. Because the Bible says we're drawn to him like the vultures are to something they're gonna devour.

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It's that much attraction. Give them up, let them come to me. Bring my sons from afar.

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Now listen, the Jew never called themselves sons from afar. They were the sons from near. You understand what

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I'm saying? Like, we're close to God. The ones that are afar are the old stinking Gentiles. They can't be saved anyway, they would think.

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You know, and Paul was always teaching them. Yes, they can. God, Jesus died for all kinds of men, not just Jews.

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How about bring my sons from afar and my daughters from the ends of the earth.

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That's not just Israel all of a sudden, is it? How many of you think that's just Israel? Or maybe he's talking about bring

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Jews from everywhere. No, I don't think so, but it could still mean that. So let's keep reading. Bring my daughters from the ends of the earth, even everyone that is called by my name.

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Now, who's that? That's everybody. There's neither Jew nor Gentile.

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So that's all of God's kids, even the adopted ones. Did you know, I finally found like two years ago after 40 years of studying that even the

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Jews have to be adopted into God's family. I didn't know that because the only true son of God is who?

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Jesus. Everybody else is adopted. And the Jew wants to make a big deal out of that, these

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Judaizers. Oh, you got to be adopted. Well, so do you. You just hadn't figured it out yet. It took me 38 years to figure it out.

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So anyway, so North, give up my kids. South, East, West, give up my kids.

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Even everyone is called by my name for I have created him for my glory.

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I have formed him. I have made him from before time began.

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So it's neither Jew nor Gentile. Now we're totally out of time and we'll just stop there for now.

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But as we move through this study, what I want you to be looking for are key words or phrases that show a huge distinction between the

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Old Testament works concept that the Jew believed in. And by the way, let me say this. I personally don't believe the

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Jews believed they were saved by that throughout the Jewish history. I think it was mostly during the inter

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Testament time period but the last 300 years between the prophet

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Zechariah, which is the Jews last book of the Bible. Theirs is not in the same order, but ours is. The last book of the

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Jewish Old Testament is Zechariah. And from the time he lived till the time

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Matthew was on the earth and Jesus was here was 300 years. During that time is where they began to think they were saved by works.

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So even for the Jew, it took false prophets to convince them and the way they did it, by the way, is they stopped teaching from the

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Old Testament scriptures. And for 300 years, the Pharisees arose during this time period.

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The ones who crucified Christ arose to power and they began to teach from things called

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Targums, which is their own, what's the living

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Bible? What do you call that? It's not a translation, it's a paraphrase. It was their own paraphrase of the

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Old Testament. So the people, since they didn't all have the scrolls, they never got to see the Bible.

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All they saw was what they told them they thought the Bible meant. And if you go read Isaiah 53 in the Targums, Jesus is totally gone.

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If you read it in the scripture, it's all it's about. Anyway, so they missed their

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Messiah because the teachers, the last 300 years. So this idea of legalism was relatively new by the time

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Jesus came into the world and certainly Paul, it had only existed as far as being really popular among the

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Jews for about 300 years. Now, legalism has existed since the Garden of Eden because that's what Satan taught

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Eve and Adam, right? But anyway, so we're gonna start looking for key words and phrases in the study that just slam dunk the incorrect theory that you gotta add law.

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I mean, it will just totally annihilate that theory and you're gonna have several by the time we get done with the study and you'll have that to use at your family

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Christmas lunches and your Thanksgiving get togethers with all your friends and family who don't understand this yet.

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All right, let's stand and have prayer together. Lord, we thank you so much for your word and thank you for protecting our church family and us and getting us all back together safely today.

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Thank you for our online church family as well. We missed everybody. Thank you for the rest that you gave

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Charlotte and myself and the people we were allowed to fall in love with on the ship and witness to and on some of the islands and Lord just work in their hearts even though we're gone from them now, may your word continue to work in their hearts and may you bring other

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Christians and scripture, bring the Bible to them and all these things and Lord be with us here, help us to all be good witnesses everywhere we go and take the gospel with us and thank you for the meal we're about to have.