John 6:44-47 (Drawn To Obedience)

The Shepherd's Church

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It's been a long time since high school. I was thinking about that the other day. It's been a long time.

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I think I'm coming up on 20 years, which is crazy. In high school, I remember there was these certain problems that I used to really love.

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I was really good at them. They're called solving analogies. And you would find them on your SAT and CAT and every other type of test, standardized testing that you would have.

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And a solving analogy basically is it's two groups of things that are known compared to something that isn't known.

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So for instance, an apple is to an orange as a Toyota is to a blank. And they're inviting you to understand the correlation.

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What is the similarity between an apple and an orange so that we can understand what Toyota's counterpart might be? And they would provide you with a blank of answers, like for instance, pineapple, which would just be dumb.

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That would be the answer that you wouldn't pick. A Toyota is not to a pineapple. We would obviously know that. So we'd mark that off.

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Maybe they give you car or motorcycle and Honda. And you start to realize that types of apples compared to types of cars,

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Honda would be the only appropriate answer. And you would get that question right. C is not right this time.

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You know how the strategy, you always pick middle C. It would be Honda. An apple is to an orange as a

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Toyota is to a Honda. Now, the point of that exercise is to examine the relationship between these terms.

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And that is exactly what I want us to accomplish today. I want us to see the correlation between salvation and obedience.

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I want us to see that obedience does have a place in the Christian's life. And it doesn't have to be perverted, like we see in the

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Catholic Church or other legalistic churches. Let's use the Catholic Church for example just for a moment. If the

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Catholic Church was to create an analogy, it might be like this. Obedience is to salvation as a root is to its fruit.

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What the Catholic Church would be saying is obedience is like the root of our salvation. And salvation is like the fruit.

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So that if you obey and obey and obey, then maybe you will be accepted at the end of your life. That's what the

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Catholic Church has done. They've confused the root with the fruit. You have to participate in the sacraments or else you're not going to go to heaven.

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You have to be baptized as an infant, because if you die without baptism, you're not going to go to heaven. You have to be confirmed.

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You have to go through confession. You have to venerate the saints. You have to practice penance. You have to do all of this stuff.

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On and on and on and on it goes. Because it's nothing but religion. Instead of faith alone for salvation, it's faith plus works.

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Instead of Scripture alone for salvation as our infallible guide, it's Scripture plus traditions. Scripture plus the council.

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Scripture plus the pope. Scripture plus this. Scripture plus that. Instead of grace alone for salvation, it's grace plus merit.

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Because Mary undoubtedly was so good that she earned a storehouse of righteousness that you can pull upon when you're in your moment of need so that you can avoid purgatory and everything else.

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That's foolishness. The whole religion is a demonic counterfeit and it's built upon the flawed notion that you must obey

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God in order to be accepted by God. And that's wrong. The Bible never says that. The Catholic way to salvation is obey in order to be accepted.

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And we learned last week that you can't. Jesus said, no one can come to me unless the father who sent me drags him.

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You can't come through obedience. You can't come through a man in a big white gown who says that X, Y, and Z, the pope, just because he sits in Rome and he claims

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Petrine descent. You can't come to Christ through that man. That man is equally incapable of coming to God unless Jesus Christ intervenes on his behalf.

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If salvation were all about us, then we would be the one earning it. We would be the one paying for it.

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We would be the one striving after it. And who would get the glory in that? We would.

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And we can't bear the glory of God. God gets the glory in our salvation.

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That's what we learned last week, that we needed God to come and do every single facet of the salvation enterprise for us because we could not do it ourselves.

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Before we knew anything, we needed God to know us. And he knew us before eternity, before time and space began.

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It says before time, he chose us. Before we chose anything, he had already chosen us. Before Adam fell, he had made promises to us that he was gonna save us.

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At some point, Jesus came 2 ,000 years ago and he paid for our crimes against God.

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At some point in our life, God's eternal choice collided with our life and his payment plan was deposited into us when we heard the gospel and we were converted by the gospel, adopted by Christ, justified before the

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Father. These things are all a God -centric effort. He alone converted us.

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He alone justified us and redeemed us and adopted us and is sanctifying us. And he alone is going to one day glorify us before the

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Father. Every day of our life, we're being held by the grace of God. You and I aren't doing really anything to hold ourselves and keep ourselves.

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Past, present, and future, we are saved in eternity for eternity, not by our power, but by the power of God alone.

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We didn't choose ourselves. We didn't drag ourselves. We didn't atone for ourselves. We didn't regenerate ourselves. We didn't justify ourselves, sanctify ourselves, and we won't glorify ourselves either.

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God is the one who is doing it all and he is the root of our salvation. And because of that, because we have such a healthy root, which is

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God, we will bear fruit. What often happens is when destructive religions, like Catholicism and legalism and fundamentalism,

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I grew up in a church, or I grew up near a church that was very fundamentalist, where you had to obey in order to be accepted by God.

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They were Protestant, but they were Catholic at heart. They just had a different set of rules that were more evangelically.

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Those sorts of destructive religions don't take us to God. They take us to ourselves and ourselves cannot do anything.

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But if we're connected to God, we will bear fruit. We don't throw out fruit. We don't throw out obedience.

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We will obey God, but we'll obey God differently. We want to obey God to be accepted. We already are accepted by God because of Jesus Christ, and therefore we obey.

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That's what Jesus says in John 15. He says, I am the vine, you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him bears much fruit for apart from me, you can do nothing.

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Obedience is the fruit of salvation. Obedience is the result of salvation.

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Obedience is when you are connected to Christ and his life -giving grace so flows into you that you can't help but grow.

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And I love what it says. It doesn't say that we will produce little fruit. It doesn't say that we will produce scant fruit, shoddy fruit, rotten fruit, minimal fruit.

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It says that we will produce much fruit, much fruit. If you are connected to the cord of Jesus Christ, then you have all the nourishment necessary already flowing into your soul to bear much fruit for Christ.

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You think about a child who's connected to her mother via the umbilical cord. She's not thinking about growing.

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In her kicking and sleeping and everything else that she's doing while she's floating around in there, she's not thinking about growing.

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She doesn't have a growth list. She doesn't have a New Year's resolution. She's not thinking about how am I gonna grow today?

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It naturally happens as an absolute consequence of being connected to her mom.

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She grows because of who she's connected to. How much more for us who are connected to Jesus Christ that we will grow?

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And we're not gonna have to think about it today. I really need to work on patience. Tomorrow I really need to work on being loving.

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The next day I really need to work on being a good neighbor because my neighbor kind of frustrates me. No, that's legalism.

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If you do that, you will fail. Being connected to Christ means that we will grow and it won't happen instantaneously.

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It's not like the matrix. You don't get an instant download and you know how to fly an Apache helicopter.

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It's not like that. Over the course of your life, being connected to Christ, you will grow. You will grow more and more.

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You won't need Pharisaic rules and legalism in order to grow. You'll have Christ and his grace and righteousness will be flowing through you.

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That's enough. In the same way that the vitamins and minerals enter into the child, the child of God will have

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Christ's nourishment coursing through your soul and it will be enough. Now the opposite is also true.

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If you are not connected to him, you cannot bear fruit for God. You cannot bear fruit for God if you're not connected to Christ.

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It will be at best the poison grapes of Sodom and Gomorrah. You think about a vineyard.

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You walk up to a grape vine and you cut one of the branches off and it falls to the ground.

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Immediately, the process of death begins in that very moment. You might not see it. It might take a couple of days, but it will wither.

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It will die and it will be nothing but dust by the end of it. The same is true for those who are not in Christ, who were born disconnected from him.

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If you were born disconnected from Christ, you were born spiritually dead. The color of pale death.

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And without the supernatural grafting of the good and faithful gardener connecting you to Christ, you will never have life.

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And by the time your physical body catches up with your spiritual body, meaning your physical body dies as dead as your spiritual body has always been, then that branch will be cut off, thrown into the fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

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That's what Jesus says. Human beings will be thrown into hell or welcomed into the kingdom of heaven based on their fruit.

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Now, let's get this straight. We cannot produce fruit without Jesus Christ.

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So we can only produce fruit with Jesus Christ. So those who are saved are only because of him.

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They bear fruit only because of him. So what I'm saying to you is that we cannot manufacture obedience apart from Christ, but with Christ, we must obey.

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Jesus says in John 14, 15, if you love me, you will obey my commands.

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So that's what I want us to talk about today. What is the relationship between salvation and obedience?

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Last week, we talked about the fact that we've been dragged to God. I apologize also for the fact that I said drug a bunch of times.

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In my particular region, I look this up, in my particular region of the Piedmont of North Carolina, it is acceptable in the third person singular to say drug.

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It's not the case everywhere, and I did not do my homework, and I apologize for giving you bad images of what

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God has done in your life. God dragged you to the gospel so that you would be obedient to Christ.

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God dragged us so that we would be drawn to obedience. God dragged us, and we'll learn four things today in this passage.

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God dragged us so that we would be drawn to the Word of God, that we would be drawn to the knowledge of God, and we would be drawn to the

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Son of God, and we would be drawn to the right belief in God. We were dragged by God to Christ so that we would love

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His Word, understand His Word, believe in the Son of God rightly. That's what we're gonna talk about today.

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What is the result of our salvation? So if you will, turn with me to John 6, 44 through 47.

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If you don't have your Bible with you, it's gonna be up there on the screen. We don't take that for granted.

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Today has been interesting. There it is, good. Let's read the text together. No one can come to me unless the

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Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up on the last day.

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It is written in the prophets, and they shall all be taught by God. Everyone who has heard and learned from the

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Father comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God. He has seen the

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Father. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life.

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Lord, thank you for your teaching on salvation. Lord, thank you that we don't have to figure this out on our own.

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Lord, thank you that you have given us such clear words to understand. And Lord, I pray that today for all of us who love the fact that you saved us, would also love the fact that you have empowered us to obey you.

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Lord, I pray that the same passion and satisfaction we get from our salvation would be the same passion that we have to let your grace course through our soul and veins and leave this world to be lights for the gospel.

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Lord, I pray that your word would invade every aspect of our life, that it would, as a lamp to our feet, guide our paths, and as a spotlight shine upon the dark parts of our soul that we still have hidden from you, roped off from your grace.

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Lord, I pray that those ropes would come down. And Lord, I pray that we would see something that modern

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Christians struggle so difficult with, so difficultly with. What is obedience?

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Why is obedience? Why does it matter? Lord, I pray that we would understand these things today.

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And it's in Christ's name that we pray, amen. For those of us who've been dragged to God, we've also been drawn to the word of God.

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This is what Jesus says. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them. Jesus is making a theological statement here.

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He's saying no one can come to God unless God draws them. He is saying a point, but I want you to understand something.

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We talked about that last week. He is not just making that up, and he's not just asserting his opinion.

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or his educated guesses or offering hypotheses. He is pointing to scripture.

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Jesus is looking at the crowds and saying, none of you can come to me unless God draws you.

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Why? Because it's been written. Jesus, who had unlimited knowledge, did not pull from the halls of academia.

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He did not consort the philosophers of Athens. He didn't cite the textbooks of Alexandria, where the greatest library in the ancient world existed.

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He didn't quote the orators of Rome. He did not point to the rabbis in Jerusalem, Jesus Christ, who had infinite knowledge, pointed to scripture because the wisdom of man pales in comparison to the wisdom of God.

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The book that we have in our hands that often collects dust on our shelf shames the wisdom of the world because it was written with the wisdom of God.

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It is better than Freudian psychology. It is better than Nietzschean philosophy, and it is better than Faucian epidemiology.

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It is better than the wisdom of man because it's written with the wisdom of God.

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Jesus, who was omniscient, who could have pulled from the entire library of available knowledge, cited scripture.

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That ought to tell us something, that Jesus, who is God, cited the

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Holy Bible. He looked at the crowds and he says, it is written because that was the rhythm that Christ wanted you and I to inherit as Christians.

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And I'll tell you this, if we had more that it is written kind of Christians, if we had more

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Christians who cited the Bible instead of sociology or anthropology or psychology or the latest

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TV show or whatever else, if we had more Christians who were rooted to the authority of the text, the church in America wouldn't be so sick.

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Jesus said, I don't speak on my own authority, I speak only what the Father tells me. Jesus, when he was being tempted, didn't share opinions with Satan.

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Jesus is smarter than Satan. And yet Jesus quoted scripture. He said, man shall not live on bread alone, but by every word that comes out of the mouth of God.

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What I'm saying, dear Christians, is if you know that same Jesus who relied on the

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Word of God, who clung to the Word of God, who hung on every word from God, if you know that same Jesus and Jesus' Spirit lives in you, won't you also cling to the

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Word of God? Won't your passions become his passions? Won't your affections become his affections?

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Won't your interests become his interests? And if he was interested in the Word of God and he rooted his entire life in it, won't that become what we're rooted into?

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The same Spirit of Christ that raised Jesus from the dead lives and dwells in you.

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That same Jesus loved the Word. I think believers will love the Word too. We will increasingly build our life upon that.

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We will turn away from the mutable experts and all of their failings.

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Don't wear a mask, wear 15 masks. They've proven they don't know anything. We've got to let what

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God's Word says define our lives. Now listen, it's easy to be a sola scriptura

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Christian on Sunday. It's more difficult to be a sola scriptura Christian on Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday.

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And when I say sola scriptura, I mean the Bible alone is our infallible guide for life and godliness.

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Let me just ask some questions. Husbands, I'm including myself here because I don't do what

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I'm supposed to do. Husbands, will we let God's Word define who we are?

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That we are to love her like Jesus loves the church. That we are to be kind to her and sacrifice for her and give to her freely.

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Will we do that? Or will we compete with her? Or will we be harsh with her?

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Or will we tear her down and will we be selfish and seek after our own agendas and treat her like Jesus would never treat you?

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It depends. Will we root our lives in the Word of God? Let it define everything about us or will we root our lives in what's convenient for us?

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We make allowances for our flesh and then on Sunday say, yes, Bible alone. Wives, same question.

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Will you love and serve and care for your husband as the church loves and cares for Christ, serves

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Christ? Or will you allow your bitterness because your expectations have not been met? Allow your frustration because things are not going your way to dictate how you treat your husband.

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If you're single, will you allow what God's Word says about you to be true? You are never alone if you're in Jesus Christ.

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You have never for a moment been by yourself if you are in Jesus Christ. And by the way, you have a true and better husband that any husband that you ever find is never gonna match up to.

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You have no need to be yearning after some boy who doesn't yet know how to be a man when you've got

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Jesus Christ. Let the right man come and then marry that guy, but don't go out searching for someone who's just gonna fill a void in your life.

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Live with the Holy Scriptures as your guide and you are loved and you are accepted and you have the true and greatest husband of all time.

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Live in that comfort and don't let your loneliness dictate your behavior. You think about sex before marriage.

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Are we gonna allow hookup culture and entertainment and porn and everything else to dictate how we approach the opposite sex?

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Or are we gonna allow God's Word to inform our purity and our holiness and our life?

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We can allow comfort, temporary pleasures, the world, the flesh and the devil to define who we are or we can understand who we are in Jesus Christ, understand what

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Christ has done for us and live according to that. And let's be honest, the

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God who designed sex, the God who designed marriage, the God who designed husbands, the God who designed families, the

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God who designed children knows better than we do on how that we are supposed to do these things.

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And if we do these things according to the way that God said, it won't take from us, it will give to us, we will have more joy, we will be less broken because he's the designer.

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If I take one of these TVs outside and hit it with a sledgehammer and I call LG, I think made it,

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Samsung, if I call them and say, hey, the TV's broke, they're gonna say, what do you do? Well, I hit it with a sledgehammer.

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I was testing its durability. We're not supposed to do that. We're not gonna fix it. It's broken because of you.

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Our lives sometimes are broken because we don't follow what the designer has told us. We don't follow his standards and we wonder why our life is shattered.

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That's right. Now, I say these things because I don't wanna provoke you into a sort of religious obedience.

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The last thing I want you to do is thinking that you have to behave better, live better, think better, pray harder, read your

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Bible more and just become religious. That's not my point. I don't want you to obey because you want

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God to be happy with you. I want you to understand that God is already happy with you in Jesus Christ and I want the joy of God to flood you so deeply and so fully and so perfectly that in that joy, you wouldn't even want to sin against God.

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It's really hard to sin when you're enthralled with Jesus. At night when you're tempted and you're enthralled by things that aren't

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Christ, the cure to sin is worship. It's loving Christ more than everything.

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When we do that, it's really difficult to sin. Now, again,

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I say that so that you will be filled with the joy of Christ and that obedience will become natural for you because I believe that the

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Christian who has been dragged to God also is drawn to the Word of God. And I believe that the

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Holy Spirit has been given inside of us to provoke us and to push us towards the

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Word of God. If you don't have a regular relationship with the Word of God, I'm not telling you this so that you can go add another item to your agenda.

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I'm telling you that these are the words of life. Peter says, where else can we go?

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You have the words of life, Jesus. You and I have those words in front of us. So I think the Holy Spirit wants us to read.

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And that might begin with reading Genesis through Revelation. That might be a big goal. Maybe you start with the

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New Testament and you do Matthew through Revelation. Maybe you start with a smaller book like Romans and you read it.

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Maybe you read five chapters a day because you're really ambitious. Maybe you read five verses that are well examined and prayed over and meditated over and all you get to is five verses in a day but you let

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God's Word define you. And you let God's Word inform you and shape you.

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Maybe you read topically. I've done this before where I'm struggling being a husband. So I read every verse in the Bible on being a husband.

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And I let God's Word define who I am instead of me trying to define who I am. My point is that true

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Christians do not identify or get their truth or get their knowledge or get their understanding from the world.

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True Christians get their knowledge and their understanding and their identity from God. And God has given us to that in His Word.

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If you wanna know how to be sexually pure, you go to the Word of God. If you wanna know how to be a wise steward of your time and your resources, you go to the

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Word of God. If you wanna know how to be a better employee or employer, you go to the Word of God. If you wanna learn how to be a better husband, father, mother, aunt, uncle, or whatever else, you go to the

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Word of God. Because everything that we need is all there.

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It is a sufficient Word, which means that it has every single thing that we need. And if you think about that, what grace has

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God given us? He not only saved us by His power and authority and work alone,

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He gave us His Word so that we would not be confused as we walk out the life of faith here on earth.

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What grace has God given us that we were rescued out of our sins and given

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God's Word to help us? I say it again, what grace, because I say that because we often don't look at the

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Bible as grace, we look at it as a chore or as a duty or as something that we have to do to make God happy with us.

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God has given you a gift in His Word. Don't neglect it. Let it rewrite you.

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You know, they say, I've heard a pastor say one time that we ought to read the Bible until it starts to read us.

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Write in the margins until it starts to write on you. The Bible will redefine our values, it will reorient our norms, it will draw us away from the world, it will sever the roots that we have with this world, and it will establish us in Christ.

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That's the first observation, is that those who are dragged by God to salvation are drawn to the

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Word of God as a natural consequence. When you're connected to His vine, you get the things He gives you, and the things

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He gives you is the Word. The second thing is that we will be drawn to the right knowledge of God.

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Jesus says, as it is written in the prophets, they shall all be taught by God.

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Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me. Jesus is saying no one in their flesh comes to Him, but when

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God grabs you and drags you and when He pulls you to salvation, He will not leave you in your ignorance.

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Praise God. This same God who pulls you to Christ will give you new cravings for the

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Word of God, and He will give you understanding of the Word of God. How often have we been frustrated because we don't understand the

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Word of God? Sit with it, read it, dwell on it, because the Spirit of God is in you to help you understand it.

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You may not be a biblical scholar, but you will understand the Word of God if you just give it a chance and try and read it because He's given you the very tools to do that.

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He's saying that every single believer has been given the keys to understanding.

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Now, I wanna say it this way. Every single Christian on planet Earth, I don't care if you're tall or small,

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I don't care if you're the most feeble -minded person in all of humanity, you understand the Word of God better than the sharpest atheist and the most intelligent agnostic.

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You understand God at a level that they could never dream because you have the Holy Spirit of God inside of you.

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Billions and billions of people open up the Bible and billions and billions of people lay it down because they can't understand the truth of it, they can't handle the truth of it, they can't swallow the truth of it.

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Only the believer will love and accept and rejoice over the truth of God because you've been given the gift of the

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Holy Spirit. Jesus promised that in John 6 when

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He said, all will be taught by God. But He also, this promise goes way back even deeper into the

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Old Testament. Jesus is quoting two verses here that I wanna share with you. One is Isaiah 54, 13.

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Isaiah says this, all your sons will be taught of the Lord and the well -being of your sons will be great.

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Isaiah's looking forward to a day when the Messiah will come and who will usher in the kingdom of God. And when

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Jesus quotes this passage, He is that Messiah. He is that one who by His sacrificial worth will reconcile humanity to Himself and He is that one who will see this prophecy come true because when

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Jesus dies and He sends His Holy Spirit inside of you, you will be taught by God. 700 years before Jesus came, this prophecy came true in Jesus Christ when

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He came. When He rose from the dead, that's when God started plundering the kingdom of Satan.

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Jesus says in Luke that He came to bind the strong man, that's Satan. And in binding the strong man,

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He was gonna plunder Satan's kingdom. What was Satan's kingdom consisting of? You and I who were born dead in our sins, shackled in chains, dead to the things of God and Jesus Christ died to plunder the kingdom of Satan and then dragging us to God so that we will understand and love

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God and walk away from our chains in freedom. We've been given the gift of the knowledge of God.

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Now, again, I say it's not an instantaneous download. It happens over the course of a lifetime.

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It happens over the course of regularly studying the Word of God. Waking up in the morning when you still have sleepy in your eyes, when your coffee hasn't taken effect yet and you say,

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God, here I am. When you open up His Word and you let it inform you, when you have a problem in your life and you run to His Word and you say, teach me, over the course of a lifetime,

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His Word gets down into you. It's kind of like a metal worker where they throw the piece of iron into the fire until the fire gets into the iron and then it can be shaped and it can be molded.

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You and I are so hard and so rigid that we've got to go into the fire of the Word before we can be moldable.

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And then when we got the fire inside of us, the fire of God's Word inside of us, then we can be shaped. Then we can be made into something beautiful.

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Then we can be molded. That's what the Bible is saying. He also quotes Jeremiah 31, 34 when he says, they will not teach again each man to his neighbor and each man to the other saying, know the

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Lord for they will all know me. From the least of them to the greatest declares the

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Lord for I will forgive their iniquity and their sin I will remember no more. Jeremiah is not saying that all people indiscriminately are gonna know

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God. He's saying that all of God's people are gonna know God and all of them are gonna be taught by God and all of them are gonna, their sin will be remembered no more.

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No one in their flesh, Jesus is saying, can come to Him, but when God is drawing you, one of the evidences of that is that you will love

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His Word and that you will begin to understand His Word. When God is drawing an unbeliever to Jesus, some of the things that happens is they begin to desire to understand the

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Word. Even before they're a Christian, more questions start popping in their head.

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Christians in their life who've never spoken about Jesus before start telling them about Jesus. When God is the one drawing them, they're on the

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T riding into Boston and they hear a sermon over someone's AirPods. God begins drawing people to the

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Word so that the Word can begin defining them and shaping them and changing them into the people fit for the kingdom of God.

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Somehow, someway, at some point in every believer's life, God draws them to the

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Word of God and He gives them a hunger and a thirst for the Word of God to hear truth, love truth, and be known by truth.

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And this does not just apply to the believers. Or this doesn't apply just to the new believers. Christians are truth people.

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Christians are not people who believe in myths and who believe in secular philosophies.

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Christians are people who believe in the truth of God and let it define every part of who they are.

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That's the second thing, that we'd have the right knowledge of God. The third thing is that we would be drawn to the

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Son of God. Now what I love about that is so beautiful. No one comes to Jesus unless God draws them.

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And when God draws them, He draws them to Jesus. He draws them to Christ so that Christ will be the very center of their life.

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So He will be the air that they breathe. He will be everything to them. Look at what Jesus says. I'm gonna read all these verses again.

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No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him and I will raise him up on the last day. That's the whole of salvation.

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That's beginning to end right there. Jesus goes back and says, it is written in the prophets that all shall be taught by God.

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That's during your life. You will be taught by God and everyone who has learned by the Father comes to me.

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Everyone who God has put the knowledge of God inside have come to Jesus. Every single one of them.

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God taught us so that we will come to Christ. It doesn't say in the

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Bible that God taught us so that we will come to the Father. Let that sit in for a second. It does not say that everyone who has heard and learned from the

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Father comes to the Father. It says that everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Jesus. Because in our sin, even in our finite natures,

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God is too glorious for us to know directly. That's why we come into heaven clothed in the robes of Christ, because if we were not, we would be evaporated by His holiness.

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No one has seen the Father except the Son, Jesus says. No one can know the Father unless you know the

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Son, Jesus says. And that is exactly what God is doing to us in our salvation.

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God wants to know us and for us to know Him, so He lets us know His Son. He gives us knowledge of the

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Son. He says, if you've seen Me, then you have seen the Father. Praise God, when you know Jesus, you've seen exactly who the

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Father is. When you get to heaven and you stand before Jesus Christ, you will know who the

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Father is. Because you are looking squarely in the eyes of Jesus Christ. That's why every single sermon at Shepherds is all about Jesus.

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Because if I just stood up here and gave you three rules to live by, I'd be damning you to hell. If I stood up here and told you how to make your life better,

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I would be damning you to hell If we don't come to Jesus Christ, we will not know the Father, so therefore everything we do here better be about Jesus Christ.

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Hebrews 1 .3 says, He is the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of His nature, and He upholds all things by the word of His power.

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That's why a true Christian can't shut up about Jesus. We just can't.

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He's the air that we breathe. He's our purpose for living. I wanna go through a few names of Jesus here because it says if you know

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Jesus, you know the Father. So I want you to see that as we get to know Jesus, we actually know so much about God.

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Let's go through this real quick. The Bible calls Him the Alpha and the Omega because He's the beginning and the end.

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The Bible calls Him the true word, which means that that's where we come to learn about God. He's the eternal word, so He can eternally teach us for the rest of eternity.

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We will never be lacking because of this word. He's the true and better Adam who will lead His people to be fruitful and multiply and spread out to the ends of the earth and inherit a glorious kingdom.

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He's the bright morning star because He gives us light. He's the rising sun because we are warmed in the rays of Jesus Christ.

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He's the living one who will never die. He's the amen that God already perfectly approves of.

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He's the true light so that we will never live in darkness. He's the righteous one who can never be corrupted.

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He's the Lion of Judah that can never be conquered. He's the true King that makes us His citizens.

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He's the bread of life so that we will never be hungry. He's the water of life so we'll never be thirsty.

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He's the way, the truth, and the life so that we will find the Father because of Him. He is the gate that we have to enter into.

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He's the good shepherd who's protecting us. He's the resurrection and the life who gives us life in Him.

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He's the true vine that we're connected to. He's the seed of Abraham who's making a worldwide family. He's the root of David who's gonna oversee a global kingdom.

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He's the faithful witness who tells us the things of God. He's the Emmanuel who welcomes us into the presence of God.

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He's the cornerstone we build our life on. He's the rock who protects us. He's the bridegroom who loves us. He's the older brother who welcomes us.

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He's the Lord that we worship. He's the head that we submit to. He's the rabbi that we learn from. He's the prince that we serve.

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He's the man of sorrows who took upon himself our grief. He's the Passover lamb who took our sins. He's the horn of salvation that we are anointed in.

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He's our true high priest. He's the true and final prophet. He's the son of man and he's the son of God.

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Colossians 115 says he's the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

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What this is telling us, my dear friends, that if we are in God, if God has dragged us, then he has dragged us to Jesus Christ, to love him, to worship him, to adore him and to know him.

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That's the third thing. The fourth and final thing that we're gonna talk about is true belief. We've been drawn to God with true belief in Christ.

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Jesus says this, this is how it ends. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life.

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Now, I want us to end here because we don't, in America, really understand belief like they did in the first century.

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We think belief is an intellectual acknowledgement of a fact. We think belief is agreement, mental assent, cognitive acceptance.

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But that's not the full picture of what belief in Jesus Christ is. In the

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Bible, belief is to trust something with consequences. It's to trust something with consequences.

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When you believe something, it will come with consequences that will impact your life.

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Belief is not just a head thing, it's a life thing. And I'll give you an example. Because I can believe the sky is blue and that doesn't really do anything for me.

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I can believe that the sun is, what, 93 million miles away and that doesn't really change the way that I eat my breakfast or do anything else in my life.

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But let me give you an example. In the ancient Roman world, they would cry out,

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Caesar is Lord. They looked at Caesar as being Lord on earth and it changed the way that they behaved.

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If you believe that Caesar is Lord, then you will offer him honor and you will offer him respect and you will offer him loyalty.

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That belief came with consequences. And that kind of pagan worship comes closer to biblical belief than much of what

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I've seen in American Christianity. Instead of a placid acknowledgement that the tomb is empty, understanding who the real

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Jesus is means that your life will be propelled into joyful, worshipful obedience.

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Because if the tomb really is empty, how could we stay still? He has all authority, all the power, all the dominion.

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He's the Lord over all creation. And if he has that, he is far greater than any

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Caesar or any dictator, any president. He is Lord and we are slave. And if we know that, it ought to change us.

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Now let's put all of these thoughts together. This is where in seminary they say, land the plane.

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Don't keep bouncing on the runway, land the plane. Last week we learned that God is totally responsible for our salvation.

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He chose us, he made promises, he came to Calvary to pay for us and then he dragged us to the gospel. Once you have been dragged to the gospel, it changes your life.

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And it changes your life because you will begin being drawn to the word of God and you'll let that define you instead of the world.

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You'll be drawn to right knowledge of God instead of what the world says about God. You'll be drawn to Jesus Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith and you will be drawn to the right kind of belief.

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Not the belief that lets you sit in the pews and do nothing for Jesus for a lifetime and then presume upon his mercy when you get to heaven, but the kind of belief that will joyfully fuel you to the nations, that will joyfully fuel you to your job where you will live and do everything to the glory of God.

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The kind of belief that will so fundamentally reshape you that you'll be willing to give up anything and take on anything and do anything because Jesus did everything for you.

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The point of today's message is not to obey in order to be accepted by God as we have been accepted by God, therefore we obey.

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It's not obedience as the root of our faith, it's obedience as the fruit of our faith. And let's say it in language like John six says it.

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If you have been dragged to God, then you've also been dragged to holy living.

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Let's pray. Lord Jesus, thank you so much.

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You've done everything. We've done nothing. And you've deposited within us something so great that we have to respond to it.

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We were walking towards an oncoming bus and you yanked us out of the road and you saved us and when we opened our eyes, we saw you and it changed us.

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We can't keep walking the way we were walking. We can't keep doing the things that we were doing. Lord, I pray that for those who are truly in Christ that they would not neglect the joyful, worshipful response of obedience.

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Ephesians two says that you made us and you saved us not so that we can boast but so that we can give all glory of God and you did that so that we would obey.

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Lord, the nations are looking for hope right now because they have none. Wokeism isn't gonna do it.

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Liberalism isn't gonna do it. Racism can't define everything. They need to see the gospel on us, your people.

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So Holy Spirit, I pray that you would wake us up, that you'd give us courage, that you'd give us joy, that you'd give us worshipful obedience and that Lord, like the babe who lies in her mother's womb, that it would be so natural that we don't even have to focus on it, that we would look back at our life 20 years later and say, dear

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Lord, look at what you've done. Lord, I pray that you would do these things even in us today, in Christ's name, amen.