FBC Morning Light – January 3, 2023

Faith Baptist Church

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Well, a good Tuesday morning to you, and again, I hope your new year has gotten off to a good start.

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Have you established some goals for the new year? I hate to call them resolutions, they have such a bad rap, right?

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Make those New Year's resolutions, two weeks later you forget about them. You write down some resolutions on December 31st or January 1st in between plays in the bowl game or something like that, and you write them things down, and you think, boy,

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I want to really do these things, etc., etc., but then you file it, you write it down, but you forget about it, and a few weeks later you can't even remember what you wrote.

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I hope that's not what you do. I hope instead you really take some time to pray and ask the Lord to direct you into some growth goals in the new year.

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One of those, I hope, will have to do with the reading of God's Word. I try to encourage people to make a goal of reading through the

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Bible. Last couple of years we did it in two years, this year our goal is to read through the

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Bible in the next 12 months. In that goal, remember we're reading two chapters from the

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Old Testament every day, started with Genesis 1 on January 1st, today we would have read

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Genesis 5 and 6, read one chapter in the New Testament Monday through Friday.

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Yesterday we began with Matthew 1, today reading Matthew 2, and then

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Monday through Friday also reading a portion of a psalm. Yesterday we began with the song of the blessed man,

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Psalm 1, and today Psalm 2. I want to focus on Psalm 2 for just a minute or two here.

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Doesn't the first three verses of that psalm really kind of describe the climate of our culture today?

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Listen to how it starts. Why do the nations rage and the people plot a vain thing, an empty thing?

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What is that vain, empty thing they plot? The kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers take counsel together against the

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Lord and against his anointed saying, and here's their vain, empty thought. Let us break their bonds asunder.

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Let us cast away their cords from us. Let's cast off the restraints and the rules and the regulations, if you will, that the

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God of the Bible would place upon us. That pretty well describes the attitude of our day.

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God has established the boundary of two genders, male and female, and those boundary lines are just being completely disregarded, as if we can, by our smarts and our intelligence, we can recreate our sex, our gender.

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It's an impossibility, but we think we can. We can cast off God's restraints and we can break his bonds in pieces and have our freedom to do what we want to do.

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We see this in so many areas. We see it in the rule of the government and the attitude toward law in general, and so on and so forth.

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But how does God respond to that? What's God's attitude toward this vain thought?

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Well, he tells us in verse 4, he who sits in the heavens shall laugh.

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The Lord shall hold them in derision. It's as if God sees what we're doing on this planet, doing to our societies, doing to our cultures, doing to ourselves, and doing so with our fists shaking in the face of God and snubbing him as if he is irrelevant, and he just looks at this and he laughs.

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And he says, you guys, you think you're so smart. You think you've got it all figured out.

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You think you know what you can do and make yourselves happy and give yourselves freedom.

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Well, let me tell you something, God says, you're asking for nothing but disaster, nothing but trouble.

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That trouble may come in the immediate future, or it may come in the far -off future.

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I think, for example, of how smart we are when it comes to things like controlling the animal kingdom and controlling pests and predators and things of that nature.

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We think we're so smart. We do things like, somebody years and years and years ago introduced the kudzu vine to the southern

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United States thinking that this is a good crop for cows and we can more efficiently and economically feed livestock.

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Well, they didn't want anything to do with it, but the kudzu just ended up overtaking most of the, well, a lot of portions of acreage in the southern part of the

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United States. We think we can control climate. We think we know how we can do things so that the climate will be under our control and not subject to God's control.

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We think we're so smart, and yet God looks at it all and he laughs.

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You throw off my restraints, you throw off my restrictions that I place upon humanity for man's own good, for man's welfare, and you're inviting disaster.

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Like I said, it may come in the immediate future, but it will come. It will come sooner or later.

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For example, the next several verses talk about, the Lord says, I have set my king on my holy hill, and what will he do?

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What will this king do? He will break them with a rod of iron and dash them to pieces like a potter's vessel.

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In other words, the King, Jesus Christ, the King of kings and Lord of lords, will hold everybody accountable.

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That day is coming. How wise it would be for us simply to bend the knee before the

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King of kings and the Lord of lords and to say, what is your law?

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How should we now live? What would be...you're the one that created us.

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How would we live in a way that would be consistent with your creation? Give us that instruction, grant us that wisdom.

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And he says, open my word, open my word, and you shall read.

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Our Father and our God, we pray that we would not have this attitude that is so common in our culture today, an attitude that says it's perfectly fine for us to cast off all the restraints that you place upon mankind and to live our own lives and to live in quote unquote freedom, asking therefore for trouble.

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Deliver us from that, we pray. And we ask it in Jesus' name. Alright, well listen, have a good rest of your