A Sermon for Thanksgiving

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Sermon by Josh Rice from various texts.

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There's a lot of arguing over whether or not America is a Christian nation And I think the argument is quite foolish, and I'm gonna start us off by something.
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I don't do often I'm going to I'm gonna quote a politician, so we're gonna start spicy the politician you might have heard of him his name is
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George Washington and Back a long long time ago
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George Washington Made a proclamation for a day of Thanksgiving in America, and this is an excerpt of what he said
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He said and also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications
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To the great Lord and ruler of nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions to enable us all whether in public or private stations to perform our several and relative duties properly and Punctually to render our national government a blessing to all the people by constantly being a government of wise just and constitutional laws
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Discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed to protect and guide all sovereigns and nations
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Especially such as have shown kindness unto us and to bless them with good government peace and concord to promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue and The increase of science among them and us and generally to grant unto all mankind
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Such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.
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I was struck by reading that proclamation as I looked into this week trying to find the history and the distinctly
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American history of the holiday of Thanksgiving and I was struck by how far we have fallen and And our politicians don't speak this way.
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There is no idea there is no sense among the people of the national sins that we have and the transgressions that we've committed as a people and Washington in the early days brings that to the forefront that a people that are under God have to Seek the good graces and the repentance before their
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Lord that all good government all wise and just Government comes from a people where true religion and virtue are practiced and true religion is a code
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That means only one thing because there is only one true religion and that is the religion of the risen
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Savior Jesus Christ Every other religion is false and therefore will not promote virtue will not promote goodness will not promote
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Science among all we've seen the kind of science that the false religion brings us and it's a science of tyranny
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But Washington wanted something better another piece out of our history the 1789
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American Book of Prayer offered this prayer prayer and thanksgiving to Almighty God For the fruits of the earth and all the other blessings of his merciful
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Providence to be used yearly on the first Thursday in November and on other such days as shall be appointed by the civil authority
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Most gracious God by whose knowledge the depths are broken up and the clouds drop down to do we yield the unfamed?
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Thanks and praise as for all thy mercies So especially for the returns of seed time and harvest and for crowning the year with thy goodness in the increase of the ground and the
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Gathering in of the fruits thereof and we beseech thee give us a just sense of this great mercy
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Such as may appear in our lives by a humble holy and obedient walking before thee all of our days
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Through Jesus Christ our Lord to whom with thee and the Holy Ghost be all glory and honor world without end.
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Amen It strikes me that we immediately transport words like this into our modern context where going hungry is missing lunch by an hour and we drive and get a ready -made hamburger a piece of fried chicken and At the time when these words were written
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It was a hardscrabble life where hours a day were spent procuring food to feed the family
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It was difficult to make the ground yield its fruit and yet our fathers our fathers
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Thanks God for the bountiful harvest that was given and they they uttered a sense of dependence upon the harvest that we've lost
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And they rooted all of it every single time in the goodness of God through the Lord Jesus Christ And as we look out at our country,
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I think the issue becomes manifest now I'm not saying that all of the problems in the
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United States and in the American Church come from one thing But I will say that a lot of them come from one thing and that is the lack of Thanksgiving And so today
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I hope to show you four and there's tons of things out there But four ways that Thanksgiving can protect and embolden
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God's people and I hope that you can keep this in mind this week Let's start with James 1 one of my favorite practical pieces of Scripture James right start starting in verse 13.
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Let no one say when he is tempted I am being tempted by God for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself does not tempt anyone
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But each one is tempted when he is carried away and enticed by his own lust Then when lust has conceived it gives birth to sin and when sin is fully matured it brings forth death
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Do not be deceived my beloved brothers Every good thing given in every perfect gift is from above Coming down from the father of lights with whom there is no variation or shifting shadow in the exercise of his will
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He brought us forth by the word of truth so that we would be a kind of firstfruits among his creatures
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Now maybe it's not obvious right off the bat why I've chosen to start at this text, but the reason is this is that I have a
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Premise here that I'm going to try to prove and that is Thanksgiving is a sin killer and in the church we are rifled through with sin and Every person sitting in here has a struggle and a fight with sin and some of us have laid down our arms for the time
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And let sin grow Because we have looked with the lust of our flesh and the desire of our eyes and we have given heed to the lie that God has not given us something that we deserve and so we have taken it and therefore we are growing in our grumbling and growing in our murmuring and Thanksgiving is the only way that this sin starts to be killed.
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If you don't believe me Let me start to try to prove my premise I'm gonna start with one of the most well -known pieces of Scripture and that is the
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Ten Commandments in Exodus 20 if you want to Turn there you can if you don't I'll summarize quickly the
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Ten Commandments We call them the first table and the second table. The first table talks about our relationship with God himself and the second table
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Talks about our relationship with one another with brothers The Ten Commandments are bookended by the only two commandments that have never been considered crimes
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All of the Ten Commandments to break them is sin But the first and the tenth commandment to break them is not a crime and has never been punishable because these are sins of the
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Heart that are only made manifest through the crimes of other breaking of commandments So when we look at the first commandment thou shalt have no other gods before me
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How can we judge that? No civil authority can come into your house break in and look into your eyes and say oh you've broken the first commandment
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They can't it takes outward Manifestation to judge whether that commandment has been broken and a person who has no other
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God besides Yahweh Will instinctively follow the other commandments in the first table if there is no other
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God but Yahweh Then we will understand that our God is Yahweh our God who created everything who has a claim on us and we will remember
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That his name is holy and that his name is not to be made common That his name is something that we are to treat with great honor with great sanctity.
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It is set aside It is not used as invectives to swear our word to someone else
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It is not used to put as a label around our chest showing that we are God's people while we do evil and wickedness
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It is holy and to take his name in vain is a scary thing Likewise, we are not going to build up graven images and idols when we have one
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God the Lord God We're not going to build graven images because we know that there is no power and idols carved out of wood or stone
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We know that there's no power in the idol of recreation in Vacation and we will understand that there is one
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God and finally when we have one God We will know that to worship that one
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God we enter into his rest And so we will honor the Sabbath and keep it holy because we as Christians know that in Christ We have the rest of Sabbath that drives
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Thanksgiving and worship That is how the first commandment Drives obedience to the first table when we truly honor
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God in our heart as the one true God We honor the rest of those commandments Likewise the tenth commandment it says that thou shall not covet thy neighbor's oxen his wife
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All of this stuff. We don't covet and the heart who is satisfied in Their things is
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The one who does not commit adultery the one who does not murder the one who does not bear false witness
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The one who honors his father and mother That's the one who does not covet because as Paul tells us in Ephesians 5 he says therefore be imitators of God as beloved children and walk in love just as Christ also loved us and gave himself up for us and Offering in a sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma
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But sexual immorality or any impurity or greed must not be named among you as is proper among Saints nor filthiness and foolish
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Talk or coarse jesting which are not fitting but rather giving of thanks So we can see that what
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Paul does is he sets greed and sexual immorality up Against the other side, which is the giving of thanks
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Because when we look at the two sides the two bookends of the Ten Commandments They drive obedience towards the middle because they are a heart condition
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James told us that in for in chapter 1 James told us that God does not tempt us
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But instead we are tempted when we are enticed by our own lust that is a heart condition
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When we are enticed by things that are evil things that are wicked things that we ought never have or things that we could have
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But we ought not get by those means Then we are enticed by our own lust and we are going to give way to sin and when that sin is fully conceived
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It brings forth death so when we look about our landscape and we see a culture of death that reigns our
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Country loves death. Our country votes repeatedly for death. We love the death of abortion
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We love the death of welfare that kills the family We love the death of feminism that kills right and ordered godly
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Relationships within the family within the government and within the church and when we embrace that culture of death
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What we do over and over again is show our lack of gratitude and we are just like the Israelites wandering around the desert
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Murmuring and grumbling it gets God for the meat and the bread that he has providentially given us out of his supernatural gracious lavishing generous hand
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That's why Thanksgiving drives out sin is because to sin is to fundamentally be a grumbler
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To sin to sin is to think that God has withheld from us something that we desperately need and so we will take it by Our own means by our own ingenuity and it's to deny the claim that God has over all the universe that he created and so it is
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Cosmic treason all of the little sins that we so easily Excuse and rationalize in our minds and all the great sins that are born out of the little skin
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Sins that take us far apart from our Lord and Creator and this must not be in the church among the brothers and yet we see it rage, right a
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Thankful Christian is heavily guarded against the inducements of the flesh and the enemy
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Because so many sins are wrapped up in us simply wanting what we do not have and what someone else has
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I'll encourage you as you look through the Ten Commandments to think of them that way to think about how
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Murder comes from hating our brother. What inspires the hatred? Is it not something he has that we want?
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Is it not something that he's done that we feel like we deserved better? When we commit adultery obviously by definition, it's trying to take something that belongs to someone else so sin rampages because We have followed once again into the sin of our great great great great great great great great grandparents
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Which were the Israelites that were kept in the wilderness for a generation until their grumbling and thanklessness
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Was born out by the next generation Moses generation never saw the promised land
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Because they grumbled against God. They were not happy with what they got. And so they were barred out from all of the promises
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Here's the answer for us And I get these I get these questions often and I have these questions
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We are all at some level of a struggle with sin in our life. You know the one
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I'm talking about right now in your mind What we want to do is in a very
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Romans one sense We want to suppress the truth of our knowledge of that sin. We want to make ourselves feel more righteous
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We do that in several ways. We will say things like it's not that big a deal. I've got this under control
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I'm going to confess this whenever I've finally put it to death and it'll be safe to tell other people about this sin
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In other words, we think that we can clean ourselves better than the blood of Christ can clean us. It's a lie
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Do you sin? The answer is to repent and give thanks to God for his forgiveness
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You know what your sins are they are the things that you want to hide They are the things that you don't want to tell anyone and they are the very things that are keeping you away from God today
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Repentance is sweet repentance is a grace repentance is a gift of God and it turns us away from the lies and the decaying corpse of sin and To the bright light of God's Son and to the glory and the mercies of his kingdom
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Are you embroiled in besetting sin repent? repent and Thank the
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Lord Because your repentance was a gift from him. It wasn't you. It wasn't your willpower
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It wasn't your moral compass coming into play It was a gift of the Holy Spirit and we should thank him.
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We often want to take credit for our own righteousness Even when we do the very good thing of turning away from a sin that so ensnares us
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We want to plant our flag and say I just conquered that sin Friends you did not and that is that mind frame is what will bring you back
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Into you have swept out the house and you're gonna have seven sins come in that are worse than the first one Because pride is the fountainhead of all of these things
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What I'm trying to do here this morning is say that if we have Thanksgiving as a people it's going to build a certain kind of person in a certain kind of church and I'll tell you first of all the
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Christian who is thankful the Christian who is thankful is a Christian who is courageous We've talked about that much in the last few weeks
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The Christian who is thankful knows that God has given him Everything that he has and knows that God holds it all in the palm of his hand
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And so that Christian has a clean conscience Knowing that he has everything that God wants him to have that he can work hard that he can trust in the
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Lord for the promises that God has given and that person is going to be characterized by seeing by being happy by being joyful and by Being very very unsteerable.
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The covetous man is easily steered by his desires We have to put away covetousness
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That's why Thanksgiving drives out sin. So point number two Thanksgiving drives us to do good
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It drives us to do good. Look in Hebrews 13 Hebrews 13 We're gonna look at verses 15 through 16
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Hebrews 13 15 through 16 says Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God That is the fruit of lips that confess his name and do not neglect doing good and sharing for with such
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Sacrifices God is pleased. Is there anything better for the human being made in God's image?
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Than to know that through the words of our mouth God is pleased Hebrews is a book that I can't go through the whole thing right now
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Obviously, it's an undertaught book of the New Testament But Hebrews main theme is that you cannot go back to the old religion of before and so the word sacrifice
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Takes on a different meaning to the original audience of the book of Hebrews the word sacrifice
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Literally meant going into the temple and offering animal sacrifices but the author here tells us that the sacrifice of praise to God the fruit the
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Outpouring the result of lips that confess his name pleases God In Christ, we don't offer animals to do so as blasphemy because Christ is the final sacrifice
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He is the ultimate high priest who is both the priest the mediator and the sacrifice. He is the scapegoat
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He is the propitiation. He is the imputation. He is all in all of our salvation
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There is nowhere to go but him and when we go to him We will start doing good
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And I don't mean like doing good at work. I mean like doing good to others That asked that that makes us have a couple of questions because we have to define what doing good is
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Before we do that. I want to make a statement the pinnacle of the
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Christian life is not to make war with sin It's really not did you know that Jesus did not hit tell his disciples that I will be known by your war with sin in Your prayer closet
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He did not say that He said that he would be known by their love for one another
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The marker of a Christian the pinnacle of a Christian life is a Christian who does good
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That's fundamental. It's ongoing. It should mark us and the question that we have to ask is does it mark us?
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Does it mark us in this church? If not, why not and the why not would be a lack of Thanksgiving because Thanksgiving drives us to do good
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It's the joy of the Christian life, did you know that loving your neighbor loving your brother is the joy of the
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Christian life Don't believe me. Let's get into it. Let's follow the logic First of all, we have to look at what doing good is if you don't know this text
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I've taught it so many times and quoted it so many times in the past four years Romans 13
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Everybody knows the first part right be subject to your governing authorities. They are a deacon of God They have the sword of vengeance, but then he says that you will do good and he says what is it to do good?
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And what Paul does is he quotes the second table of the Ten Commandments doing good is not committing adultery
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Not murdering not bearing false witness not being covetousness not being covetous
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So when we do good, that means that we are law followers with our brothers
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And I have asked many people I've shared this story many times There was a there was an atheist co -worker that I worked with several years ago
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And we were having ongoing conversations and I read through the Ten Commandments and I was being a little tricky
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I only read the second table and I said what would you call a world where every person did these things all of the time where no one ever murdered?
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No one ever committed adultery everyone honored their mother and father. No one ever lied bore false witness
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No one ever was jealous of what other people had and her answer was utopia
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That's what we would have utopia We know this in our inner being that the follow God's law is to unlock the blessings that God has promised his people and we
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Know as Christians that the only possible way to follow God's law is to have a heart that's not actively in rebellion against it
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The only way to have a heart that is not in rebellion to God's law is to have a heart of stone that has been
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Changed into a heart of flesh through the blood of Jesus Christ and so this morning this morning if you do not trust
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Jesus Christ for your salvation if you have not bowed the knee to him if He is not your God if he is not your
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Messiah if he is not your only hope is he is not the primary affection You have no chance and you will die in your sins.
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And so I plead with you today if you want these things There are great blessings in Christendom there are great blessings in Christianity chief among those
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Is to be at peace with your God He has made a way He has provided reconciliation to himself through his son
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Jesus Christ. He spared not the thing that was most precious to him Jesus grasped not onto the heavenly kingdom
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But he emptied himself into the form of a man and if that wasn't enough which that is insane to think about That the
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God who was in light the divine son of God the second person of the
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Holy Godhead in the high places ruling over angels ruling over principalities ruling over everything stepped down into the form of a weak human man and Then he subjected himself to false charges
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He subjected himself to the tyranny of his own people and of the Roman government He died on the cross so that he could make
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Reconciliation to the great gulf of sin that was between us and then for the Christian, you know what he did he unlocked the way that we please our
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God and the way that we please our God is By exalting his holy name with our lips and by doing good by loving our neighbor.
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So let's follow the logic When we are satisfied and content When we are thankful for the rich blessing that God has lavished on us
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It opens our hands to help others and when we start to open our hands to help others
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We experience the greatest temporal blessings available to us, which are strong healthy relationships
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I'm around a lot of teenagers a lot and What I can tell you is if there is if there is one thing that the teenager desires
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It is strong healthy relationships that provide stability relationships that they can count on Relationships that don't involve lying and stealing and backstabbing these kinds of relationships are only based on doing good to one another
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They're only based on that and we in the church are the same way people come into the church with broken families
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Homes with divorce homes where it's difficult to honor father and mother because father and mother may have done terrible things this characterizes the
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American Church today and So we come in with broken people who are looking for belonging who are looking for connection
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And so when we are thankful to what God has given us it unlocks us to help our
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Brothers, and when we help our brothers we unlock lasting Meaningful deep relationships and there is nothing more joyful Temporally than that don't believe me
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Look at what Jesus said Jesus said in one of the most confounding parables in the New Testament the parable of the dishonest manager
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Which struck me a few years ago and I come back to it often Luke 16 9 through 10 Jesus said
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I say to you make friends for yourselves from the wealth of unrighteousness
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So that when it fails They will take you into the eternal dwellings He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much
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The idea is this we work and we make money and Money is of no eternal value, but money is of much temporal value and when we make money
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We have choices of what we can do with that money We can spend that money to progress our own little kingdoms and our own selfish ambitions and we can buy into the lie that the money is going to bring us contentment or We can use that money shrewdly.
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That's the whole point of that parable. We use that money shrewdly to develop systems to develop relationships
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That are going to be of eternal significance So that when we go into the final kingdom when
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Christ's kingdom is consummated and we are done with sin Then I believe that we are going to have neighborhoods of the people who are our spiritual and eternal friends and what a blessing it will be if we have
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Striven and given all of our unrighteous wealth to build up heavenly friends with our action here on earth that's the only thing that we're gonna be able to take with us and Guess what that that heavenly minded focus has huge temporal blessings for us here
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Because the man who is the opposite of Ebenezer Scrooge is the man who blesses many lives
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It's the man who has many friends It's the man who builds up eternal friends because who knows when we preach and proclaim the gospel
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Who knows what heart that lands on and where that takes root and repentance starts and many times
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I think that as we proclaim the gospel, we are frustrated by the lack of apparent fruit But what we don't see is that God plays the long game and that every heart that's going to repent is already known by the
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Lord Jesus Christ and then someday someday the proclamation that you said maybe in passing might have been the key that Started this seed laying in the ground and someday that person is going to be your eternal friend.
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I pray for that I pray that the influence that we have in preaching the gospel is far more than we can see right now that is a hopeful thing indeed and when we do that we start to practice this relationship building that Thanksgiving unlocks because we do good one
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To another and I'm going to tell you a little secret Everybody wants to be around someone who does good to them
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Everyone no one wants to be around someone who does evil to them The pagans know this the person who hates
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Christ knows this They don't want to surround themselves by a pit of vipers who are constantly trying to stab them
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They want to surround themselves even if they treat wrongly with people that are going to do good
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That's the logic we practice this in our marriages Don't we we practice doing good to our spouses and the reason for that is that we understand that we have to live together
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And we also understand that when we practice doing good towards our spouse it builds
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Deeper deeper relationship deeper trust deeper commitment, and it's a beautiful thing that points to Christ But what we often do in our individual
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Individualistic culture is we only invest in our own spouse and maybe in our own children
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And we don't have any other spiritual friends now look. It's primary we start there We start in the family but we also can use our time and our treasure to build concentric circles of people who want to be around us doing good and All of those riches are not going to waste
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This is not ethereal Look at what the rich do the rich think oftentimes that their contentment is in money, and that's a lie
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But there are plenty of rich people in the Bible. Let me name a couple of them Abraham Nehemiah There's lots of them
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David Solomon these people are rich. What do they do with their wealth? What did
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Abraham do? He blessed his nephew by taking the poor land and Letting his nephew take the rich land and what did lot have to say about Abraham after that nothing
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But what we do know is that lot seems like a train wreck in Genesis But we understand when Peter writes later that righteous lot was grieved by the sin that he saw in Sodom We never saw that in Genesis But how much of an impact do you think it had when
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David or sorry when Abraham? Blessed lot with letting him take the fat land. We should be known that way
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We should take the cost on ourselves to build spiritual friends to build eternal friends. I've waxed along there.
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Sorry I'm trying to build the foundation. Okay, so Thanksgiving protects us from sin Thanksgiving drives us to do good
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Thanksgiving also protects us from our enemies a little bit more of a difficult text here I want to look at Psalm 7
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Psalm 7 This should be familiar for our first Samuel series I'm gonna read the last six verses here starting in verse 12
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If a man does not repent he will sharpen his sword. He has bent his bow and prepared it
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He has also prepared for himself deadly weapons He makes his arrows fiery shafts behold
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He travails with wickedness and he conceives mischief and gives birth to falsehood He has dug a pit and hollowed it out and has fallen into the hole which he made
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His mischief will return upon his own head and his violence will descend upon his own skull.
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I will give thanks to Yahweh According to his righteousness and I will sing praise to the name of Yahweh Most High There's a lot of things going on here first of all is when we read
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Psalms like this I think oftentimes we teleport immediately to who our wicked enemies are and we don't think about who we're an enemy to Through our own wickedness and so what we should get right away is when we have enemies that we've that we've created by our sin and by our doing evil then what we should not do is
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Double double down and fall into the pit that we're digging for them because we know when we do wickedness
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We're going to fall into the hole that we're digging to try to trip them into so we should repent The failure to repent is a trust in the self to overcome the consequences of sin
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We saw this over and over and over again with Saul that we not in first Samuel his violence his anger his idolatry his discontent his foolishness
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Increased and increased and increased as he refused to turn away from his sin So it is also in our lives.
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We think that we can deny the law of the harvest over and over again We think that we can plant apple seeds and grow orange trees
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It's not going to happen when we refuse to repent what we're going to continually get is the fruits of our own sin
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And so my urge again is repent Repent and then thank God for your repentance
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But we do have enemies also We do have enemies. We have enemies who wish us harm.
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We have enemies who fight against us We have enemies who are violent who are using cunning tactics to take us down And it's very easy for us to focus on our enemies and it's very easy for us to think about our enemies and fear it's very easy for us to think about our enemies and be bitter and To hate and to revile
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What we don't understand is That they will continually sharpen their arrows and they will draw all of the scorn upon their own head
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Unfortunately for us many of the enemies that we will find as this vision starts to Come in place at the end of the sermon if we're a church characterized by these things
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We are going to start to see some enemies Outside of the church, but we will also have people who are brothers who are truly brothers who will treat us as enemies
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And that's very difficult when people who preach a true gospel and who proclaim the name of Christ look at us and Call us enemies for our secondary differences for our philosophy of mission for all those sorts of things
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What we should do is we should trust in the Lord and have Thanksgiving Understanding that he sustains us that he keeps us
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We should know that without repentance even our own brothers are going to fall into their own traps
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Not for their eternal condemnation, but for their discipline because because God disciplines his people he chastens them so that they would turn to repentance
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Here's the thing you need to understand. We spend a lot of time thinking about enemies, especially in a post -election season
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We our country sees the other half of the country is enemies oftentimes. That's a scary thing, right?
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We're not we're not necessarily like kind of disagreeing over tax codes. We're having like a
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Struggle against principalities and authorities that have a totally different moral system That can be scary
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But the thing that we can remember from the words of this psalm is that they cannot assail us effectively
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When we give thanks We will be impervious to their fiery arrows that they will shoot
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We will be armored against their lies We will have a clean conscience and therefore no lie will hit us
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Because we know it's not true The truth is on our side and we have witnesses and we will be upright when they fall into the pit of their own crafting
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Here's my urge as far as our enemies go What we must not do is give bitterness a foothold what we are not what we cannot be is a vengeful spiteful dour hateful people
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There is a caricature. I know some of you guys are not reformed. I could put a trademark after that but if you are reformed and you go around on the internet, you're gonna start to understand that there is a
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Characterization of reformed people that's out there and the reformed person if we were to put a picture of them They would look something like this
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All right Because what we like to do what is our tendency is that we think because we love our doctrine
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We love our doctrine and we think we're right. Obviously, we think we're right We wouldn't think it if we didn't think we were right.
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Okay, but we think that we're right and so therefore everybody else is wrong and Because they don't base their arguments on the sound exegesis that we do.
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They must be stupid They're still Christians, but stupid Christians. I saw one yesterday.
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They have the mind of gerbils Quote from a reformed pastor yesterday. Okay all the while saying that we must not give in to bitterness and hatred
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I kid you not Blindness is a real thing pride is a terrible thing
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We can't see it Here's all we can do right is through leadership
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That we can give the warning and I tell you when you see the dour hateful disposition of your brother
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Call them out When you see the dour hateful overly polemic pugilistic meaning
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I want to fight all the time. Look I'm given to that I like to pull out my sword and try to cut people's heads off with it rhetorically.
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Okay When you see that a word of balance can be good it can be helpful
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It can keep a brother from a lot of sin. It can keep us from falling in the pit What we should be characterized as is singers workers leaders builders fathers mothers brothers sisters and friends
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We do not in the Christian Church ravage and kill We pray and we feast
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We trust the Lord We speak truth with cheerfulness With joy with zeal with generosity when we're having a conversation with a brother who disagrees with us
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You know, we can ratchet the temperature down quite a bit We're not talking about heaven and hell at that point
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We're talking about finer points of doctrine and it's okay to be patient and it's okay to say hey
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We may not figure this out this out in this three -hour conversation It might take ten more three -hour conversation
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It might take ten years of conversations and guess what you're still my brother we still love each other
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We're still joyful in the Lord and we can carry this on Because the matter of whether you baptize your infants or not is not a matter of chopping each other's heads off it's not as Christians we should seek reconciliation and forgiveness not grudges and not hatred
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We'll be tempted to do that. I know you think you're right. I Know I think
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I'm right And I know I think that I have very logical reasonable backup for why
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I'm right and Yet I could be wrong We have to hold that intention all of Christendom Might not agree with you and we should reason with each other.
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That's the true sense of how iron sharpens iron on doctrine I see it happen. It grieves me.
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The Lord is surely gonna strike his enemies down But we should pray and hide words like psalm 7 in our heart so that we might not sin against God the greatest protection for our enemies is gratitude and thanksgiving for our
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God who holds all of our enemies and all of their schemes and All of the times when it seems like they're gonna win.
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They are always doing the purpose of God Did you know that they dig the pit for you and God has ordained them to fall into it themselves
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They shoot fiery arrows at you and God laughs at them in derision that goes all the way from the greater
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Democratic Party from the dictator of North Korea Anyone else you can think of?
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They all fall into the pit that they have dug for their enemies because God laughs at their puny little schemes
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Just like he did at Babel and just like he did at the Pharaoh and just like he does over and over again today
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He is the same God forever Last point Thanksgiving empowers the church militant.
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Now, this is the stuff I like to talk about and here's what I want to say So we've painted a picture We've been pretty individualistic but growing into molecules the individual that Thanksgiving protects us and kills sin
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When we are thankful to God for what he's done We follow the Ten Commandments because it drives it thankfulness drives obedience thankfulness drives contentment
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It drives not giving in to the temptations of our desires So when we're that kind of person when we're thankful when we're giving praise pretty hard to sin when you're singing joyful praises and hymns and psalms
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Pretty hard to sin when you're in Scripture and praying to God and being dependent when that kind of person
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Starts to live that life out and do good then we start to grow bonds, right?
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These are smaller molecular bonds where it's not you against the world It's not you with your Bible in your prayer closet against the whole culture
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It's you and your family and your friends who are battalions who are people who are holding each other to account
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Who are calling you on your blindness who are encouraging you in those spiritual disciplines when we have those kind of people
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We start to be the kind of groups of people that the enemy does not like and so he will start to dig out pits
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For you he will start to send fiery arrows your way and Thanksgiving empowers us to be protected from our enemies because we don't revile them in return
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But instead we look at the one who took all of the reviling and did not speak out Did not burn the people who crucified him in his wrath, but instead he died so that many of them would be saved
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Many of the hands that lifted up to kill the Lord Jesus Christ Repented in acts if you don't believe me read it
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They were cut to the heart when Peter laid it on them and he they said what can we do?
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And Peter said repent and when we have these kind of groups We start to organize into the church militant because friends we don't have a choice about this
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The eternal kingdom is not in place right now. And so the church is not the church triumphant right now
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We are the church triumphant in the sense that we surely will be we surely will be chances of triumph a hundred percent
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But right now we're in the phase where we are the church militant and the church militant is Uncomfortable because in militant action eggs get broken
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Okay in militant action feelings get hurt in militant action start things start to happen and people get uncomfortable
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Because there's gonna be a lot of truth. There's gonna be a lot of joy and there's gonna be a lot of dangerous crazy men
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It's gonna happen. The church militant is not the church domestic the church domestic
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Empowers the militant action of the church We have to have our bases at home covered so that we can adventure out and we've had no vision for this
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Lately, we've had a mere evangelism idea where what we did was we took the
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Great Commission and we thought that we were given the authority to go make converts and then forget them or To grow our numbers so that we can count our baptisms with no discipleship whatsoever
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But that's not the lofty task that Christ gave his church militant We are to go to all the nations and we are to make disciples little ones of us
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Imitators it's a high -calling Christian when you make a disciple because they're gonna look at you and they're going to pattern themselves after your faith
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And when we do that, we have to be those other three things, right? We have to be doing good We have to not be revilers.
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We have to be joyful When we do those things those disciples are gonna start to watch and those people are going to start to take on the
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Characteristics of their fathers in the faith. So we need fathers in the faith. Here we go in the church militant
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I can't think of a better scripture than this Colossians 3 14 through 17 and we'll end here today above all these things put on love which is the perfect bond of unity and Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts to which indeed you were called in one body and be thankful Let the
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Word of Christ dwell in you richly with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs
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Singing with gratefulness in your hearts to God and whatever you do in word or deed Do all in the name of the
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Lord Jesus giving thanks to God the Father through him The picture that Paul is painting here is an oasis in a desert of individualism
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It's an oasis in a desert of infighting and bickering and what he says instead is where you find unity
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You're gonna find people singing. Look at what he says. They are teaching each other and Admonishing each other how through podcasts
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Through didactic listener hearer teaching no, they're teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and Spiritual songs because children we know this.
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What are the first doctrines that children learn the hymns? Because songs are easy to remember and music drills deep into our hearts
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And so even if you can't make a very joyful noise like me I still try as hard as I can because the joyful noise drills in deep and those songs stir our affections and there is there is a
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Connection between a church that wants to go on mission and fight and in a church that sings loudly and that's what encourages me here
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Because I think with the singing loudly comes the spirit and the idea that we have a war song on our lips
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Because it's the warrior poet of old We are not dry stuffy
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Reform Theo bros smoking cigarettes and so on not cigarettes. That's gross cigars and pipes you know
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God's tobacco and Worrying all the time about supercessionism
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Okay That's that's where we sit. That's not what we're doing. We're singing songs.
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We are loving each other Notice the picture that Paul's paying it's a vision. It's vision casting you can have this
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Church you can have this You can have this if the name of the Lord is on your lips and if thankfulness is in your heart and the church
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Militant is very very very dangerous Dangerous to extent that we've not seen in many long years in our culture, but I starting to see the first fruits of it
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I think it's stirring. I think change is happening I think there's winds of change that are driving and so for us the responsibility is for us to be thankful and to love one another because the church
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Necessarily is an offensive body Did you know that we give great offense to the world that sets themselves up against our
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Lord Jesus Christ and we have an authority and in the church We have an authority to make an appeal for our
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King and that appeal is the reconciliation to the law word of God Through the work of Jesus Christ in his own perfect obedience to that law
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Do people in our culture want the church Why not Why would they want something that's weak?
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Why would they want something that looks like it's no fun that it's boring that it's dry That doesn't mean that we start making smoke machines go off everywhere and strobe lights
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What it means is that we should love one another because everyone wants to be loved and known
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Do people see the offense in the church But then here's the next thing many will see the offense of the gospel and their toner turn away
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But what they heard is something that knocks their their view There's a heart -clenching attraction to the gospel too, and we don't talk about that enough
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We talk about the offense of the gospel because we're drawn to the militarism of it But oftentimes what we don't remember is the attractiveness of the gospel
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Boy, it offends us, but then it offers this promise. Do you hear the promise? You can be in perfect fellowship with your
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Creator With the one who's in control of everything. He's made a way at no cost to you at complete cost to himself take up your cross and follow him a heart of Thanksgiving bubbles over it bubbles over with cheerfulness and Attractiveness if we have no
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Thanksgiving, we will have no unity if we have no unity We will have no militaristic strength because no army that's all going in their own direction is going to accomplish anything
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That's why we have hierarchy. That's why we have unity because we should be focused on the purpose and on the mission.
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I Want to end this with two things here a couple of prayers Again from that book of prayer
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Oh most merciful father who has blessed the labors of the husband men in the returns of the fruits of the earth
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We give thee humble and hearty. Thanks for this thy bounty beseeching thee to continue thy loving kindness to us that our land may still yield her increase to thy glory in our
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Comfort through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen And I don't want to end that way. I want to end with the great
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Psalm Psalm 95. Oh Come let us sing for joy to Yahweh Let us make a loud shout to the rock of our salvation
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Let us come before his presence with Thanksgiving Let us make a loud shout to him with songs of praise for Yahweh is a great
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God and a great king above all gods In whose hand are the depths of the earth the peaks of the mountains are his also
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The sea is his for it was he who made it and his hands formed the dry land
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Come let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before Yahweh our maker for he is our
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God And we are the people of his pasture and the sheep of his hand today If you hear his voice
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Do not harden your hearts as at Meribah as in the days of Massah in the wilderness
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When your father's tried me they tested me though. They had seen my work for 40 years
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I loathed that generation and said they are a people who wander in their heart and they do not know my ways
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Therefore I swore in my anger. They shall never enter into my rest Don't turn your back on God turn towards him in repentance and Know that he makes everything and he knows everything and he has accepted you through the blood of his