The Sufficiency of Christ’s Word

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September 25, 2022 | Steve Cortez on Mark 7:1-13.

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This sermon is from Grace Fellowship Church in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. To access other sermons or to learn more about us, please visit our website at graceedmonton .ca.
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Good afternoon, everyone. It's interesting to preach in as many weeks as I have. It's like two times in a row, especially with the texts
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I've been given. I think Woody Bauckham is the one that said that he'd been beaten all week with the text, and he gets to share it with you guys, and that's kind of what
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I'm doing today. So, good afternoon, everyone. It's good to see everyone again back at Grace Fellowship Church.
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Welcome back, Shannon. We've missed you. It's good to see you, brother. But for today, we're looking at, like our brother
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Peter just read, we're looking at Mark chapter 7, verses 1 to 13.
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I actually wanted to begin today by asking somewhat of a rhetorical question or just some food for thought. And the question is this.
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When was the last time the world took God's word seriously? So, outside of the church, when was the last time that the world actually put its faith behind the scriptures?
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Now, that might seem like an odd question because the answer is, well, never, right? Because that's not—the return of Christ has not come yet, so that technically has not happened.
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However, there are moments in history where that have come, but they're few and far between.
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They're not often when the word of God is taken seriously. Few of these moments come to mind. We think about the
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Protestant Reformation. That's a good example, but there are not many circumstances where that takes place.
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The Bible hasn't been taken seriously throughout human history. But on the flip side, however, all throughout human history, from the beginning of the creation of man, religion and human tradition, that has been flourishing.
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That has been flourishing from the beginning. This goes back way before the days of Jesus Christ, but also is true of those days when
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Jesus Christ walked the earth. Although this goes back to a
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Jewish—takes a more Jewish flavor. As Jesus Christ walked, the
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Jews were subject to Jewish law. However, even they were not satisfied in the word of God. Even they didn't find their sufficiency in the word of God.
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So much like today, even though they were ruled by Jewish orthodoxy and Jewish tradition, which is a different flavor than our religious orthodoxy of secularism today that we might see, the result is still the same.
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A low view of the scriptures and the sufficiency of the word, and a high view of human philosophy and man -made institutions.
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So like our brother just read, the main takeaway of today's text, as we're going to study and we're going to read and we're going to know it, is that God's scriptures are sufficient.
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And our soul needs nothing else. So God's scriptures, the
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Bible, is sufficient and our souls need nothing else. The Jewish leaders didn't believe that was the case.
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They didn't believe that that was so. And if we don't, we are going to fall into the same traditional trap that they did.
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The world is too good at this. And brothers and sisters, if we don't heed the word of God, if we don't see it as sufficient, we will do the same things.
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It will happen and it will result in straying and compromise. But before we continue, let's go to the
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Lord and pray. Dear Father in heaven, Lord, thank you for this day.
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Thank you, Father, for those that you've brought. Lord, whether a few or many, Father, we come to honor you. We come to honor the
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Lord Jesus Christ. Thank you, Father, for those that you've brought today here, Father, to hear this message.
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Lord, I pray for the clarity of speech, Father, that your text would be understood clearly and obediently followed rightly.
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Lord, we thank you, Father, that you continue to provide and that, Father, your sufficient scriptures are available to us.
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Father, there is no other text on earth that is God -breathed and no other text is profitable for teaching, for reproof, correction, or training in righteousness,
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Father. I pray, Lord, give us the eyes to see this and to understand it rightly,
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Lord, that we would obey this. Lord, that we would come to know your holy word even better, Lord, that we would know it as the sufficiency that it is,
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Father, that we would place our faith in nothing else, but that we would stand on that firm foundation. Father, for there is no better path.
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Lord, we thank you, Father, we pray for the understanding and we pray all these things in the sufficient name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Okay, so for today's text, we've broken it down into two main points.
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It hinges somewhere in the middle. In verse 8, this is where we're going to see our hinge point, but for those taking notes, as you're heading, our first point is this.
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Man's commandments lead to death. Man's commandments lead to death.
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So if we're looking at our passage, we find ourselves in a familiar scene again. So let's read verses 1 to 8.
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It says this, Now when the Pharisees gathered to him with some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem, they saw that some of the disciples ate with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed.
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For the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they wash their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders, and when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash.
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And there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of cups and pots, and copper vessels, and dining couches.
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And the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?
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And he said to them, Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites. As it is written,
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This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. In vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.
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You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. So to give you some context,
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Jesus Christ is back again dealing with scribes and Pharisees. Oftentimes in the book of Mark, that we've seen even up until this point, we see
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Jesus Christ performing miracles, displaying his powers. So we're seeing him healing the sick. He is casting out demons.
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He's feeding the multitudes of people that come to him. He's teaching. He's deliberating with people.
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And at some point within all these miracles or these moments, at some point, the
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Pharisees and the scribes come out to antagonize him. So like in times past, they're looking to trap him.
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They're trying to trap him in human constraints or human logic concerning his authority, his power, and if we look at today's text, in our case today, his sufficiency.
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They're trying to trap him here. So as a reminder, the Pharisees were the religious elite or the teachers of the first century.
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Actually, they date a little bit farther before that, but during Jesus' time, these Pharisees were the teachers of the law. And he's also accompanied, or they are accompanied by the scribes.
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And what makes the scribes different than the Pharisees are that the scribes are like religious experts.
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They are the lawyers. So if you think about in a legal context, the scribes were legalists, and they were especially versed in the law, but not just God's law, but man -made laws and traditions.
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We see that in verses 1 to 5. Mark explains in our text that the
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Pharisees and scribes had observed that Jesus and his disciples didn't hold to the cleaning rituals of the day.
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We read about those in verses 3 to 4. Read this again. For the Pharisees and all the Jews did not eat unless they washed their hands properly, holding to the tradition of the elders.
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And when they come from the marketplace, they do not eat unless they wash, and there are many other traditions that they observe, such as the washing of the cups and pots and copper vessels and dining couches.
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We get a little bit of a commentary within Mark itself, from Mark. He writes this and he inserts this, because this is, he's trying to give context to the
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Gentiles who might be hearing this. So according to the historians, so if we're going to try to understand what some of these rituals might have been, like the hand -washing one, these rituals were somewhat long and tedious.
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So if you can imagine, it would take two people. It required that one person pour water on top of the hands of another.
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So if I understand it correctly, the water was to be poured, for the first stage as it is, the water was to be poured on top of the hands of the individual, something like this, or their hands had to be pointed upwards, and the water needed to run off their wrist.
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And if the water ran directly onto their hands, off their wrist, they could then go to, I guess, stage two, which at that point, they would put their hands downwards and have the water run straight downwards.
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Lastly, they would take their fist and then they would scrub their hands in kind of a really meticulous fashion.
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They would go back and forth and they'd be really intentional about scrubbing their hands and making it really clear that their hands were clean, that they were washed.
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And then, and only then, they could proceed to the rest of whatever other traditions that they were looking to do before they ate.
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You see that at the end of verse four, they would wash the copper vessels and the pots and even the couch, which they were sitting on.
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But you could see how it was tedious. It was this long, drawn -out affair before they could eat. So, this is kind of lost on our culture today.
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But ritual cleanings were common during the time of Jesus Christ. This was nothing new. This is the status quo.
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This is a really particularly religious culture, after all. And the Lord had given, the
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Lord himself, did instruct cleaning rituals to the Israelite people in the Mosaic Law. Just for reference, there's many of them, but there's a couple of references you can look to in the
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Old Testament. Leviticus 11, 32. You're looking at Leviticus chapter 15, verses 4 to 12.
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Numbers 19, verses 18. You're looking at all these different rituals, different cleanings for different purposes. And these are all examples of these things.
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And they're not just for spiritual purposes, even though that was the main intent. Some of them are actual practical reasons, like dealing with blood and certain discharges and general hygiene.
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These things had good practical reasons why you would do them. But what
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Mark is emphasizing in our text today isn't that these rituals existed, or they existed in their time, or their practicality, or what they were serving.
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It's the vanity and the pointless theatrics of it all. That's Mark's emphasis in our passage today.
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It's the arrogance. Actually, that's where he's getting at. It's the arrogance, the desire for our own self -righteousness that have replaced the
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Word of God for vain traditions. Even worse, if we look at verse 5, they say this to Christ.
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They say this to him. Why do your disciples not walk according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?
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In other words, they aren't asking Jesus to figure out why this is the case, what teaching he's bringing.
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They're not asking a question for knowledge. This is an accusation. And they're accusing him,
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Jesus Christ, of teaching his disciples to act in unholy ways or defiled ways.
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And this is the height of unbelief. This is the height of depravity. So sinful man takes
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God's law and they create a system of works that focus on self -righteousness and self -piety.
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And then, these Pharisees and scribes have the arrogance to take this man -made law and shove it upon the author of the law himself.
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They accuse God of unholiness or injustice. Like I said, this is depravity. So when
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Jesus Christ, if we look at our text in verses 6 to 7, quotes Isaiah, Jesus Christ is making a statement.
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Jesus Christ is saying these vain rituals will do nothing for you. This is useless.
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They won't do anything for you. If I could have you guys turn to Isaiah 29, and we're actually going to go to the text that Jesus Christ cites.
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We're going to spend a couple minutes there and I think it's important that we look at it in context because there's a lot being said here.
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So for context, Isaiah 29 is a prophecy from the prophet Isaiah. As you spend some time looking at it, we're actually going to understand why
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Jesus Christ quotes from here. Jesus, by quoting this chapter in particular, he's following this prophecy to its logical conclusion.
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And we need to see what it is that Jesus Christ is alluding to. So in 29, if you're looking at verse 13,
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Jesus Christ is pronouncing judgment upon the Pharisees and the scribes. This is a weighty charge.
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So let's just read it and let's understand what is being said here. So Isaiah 29, verse 13 says, And the
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Lord said, Because this people draw near with their mouth and honor me with their lips while their hearts are far from me and their fear of me is commandment taught by men.
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Therefore, behold, I will again do wonderful things with this people with wonder upon wonder and the wisdom of their wise men shall perish and the discernment of their discerning men shall be hidden.
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I don't know if you caught that in verse 14. Let's read that again. The wisdom of their wise shall perish and the discernment of the discerning men shall be hidden.
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Jesus Christ is rebuking them for their false wisdom, their false knowledge. But not only that,
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Jesus Christ is alluding to the fulfillment of this prophecy that is to come.
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So the rebuke, the judgment, the woe that Jesus Christ was casting upon the Pharisees and the scribes, this would have been clear to them.
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This would have been clear to those who knew the law. But verses 15 and 19 in Isaiah 29, these are what really concern us.
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This is where Jesus Christ is taking this argument logically. In these verses,
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Isaiah prophesies that in God's sovereign appointed time, he will redeem his people and he will use the arrogance of the elites of the day to do it.
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So in other words, Jesus Christ will go to the cross. Aided by the foolishness of men, he will die and he will do away with all needless religion and false rituals.
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When Jesus Christ spoke these words, although his death on the cross was always on the horizon, this is one of the key features of Mark, the cross is always near.
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We're always looking to the cross. Those hearing at this time when Jesus Christ spoke these words, they could never have understood the joy and the hope that was to come of Jesus Christ's obedience.
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But for us, this is a different story. We have the word of God in front of us. We have the scriptures. We have the gospel of Mark.
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It's a different story and this is where we need to find ourselves. We need to ask ourselves certain questions. What does this mean for me today?
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What does this mean for me right now? And this is where we can apply this. We can apply this right now.
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We can say, for some application, we need to take God at his word. We need to take
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God at his word. He does not lie. So turning back to our text, in verse 8,
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Jesus Christ, there's two things that he renders against the scribes and the Pharisees. We're going to look at the first one in our application.
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He says, you leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. That first part, leaving the commandment of God is going to be our focus right now.
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Brothers and sisters, we need to see the word of God for what it is. We need to see it as the living word. We need to believe it and we need to do it.
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Second Corinthians, chapter 10, verses 4 to 6, says this, and just bear with me here.
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Just listen to this. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds.
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We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey
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Christ, being ready to punish every disobedience when your obedience is complete.
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Colossians 2 .8 says, see to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.
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One more reference, Jeremiah 2 .13 says, for my people have committed two evils. They have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn out cisterns for themselves, broken cisterns that hold no water.
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There are many core references that I could bring forward. This is just three of them, but the point is clear.
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We need to understand God's word, and we need to take it at His word. God is not a liar, and in our current day, especially in the year 2022, this is a real consideration for all of us.
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This is real. Think about the institutions that the world holds near and dear to their hearts.
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Think about all these areas of studies and disciplines. Think about philosophy. Think about how philosophy has made its way into our secular society.
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Think about psychology, biology, history, etc., etc., etc. The list goes on, and the question that is always missing in each one of these fields is where is
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God in any of this? So where is God in any of this?
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We need to weigh these choices carefully. The world makes it too easy to play by its rules.
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If you fall within some human man -made system, and you play by the rules the enemy has set forward, it is too easy.
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And many of you, I think I've shared this with enough people, know some of the challenges I was facing, not even a couple months ago, when
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I was deliberating, praying about whether or not I would return back to school. Like I said, this is learning.
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This is the text being brought to bear in my life. This is something that I've had to apply to myself quite painstakingly at some points.
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Am I going to trust the sufficiency of the Scriptures? Am I going to trust God's Word?
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Am I going to trust it in its entirety? Or am I going to play into a system that removes
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God at every avenue? Am I going to fall within a human system that does everything in its power to do away with God?
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So when facing this decision, are we, am I, going to trust the Word of God?
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Or am I going to trust in the empty logic or even convenience of man? 2
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Timothy 3, verses 12 to 13 says, Indeed, all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil people and imposters will go on from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.
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At some point, brothers and sisters, there are decisions to be made, real practical decisions.
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You guys know your situations at large. You guys know, for the most part, where these decisions lie, whether it's a situation at work, whether it's a compromise at work.
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You're looking at a substantial purchase in the near future. We're looking at God's promises and what He says about these things.
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Or even a school application. What am I going to study? How will I honor the Lord in my studies?
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What am I going to study? Am I going to study the Word of God? Am I going to trust the Word of God? Or am I going to trust some logic system put by ungodly men?
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At some point, brothers and sisters, we're all faced with these decisions. And we all have to ask ourselves at that point, do I trust the
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Scriptures? Are they sufficient? I will tell you right now, God's Word is sufficient.
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It is good. It is perfect. Nothing else satisfies. And we need, for us, at this moment, this day, we need to understand
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Him and take Him at His Word. It is God's Word. We need to trust it. To illustrate my next point, before we move on to the, before we go back to Mark, I want to tell you just a short story on a little church history, on the story of John Wycliffe.
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John Wycliffe is, if you don't know him, I think you should get to know him. He's actually a very interesting individual.
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So often we speak here about Martin Luther. We talk about the Protestant Reformation and we, I think at some point, we all have some knowledge base, at least here, about the
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Protestant Reformation. If you don't know, this is kick -started by Martin Luther when he nailed his 95 theses to the church in Dortmund, Wittenberg, Germany.
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From the Reformation, we get the five solas. This is what, that we hold to by faith alone, by grace alone, in Christ alone, by the scriptures alone, for the glory of God alone.
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This is church history. Some of us have a frame of reference for this. We know this to some degree. But what you probably don't know is that the
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Reformation, although it started there, it started a lot longer before that.
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God was laying the foundation for the Reformation long before Martin Luther came into the picture. And actually one of these men was
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John Wycliffe, or Wycliffe. So this John Wycliffe, he lived between 1328 to 1384.
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And during the time in which he lived, this is his context, this time frame is best described as a spiritual graveyard.
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It's a spiritual graveyard. It was death. The Roman Catholic Church during this time was holding the scriptures captive.
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They were locked away behind monasteries and studies. And if you subscribe to the Roman Catholic doctrines, then you could study the scriptures, the
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Latin Vulgate, which is the original Latin manuscripts that they had translated. But they were locked away behind legalism.
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And the Word of God, if we can picture it now, was not readily available. We have access to Bibles. There are probably more
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Bibles in this room than people. But there was a time when this wasn't the case. During this time,
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John Wycliffe was a studier of the Bible. He was within the Catholic Church.
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But he took note of this. He started to study. He started to study the scriptures. At the time, because of his study, because of his genius, he became actually a top professor at Cambridge University.
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And actually, he rose the ranks quite quickly. He was just a powerhouse. He was a genius.
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And through his studies, what he started to do, looking at the sufficiency of scripture, he started to look at what the church was doing, the
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Roman Catholic Church was presenting as salvation. All the works -based indulgences and different works that were being put in front of him.
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And he started to compare it with the living word of God. He was studying the textbook while they were presenting him fool's gold.
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And he took note of this, and he started to speak out against the Roman Catholic Church. He said a bunch of things, and I won't get into all the specifics, but he took issue with many of their doctrines.
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And eventually, he made enough of a stir that the Roman Catholic Church had to make a statement against him and had condemned his teachings.
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As the political climate got worse around John Wycliffe, what had happened was Cambridge buckled as well, and they said, well,
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John Wycliffe, you have to go. And he was actually kicked out of one of his classes as he was teaching. And if you were to look at man's efforts, you would say, well, this is where the story ends, because this is where, logically, it has to end.
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The church would eventually have gotten him, and that would have been it. But as God would have it, this is actually the time, the period of time when
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John Wycliffe was most influential. So he and many of his colleagues left
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Cambridge at this time, and they went to a town called Lutterworth. So together with Wycliffe, they did something that was never done ever in human history.
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They translated the Bible into English for the first time. And you have to understand that they held to the sufficiency of Scripture before we knew it as sola scriptura.
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They held to this sufficiency so tightly that this translation of the
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English Bible, the Wycliffe translation, was super literal and actually really hard to understand. Actually, after Wycliffe passed away about a year later,
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I believe, they went back and retranslated it because it was actually so literal, so close to the
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Vulgate, what they had in terms of manuscripts, that it was actually hard to understand. But these men, along with Wycliffe, understood the importance of Scripture.
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They understood its sufficiency and the power of Scripture in light of false human tradition and religion.
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They recognized that if the common man could read the
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Scriptures for themselves, they would recognize, for one, the travesty of the
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Catholic Church, of what was being told to them. And two, by knowing the
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Word of God, they could come to know Christ as their own. That's the foundation for the
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Reformation. It goes a little further, but I don't have time to get into all of that. But that's the foundation for sola
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Scriptura. Wycliffe himself, he said this, he said,
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Trust wholly in Christ. Rely altogether on His sufferings. Beware of seeking to be justified in any other way than by His righteousness.
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Faith in our Lord Jesus Christ is sufficient for salvation. As it goes, in 1384, he died of a stroke before the
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Roman Catholic Church could get to him. But his legacy and his recognition was that rightly understood,
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God's Word was the method for understanding the Gospel and that any other deviation or any adding or deviation from the
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Bible never adds anything, it only ever takes away. And this is where we're going to come to in our second half of today's passage.
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Our second half. So if we're looking at our second point, God's commandments, these lead to life.
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God's commandments lead to life. Picking up in our text, we're going to pick up from verse 8.
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It says this, You leave the commandments of God or the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men.
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Verse 9, And He said to them, You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition.
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For Moses said, Honor your mother or your father and your mother and whoever reviles father or mother must surely die.
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But you say, If a man tells his father or mother whatever you would have gained from me as Corbin, that is given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down and many such things you do.
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So we've looked at verse 8 a little bit. In verse 8, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees and the scribes for two things.
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The first we've looked at, leaving the commandment of God, the scriptures of God. They've left those. And the second thing is, they are holding on to the traditions of men.
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So to illustrate this point, Jesus first states one of the
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Ten Commandments. Honor your father and your mother. And this is from Exodus 20, verse 12. So he goes right to the
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Ten Commandments, Exodus 20, verse 12. Then afterwards, he states the consequences of disobeying this commandment one chapter later in Exodus 21, 17.
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Whoever reviles father or mother must surely die. Kids, that's kind of a big deal. I don't know if you guys should be listening to that.
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It's a big deal. And some might say that's really harsh. That's really harsh.
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It's a harsh commandment to follow. And it is. But that's not the intent. The rightful response to God's word is this.
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If you're looking at Matthew 22, we're going to turn there briefly. Look at Matthew 22, verses 37 to 40.
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Jesus Christ says this of the Great Commandment. He says, And he said to them, You shall love the Lord your
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God with all your heart and with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment.
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And the second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.
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The root of the law was love. That was the root of the law. It might seem harsh to us now, but it is loving to obey your parents.
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It's loving to honor them. And to disobey a commandment from God meant not just dishonoring your parents, but it dishonors
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God. So the root of the law was love. And it was intended to, this is
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God's law. He gave it to us that he would honor him. It would give him glory, but also be the standard by which we love one another.
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But this isn't what's taking place in Israel at this time. What's happening in Israel is much, much worse.
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Look back at our text, verses 11 to 13. But you say,
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If a man tells his father or mother, whatever you would have gained for me is Corbin, that is given to God, then you no longer permit him to do anything for his father or mother, thus making void the word of God by your tradition that you have handed down and many such things you do.
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Look at those first three words. But you say, this is man -made religion at its finest.
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This is the perversion that we're getting. In verse 11, this word Corbin is actually a
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Hebrew and Aramaic word. And Mark actually defines it for us in those brackets. He translates it for us as given to God.
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And what Corbin is was a simple vow. It was a simple tradition or a vow that any gifts given to someone could be declared as a sacrifice to God at any moment.
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At which point, those who receive the gift would no longer really have access to it.
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This vow was so that things pertaining to God in terms of an offering would be off limits.
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And you might say, okay, well that doesn't really make sense. But let me give you an example, a modern example that shows some of the foolishness of what this is.
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Suppose for a moment that my brother has car troubles.
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We live together and he has car troubles and my car works. His no longer does, but mine does.
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So because I'm so loving and good, and I'm such a good person, I allow him to borrow mine so that he can access it for all the goods that he wants to do.
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This means that he can drive to work, he can get groceries, he can go to soccer games with his kids, all the like.
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He does all of these things and I'm being generous, I'm giving to him and he can do all he wants with it.
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But then suppose after a time tensions start to increase, tensions rise. And as sometimes him and I do, there's a disagreement that occurs between him and I.
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So, in my righteous anger, I let him know that he can no longer use my vehicle unless he is going to church with it or prayer meetings or anything related to church.
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He can no longer access my car, but if it's for the
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Lord, I will make that exception. I will allow him to use the vehicle for the
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Lord's sake. Do you understand how stupid that is? Not only is it foolish, it's totally foolish.
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It's a mockery to God. This turns the spotlight onto my own self -righteousness.
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But to make matters worse, it takes the provision the Lord has provided. It's his good provision, his good graces and his word and I've turned it into a cudgel to beat those around me with.
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This is what Jesus Christ is confronting in this day. It isn't that they've just got it wrong and they're misapplying it.
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They have depraved the word. It's debased. It's no longer good.
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Look at verse 12. The fathers and the mothers tied by this Corban vow no longer had access to any of the necessities they needed.
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Thinking during those times, this could have been a matter of life and death. Depending on the need, this could be a death sentence all for the sake of self -glorification.
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If they have no income, no food, no provision, who will provide it? If their sons won't, who will? In some cases, this is a death sentence.
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We need to bear in mind that this is only one example of how the law had been deformed and defaced.
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In verse 13, Jesus Christ says, and many such things that you do, there are many, but this is just one of them, how the law was deformed.
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And we need to be aware that this doesn't happen just in their times, but these things are happening around us all day, every day today.
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Jesus Christ needs to be our firm foundation. This isn't exclusive to a
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Pharisee or a scribe issue. This is a sinful man problem. Outside of the
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Scriptures, this is what we are all prone to do. Our first authority is
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God's Word, and that means we need to be careful about how we treat it. So as a point of application, don't dare add a word to the
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Word of God. Don't dare add a word to the Word of God. Don't think of it, and you might think that doesn't apply to me.
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Let's go to Revelation, chapter 22, verse 18 and 19.
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It says this, I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, listen carefully, if anyone adds to them,
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God will add to him the plagues described in this book. And if anyone takes away from the words of this prophecy,
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God will take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are described in this book.
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Brothers and sisters, we might be quick to think this can't be me. I won't do this. I can't do this.
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I am incapable of doing this. How can I add a word to the Word of God? How can I add anything to this?
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What the Pharisees do is not something that I can do myself, but this is sinful human thinking and pride, and we can't think like that.
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Earlier I mentioned that I was struggling with this decision of going back to school, and by God's grace, He stirred me from that decision.
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He delivered me from this in a very real way, and it took good, godly brothers and sisters to bring me to a real understanding about what it meant to go back to school in those conditions.
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It really is too easy to fall prey to the schemes of the enemy. There's just enough sugar in this poison for us to taste it.
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There's just enough truth in this lie for us to take the bait. In our own lives, just inward looking for just a moment, think about how often we refer to secular phrases or even modern pop psychology to deal with the human condition of sin.
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Think about the things that we say and the things that we approach life with, and this might seem inconsequential, but think about the discussions we have about things like love languages or personality tests, things that we might do for fun, and think about some of the bigger things like the discussions on different company policies you might be working on, reconciliation, social justice, gender, etc.
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etc. All of these within man -made systems and ethics that are all perversions and distortions of who we are and what we are meant to be.
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They're distortions of the gospel to take us away from them, and the gospel is that Jesus Christ came to a dead and dying world to ransom sinners like you and me.
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We need to think about these movements logically. Do we add to the word of God in these movements? Do we add by internalizing some of these things?
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Nowhere in any of these systems do we make mention of our Lord. Psalm 711 says that God is a righteous judge and a
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God who feels indignation every day. Brothers and sisters, it's all too easy for us to fall prey to these systems.
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The world makes it so easy to play by its rules. It really does. We need to discern what messages we're absorbing, what is being taught, what we are teaching, how we relay information.
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Are we adding to the word of God? Are we integrating ideas within the
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Holy Scriptures that take away from the truth of God? Are we doing this? Are we weighing that?
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Are we bringing that to one another? Are we testing one another? Discern these things. It's so easy.
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It really is. Often there's just enough truth to make us lose sight of the bigger picture. The Lord really does care about these injustices.
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And this is not to make light of some of these things. At the base level, we can agree with some people about some things.
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We agree that there is sin. But this sin has a cure. It has the
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Lord Jesus Christ. And anything that takes away from that or integrates some man -made system is debaucherous.
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We can't do that. Romans 1, 16 -17.
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Just because we were talking so much of the Reformation, this is a perfect passage to land on.
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For I am not ashamed of the Gospel. Listen, because for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.
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To the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed for faith for faith.
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As it is written, the righteous shall live by faith. Anything that takes away our eyes from the
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Gospel, from the cross of Christ, distorts our view. And we need to be careful that we do not add that to our view.
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That we do not bring that into the Scriptures. That we do not take away from the Scriptures by relying on some man -made system.
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Let us handle the Word of God rightly. And not dare think that we can add or take away from this beautiful text.
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This right here. This is perfect. It doesn't need you to do anything with it. So as we end today, we're...
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I love the fact that we're doing catechisms. Actually, and if I'm honest, I have to apologize because sometimes my enthusiasm might start to wear on people.
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I love the catechism. I really do. And to hear the children repeat catechism, to see them lay their hope in these foundations, these truths, it is so important, everyone.
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It is so important. It's so easy to fall prey to human systems and human cunning.
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We need to be careful that the same cunning lips that deceived Adam and Eve in the garden don't deceive us.
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Did God really say? Yes, he did. And it is right here.
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Right here in this book. So in true catechism fashion,
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I'm going to end with a question from the Westminster Catechism, number two, if you're familiar with it.
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But it's this. You guys don't have to memorize this, kids, in case you're wondering, but just think about this. What rule hath
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God given to us or to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him? So just one more time.
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What rule hath God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him? The answer is the word of God, which is contained in the scriptures of the
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Old and New Testaments. It is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him.