What is the Source of Our Strength? | Kingsmen

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Welcome to the Kingsmen Podcast, where we are reclaiming biblical manhood by training and equipping men for the work of the kingdom.

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I'm your host, John Moffitt. I'm the pastor of Grace Reform Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and also one of the hosts of Theocast, a weekly podcast about Reformed theology.

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Gentlemen, let's jump right back into this. I've had some time in between the last two episodes to think about this particular one.

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And as I've been contemplating it, this is a significant episode because I want to introduce a concept that you know of, but I don't know if we've processed it in a way where it goes down into the levels of where we make decisions, like why we allow certain areas of our life to affect us.

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I know that I've had conversations with several of you men that are listening to this about struggling to lead your wife, struggling with anger, the significance of your job, your finances, regrets and purchases that we've made, things like this.

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And what ends up happening is I know that we know that the world is wrong and that we shouldn't love these things, but then we fall into the trap and we do, and then we feel guilty, right?

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We have buyer's remorse about our life. We bought into the wrong idea and now we want to give it back, but it's too late.

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Like we've lost the time. I don't know about you, but you know, I'm 41 and there are definitely areas of my life where I felt like, man,

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I can't believe I wasted my life doing this or not doing that.

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And I have regrets about what I went ahead and spent my time. And we don't think about time in that way.

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We don't think about how we spend time. I don't know about you. I'm an optimist.

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I'm an entrepreneurial. So for me, it's like time is infinite, right? I have all the time in the world to make all the mistakes that I want to make and then it'll all work out.

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And now I look back at my life and I go, well, not everything worked out like I thought it was going to work out.

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And you're probably feeling this. One of the things that I've been wrestling with, and we started our first episode with this, is

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I'm wrestling with the awareness of my weakness. And the longer

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I live, I am discovering how I depend upon myself in ways that is causing all of my problems.

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Like when I depend upon my own wisdom and my own strength, that's when I find myself in the holes

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I find myself in with my relationship with my wife and relationships outside of my marriage in the church.

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That's where I find my holes because I'm depending upon my own wisdom, my own strength.

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And I don't know about you, but I love talking to people who agree with me and who will affirm me, right?

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If I have a really good idea, I have a tendency to talk to people that would agree that that's a good idea.

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And that's not really how we should do that. We should probably talk to people who disagree with us and hear why they disagree with us and then evaluate where is our weakness?

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What are we not seeing? What are we not hearing? And that's what I call being teachable. So guys, I'm going to just ask you in this episode,

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I want you to set aside all your preconceived ideas about the purpose of your life, about the Bible. And I want you to be teachable for a moment.

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I'm not asking you to blindly follow me. I want you to do the exact opposite. I want you to hear what I have to say. And I want you to go to the

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Bible and ask yourself, does my life line up with this? Okay. One of the things that we're walking through so far is that in the first area of our life, which is our salvation, we have no problem sending that over to the

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Lord, especially if you've grown up in a Calvinistic perspective. I love the doctrine of God's sovereignty about to preach

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Ezekiel 36. He pulls out our heart of stone. He puts in a heart of flesh. We all say glory to be to God.

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If he did not save me, I would not be saved. And we love handing that over to him. And we do it in our music and we do it in our praises.

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It's wonderful. Where we struggle is the next two steps, right? Because our life is made up of really three stages.

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You have coming to life, and then you have sanctification where God is molding you into his image, and then you have glorification where we're going to go and be with God in our glorified bodies.

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The last two stages are hard for us to give up. We naturally want to take the reins from God's hands and go, like,

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I think I know how to sanctify myself better than you do, which is confidence where we should not have.

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And then we think that our glorification is when we get to heaven, God's going to be happy with our actions, and therefore it's our glory that we're going to be celebrating, not

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Christ's glory. This is where we get messed up with the purpose of our life, right?

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So your sanctification, the way in which God molds and shapes you, it's the same process of your salvation, okay?

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He doesn't look to your strength so that you can partner with him in your sanctification.

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And when you think that, it actually distracts you from your purpose. You know, let's say

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I gather 10 men together, and we're going to go build a house. And I buy all the equipment that we need, and we've got air guns, and we've got ladders and tractors and all this kind of stuff, and you show up with your hammer, and you're like, bro,

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I got this. And I'm like, well, you probably could do that, but you're going to really slow down the rest of us, and I don't even know how efficient it might be because your strength may not be strong enough to actually drive in some of these nails that we need to do.

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But you're convinced you're going to do it. And this is what we do with the church. You show up telling

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God, hey, God, I know that you purchased all this stuff, and I know it's your power. We don't cognitively say that.

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But because of our ignorance, we're like, look, I got my hammer. I don't need anything else. And to you, everything is a nail. I'm like, actually, we're installing a window, and I really don't need a hammer.

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But you're convinced you need a hammer. And I want to step back and say, I'm not accusing you of making that decision knowingly.

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Like, you know what you're doing. I think we've been deceived. This goes back to the episode where Satan is deceiving us.

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He's tricking us that, no, no, it's your strength, it's your might, and you'll get that window, and they're just banging harder, right?

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And how many windows do we have to replace that we've shattered in our life? And we keep making the same mistakes.

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I don't know about you, but are you frustrated with making the same mistake over and over again? I do. I am.

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I get tired of making the same mistakes. I don't want to make the same mistake over and over again. So that's where you have to step back and go, maybe

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I don't have all the wisdom I need. Maybe I don't have all the strength I'm supposed to have. I think

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I need some power outside of myself. I think I need some wisdom outside of myself, and I think

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I need some help outside of myself. Guys, you have to ask yourself, what's the goal? In this illustration, the goal is to build a house.

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In God's illustration, it's to build the kingdom. And God uses His means and His ways to do that.

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And we get to be involved in it. We're going to talk about that in a couple of minutes.

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I read this verse last week. I mean, God's involvement of having us involved in the building of the kingdom is this, right?

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2 Corinthians 5 .20. Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ. God making His appeal through us, right?

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We become the heralding of the power of God. And God says, I'm going to use you, your life, to do that.

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But we tell God, no, I think there's something else better for me to do. So that's the second area that we are confused in.

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And then the end of our life, the glory of our life, where God is now going to transform us into His final image, and we're with Him forever for His glory, we think that all of these works that we're doing are for our praise, and it's not.

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There's nothing about this life that you want to take with you, okay? When you get to glory, the only thing you want to set before Him are all of His power tools saying, look how awesome you were at building your kingdom.

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And thanks for letting me use your tools. You're literally going to lay down the power tools of the

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Spirit and say, I thank you for letting me use those, because this would have never been accomplished. We would have never seen the kingdom to where it is if it wasn't for your power.

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We're going to be praising Him and glorifying Him for the rest of our life. So what does that look like tomorrow when you wake up, right?

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What does this look like on a day -to -day basis? I can't help but walk away from Paul's wisdom when he says that, in my weakness,

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I find my strength. And the longer I study God's Word, I am so ignorant,

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I am so dumb when it comes to just biblical knowledge and understanding the awareness of God's power.

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Because if I did, I wouldn't fall into the same traps I fall into all the time. I keep falling, and the

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Bible says that, that we keep falling into the same traps because we're not willing to admit that we're not strong enough to hold ourselves up.

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So in order for me to convince you the purpose of your life is to cling on to Christ as tightly and possibly as you can, and you will have the greatest significance and joy and hope,

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I have to convince you to let go of everything else. You've got to let it go. And it's really hard.

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Now, we're good at this with our salvation. You know, for those of us who are like, yep, it's by God's grace, you know, not by works, lest any man should boast.

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And we're like, yeah, praise God for that. But then we pick up the works when it comes to the work of God.

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And you're not supposed to do that. Jesus says, actually, I have a way for you to live. And it has nothing to do with your own strength, nothing to do with your own might.

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It has everything to do with my strength and my might. So what are some of these tools to accomplish the purpose of our life?

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What are some of these tools that God has put in our life? Well, I mean, the most powerful tool we have is the Word of God. So praise

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God for that. We don't have to come up with our own knowledge. We don't have to figure this out on our own.

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He gave us a book and said, everything you need to know about me is in this book. So praise

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God for that, right? Now, here's where things get complicated. And please do not turn this off.

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Hear me out. Okay, just hear me out. The mistake we make is I believe that it's my

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Bible and me, and I have the capacity and the ability to engage in God's Word on my own and come to the right and final conclusions to do the right and final work.

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Well, this is how we got into this mess. This is exactly how we got into this mess, is that we isolate ourselves from God's power.

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That's like to say that all you needed was the information to make the decision to follow

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Jesus and for salvation. No, you needed a supernatural power. And that same supernatural power is still the same now.

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God's Word is a supernatural book. But if you do not obey the book, it will not accomplish what you've told it to accomplish.

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One of my favorite illustrations I love is this video. And this young worker is at this construction site, and they're tearing apart this concrete.

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And you see this big old sledgehammer, right? It's, I forget what they call the name of that, but it's a jackhammer.

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And instead of the jackhammer being plugged in, you can see the wire dangling, and he's picking it up and he's slamming it into the ground.

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And he's breaking up a slab or two, and it's taking him a while. You could see the sweat pouring down.

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Then you see the foreman walk over, and he just kind of pats him on the shoulder, walks over the extension cord, plugs it in, and it takes care of the whole sidewalk in about five seconds.

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And you can see the guy's look on his face like, wow. He had no clue what that tool did.

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But instead of humbling himself and walking over to the foreman and said, I actually don't know how to use this.

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Can someone show me how this works? He arrogantly walked over and in his own strength, and probably felt really good about himself, wow, look how much

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I've already accomplished. That is what happens when you think that it's your abilities with your strength and your power and God's word apart from God's system and God's power.

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That's what gets us into this mess. So I need you to continue to embrace your weakness and say, what does

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God say in his word about how I engage his word? A lot of us have lost the purpose of our life because we isolate ourselves down into the text.

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And we read texts that we want to read. And we engage the word of God in the way we want to engage the word of God.

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And we miss what God's word, the whole entirety of God's word we have for us. So let's plug in, all right?

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Let's take the power of the spirit and let's plug it into the word of God that we might actually experience what

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God has designed for us to experience. And that is, it's very clear that God has designed the church to be the means by which the

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Holy Spirit works, right? He works within us to see the work in our own hearts.

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This is why he says things like this. Do not forsake the sibling of yourselves as such as you were doing. Submit to your elders, right?

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I love this one. Let the word of God dwell in you richly. Okay, so we hear that and we're handed the sledgehammer.

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Then we're like, yeah, let the word of God dwell in us richly. And we walk away and we go do it our own way. And Paul says, come back here.

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Come here, come here, come here. Let me show you how that works, by admonishing one another. In other words, you don't do it by yourself.

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You don't engage God's word by yourself. He says, let it come richly into your life by admonishing one another.

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And then he says by singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs to one another. Go to Ephesians 4.

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This is my challenge to you. I want you to read Ephesians 4. And I want you to walk away with one question and see if you can find the answer to it, is what does

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God promise you? Supernatural protection from bad doctrine. Supernatural protection being tossed all over psychologically, spiritually speaking.

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And a guarantee that you will grow into the image of Christ and you will grow in love. What does he say does that?

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And if you read that chapter, you're going to walk away saying, it's when the body functions properly. And what does a properly functioning body look like?

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These are the questions we have to answer, right? So God has a way for you to live and find strength.

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Guys, psychologically, spiritually, mentally, and physically, we find ourselves exhausted because we're trying to fight a battle by ourselves and our own strength.

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And we keep losing. I don't know about you, but I feel that. I can feel the spiritual and psychological fatigue when

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I try and live this world and the purpose of God in my own strength. God says, you're not supposed to live it in your own strength.

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The body is there to consider daily how to build one another up into love and good works.

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Okay? So part of the purpose of your life is to embrace your weakness and say, if I am not receiving

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God's strength and power by his means, I cannot accomplish what it is that he wants me to do.

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He's handed me the tools. I've got to learn how to use them. Okay? There's actual instruction manuals in the

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Bible on how to do his work and we're ignoring them. So listen, you don't have to take my word for this.

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This is not my opinion. I really want you to engage in God's word and ask yourself, how is it that we're supposed to live?

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Why does he say this in Hebrews 10, that the elders are ones watching over your soul?

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This is why it matters what kind of church you go to. And that the church is biblical and they teach the word of God.

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And they hold to a confession that you can say, yes, they're teaching God's word. There's one other aspect to this, as far as our weakness goes, is that the word of the way that God accomplishes his purpose on this world.

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Okay? The purpose of God is not like, enjoy me and like, kind of just wander around. No, he's actually accomplishing something.

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When he says, seek ye first the kingdom of God, Jesus is like, I have come to proclaim the good news of the kingdom and that the kingdom is coming.

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And your job is to proclaim the good news of the kingdom. But we're not, right? We're distracted pursuing our own kingdoms, pursuing our own missions.

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And so when you hear me say, seek first the kingdom of God, your heart starts to go, oh man, I don't want to do evangelism.

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And then you're feeling guilty. Like, well, now I feel like a really bad Christian because I don't want to do evangelism. Let's back up.

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If we understand that the power and strength to live the Christian life comes through the power of the spirit within the local church that lives in harmony around God's word, looking unto

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Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, then you're going to be able to do the very thing that Jesus calls you to do.

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Lay your life down. It's so hard, guys. I'm there. I want to pick up my own ambitions.

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I want to have this and I want that. And I want people to respect me over here. And it's true.

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We want safety, respect, and pleasure. This is what we want. That's the purpose of our life. If no one gives you the purpose of your life, you want respect, you want pleasure, and you want power, right?

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How do we know that? Because that's what the world pursues. Jesus says you can lay all that down. As a matter of fact, you have to because you've been called into a different purpose.

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You've been called into the purpose of the king. This is why Jesus says, don't worry about power.

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Don't worry about pleasure. Don't worry about prestige. He says, seek first my kingdom and all these things that you're trying to pursue.

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God will provide those to you. You will find your significance in the king and his inheritance.

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You will find that the world, what they're offering you as far as a place to live, it's nothing compared to what's coming.

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And you will find that what you wear and what you eat, you don't need as much as you think.

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And God will provide everything that you need. All right, so this leads us to then what are we doing?

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And I'm going to spend just about a few minutes here teeing it up for next week. And we'll accomplish this next week.

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Then what are we doing? Well, once you finally embrace your weakness and your salvation, and you embrace your weakness in your sanctification, how

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God's training you and molding you, and you realize that it's not me molding myself to scripture, but if I allow scripture to mold me, it's going to require brothers and sisters.

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It's going to require the preaching of God, the word of God. It's going to require me to confess my sins to my brothers and have them held me accountable.

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It's going to require me to lay my life down for what purpose, for what reason? So that those who are enslaved in the kingdom of darkness will be transformed and liberated, and they will experience the love and the joy and the freedom of Christ because of the way in which you shine the light for them.

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So we're going to look at passages next week such as this one in Matthew 5, 16, where he's like, don't hide your lie.

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Don't hide it under a bushel, right? This is not the purpose of it. You're not going to receive Christ and then go hide in a bunker.

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Isn't it interesting that Jesus knew that we were going to do that? I'm so glad I got my ticket out of this place, but now I'm going to go hide because I know if I shine the light of Jesus, I'm going to be persecuted.

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He says, don't do this. It says in Matthew 5, 16, he says, let your light shine before others so that they may see your good works and give glory to your father who is in heaven.

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Your good works are not so that you can confirm your salvation. That's not possible. God wouldn't accept them.

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But the world will see your broken, frail, messed up attempts at good works and understand the intentions behind them.

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They're going to go, okay, why are you doing that? Because Peter says, be ready to give every man an answer of the hope that lies within you.

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Why? Because they're going to say, you're hoping in something I'm not hoping in. You're pursuing something

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I'm not pursuing. And it's different. Why is it different? This is why people were drawn to Jesus.

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They were drawn to sinners, the worst of the worst, were drawn to Jesus because of his love and affection.

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Jesus, friend of sinners, right? They were drawn to him saying, okay, you're not judging me, but yet you have something

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I want. This is why at the woman at the well, he says to her, I'm going to give you water that lasts forever.

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She wanted physical water. He's like, no, I'm going to give you spiritual water. It intrigued her. And then eventually she realized who

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Jesus was. Next week, we're going to talk about if you can see this, where you can abandon your pride, your strength, and your own ambitions, and you can see that to love and serve

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Jesus and his church will give you the joy and significance and power and strength that you cannot find anywhere else.

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Every day when you wake up, whether you have cancer, where you have a horrible job, whether it doesn't matter your situation.

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This is why Paul says, no matter whether I'm wealthy or poor, if I'm healthy or sick, he goes, I'm content because I'm a part of the king and his kingdom.

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How is it Paul can say things like that? Next week, guys, I want to talk to us about this crazy idea of taking

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God at his word and changing the world by becoming weak and then finding our strength in Christ and his church.

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And then maybe we can then take that strength into our home for our children and our wives and take that strength into our jobs and take that strength into our communities and take that strength into our countries so that the world who is enslaved and the world who is trapped and has no hope and no joy will then be liberated.