Book of Romans, 8:1 - Fruit Bearing of the Believer, Pt. 5 (10/20/2019)

Park Meadows Church

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We're gonna be in Romans chapter eight, verse one, for about five seconds, and then we're gonna move to Galatians.

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Lord, thank you so much for a time to come together and study your word. We just pray that you'll bless this time in particular, that your

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Holy Spirit will be our teacher. We thank you that you've given us your word. You've breathed it to us.

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You've protected it through the ages and preserved it until this day and until the last generation.

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We thank you for that. We don't know where we'd be without it, and so thank you that you're the author of it, and we thank you for giving it to us and for giving us your presence as well as our teacher.

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We pray in Jesus' name, amen. Well, let's read this verse.

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It's kind of the launching pad into what we've been talking about for some number of weeks. Romans chapter eight, verse one, there is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ, Jesus, who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.

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And there's a lot said and written and preached about the first half of that verse, almost as if it has a period after the first half.

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There is therefore now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, period. But it doesn't say that.

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It continues. The comma's not even there in the Greek, obviously, but it goes on and says who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit.

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Now, what's interesting about this verse is that some would use it to try to act like the second part of the verse is the condition for the first half, which is totally wrong.

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It's like getting the cart before the horse. Totally wrong. It's not a condition.

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It is an effect. It's an effect of the first part of the verse. So speaking of people who are born again,

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God says of them that there's no condemnation for them anymore, and those are the people who walk not according to the flesh, but according to the spirit.

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They're the same people. And so the second part there of walking in the spirit, but not in the flesh is not a condition of salvation, for God himself fulfilled all the conditions of salvation.

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We don't fulfill any of them. It is a covenant that has no conditions.

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It's called an unconditional covenant. God did all the work to save us. We don't do any of the work to save ourselves, so the second half of the verse cannot have anything to do with the cause of our salvation.

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It is an effect of it. It's a result of it, and people don't get that, but that's so obvious, especially when you read the entire chapter right before the verse and the rest of this chapter after the verse, it's very clear, but people love to pull a verse out of context and put it up there and try to prove something with it, which is not how

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God wrote it, and that's cheating, so we don't do it that way. But in this little second half of the phrase there where it says who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit, we read an interesting comment by John Calvin on this particular verse, and he said pretty much what

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I've already said. He said that it's not a condition of the first part of the verse. He said the second part of the verse is simply speaking of someone who is indwelt by the

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Holy Spirit, and I thought, he sure made that simple. I mean, it's not that easy of a verse to figure out, really, if you're not familiar with the

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Bible, you'd have trouble with that, with verse one, but he made it seem very simple, so what we decided we would do as a group is we would go together throughout the scripture and see if John Calvin just made that up because it's how he wanted to say it, or is it really true?

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Is it what the Bible teaches? And of course, we know it's what the Bible teaches, but that brings us to probably the last phase in this study on what it means to be a person who walks after the spirit, and let me just remind you the last couple of times we've talked about that there are several ways you can divide up the fruits of the spirit, but one way you can divide it up that's really good to remember, and that is you have three kinds of fruit.

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You have convert fruit, which means where the Bible talks about the fact that we're supposed to give the gospel to people.

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Doesn't mean we can save people, only the Lord can do that, but we're supposed to give them the gospel, the good news of how they can be saved, and sometimes, as we do that, a few times in our life, or if you're like Charles Spurgeon, a couple hundred thousand times, perhaps, or more in your life, the

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Lord will let you actually see someone get saved as a result of your witness, and I know people in this room have had that experience from time to time.

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It's a wonderful thing, isn't it? But that's called convert fruit, so Charlotte and I were part of a group for quite some time when we were in our 20s and we didn't know better.

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It was a very legalistic group, but one of the things that they thought was that any time the

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Bible talked about fruit, it was talking about convert fruit, but that's not true. That's just one grouping, okay? In fact, it's not even the major thing the

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Bible talks about, oddly enough. The major thing it talks about is what we're gonna talk about this morning, but anyway, so you got convert fruit.

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The second one is conduct fruit, and there are scriptures that talk about things like the blah, blah, blah, and they have the fruits of righteousness, so that's living right.

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You know, it's good conduct. It's how you live, and we know the Bible talks about two kinds of righteousness, don't we?

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One is called positional righteousness, which is where Jesus Christ, when he saved us, he did like 33 things to us in a nanosecond.

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One of the things he did was he gave us his own righteousness. He took his righteousness and put it upon us, and he took our sin and put it upon himself, and that's called the doctrine of imputation, but that's called positional righteousness.

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In other words, when the Father looks at us, he does not look at our righteousness. He sees Jesus' righteousness on us, and that's why we go to heaven is we're all dressed up in the righteousness of Jesus Christ, positional.

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Like, there's nothing you can do to make that go away, by the way, because you didn't put it there. You didn't put it there, nor can you remove it.

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God put it there when he saved you, but there's a second kind of righteousness with many verses, and the only way you can tell which it is, by the way, that's a theological concept of positional and experiential righteousness.

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That's theology, but the way you find the verses that fit under those categories is just by the context of the verse where you see the word righteous, or righteousness, so the other group is experiential.

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That means we're supposed to, like Jesus told us, be holy for I am holy. We have a responsibility to try to be a good man and a good woman, to work at it, right?

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Now, that doesn't save us, but nevertheless, once we are saved, one of the effects is supposed to be righteous living, a lifestyle that grows more and more like the

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Lord Jesus' life, and that's a process throughout our walk, and that's called experiential righteousness, and that's what

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I think you would call conduct fruit. In other words, if a person truly saved, and you watched them over the next seven years of their life, you should see a changed life from the way they were before they were saved.

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You should see many symptoms of salvation. For example, they should all of a sudden love the Bible, whereas used to, they thought it was boring.

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They should all of a sudden love to be around God's people, whereas used to, they didn't want to be seen in church. They should have certain habits of sin that are now gone, that used to be there, and others that are still being worked on by the

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Lord, right? But you should see some of these things in the life of that person. You can't always tell that in a glimpse, but if you walk with the person for a while, you can, in fact, see it.

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Now, I understand what preachers mean when they say, well, God, you know, you can't really tell if the person's saved or not.

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Only God knows. I understand what they mean, or if they say, well, God didn't put a yellow stripe down the back of the elect, so you don't know who's gonna get saved.

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You don't know who's a goat. You don't know who's a tare. And yet, Jesus tells us not to cast our pearls before the swine.

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Now, how can you do that if you don't have some discernment? So we do have it. Despite what preachers say, the

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Bible says we have that discernment, but don't you agree with me that you can't have it in a, just if you pick one spot of time and pull it out and you say, oh, that person must be lost because I just saw him do this, right?

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Because you have to look over a period of time. You have to walk together for a while to get that sense.

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Sometimes you can think you might get that sense kind of immediately with some people, but it doesn't mean they won't get saved.

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You can't tell if they're gonna get saved in the future, right? You know, you can't. Can you tell a lost sheep from a goat?

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I think that's very difficult, because we were lost sheep. We ran with the goats, right? We would have been thought that maybe we were a goat, right?

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So I'm gonna kind of go with those who say God knows that, but I do think you should ask the

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Holy Spirit who to witness to before you witness, lest they turn and rend you, right? So don't witness to anybody the

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Holy Spirit doesn't lead you to witness to. So convert fruit would be that, the witnessing. Conduct fruit is how we live.

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Now, that brings us to the third, and that's character fruit, and that's what we wanna talk about this morning, character.

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So you have convert fruit, conduct fruit, and character. Now, what we've kind of done here in teaching in this order, we've gone to the most obvious that we observe out in the world, all the way to the most inward thing that is on the inside of us.

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But this character fruit, you have to understand it is the germ from which all the other fruit comes from.

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It can't be the other way around. So this must be in the heart, or the conduct and the convert fruit won't be there, or it'll be counterfeit, one of the two.

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So the character fruit's the most important because everything stems from it. And we understand

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Jesus gave the analogy that he's the vine, and we're the branch. And there are other places in the

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Bible that calls him the root of Jesse. So all the nutrients and the life in a plant come from the root, that's

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Jesus. The fruit is created by the root, not by the branches. We're just the branches.

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We hold the fruit, we bear the fruit. It hangs off of us and the world can see it, but we didn't create it,

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God created it within us. So when we look at the character fruit, it's not talking about our character, it's talking about the character of the new man that God created miraculously within us when he birthed us.

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When we were born again, and the old man was counted as crucified, the new man is a miracle, it's a miraculous birth, and God has given the new man his own character, the character of Jesus Christ.

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Now, whether that is operative or not is largely dependent upon whether we're spirit -filled or not.

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I'm talking about indwelling. We're indwelt permanently at the moment of salvation, but that doesn't mean we're filled.

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Being filled is a choice we make. And it is a power plug that we can plug into anytime we choose to, where we just simply reach up, take the

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Lord's hand and say, I wanna walk with you. And when we hold his hand, we're spirit -filled, and you see his character.

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All of a sudden, the Bible says, our spirit and his spirit become one spirit. So all of a sudden, you see this character begin to be part of who we are.

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And by the way, that's the real you. The old man is no longer the real you, he's dead, she's dead.

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I know she seems, and he seems to come alive and bother us from time to time, right? But theologically, the old man has already been crucified.

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He died in Christ the day Jesus died, just like when Jesus came out of the grave, we came out in him.

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So beautiful picture, but, and it's not just a picture, it's real. I mean, our old man literally did die in Christ that day, and we literally were resurrected with him when he came out of the grave.

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That's another way we know we didn't play any part in our own salvation. It happened 2000 years ago, over that now.

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We played no role in it, we just received it as a gift, a free gift, which is redundant.

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Because gift means free, doesn't it? So now part of, a huge part of what we received in a nanosecond of time at the moment of our born again experience was this character fruit that we're gonna see.

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Now in Ephesians 5, you don't need to turn there because we're gonna be in Galatians chapter five, verse one. But Ephesians 5, 18 says, be not drunk with wine wherein is excess, but be filled with the spirit.

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Now when you look at the second half of Romans chapter eight, verse one, which is the verse we've been studying now for six weeks or more, eight weeks maybe, the second half of the verse where it says who walk not after the flesh, but after the spirit,

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Ephesians 5, 18 is talking about the same thing. Be not drunk with wine wherein is excess, but be filled with the spirit.

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Why did the Lord put it in that structure? Don't you think it's odd? Don't go get drunk.

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Instead of that, be filled with the spirit. Now why would he do it that way? Well, for one thing, when we're filled with the spirit, it can mimic some of the attributes of what alcohol can do to the mind.

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In fact, I remember times where they said, no, these are not drunk. They're just filled with the spirit because they had just been received

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Jesus and the Holy Spirit was causing them to have this joy that people mistook for drunkenness.

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So you don't need alcohol, you don't need wine, you don't need beer, you don't need any kind of hard drink when you're saved, you just don't need it.

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I'm not preaching on whether it's right, okay, to have a social drink. I mean, I got my feelings about it, but I'm not preaching on that.

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I'm preaching on the fact that you don't need it. If you have the joy of the spirit, you don't need that.

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It's a crutch that your flesh wants maybe, but you don't need it. Your new man absolutely has no use for it, okay?

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So I think the wrong question is, is it okay to have a drink? But I've said that a million times, so I'm not gonna say it again, but I just did.

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The right question is, why do I need it? That's the right question. Okay, so let's, you know, 518 makes that pretty clear.

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And also, wouldn't you agree, the second half of the verse is a command. There are commandments in the

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New Testament, and you can even tell from the grammar when it's a command because it's in that tense, or voice, or what would it be?

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I need Ms. Thurston here. All right, voice. So this is a command, like the

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Lord pointed his finger at us saying, you, be filled with the Holy Spirit, be filled with the Holy Spirit, be filled with the Holy Spirit. It's a command, so it's a responsibility, right?

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Now, why is it so important? Because when we're not filled with the Spirit, we will exhibit the fruits of the flesh, which are also mentioned in the same passage in Galatians chapter five.

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You will exhibit those because that's what your flesh just does naturally. So we're commanded, after we're saved, because of our salvation, and now we have the ability, we are now commanded to be and stay filled with the

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Spirit, which we don't do. We don't do that because it's a choice we have to make, and we don't always make that choice, and that's bad, but that's how we are.

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Now, God wasn't surprised by it. He said he put this treasure in earthen vessels on purpose so that he would get the glory when we do get it right, right, like we get it right, he gets the glory for that because in the flesh, we never could have done it, never would have done it, never would have desired to do it.

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So he gets the glory for all of it. So it's on purpose that we're schizophrenics, right?

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You've got an old man, you've got a new, let me put it this way. You have an old man, you are the new man, okay?

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But this is showing us vividly what we're going to look like when we're filled with the

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Spirit, all right? So let's look at Galatians chapter five, starting with verse one. So I guess the first point in this part of character fruit is that walking in the

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Spirit causes us to bear fruits of the Spirit and this is without the deeds of the law and by without,

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I mean apart from, with no help from the deeds of the law.

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There is no set of rules that can cause a person to live this way. Churches make the mistake of getting into that, let's make rules how we gotta dress, what we're gonna listen to, where we can go and all that.

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None of it will create this fruit. It is not carnal, it has nothing to do with the law which is of the flesh.

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The Bible teaches very clearly the law is part of this world, it's part of the fleshly system and that Jesus nailed it to the cross when he died and then when he resurrected with us in him and he in us now, that's the operative way to have conduct fruit is by having, be holding his hand.

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That's the whole answer, it's not a list of rules. So you'll see that as we go through this. Now it kind of sets it up in Galatians five starting verse one, a few verses but there's some important things to understand here that will help us understand when it talks about what the fruit and spirit are, what they, it names them and tells us what they are.

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So start with me and follow along here, verse one. Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith

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Christ hath made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Now I can't just go past this without making a comment that in this beautiful chapter that's gonna talk about the fruits of the spirit, character fruit, what's on the inside of us?

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What is it on the inside of us? It starts the whole passage saying be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

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This has nothing to do with rules, nothing to do with rule keeping, nothing to do with I keep the rules better than you keep the rules, nothing to do with the law of any form of the law and people will debate on that.

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Oh well, you still have some form of the law is still operative and other forms such as the dietary laws, those don't count and they try to divide it up and they create all these theological concepts to try to get around the fact that verse one says it's nothing of the law and the law was crucified.

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It is dead, we're dead to it, it's dead to us when you're born again because think about it. If you hold his hand and you walk with Christ wherever he goes today, is he gonna lead you into the wrong place?

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Is he gonna have you say words that are foul? Is he going to cause you to do deeds that are evil?

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Of course not, you don't need rules, you don't need the law, you have Jesus, you have the law giver in your life, in your heart leading you into what to say and what to do so it's ridiculous argument that we need the law but people still bring it up all the time, it's still a battle we fight all the time.

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In churches where false teachers will rise up and false teachers always will bring in legalism, always they do and with it they bring not only idolatry which is worshiping false things but adultery comes with it because spiritual idolatry and physical adultery go together and you'll see these very same legalistic preachers having all kinds of trouble and then they end up gone.

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You've seen it, I've seen it. Legalism is a satanic, luciferian principle and it's very damaging to a church and it starts by saying it ain't that.

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Do you see it? Look, I mean it just emphasizes it. Stand in liberty, what is liberty?

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Liberty from the law, you are free from the law and some people say well that's not what it means

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Brother David, what it means is you're free to keep the law and I've even said that, you know I said it because some cool older preacher said it and I repeated him but you know what

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I'm saying. We hear preachers say things that we repeat and they're not necessarily scriptural but they sound great but they're not right but you think about this.

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This doesn't mean, I mean it's not what it means. It doesn't mean that we're free to keep the law.

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It means we're free from the law, that's what it means. We're free from it. Now is it true though that by being saved we are freed up to keep the law?

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Of course it's true. We keep, we please the Lord if you wanna put it that way and so it's not that bad of a saying when people say that but I just want us to understand, this verse is not saying that it frees you up to keep the law, it's saying you're free from the law.

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Be not entangled with the bondage of the law. You have liberty, you have freedom.

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Paul literally said all things are lawful for me. He said that.

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Now he did say in the same sentence not all things are expedient and then he said I won't be made a servant to any of it and so you have this interesting discussion that's gonna take place even in this chapter and of course

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Paul is the human penman here. God's using his personality as God writes this for us but you have this interesting little conflict that goes on with this doctrine that is so true and yet so hated is that we're free from the law and here's the conflict.

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The conflict is and Paul's gonna deal with it in a minute. The conflict is okay if I'm free from the law then

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I can live and do anything I wanna do and I know churches in Dallas, you've heard me say this and I'll never quit saying it because I hate it.

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They have young couples groups studying the Bible and then go out and have a drink together at a bar later that night. Now where do you get that that's, you're supposed, you may argue well you can have a drink but you're not gonna argue where church is supposed to be doing that, right?

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Surely we'll not argue that that's okay. So does that mean I'm an advocate of rules?

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I'd like to be, frankly I like rules but knowing the scripture like I do we're not supposed to use that, are we?

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That's cheating if pastors try to use that. But don't you think there's this interesting conflict where if we agree with each other that we're free and we have liberty that it would free us up to slip into some things that we wouldn't have if we had rules against it, right?

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And so you're gonna see this interesting little conflict but you know what I love about the whole thing? Okay, because Charlotte and I when we were in our 20s for at least eight years, maybe longer, this church started as a legalistic church.

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We just didn't know, I wasn't a pastor, we were just members and I got called to preach later but we didn't know better.

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But my goodness, it got ugly. Legalism is never pretty, it just doesn't work.

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You know why? Because it's geared towards the flesh and the flesh can't keep rules anyway. In fact, Paul said, look I would have never coveted.

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Lord if you hadn't told me thou shalt not covet because that's how the flesh works, right? So it won't work.

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So now we have this idea that we're free and we have this liberty. So now we have an opportunity to abuse the freedom, don't we, if we're not careful.

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We could abuse that liberty and people do, don't you think? So and yet at the same time, what

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I was about to say that I love about this whole thing because we grew up in that era where we were taught, well you need to teach your kids, they can't listen to this kind of music and I got to thinking about that.

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I said, you know that works really great until they get their own car where they have their own radio and I'm not in it with them and then it won't work.

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And it's like the Lord said, hey, David, why don't you just teach them to ask me, ask the

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Holy Spirit, would you like to listen to this song with me? If he says no, turn it off. So that's what I taught them and it still works. Still working in their lives and they're all grown.

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So that's how the church should approach it for everything. Like, is it okay for me to have this social drink?

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Well, I'll tell you what, ask the Holy Spirit, would you like to drink with me tonight or whatever and if he says okay, do it.

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If you have peace about it, you know, if he says no because you need to be the person that they know is different so when they need help, they'll come to you, then don't do it.

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So all of it works that way and yet it's this enormous liberty and Christianity came out of Judaism and they weren't used to that, were they?

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They were used to rules, wouldn't you agree? They did not like this teaching that Paul was teaching right here and neither do people in churches.

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It's funny, the flesh wants the rules for some reason but it won't keep them. All right, so there's where we start.

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It ain't about the rules. We're talking about liberty and we need to live in the liberty that Christ has set us free.

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Free to what? Keep the law. Well, that's not what it says but I would agree if what you mean by that is it sets us free to live for him.

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I would go with that one, wouldn't you? It does set us free to do that but that's not what it's saying but what it is saying is do not get entangled again because you used to be, don't get caught up in legalism, the yoke of bondage.

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Now, verse two. Wow, we got a whole verse done today this morning. We're going to the second one now. Behold, I, Paul, say unto you that if you be circumcised,

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Christ shall profit you nothing. Now, Paul gave what he's talking about in verse one but Paul is kind of the type of guy who like when he talks, he'll talk long enough where you'll fall asleep and fall out the window and die, get so bored.

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He'll talk three hours. His sermons be like about three hours so he's going to say let me elaborate on verse one a little bit and now he's got all kinds of people in the audience, right?

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He's got Jews and he has Gentiles of various different races that he's speaking to when he's speaking usually and in this is the same way.

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So he says, let me for our Jewish brothers, my Jewish brothers and sisters, let me expand a little bit on this thing about liberty and not being caught up in legalism.

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He said, look, I'll even go as far as to say this. If you tell people that to get saved, what they got to do is believe in Christ and then also they'll get circumcised because Moses in the law said to get circumcised because a lot of the

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Jews were saying that at the time and Paul was correcting them right here. He says, now look, here's what I say.

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That if you get circumcised for that reason because you think it plays a role in the cause of your salvation, then look what

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Paul says. Christ will profit you nothing. Now let me ask you this. How many of you will get to heaven without anything

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Christ does for you to get you there? Not a one.

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So Paul in essence said this. Look, if you add one thing, one rule along with his blood and you say it's his blood plus this stuff we need to do in our church, then he won't profit you at all and you're gonna have to try to get to heaven by keeping those rules and you won't.

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Verse three says, for I testify again to every man that is circumcised, if he was circumcised to get saved, if that was the cause of his salvation, that he is a debtor to keep the whole law and if he breaks it in one whit, he's going to hell.

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I added the last part, paraphrased it. Think about that.

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So I mean, Paul is, I don't see how a person could be any stronger in saying what we're about to talk about has nothing to do with law.

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It's not even talking about you keeping it better. It's nothing to do with law. It is a part, if you look at the word without, when

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I put in my little title here, it's without the law and the Greek word for that means like a great gulf between the two. You got grace, you got law.

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There's a huge gulf between them. They're not connected. They're not connected. Not once we're saved and so there are so many effects of salvation that different churches add as a cause.

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It's ridiculous. That's why we have so many different churches. They're fighting over the effects and none of it saves them.

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I asked a dear Roman Catholic friend of mine who loves, he just, I believe the man's saved.

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I want to believe the man's saved. I believe he's saved. But he loves the Catholic tradition and he knows it so well it's hard for me to argue because I don't know it that well.

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I have to bluff my way through it. And I looked at him and really the first time

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I felt like the Lord gave me any victory in getting into his head at all because I told him that quote from Spurgeon that I love so much

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I didn't even find it until 2018, the first time I ever saw it. But he said that an effect cannot be the cause of the cause.

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Now you just think about that. That's logic, that's philosophy, logic. But it's true.

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God says come let us reason together, be philosophical. An effect cannot be the cause of the cause. So I asked my friend,

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I said look, let's don't talk about salvation, it's too big a topic. Let's talk about regeneration. What is it that causes that?

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And he just got dead silent. Roman Catholic, he would have loved to give an answer but he knew what

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I was getting at and he just got quiet. And I said now I'm talking about like the born again experience.

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Like here we are, we're walking dead in our trespasses and sins and he quickens us, the

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Bible says. It brings us to life from death. That's regeneration. I said what's the cause of that? He finally said

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God, I said that's right. And I said everything else is an effect. And he said,

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I never thought about that. Which means I'm going to go think about that. So think about it, we need to think about it.

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Circumcision, that's an effect. Water, we have a baptistry back behind that glass. That glass rises up and we baptize people in there.

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And that is an effect. It's not the cause of salvation, it's something people do because they got saved, right?

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Obedience is an effect. Repentance is an effect. Human belief is an effect.

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Our own worked up belief, that's an effect. It's not the cause of salvation. So all these things that people want to think are causes or not and Paul is nailing just one or two that they're familiar with and say look, if you even add that one, then

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Christ availeth you nothing. He will have, you'll have no profit from Jesus Christ. Then verse three says, but I testify again to every man that is circumcised that if he thinks he's going to get to heaven by making that the cause of his salvation, he's got to keep every point of the law down to the detail of every law

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God ever gave perfectly with no mistakes like Jesus did. And then you won't need Jesus.

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Now Paul is getting them thinking, isn't he? If you're a Jewish person who loves legalism, he's got them thinking.

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And verse four says Christ is become of no effect to that kind of person. Now what happens to you if Christ has no effect on you?

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Whosoever of you are justified, in other words, made right with God by the law, you are fallen from grace.

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Now isn't it funny that so many denominations believe you can fall from grace and they get it from that phrase and if you look at the context, that's not even what it's talking about.

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That is not talking about someone who was saved and then lost their salvation. You won't find that anywhere in Galatians chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, chapter four, chapter five.

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Nowhere in here is it talking about that but that's how they use it and they pull that verse out to prove you can fall from grace.

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What is it talking about? It's saying if you think that you can pick any of the effects that we've talked about this morning or any others you can think of and say that's the cause of my salvation, then you're no longer saved by faith, you're saved by the law.

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You're like Moses. So now you gotta keep the whole law. You've fallen from grace, now you're into law. You can't be saved by both.

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That's what he's saying. You gotta pick one. It's one or the other. It's not this plus this helps.

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It's the blood plus nothing. It's not the blood plus believing. Not the blood plus repenting.

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It's not the blood plus getting baptized, going to church and being a good person and having good works and bearing fruit.

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It's not any of that. It's the blood, period. And it's the Holy Spirit who applies the blood to you when he saves you while you were still in your sin.

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So you play no role in it. It's a gift. It's one of the 33 things he did to you in a nanosecond is he put his blood on you and made it part of yours.

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It wasn't enough that the blood was shed. It had to be personally applied to each individual sheepy so that that sheep would go from lostness to savedness.

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I like that. I like the way I said that. So Christ is become of no effect to you whosoever you are that think you're justified by any point of the law added to the blood.

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I paraphrased that. You are fallen from grace. Now verse five says, for we through the

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Spirit wait for the hope. Look at this. What does the word hope mean? Joyful expectation of a future event.

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Look, you'll be very careful. This is not a verse we studied. That's where I want you to stop and think a minute. For we. Now the word for is like but.

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It's like, okay, here's what some of you guys are doing. You're trying to get saved by legalism. You're trying to add stuff to the blood of Jesus for your salvation.

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Now you have fallen from grace and you gotta keep every point of the law. But now let me show you how we live. Now who's the we?

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That's the born again people. All right, he says, for we, this is the

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Romans chapter eight verse 1b person. We walk not after the flesh but after the

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Spirit. We, these people, these who have no condemnation because we're in Christ.

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We, that's us, we through the Spirit wait for the hope of righteousness by faith.

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Now what is that telling us? If you wanna talk about positional righteousness, then hope there means that you have a certain, you have a joyful expectation of a certain event in the future which means

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God is gonna find you to be positionally righteous. That's what the word justified means. He made you righteous.

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It's not something we did. It's something he did to us. He justified us. It's in the passive in the Greek. Means someone bigger and greater than you did it to you.

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That is positional righteousness. And if you think verse five's talking about that, then it says we have the hope of standing before God someday.

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And he looks at us and says, well, you're righteous. And we didn't even think we were, right? Except we know from Scripture. But I mean, we don't feel righteous, do we?

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Who in here feels righteous today? You know why? Because the experiential side, we're not very good at that yet.

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Would you agree with that? Like the old man takes over and then we do stuff. A guy can't believe I did that.

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Forgive me, Lord. And do you know that when you ask him to forgive you, that is not exactly what the Scripture says to do.

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The Scripture says in 1 John 1, 9, to simply agree with him that what you did was sinful. It doesn't say to ask him to forgive you.

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Why do you not need to ask him to forgive you? Because the sin is removed from you already.

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The blood removed the sin from you already. Now, is it okay to ask him? Yeah, I always ask him to forgive me.

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Because he's my father. I mean, I can talk to him as a son, too. But theologically, I'm forgiven. I am in a state of forgiveness.

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So you know what it really means? It's like your conscience needs to be washed. Would you agree with that?

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Your conscience will never be natural with believing that you are totally and entirely separated from every sin you've ever done, thought, or will do, or think.

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And it's no part of you whatsoever. You'll never be totally comfortable with that fact. So you always feel a little dirty when you sin.

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And I think God made it that way on purpose because he wants us to respond with sorrow.

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Right? So, our first thought is, if I'm saved, why'd

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I do that, right? That's kind of the thought. Or, we know I'm saved. We know we're saved, right? We say, well, I'm saved. Why'd I do that?

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And Lord, forgive me. And then you say, well, you asked me to forgive you for that yesterday. And you just did it again.

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So now you feel like a child who just stole another cookie after getting spanked yesterday, don't you?

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And you think, well, am I a really bad kid? Don't you think that way? Am I that bad? Yes, you are.

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And so am I in the flesh, right? In the flesh, we are that bad every day. We can be that bad.

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And what Paul is saying here is, well, that's not how we walk. We don't walk by trying to keep the rule of don't eat the cookie.

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Because we'll fail at it. And we'll feel dirty and guilty. And then we can't serve God because in that state, we just won't.

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And Satan will come say, oh, you're probably not saved. That's what he'll say. And we certainly won't serve

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God when we think that. I had this wonderful man out in San Francisco, about this tall.

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He comes up to me at the end of the whole thing because we do some preaching in those stock market meetings. And he said, you know,

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David, he said, I am not even, I'm not even sure I'm saved. And we had a really good talk.

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And Satan had convinced him maybe he wasn't saved. But he was saved.

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He just had one glaring sin in his life. And I think I can tell you what it was. He had stopped studying and reading the

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Bible. And he shared that with me. And I said, that's simple. Just start and realize your salvation doesn't depend on the fact whether you read the

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Bible or not. You see what he was thinking? He had lapsed back into the law and not realized it.

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I said, that's not what saved you. Like you can't get saved by reading the Bible because nobody wants to read the

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Bible when they're lost. So that doesn't save anybody. You do need to start reading it though, because then your conscience won't feel lost.

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Your conscience will realize you're really saved. So that's kind of what this is talking about. But don't you think it's amazing that it says, through the spirit, we wait for the hope of righteousness by faith.

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So what does that tell you? You're not gonna feel perfect. You're not gonna feel even like a good man or woman sometimes, but it does not affect your salvation one bit because it wasn't based on what you did or any effects or anything you could do anyway.

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It's based on what God did to you. Now, what God is saying though, when you feel that feeling, when you feel that feeling of disappointment, that you disappointed

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God and you've disappointed yourself, you need to confess the sin and believe him when he says,

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I'm faithful, which means I'll do it every time. And I'm just, which means because my son died for you, I'm free to forgive you every time.

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It's not a fake. It's not a gimmick. I know you did it yesterday, but you can get forgiveness again today because I paid for every sin you'll ever do and I've already seen them all and you didn't surprise me.

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That's a paraphrase. Okay. We walk in the spirit with the hope of righteousness.

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We ain't there yet. Not on experiential side we're not, are we? We're hopefully better than the day he saved us though.

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It better at living. We're better livers or gizzards or whatever we are. We're better than we were.

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We have visitors going, huh? She going, what do you mean gizzard? You know what I'm saying? We're better at it than we were the day we got saved, but we're not there yet.

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Even Paul said, I've not yet arrived, but positionally we'll never get more saved.

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You can't be more saved than saved. You're just flat saved. So we don't think about trying to keep that law is what

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Paul's saying because that doesn't work. And if we did try to have salvation that way, then

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Jesus wouldn't even have anything to do with us. He would have no effect on us and we'd end up in hell. He says what we do do is we walk in the spirit.

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So every time that we think about it and we need to think about it more often, we reach up and take that hand and say,

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I cannot walk on this water without you, Lord. Take my hand and let's walk through this trouble together.

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Let's walk through this victory together. And when we do that, we have the hope of righteousness by faith.

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We have the positional. We need to hang on to that and realize and believe it's true and we shall have the experiential the minute we face

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Jesus face to face first time at the rapture. Even this body of flesh will fall off of us. We won't have one thing pulling against us at that point.

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Verse six says, for in Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision.

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Paul is saying, look, if you're in Christ, whether you keep the law or you don't keep it, does not avail anything to you.

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You don't benefit one way or the other with regard to your salvation. Isn't that interesting? He couldn't have nailed verse one.

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He's still talking about verse one. He couldn't have made it stronger. In Christ, if I'm in Christ, if I'm saved, if I'm born again, neither keeping a rule or not keeping a rule has no avail, no profit for me whatsoever.

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Now, that's not what preachers say. Well, he saved you so that you could, you would have the ability to keep the law.

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You're not gonna have the ability to keep the law here. You're not going to keep the law. If you try, you'll end up in hell.

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Now, not if you're saved, but you know what I'm saying. If you think that's your plan of salvation, it won't work. And Paul is saying, whether you keep it or you don't keep it, avails you nothing with regard to your salvation.

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And here's what does avail. The last phrase says, but faith, which works by love.

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Now, as you go on in verse 11 and you keep going through the chapter, you're gonna start to see what that means. Because there's only one thing that Paul says has anything to do with having an effect on your ability to do right and live right and treat people right.

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And that is if you love the person and you can't love them with agape if you're not born again, because you don't have that love in you.

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It's God's love. He has to give that love to you. It's one of the 33 things he gives you when he saves you. You get his faith, but you also get his love.

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And when you have that love and you look at that brother or that sister and you say, well, Lord, I can't do that because if I did,

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I would dishonor my brother or sister and hurt them, and just because I love them, I won't do that sin. You see what

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I'm saying? Like whatever law you wanna name, love for the brother or sister and or for God will keep you from doing that sin.

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And that's how Paul says we walk. He says trying to keep the law doesn't help, but faith is what helps.

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And he says, now, if you wanna see faith, because faith is invisible, isn't it? If you wanna see faith working, that will be the fruit that comes that you see because of the faith that's in that person's heart.

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And the reason he didn't abuse you or your family is because he loves you, because God put the love in there. And it's all invisible.

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It's all on the inside. It's not something man can count or take credit for. And churches can't say, well, we're better than you because we have better rules.

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None of that works anymore. And Paul says it's all in there, and that's how we walk. That's not how you walk, but that's how we walk.

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And you better not miss one point of the law. Man, that's a good sermon in itself, isn't it?

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And all of that is just said to set up what he's about to teach us about what it means to walk in the spirit.

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All right, so I used up our time with the introduction, but Paul did it, not me. Blame him. Let's go just a couple more verses.

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Verse, I'm gonna skip down to verse 11. And I, brethren, if I yet preach circumcision, if I were a preacher who says, well, yeah,

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Jesus died for you and the blood's important, but you gotta do this, this, this, and this. If I was that kind of preacher,

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Paul says, why do I yet suffer persecution? Do you know that the only kind of religious person that the world will really persecute is someone who says, look, it's all about faith and love, nothing else.

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They won't try to kill you. That's weird, isn't it? But Paul said, look, if I was teaching that if Jesus plus you gotta get circumcised, why am

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I being beat to death and left in a ditch? See, that's what he's saying, because it was

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Jews that beat him up and left him in that ditch, because they did not like him preaching that there's liberty. They didn't like that, it ruined their whole system.

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Why do I yet suffer persecution still to this day, Paul said. Then is the offense of the cross ceased.

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So once you add one thing to the blood, like you said, well, yeah, we believe Jesus saves us, but we also have this nice set of rules here at Park Meadows Church, and you gotta keep them too.

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At that very instant, there is no longer any offense. The world loves you at that point.

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You won't offend the world. There won't be any offense at all.

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They'll just take you right in their club. But Paul says we have a thing called the offense of the cross.

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The offense of the cross is that the cross did it all, and you don't need human stuff.

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You don't need humanism. You don't need anything man makes up, and that is very offensive to the world. And verse 12 says,

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I would that they were even cut off who trouble you, and that's sort of the end of that little section of introduction to the breach of the spirit.

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You know that the last thing he said was? Now, let's envision a modern -day preacher getting up here and saying this.

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Oh, I just heard there's a guy down the street that's been teaching some of you that you need to worship on Saturday, because you're saved by faith, and that frees you up to keep the law, and so part of the law is you're supposed to worship on the

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Sabbath, and that's Saturday. And I said, what's his name? And he said, well, his name's John Doe down here. He's preaching at this church, the first tabernacle of Satan, and his name's

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John Doe. And I would turn around in my message in front of everybody and say, well, hold on, let me pray. Lord, would you please curse that man and send him to hell today and kill him, physically kill him, cut him off, kill him, and cut him from the family of God today, amen.

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Now, let's continue, let's have lunch together. Can you imagine a preacher saying that? Paul just said it.

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That's how important it is not to allow legalism to creep in and to realize that these fruits of the spirit are not things you can concoct and do on purpose.

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They're things that either come out of you from your heart or they're not there, and that's the setup.

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So you gotta come next week to hear what they are. Let's stand and have prayer together. Oh, guess what, I won't be here next week, though, because I got a rocket launch.

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So week after next, especially if you pray for the rocket, if you pray that the rocket will be safe and work really well,

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I will be back week after next and finish this sermon. So there's an incentive for a prayer.

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Lord, thank you for your word. We ask you to bless it as you always do and bless it in our hearts specifically that you might use it within us someday when the need arises, that we would have the reason that we could give for why we believe the way we do when some person asks us.

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And Lord, be with those who we've prayed for today, Lord, and watch over them.

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We ask you to be with us in our time of fellowship here in a few moments and ask you to bless the meal we're about to have in Jesus' name, amen.