Teeth Marks in Wax Fruit

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And open your Bibles with me, if you would, to First Corinthians chapter 13.
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For those of you who are members here, those who've been attending for a long time, you know that we have been in a study of verse by verse study of the book of First Corinthians.
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And while I was out last week, prior to that, we had come to First Corinthians chapter 13, looking at verses 4 through 7.
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And though I started looking at this portion, I said it was going to take a few weeks to break everything down, and so that's where we are.
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So if you're coming in for the first time this morning, you're in the middle of a longer series, and even in the middle, as it were, of a sectional breakdown of this particular passage.
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But hopefully that won't make you feel as if you're disconnected.
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I want you to understand this passage is so full of good and wonderful truth that it just can't be contained in one message.
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And so we don't try to run through the text.
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We try to imbibe it, study it, understand it, and go as slow as we need to.
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So let's read.
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We're going to read chapter 13, beginning at verse 4, and read down through verse 7.
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Love is patient and kind.
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Love does not envy or boast.
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It is not arrogant or rude.
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It does not insist on its own way.
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It is not irritable or resentful.
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It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
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Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
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And then the first section of verse 8 goes along with this and says, Love never ends.
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Father in heaven, I thank you for your word.
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I thank you that the opportunity to preach has come again.
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And I thank you that there are those who have come into your house with the desire to hear your word preached.
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And I pray, Lord, that first and foremost, as the word is preached, that you would keep me from error.
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That, Lord, I would not put myself in the way of the text.
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That I would not preach something that is untrue.
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Lord, that is the great fear of my soul, is to be someone who would preach something that would violate the truth of your word.
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So I pray that you would keep me from error.
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For I know that I am a fallible man and certainly incapable of such.
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And Father, for the listeners, Lord, I pray first and foremost for the believer.
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I pray, Lord, that the believer would be encouraged in the fruit of the Spirit, which is love.
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That manifests itself in joy, patience, peace, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control.
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And Father, I pray that that fruit would be a sweet aroma in this place.
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And that we would be known as a church that loves one another.
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Your Son told us very clearly, this is how the world will know, my disciples, that we would have love one for another.
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And Father, those who have come today, Lord, and it might be, Lord, that they've been with us for a long time, but do not know you.
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Father, that they would see the love of God through Jesus Christ today.
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That they would understand the patience and the kindness that has been shown to us on the cross.
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And the very fact that our hearts are still beating within us is an act of mercy from you, God.
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Prolonging our days that we might yet believe on you.
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So for the unbeliever, Lord, I pray that you would grant them repentance that leads to life.
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For only that can come from you.
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No man in this room has the power to save his soul.
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Only Christ has the power to save a soul.
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So we give, Lord, you, and we ask you, we pray to you, all the mighty majesty and power to do what only you can do.
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And we pray all this in Jesus' name.
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Amen.
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You may be seated.
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Growing up in our home, we always had a rule after dinner.
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You had to take the dishes off the table and you had to reset the table.
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And normally for our house, that means that you would put the tablecloth back onto the table, which was taken off for dinner.
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And that there would be some type of a centerpiece that went in the center of the table.
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After the tablecloth was placed back straight onto the table, you had to place that centerpiece on there.
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And sometimes that centerpiece, if it were the right season of the year, it would have real fruit in it.
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And so it might have some oranges or some bananas that we could go and take and eat as snacks throughout the day.
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And that was the centerpiece of the dining room.
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Other times, however, in the year when fruit might not be in season, there might be flowers there.
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But there were times when there was fruit, but it wasn't real.
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It was wax.
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And though it looked real and it looked pleasant to taste, it did not really have a pleasant taste.
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If you picked up a wax apple and bit into it, the only thing that you would get is teeth marks.
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There would be no nutritional value.
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There would be nothing of value to it other than the bit of coughing and hacking that you get afterward.
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And that, of course, is of no value at all.
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If you remember over the past few weeks of my preaching, like I said, I was out last week.
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But if you remember the lessons that have come before this, I have noted that in 1 Corinthians 12, the Apostle Paul is dealing with the gifts of the Spirit.
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And he talks about the gifts of the Spirit as those things that have been given by the Holy Spirit to individual Christians for the building up of the body.
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And not everybody has the same gifts.
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Not everybody is given the same gift of the Spirit.
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Everyone is given a different gift so that working together, the hand and feet can work together, the eyes and ears can work together, and everyone has a purpose and place in the body.
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And when all work together, the whole body is ministering to itself.
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But then he goes into chapter 13, which I understand is an artificial distinction.
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He didn't write it as chapter 13.
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But as he moves into the idea of chapter 13, he moves away from the gifts of the Spirit to the fruit.
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The fruit of the Spirit.
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And if you remember, I pointed out that in Galatians chapter 5, Paul tells us what the fruit of the Spirit is.
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He says the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.
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That is the fruit of the Spirit.
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And the difference between the fruit of the Spirit and the gifts of the Spirit is this.
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When you are a Christian and the Spirit comes to live within you, He gives you a gift that may manifest differently than the person beside you's gift.
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And that gift is meant to be different because there's supposed to be a diversity of gifts.
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But the fruit is not diverse.
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It is ubiquitous.
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The fruit is meant to be manifested in all.
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And the fruit begins with the word love.
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And I would contest that everything that comes after that is actually a further manifestation of that initial gift of love.
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Or that initial expression of the fruit of love.
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Because we're going to see in 1 Corinthians, Paul tells us love is patient.
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Well, that's one of the fruits of the Spirit.
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Love, joy, peace, patience, right? Patience is one of those.
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Kindness is also one of the expressions of the fruit of the Spirit.
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And so the fruit of the Spirit, if it were possible to boil it down to a condensed one piece of fruit, the fruit of the Spirit is love.
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When we look at the world around us, we see a world that is enamored with the concept of love.
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More songs have been written about love than any other subject in the history of mankind.
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Entire movies, in fact, entire genres of movies are dedicated to the concept of love.
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And just about every social justice warrior you know, and maybe you are one, I don't know, will define himself as a champion of love.
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The problem is, the love of the world is like the wax fruit that used to sit on the table in my house as a child.
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It has a vague appearance of the real thing, and sometimes the appearance can be almost a trick to the eye.
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It might even fool us, because it might have some of the appearances of real love.
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But when you compare real love to the love that the world provides, you will see that what the world provides is a waxy substitute.
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It is not the love of God.
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It is not the love that is described in Scripture.
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In fact, I would argue that the love that the world provides is a sham in many cases.
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It is not like the love that is shown to us in Scripture.
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1 Corinthians 13 gives us the characteristics of love.
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As we've talked about, the Greek word here is agape or agape, and it means the self-sacrificing love which originates in God Himself.
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And this is what Paul tells us.
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He says we can have all the gifts of the Spirit.
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We can speak with the tongues of men and of angels.
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We can have all of these other awesome things that we are able to do.
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We can move mountains with our faith, but if we do not have love, even if we give away everything we own and give up our bodies to be burned, if we have not love, we are nothing.
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See, this is a juxtaposition.
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Chapter 12, he tells us the importance of the gifts.
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In Chapter 13, though, he says, But if you have the gifts and have not love, then you're missing the key component.
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You're missing that which really matters.
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It's like that illustration I gave a few weeks ago.
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If you have a one with six zeros behind it, that's a million.
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But if you take the one away, it's just zero.
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The sum of zero is zero.
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And so if you don't have love, everything else behind it is without value.
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So Paul tells us we have to have love.
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That has to be what undergirds everything.
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And in this church, we take a focus on teaching and theology.
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That is a huge part of who we believe we have been called to be as a ministry here.
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We teach systematic theology.
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We teach through the Bible.
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We believe in reformed theology, which means we go to the word of God, sola scriptura.
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We are very committed to that.
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But beloved, if you are a great theologian and you have not love, that theology will count you nothing.
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And we must remember that we cannot replace love with good theology.
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In fact, if you have, you don't have good theology.
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So Paul tells us love is what really is the foundation for all that we do.
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And he tells us love is not so much a feeling.
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I think that's where the world gets it wrong most of the time.
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Because people talk about how much they feel love.
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Love is not so much a feeling as much as what we do.
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It's an action.
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And if you notice here, beginning in verse four, where it says love is patient, love is kind, love does not envy or boast.
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All of those are verbs in the Greek language, meaning they're all something that is done.
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Even the patience, I think the King James renders it a slightly better when the King James says love suffers long.
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Because that's the idea.
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It's something that's happening.
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It's not just is patient, but it's being patient.
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It's exercising patience.
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And so it's verbal, it's action.
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And so what I have done is I've broken down these characteristics here.
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And I'm going to go through each one and provide a short explanation with an application, which I hope is helpful.
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I have no idea how far I'm going to get.
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I don't time my messages out and practice them to be sure whether this is how much I need.
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I'm just going to preach until I'm done.
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And then when I'm done today, I'll pray and then we'll come back next week.
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So if you're new, you've got to come back next week.
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You can't just come one time.
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No, we just go through the text.
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And so we're going to look at each one of these as it is given.
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What does it mean? What is love? What does it do? So we look first at the first description of love in chapter 13, verse 4.
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It says love is patient.
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Love is patient.
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In the Greek, the word is a combination.
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It is a contraction of two words.
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The word macrothume.
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Macrothume or macrothumos is the word here.
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Macro, we understand, means large or long.
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Something we talk about macro and macro.
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Macro is very little.
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Macro is very big.
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That comes from the Greek language.
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So macro is long.
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Well, the word thumos is interesting because it can have variations of meaning.
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It can mean spirit, not in the same sense of thumos, which is the word for the spirit in us.
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But the idea of being long-spirited, a person who is long in the spirit, is a sense of, it's sort of idiomatic of being someone who is able to be long in their ability to deal with someone else.
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And the word thumos can also mean anger.
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I think that's better than spirit.
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I think the word anger really fills the idea because if you understand of being long-angered, it doesn't mean you're angry for a long time.
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What it means is it takes you a long time to get angry.
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Does that make sense? It's not that you're an angry, long person, but it takes longer for you to get angry.
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That's what this idea is here.
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One commentator mentioned that in this particular context, it's more regarding people than circumstances.
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How many of you are pretty patient? Well, I better not ask that.
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I think we're patient with circumstances more than we are with people because we understand we can't change sometimes the circumstance that we're in.
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You paint a wall, you've got to wait for it to dry.
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You can't force it to dry any faster, maybe put a fan on it, maybe do something.
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But you paint the wall, you've got to wait for it to dry.
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And so we kind of do that.
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Watching the water boil.
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I recently bought my wife a new stove, and it has a quick boil setting.
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So the very first thing we did was got two pots of water, and we had to see how quick it was.
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We want to know what's the difference.
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So we put the regular one, and it was twice as fast.
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And I was like, this is impatience on display.
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We couldn't wait six minutes for the water to boil, and that has to boil in three minutes.
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But ultimately, patience is that we wait on something.
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And we can be pretty patient if it's with a circumstance.
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But when it's with a person, that's when our patience is really tried.
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You might paint yourself into a corner and have to wait for the floor to dry before you can walk off.
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But if somebody pushes you into a corner, you might not wait so long before you come out swinging.
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And that's the idea of the text.
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It's not so much patience with circumstances, it's patience with people.
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Because the idea of love is how you're treating others.
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Are you willing to suffer long with someone else? Are you willing to wait on them to get where you are? If getting to where you are is even necessary in the first place.
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The problem is we really have in our world begun to eliminate all of the patience training that we used to have.
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Because we used to actually have training that was sort of naturally built in.
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Used to, if you went to the doctor, all you had was like a Highlights magazine, man.
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You had to learn to be patient to sit there and wait.
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Now kids got a Netflix and iTunes and everything on there.
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They bring a tablet, they bring their whole computer with them.
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They don't have to be patient for anything.
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I recently went on a trip six hours.
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Last week, we drove down to a Bible conference in Cape Coral, Florida.
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Six hours, we were nervous because we got a one-year-old, three-year-old, five-year-old.
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We're like, that's six hours long drive.
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You know, never once did I hear, are we there yet? They didn't have to wonder if we were there yet.
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They had the whole world in front of them.
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They had iPads, cell phones, they had internet.
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They didn't have to wonder if we were there yet.
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It wasn't a big deal to them.
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We have lightning fast answers to all of our questions.
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We never have to wonder about anything anymore.
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Food is served at a moment's notice.
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By the time we get from one window to the next, it's ready, it's hot, we're ready to go.
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Television shows are on demand.
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You don't have to wait to watch a whole season on Netflix.
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It's just there.
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So people spend 24 hours watching 24.
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Literally 24 hours of TV.
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That's an old reference, by the way.
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24 hadn't been popular for a decade.
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We don't get bored anymore.
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We don't have to exercise patience anymore.
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And because we've experienced less training with this, by nature we become less patient people.
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And I think it's rare to see people who really, truly suffer long with others.
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Even us who are supposed to be ministering in the fruit of the Spirit.
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I think social media has created an atmosphere where folks are more naturally willing to let loose their tirades as quickly as they can and not be patient at all because they feel like their emotions are allowed to just be expressed because there's no consequence.
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And so we don't have the motivation in that scenario to be patient anymore.
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But I want to consider something about this idea of patience because I want us to think about it from God's perspective just for a minute.
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Do you realize that God is being patient with you all the time? I mean, not like a little either.
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It's not like He's just being a little patient with you today.
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He is being tremendously patient with you every moment of your life.
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God is the example of patience because we are constantly worthy of His wrath.
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You understand, and this is important, because as believers, we are not sinless.
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I mean, some people believe we are.
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There's an entire sect of a subset of Christianity that believes in something called sinless perfectionism.
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And that is the idea that once you become a believer, that there's a certain point in your sanctification where you stop having a desire to sin, you stop having to deal with the flesh, and you become sinless, at least in deed.
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Some believe you're even sinless in thought and word and deed.
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And so they believe in this perfectionism that I do not believe the Bible actually tells us.
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I believe the Bible says that if we say we have no sin, we're a liar and the truth is not within us.
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You say, but wait a minute, doesn't 1 John say that he who has been born of God does not sin? Well, that idea is in the ongoing perpetuation or continuation of sin.
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I do believe that if someone is sinning continuously, if they are living in sin, as it were, that that is an example of someone who is demonstrating that they possibly might likely have not been born again.
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That's the idea that is in that text.
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But you cannot tell me that today that you have kept either one of the two great commandments.
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What did Jesus say? What is the summation of the law? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.
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If you would stand for me, if you have done that perfectly from the time you got up this morning.
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I can't stand it.
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You have not loved the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and all your strength.
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Not perfectly.
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You say, well, God doesn't call me to be perfect.
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Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.
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There you go.
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It's there.
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The call to perfection is there.
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God doesn't give us a halfway mark.
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He says, this is the standard and you've missed it.
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That's what sin is.
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The word ha-martia.
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There is a target and you have fallen short.
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It's an archery term.
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Pull the bow back.
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Let go.
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As the bow sends the missile out, the arrow is headed towards the target and it falls into the dirt.
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All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
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And yet, you were not destroyed this morning.
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Yes, God is patient.
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You didn't, you didn't, you woke up.
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Your heart is beating in your chest right now as an expression of the patience of almighty God.
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And I must say this even, I'll take a step even further.
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If you're an unbeliever and you're here today, you are living in the patience of God every minute.
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As we all are, but in a sense, you're, you guys remember Jonathan Edwards? Jonathan Edwards, great Puritan preacher.
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In fact, the Encyclopedia Britannica said Jonathan Edwards was the greatest theologian ever born in America.
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He wrote a sermon called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
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Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is mocked by the world because it's so forceful, so powerful.
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English classes use it to mock the Puritans.
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But in that sermon, he describes the unbeliever like a spider on a web over a fire.
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That at any moment, the web could give way.
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At any moment, the fire could lick the edges of the web and cause it to collapse down and you would fall down into the pit of that fire and be destroyed.
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God has demonstrated His love toward you if you are still here in His patience with you.
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And I would say even greater love has He brought you here today to hear the gospel.
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Because if you're an unbeliever, here it is.
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It's right here before you.
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Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
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Repent of your sin and trust in the Savior.
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The Bible says salvation is today, not tomorrow, not next week.
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Today is the day of salvation.
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You cannot save yourself.
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Only God can give you a regenerated heart.
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But what results from that regeneration is faith.
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So I don't call you to be regenerated because you can't do that.
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I call you to believe and I trust that God can do that.
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So I call you today, if you're not a believer, understand you are living in the patience of Almighty God.
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And while His patience is long, it is not indefinite.
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Because there will come a day when you will face Him.
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And you will face Him in one of two conditions.
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You will face Him in the condition of having been redeemed by Christ.
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And your sin will have been placed upon a substitute who died on the cross and took your sins on Himself.
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And when He died, He bore the wrath of God for you on your behalf and gave you His righteousness.
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So that when you stand before God, you don't stand before God and say, I'm here because I was a member of Sovereign Grace Church.
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Or I'm here because I gave money.
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I'm here because I helped old ladies across the street.
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Or I'm here because I fed the poor.
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No, I am here.
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I am standing in the righteousness of Christ alone.
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Or you will stand on your own and be woefully, dreadfully, eternally lost.
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God has been patient with you.
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His patience is on you right now.
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So He's the example, right? He is the example of patience.
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In fact, the Bible tells us that.
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2 Peter 3, 9, The Lord is not slow to fulfill His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.
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That's patience.
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God is being patient.
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Therefore, let us be patient.
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Mirror God in that.
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Somebody hurts me.
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Yeah, it hurts.
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Can we be patient? Can we be long-suffering with someone? It's very difficult.
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I don't know how unbelievers do it.
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I honestly don't.
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I mean, we at least have the motivation of the Spirit of God.
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I do have a good example of patience.
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It's not a biblical example, but it is an example.
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And I don't want to argue about whether or not Abraham Lincoln was a Christian.
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I don't ever argue about historical figures and whether or not they were believers or what.
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But Abraham Lincoln was a good example of patience with one man.
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And I think this is a good example for all of us, at least in the sense of how does it look.
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You guys know Stanton Prep School, right? Right here in Jacksonville? You know who that was? The Stanton Preparatory School was named after Edwin Stanton.
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He was Abraham Lincoln's war minister.
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But prior to Abraham Lincoln becoming the president, Edwin Stanton hated him.
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Literally said awful things about him.
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Talked about how he looked.
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Talked about how he talked.
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Talked about his ethics.
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Talked about everything.
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Just drove Lincoln into the ground.
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Lincoln became the president.
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He knew this guy had hated him.
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He knew this guy had treated him like garbage and still appointed him as his minister of war.
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The war minister in his cabinet.
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And people said, why would you do that? He said, because he's the best man for the job.
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I'm not holding these things.
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He's the man that needs to do this.
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And I'm going to hold out for this man.
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I'm going to be patient with this man.
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And he was.
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When Abraham Lincoln lay dying, after having been shot in the theater, Edwin Stanton was in the room, standing over Lincoln.
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He said, this is the greatest leader of men that has ever lived among men.
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This is a man who not just a few decades earlier hated him.
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Despised him.
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Rejected him.
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And spoke nothing but ill of him by the time of his death.
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Loved him.
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Because of patience.
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Can we be patient with people? It's hard.
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Long suffering sounds just like it is.
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It's suffering.
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And I think it goes along.
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Stay with me just a little longer.
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I want to tie it into the next one.
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It looks like we're just going to get through two today.
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And that's okay.
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But the text says love is patient and kind.
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And I think the two go together.
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The word kind here is a little harder to break down.
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Patience is pretty easy.
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Macrothymia, long anger, long raging, long spirited.
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That idea I think we understand.
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Long suffering.
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But it's hard to even say the word in Greek.
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The root is the adjective krestos, which it comes from the verb kero.
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Which means to furnish or to provide a need.
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That's what the word kindness comes from.
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And where patience is holding back anger, kindness is actively doing good.
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Actively doing good for someone.
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Right? And I'm not a big proponent of paraphrases.
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I like literal translations as best I can get.
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But the paraphrase, J.B.
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Phillips' paraphrase of this particular text, I think does a pretty good job because this is what he says.
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He says that kindness is a way, it looks for a way of being constructive.
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Looks for a way of being constructive.
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I think that's a pretty good rendering of the krestos, the underlying word.
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Because kindness is the opposite of destructive.
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Right? But understand this.
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This doesn't mean that kindness can never be corrective.
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We have a call here to be constructive but not weak.
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You understand that the world has confused kindness with weakness, right? Everything in the world.
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But if you're a person who takes a bold stance, you're unkind.
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If you're a person who makes a strong statement, you're unkind.
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If you're a person who rebukes somebody, oh, that's, oh.
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You are the worst of the worst if you're willing to rebuke anyone.
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As a result, we have traded biblical kindness for what I call effeminate weakness.
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We have traded masculinity as a virtue and we've turned it into a vice.
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And that's wrong.
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Men are no longer encouraged to act like men.
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In fact, very recently a study came out of one of the big universities that said toxic masculinity is the danger that needs to be destroyed in the classroom.
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Toxic masculinity, the idea that men should act like men.
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But here's the truth.
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I think about some of you when I say this.
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Because some of you are very good at taking strong, bold stances.
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And that is praiseworthy.
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Because that doesn't mean you're unkind.
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Now, I say that by saying this.
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You can be unkind.
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And some of us have been.
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But the kindness or the unkindness is not in the rebuke itself or in the bold statement itself.
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Because sometimes the bold statement must be made.
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Sometimes the stance has to be taken.
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Sometimes you have to stand for the truth even if the world or even the church doesn't like it.
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In fact, some of the very best kindness that you have ever gotten has been a rebuke.
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Do you know that? The Bible says in Psalm 141, verse 5, Let a righteous man strike me, it is a kindness.
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Let him rebuke me, it is an oil for my head.
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And let my head not refuse it.
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You ever thought of a strike as kindness? The Bible says it is.
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If the righteous man is striking me for the purpose of constructing me, not destructing me.
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You understand the idea here? It's the kindness, the kind act.
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It's the act of building me up, not tearing me down.
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He's trying to save me, not destroy me.
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That's the kindness that's in view here.
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In fact, Proverbs 27 says this, Better is an open rebuke than what? A hidden love.
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Better is an open rebuke.
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Somebody who's willing to be honest.
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And faithful are the wounds of a what? A friend.
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Faithful are the wounds of a friend.
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In fact, I want to show you a text.
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Can you turn in your Bibles with me to 2 Timothy chapter 2? Let's turn a few pages over to the right.
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To 2 Timothy chapter 2.
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Now remember, Timothy is written to the leaders, the elders of the church.
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And so he's going to talk about here in this text the Lord's servant.
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But we're all the servants of the Lord in one respect.
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And so this could apply to all of us.
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But I want you to notice here.
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2 Timothy 2, 24 and 25.
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If you're in your pew Bibles, it's page 1268.
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Verse 24, it says this.
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The Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone.
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Able to teach, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness.
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Notice that Paul ties the two things together.
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He ties kindness and correction.
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He says we must be kind to everyone, patiently correcting, patiently enduring evil, correcting our opponents with gentleness.
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Because why? God may perhaps grant them repentance leading to the knowledge of the truth.
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And by the way, just for a little side note, that's one of those passages that reminds us that God is the one who grants the ability to repent, not us.
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God is the one who gives us that ability to do that thing.
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So that's an important passage by itself.
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But in this context, what I'm pointing at is that people would say, if you correct somebody, you're unkind.
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Oh boy, have I heard that? If you say that that is wrong, you are being unkind.
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Not necessarily.
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Now you can be.
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I would argue that, you know, Westboro has been very unkind.
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In how it has chosen to display the gospel and to represent, I would say, representing a false view of the gospel, a false perspective.
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But when Mike and I go, and Brother Mike goes to preach on the street, I've heard people, oh, this is so unkind.
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No, it's not.
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In fact, we always stress, we're here because we love you.
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We're not here to hate you.
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We're not here to hate anybody.
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When we hand people tracts and we go out into the street and we hand people tracts, when we go get the booth set up and we do the fishing hole and we hand out those gospel tracts, that is not because we hate anybody.
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We are there literally to be fishers of men.
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That's why we call it the fishing hole.
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We're not there just saying, hey, you, you're wrong.
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But they are.
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If they're not in Christ, they are.
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But that's not the goal.
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The goal is to correct them with gentleness because we want to do a kindness to them.
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The kindness is the pointing them to Christ.
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I will tell you this.
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If you try to alleviate someone's shame without pointing them to Christ, that's not kindness.
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I heard that at the Bible conference when I was there because we talked about this whole social justice movement, everything that's out there.
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And the whole goal is to try to eliminate any type of stigma on any type of behavior.
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If we're trying to eliminate shame without pointing people to Christ as the answer to shame, then we are not doing a kindness.
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We are doing a disservice.
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We're actually preaching a heresy.
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There is only one way to deal with shame.
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There's only one way to deal with sin.
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There's only one way to deal with anything in our life that is opposed to God, and that is to take it to the cross.
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And so the ultimate kindness that we can do for anyone is to point them to Jesus Christ.
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And somebody says, well, you shouldn't do that because you might offend them.
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And I want to tell you this.
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Just for a moment, say this.
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I have failed in this area out of fear before.
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I failed to share the gospel out of fear.
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I have failed to be a witness out of fear.
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I failed to hand people gospel tracts because I was afraid.
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But if we think of it like this, we should never be afraid of being kind.
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And the greatest kindness is giving someone Christ.
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And I'm not telling you that so that you feel better about yourself.
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I'm telling you that just to let you know that as a pastor, I don't always get it right.
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I failed in loving people because the greatest kindness I could ever give anyone is Christ.
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And so when I go to this passage and I see my need to repent, the first, you know what the Bible says, there's two types of sins.
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The Bible says there's a sin of commission.
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That's when I break God's law.
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And there's the sin of omission.
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That's when I don't do what God's law commands, right? God's law commands me to be kind.
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It commands me to love people, share the gospel with them, and I fail.
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And so that's when I take it to the cross and I ask God, please, one, forgive me of my failures and give me the strength to overcome this fear, the fear to be kind.
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And I want to say this.
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When we talked about patience, I said, think about how God has been patient with you.
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How in the world could I ever even break the surface of how kind God has been to you? How kind God has been to me.
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Think about the kindness of God.
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How kind.
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You think about the cross, right? In the fullness of time, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law.
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For what purpose? That he would fulfill that law, take all the burden on himself, go to the cross, die on the cross, that he would be our substitute.
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That is an act of kindness.
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Though he was equal with God, he did not count that equality a thing to be grasped.
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But instead, he emptied himself and took the form of a servant.
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And came in the likeness of men.
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And he gave himself to death, even to death on a cross.
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That is the greatest act of kindness in the history of man.
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And that provides us with the greatest example of kindness after which to follow.
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Love is patient because God is patient.
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He's been patient with us.
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May we be patient with each other.
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Love is kind because God is kind.
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He has been kind to you.
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May you share that kindness with others.
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Let us pray.
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Father, I thank you for your patience.
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I thank you for your kindness.
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Lord, may these two verbs, these two actions sit on our heart and drive us to action.
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Lord, when when when people are nervous, when people corner us, when people make life hard for us, father, give us the ability to be patient.
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Help us to find ways to be constructive.
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Help us find ways to even if it's a rebuke, father, help us to rebuke in love.
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Desiring to see them saved, not destroyed, praying for their salvation, not their destruction.
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Jesus told us we can love even our enemies if we love like this.
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Let us begin with patience and kindness.
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We pray this in Christ's name.
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Amen.