Confession is Essential

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A true church practices a true and faithful liturgy. This includes prioritizing confession.

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Thank you for subscribing to the Shepherds Church podcast. This is our Lord's Day Sermon. We pray that as we declare the
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Word of God that you would be encouraged, strengthened in your faith, and that you would catch a greater vision of who
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Christ is. May you be blessed in the hearing of God's Word, and may the Lord be with you.
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Now, I don't know about you, but I hate when a pair of socks or maybe my favorite sweater, you know, has that one thread that just sticks out and it's just begging for me to pull it.
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And every time, without fail, I end up caving in to my carnal desires, and I pull that thread hoping that this time it's gonna be different, this time that it's not gonna cause that gaping massive hole as my reward, and I just I pull the thread and inevitably it happens.
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I've got four toes sticking out of my socks. I've got a third arm hole in my sweater, but there's this like curious thing that I just I can't get over.
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When I see that string, I know I need to leave it, but I always end up pulling it. Well, in a sort of a more positive way,
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I hope that that analogy can sort of frame how we view preaching at this church.
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Because no matter who it is, every person who is preaching here that is standing up behind this pulpit underneath the authority of the
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Word of God, every person who is preaching here on Sunday, it is my heart, it is my hope that they would be pulling on the threads of Scripture.
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Because there's all kinds of threads that go from the beginning of Scripture and Genesis all the way to Revelation that when we pull on them, they open up and they unravel the meaning of the text.
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And big, massive, beautiful holes open up, holes of meaning that we can open up and look at and we can understand the gospel in a deeper way just by pulling on those threads that begin in Genesis and then work their way all through the
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Bible. And today, I want us to do that. I want us to pull on a few different threads that are going to show us and open up for us and unravel the meaning of what a true and a faithful church actually is.
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And the angle that I would like for us to take this morning is how do these things apply to the worship service?
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I want to pull on some threads in the Bible that are going to help us understand why we do the things that we do in our worship service.
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And specifically, I want to apply that to this concept called liturgy.
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Now, you may have never heard of that word and you may not know what that means. Liturgy just means the form of worship.
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Every single church has a liturgy. Some churches' liturgies are going to be thoughtful.
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Some churches' liturgies are going to be lazy. Some churches' liturgies are going to be faithful. Some churches' liturgies are going to be unfaithful.
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Some are going to be biblical. Some are going to be unbiblical. But every single church has a liturgy.
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And what I want you to understand about this church is that none of the things that we're doing are haphazard or thoughtless.
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There is thought that has gone into every single aspect of our gathering.
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Because we want, if we're going to have a liturgy, because every church has one, we want our liturgy to be biblical and we want it to be thoughtful and we want it to represent what the scripture teaches.
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So we didn't pick these things by accident. Every week when we go through the call to worship or God's greeting or the various scripture readings or prayers or songs of praises and celebrations and preparations and reading the law and confession of sin and declaration of pardon, the sermon, communion, and the benediction, all of these things are there for a reason, because we believe that the
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Bible says we must do each and every single one of these things. If there's a church that is not doing a benediction or not doing a call to worship or not preaching a faithful sermon or not administering the sacraments in a faithful way, we would say that's not a true church.
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Plenty of churches are going to just throw together a liturgy. Announcement to song, sermon to song, go home with no thought about what they are doing.
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I've been in churches like this all my life. In fact, it's rare to find a church that cares about why they do the liturgy.
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It's rare to find a church that cares about why we gather in the way that we gather.
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And we didn't come to this on purpose. The planting of Shepherds Church is all about the glory of God.
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When we planted, we had no idea what we were doing. The only thing that we got right, and that is not even a credit to us, it's a credit to the
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Holy Spirit, is that we decided that everything we do is going to be biblical. And for three years, we've been researching everything that we do.
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And if it doesn't have a biblical purpose, we scrap it. And if we're doing something that that has a biblical purpose, but we need to modify it a little bit, or shift it, we've done that.
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Like, we have just been dogmatic on everything we do has to be rooted in Scripture.
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And today, I love liturgy for this reason. I love why the church does what we do, because we have a biblical reason, chapter and verse, for all of it.
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But that's the minority in Christian churches today. You see,
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I actually think that a true church prioritizes liturgy. I think that a true church has reasons for why they do things, and I don't think that the reason for why we do things is based off of the opinions of carnal man.
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I don't think the reason that we do things is because it works. I don't think the reason that we do things is because it's practical.
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I don't think that we're supposed to hand out surveys and do straw polls to see what people want in worship.
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I think we're supposed to ask God what God wants in worship.
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Now, that may lead to some people thinking that we sing too much, or that we preach too long, or that we pray too much, or we read too much
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Scripture in service. And I would say that I love you, but we don't base our services on what your thoughts are about church.
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We don't base our services on the preconceived idea of how long you think services should be, or how long you think sermons should be.
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We don't base our services on how many songs you think we should sing. And I know that ruffles feathers, right?
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Because you're like, why would you say that to me? I'm the one who's coming, and I'm the one who's participating.
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But listen, we're not here for you, and we're not here for me, and we're not here for Derek, and we're not here for anyone in this room.
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We are here for God. And if the reason that we're doing things is based entirely on man, then we're a man -centered church.
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God's opinions are what matters. His opinions are what leads people to blessing.
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When Israel followed the opinions of God, Israel was always led towards blessing. But when they started leading into the opinions of man and man -centeredness, and this is why we do things, because it makes man happy.
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When they do that is when they cut themselves off from blessing. We live in a time period when the church is sick.
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And one of the reasons that they're sick is because they don't have a liturgy that's biblical. I mean that.
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I mean that churches have learned to prioritize 60 -minute gatherings because that's the attention span of people.
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Or we shouldn't talk about sin because that makes people unhappy. And on and on and on, you can look from top to bottom of most churches in evangelicalism, and there's some man -centered reason for why they do things instead of a biblical reason, because God is the true consumer of our worship.
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We've made worship about consumeristic tendencies. When it's
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God who's the true consumer of our worship. So to the best of our ability, we're trying to have church services that are highly intentional, that are highly and deeply biblical, that are pulling on the threads of redemption that are running throughout the entire scriptures.
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Because if we give you the Bible, and if we give you what
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God says ought to be in worship, I don't care if the church is five people or 500.
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I really mean that. I don't care if we dwindle down or if we explode.
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When I stand before the living God, and I have to be held accountable for what
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I preached, and for what this church did as far as our worship services,
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I want to be able to stand with fidelity to God and say that we valued your word,
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God. I don't want to be that pastor, and I know you don't want to be that Christian, that looks at our entire life work and all of it is burned up as dross and as chaff and nothing remains.
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That Christian that we talk about anecdotally as getting into heaven by the skin of their teeth.
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I mean, who aspires to that? So why do we aspire to that in our worship?
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Give me the minimum. This church won't do that.
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Today, for a brief moment, I just want to zoom in on a couple things. Today, I want to look at a couple themes that run through scripture that will give you sort of an idea of why we do church the way that we do church.
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And then once we've looked at those themes, I want us to look at this concept of confession of sin and why confession of sin is absolutely so critical to the life and the health of a local church.
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That's the threads we're going to pull on today. That's the big gaping hole that I hope that we leave with. So with that, let us pray, and let us jump in.
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God, I pray with all my heart that we would be a faithful church. I pray that we would prioritize biblical things.
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I pray that our worship service, even in the elements, even in the way that we do things, in the words that we say, in the aspects, in the categories, and from the top to the bottom, everything that we do here,
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God would be biblical. Lord, I pray against this modern tendency that we have freedom to offer you whatever kind of worship you want.
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You don't accept that from Cain. You don't accept that from Nadab and Abihu. You don't accept that from Uzzah. You don't accept that from Annihus and Sapphira.
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Lord, I pray against ingenuity and creativity. I pray against lawlessness.
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I pray against unbridled, untethered worship, strange fire that we could offer up because we think it works and because it's pragmatic.
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Lord, let what happens in this house be biblical. Let us not fear anything at all but God.
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Let us fear you and let us offer up to you worship that is befitting of your holy nature.
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And let us offer up to you worship that is glorifying to you. And Lord, let us be as poor beggars who are coming.
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Let us be ready to receive all of the treasures and all of the gifts that you give. Lord, we're here to give, but we're here to receive.
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Lord, today I pray that you would let us receive from you in worship. And it's in Christ's name that we pray.
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Amen. As we think about this story of redemption, if you've been around for a little while, you know that we like to tell it in a lot of different ways.
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We like to tell the story from Genesis to Malachi or from Genesis to Revelation in a variety of different ways because, first of all, we want you to know the story of the
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Bible and we want you to be able to see its multifaceted, multi -dimensional nature. But I also want to share the themes of the
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Bible with you because in that you see the gospel. And today I want you to see a few different themes that are in the
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Bible that will really give you an understanding of why we do things in our worship service the way that we do them.
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So if you're struggling here to understand what we're trying to say, I'm saying I'm going to share with you a theme in the
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Bible and then I'm going to apply that theme to our worship service. And then
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I want you to see why we do things the way that we do. That's what I want to do here in the first part of this message is
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I want to examine some biblical themes and I want us to look at why we do that in our worship.
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The first one that I want to look at is the story of redemptive historical the redemptive historical gospel, the story of the
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Bible. What is it? We know that there's various eras in the
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Bible. They're not just all the same. There's the era of creation that happened before sin entered into the world and there's
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God dealing with Adam and Eve in the garden. And then we know that there's this time of fall where sin and ruin and misery and plagues and COVID and all of these things come bursting out upon the world in Genesis 3 and from Genesis 3 to 4 to 5 to Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, all the way until Malachi.
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You've got this overarching era where man is cast out of the presence of God and if God does not intervene on their behalf, then they fall deeper into ruin and misery and sin.
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We see that all throughout the Bible. God intervenes in the life of Noah and the generations that follow fall deeper into sin.
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God actively intervenes in Abraham and in Isaac and in Jacob and then then that generation falls into slavery in Egypt and God actively intervenes in the life of Moses and the people of Israel and then that generation falls into wilderness, wandering death in the middle of the of the middle of the wilderness.
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Like if God is not actively interjecting and pursuing this people, they're constantly falling deeper and deeper into sin.
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We see that in the book of Judges. We see that in the book of Samuel. We see that in the book of Kings. We see that in the story of how the
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Israelites fall at the hands of Assyria. We see that how the story of the the Judeans fall at the hands of Babylon and we see that they just are eking their way towards the
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New Testament, literally about to collapse by the time you get to the book of Malachi. And yet, that's not the end of the story because God in human flesh came.
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The word made flesh dwelt among us. We beheld his glory and the glories of the only begotten of the father full of grace and truth.
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Immanuel, God with us came and the chiefest and sweetest of all of the graces that we beheld in his incarnation was when he willingly gave up his own life.
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And for the joy set before him, he marched up the cross up to the cross and he was crucified for our sins, stricken, smitten, and afflicted so that we could be healed.
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And not only did he justify us and reconcile us back to the father permanently this time, so that no longer we will stray like the
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Israelites and no longer will we fall into this sort of apostasy that they continue to fall into.
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No longer will we do that. But not only did he do that and justify us by the work of his glorious grace, but he also deposited within us his righteousness so that we're not only set negative, net neutral, where he's forgiven all of our sins and yet now we're back to the starting point.
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No, he has deposited his infinite storehouses and treasures of righteousness so that you and I are not even the same people.
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We're new creations. We've been transferred out of darkness to light. We were dead and now we're alive.
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Right after he resurrects from the dead and he's the first fruit of a new creation.
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He's made us into new creations right after he resurrects from the dead and he makes his appearance to his disciples in Matthew 28.
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He marches them to the Mount of Transfiguration and they meet with him and he says all authority in heaven and earth have now been given to me now therefore go and make disciples.
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As soon as he saved them, he gave them a task. As soon as he did the work and he obeyed for them, now he's calling them to obey.
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If you think the gospel stops at Jesus's obedience and does not flow into a life of living faith and obedience in us, then you've only understood half the gospel.
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He not only redeems us, he commissions us. He not only saves us, he sends us and he sent us for the last 2 ,000 years so that we've been on commission to the nations to see the kingdom of God, new
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Jerusalem and Christendom built in our spaces and to the glory of God the church will be about that mission until Jesus says it is finished.
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And he calls us home to glory. That is the story of the Bible from creation to the fall to redemption to commission to glory and yet if you pay attention every single week in church, this is exactly what we do.
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This is exactly the flow of our service from Genesis to Revelation. You'll see these themes, but you'll also see them in our liturgy.
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Like Adam and Eve, we were called here out of the dry and stale and pagan world.
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We were called here to assemble in the paradise of his presence. Not his creation, but new creation.
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And like Adam and Eve who had to face their sin and had to be clothed with the skins of an animal, you and I have to reckon with our sin every single week in confession.
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When we confess our sins to God and Christ robes us, not with the skins of an animal anymore, but with his own royal righteous robes.
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Every week we celebrate the fact that he has consecrated us unto himself through sacrifice to cover our sins, but also through our singing and through our preaching and through our celebration.
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He is consecrating us to himself. He is building us up in order to have us commune with him at his table and commission us to the nations.
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That's the story of the Bible. We're called in, forgiven of our sins. We rest in the finished work of Christ.
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We feast at the table. We're commissioned to the nations and then we do that to the glory of God until the end comes.
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That is the redemptive historical story of the Bible in liturgy.
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Call to worship. Confession of sin, consecration, communion, commission.
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All five of those elements are there. There's another theme in the Bible and there's so many of these.
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There's so many that we can't even go through all of them, but I want to tell you a couple of them just to kind of apply them. There's this theme of like urban city theme in the
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Bible. Trust me, I am the least likely person to rejoice in a theme like this, but I see it in the scripture and I love it.
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And the reason I say that I'm the least likely because I'm a country boy living in Massachusetts, which is sort of a funny joke.
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I grew up in rural America. The last place on earth that you would ever find me is in New York City.
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I mean, I might visit there, but it would not go well for me to live there. Boston is way too crowded.
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The city that I live in is way too crowded. Like give me 10 acres, porch swing, pipe tobacco smell in the background.
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I don't need to smoke it. I just like to smell it. Give me that with a little creek that runs right through the middle of my property, some goats, some chickens, like that may sound cliche to you, but like that is what my heart wants.
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And yet the story of the Bible is a story of urbanity, a story of people gathering and population density in order to worship
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God. The Bible begins with a city, you know that right? Eden. Now, I mean, it has a low population in the beginning.
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It's only two. I'm sure there's some places in Montana or Wyoming that you can find that has population less than 10.
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I've read past cities that have population eight. That's the lowest I saw. But what's the definition of a city?
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A city has a government, a city has leadership, it has centralized government, and it has access to health care. Well, that is exactly what
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Eden has. It has God as king, it has two governmental officials called Adam and Eve, has centralized health care at the tree of life, and has borders that can be extended by annexing new property.
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Eden's a city. And the commission that God gave them is to fill the city, so now you have population density.
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And then when the city is so full, then they'll do what Charlotte did to Mecklenburg County. I grew up in North Carolina and Charlotte.
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Basically, what they did is they just kept annexing the county into it. So the whole city is just as big as the county, basically.
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Eden was supposed to annex the world. And yet when humans fell into sin, they were cast out of that first archetypal prototype, the prototypical city.
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And they were cursed to wander in isolation in the wilderness.
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And yet the story of the Bible really is the story that urbanity, that the dream of city building really doesn't leave humans.
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It's now polluted though by sin. We see Adam and Eve being cast out as rulers, and we see them being cast out into the world, but they don't forget that they want to make cities because they're ancestors.
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We see Nimrod, which is not an insult in the Old Testament. I'm sure it was a fine name. Now, it's sort of an insult when you call someone, hey,
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Nimrod. It's probably a fine name back then, but Nimrod was the first city builder, and he used his city not for God's glorious purposes, but he used the city to abuse people and to subjugate people in slavery.
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Perhaps the most antithetical, antitypical city that we can imagine is right there in the very beginning.
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The first 11 chapters of Genesis were Babel. Instead of gathering to spread out to the nations, they gather there to avoid the nations.
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Instead of gathering there to make much of God, they gather there to make much of themselves, and the point of Babel is that it's the antitype of God's design.
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They're there to supplant God, which is what most modern cities today do, which, in fact, is what most cities of the ancient world did.
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In fact, I can't think of a single city other than at times Jerusalem, which did not gather to undermine the sovereignty of God, did not gather to to make much of themselves instead of much of God, did not gather to make much of sin and make very little of righteousness.
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The Old Testament story is the story of one failed city after another.
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At one point, it's Babel. At another point, it's a city in Egypt.
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At another point, it's a Canaanite city that's attacking the people of God. At another point, it's Babylon, and then it's
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Assyria and Nineveh, and then it's some great city in Greece, or then it's
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Rome, or you can just keep going on and on and on. The story of the Bible is cities in rebellion against Almighty God.
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And as I said, there's only one city that very rarely, because of the
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Lord's kindness and mercy, got it right. There's only one city that became a four -type, a type of the city that was to come.
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And yet it was that city that fell into the gravest of all sins, a sin far worse than Babylon, a sin far worse than Rome and Athens and Sparta, because this city is the city that turned on God's Son and crucified
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Him. But the biblical story does not end there.
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It doesn't end with God washing His hands of the city. In fact, from that moment on, you see the
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Bible talking about a new kind of Jerusalem. You see the Bible talking about a city of God, that Jesus Himself died to purchase, a mobile city, a borderless, an unwalled city, a city that would be a house for the
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Lord God, who He was building for Himself, that would come down, like it says in Revelation, from heaven, like new
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Jerusalem, and it would reach and bless the nations. We basically see from Genesis all the way to Revelation this story of a city.
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In the beginning, it's Eden and a garden. In the end, it's new Jerusalem and a garden city. But the point is
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God has called people to gather together and worship to Him in population density, bordered cities with faithful governmental leadership to the glory of God.
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That urban theme works itself out in the entire Bible. You don't find heaven looking like Montana.
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You find heaven looking like a very sanctified God -glorifying, perfected, cursed, cleansed city.
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Now, how does that apply to the church? Because you and I have been called out of the cities of man.
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We've been called into the city of God. We've been called. And we've not only been called to to show up, we've been called to confess our tendencies towards Babylon -like rebellion.
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And we've been called here to mobilize ourself to go out and build the city of God.
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We've been consecrated to our King, approaching His royal throne, coming through His gates, singing and listening to His decrees.
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We've moved from humble orphans to humble servants, listening to God's servants, the elders and teachers, teaching us the
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Word of God. And then we've moved from there into His own living room, dining at His own table at Communion.
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Do you see how every aspect of this is oriented towards the city? We come from the dusty parts to gather here together.
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We enter through God's gates singing. We listen to His decrees. We enter into His house.
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We sit at His table and then we're commissioned to go build Christendom in the nations. That's the story of Eden to New Jerusalem.
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And we reenact that theme every single week in our liturgy.
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See, it's not enough, I don't think, to preach the gospel in our sermons. We are reenacting the gospel in our liturgy from Eden to the fall, to commission, consecration, all the way to New Jerusalem.
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We are reenacting the gospel. And we believe that our church services need to follow that sacred pattern.
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Let me tell you another one. I'll do this really quickly. The Bible has a clothing theme. We begin in the
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Bible with a couple who is naked and ashamed. No clothing. Next thing that happens, they reckon with their sin.
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God sacrifices an animal and He clothes them with the skins of an animal. And those animal skins, although not perfect and although not permanent, were the covering, the temporary covering that God's people had all throughout the
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Old Testament. Then in the New Testament, you've got three layers of clothing that happen. I don't know if you guys have ever watched the movie, the
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Christmas movie, where the little boy is dressed up in so many layers. Ralphie's his name, that he can't even move.
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He like falls down in the snow. He can't even get up because his mom dressed him in so many layers. Well, in the New Testament, we see
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God dressing us in multiple layers of clothing, and there's three of them. In fact, the first one is we're clothed with the undergarments of Christ.
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We're no longer naked and ashamed. We no longer are covered with the skins of animals and bulls and goats and the blood of all of that.
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We are covered with the royal undergarments of Christ. And the second layer of clothing that He gives us is
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He puts on the festal wedding garment so that we can come into His presence and we can dine with Him at the table.
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We are dressed for the wedding. And then even further than that, He puts on the armor of God on us, the helmet of salvation, the sword of truth, the belt of righteousness, the shoes that speed us off to build gospel communities all over the world.
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We are armored up to leave this place and go out to the nations. Do you see the theme? Every single week you and I come in from being attacked by the world, attacked by the devil, attacked by our flesh, and our clothes are shoddy.
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They've got holes in them. We look naked and ashamed at times. We feel naked and ashamed at times, and we come into the house of God and He reclothes us.
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Every week He reclothes us when we're here. We're reminded in the call to worship that we were naked and ashamed.
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We remember in our confession of our sin that He reclothes us with His royal robes.
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We're reminded that He consecrates us with His righteousness. We're reminded that He dresses us for the wedding at the table of communion, and we're reminded that He armors us up for the battle through our commission.
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Call, confession, consecration, communion, and commission. All five elements follow the story of the redemptive historical gospel.
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They follow the story of the theme of New Jerusalem. They follow the theme of clothing, and we go on and on.
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All of these different themes are not only indicative of what Christ has done for us on an individual basis.
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All of these themes are showing us what God has done for us as a church.
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We meet and we gather intelligently, and I'm not saying that we gather because we're so smart.
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No, no, no, no. We look at what the Bible says, and we look at these themes, and we see that this is how
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God's people have always gathered. He pursues them in call to worship.
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He requires holiness of them in confession. He gives them His righteousness and consecration.
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He calls them to the table in communion, and He sends them to the nations in commission.
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These themes are all over the Bible, and our church services ought to replicate them.
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For instance, two weeks ago, we talked about the covenant structure, how there's five elements of every single covenant.
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God takes hold of something. He separates it out and makes it new. He gives the stipulations and the laws, the signs and the seals, and then
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He provides for their future. Our church services replicate that structure.
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He takes hold of us by calling us out of the world and into worship. He separates us and makes us new through our confession of sin and our declaration of pardon.
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He gives His stipulations to us through consecration. He gives His signs and seals to us through baptism and communion.
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He provides for our future through discipleship, evangelism, and the Great Commission. I hope you're noticing that all of these biblical elements—the stories, the themes, the metanarratives, the gospel—every bit of it we've intentionally put in the worship service because you and I are people who need to be reminded every week of the gospel.
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Not just in the sermon, but in everything we do, which leads to our sort of second part of our sermon today.
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Because last week we really talked about the call to worship and how that looks, especially in the midst of the
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Sabbath. Today, I want us to look at confession of sin. I want us to understand why do we do the second part of our worship service, which is every week we come and we confess our sins together.
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Why do we do that? I would say that over the series, as we thought about God being present in our gatherings and Him being holy and us not being holy, that the reason that we confess our sins is not because we have to do a work in order for God to forgive us.
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That's not why we do it. We confess our sins because we know that at the heart of the matter,
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God is covenant keeper and we are covenant breaker. He's the one who's faithful to the promises of the covenant and we're the one every week who break them and who spurn them and who neglect them.
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This understanding helps us see that our greatest need, obviously apart from the gospel, but our ongoing need that we have every week, now that we're saved, now what?
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Our greatest need is that we need to be reconciled back again and again and again to God. You and I who are in the covenant, we need to be renewed.
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We need to be strengthened. We need to be built up. We need to be reminded.
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I love Martin Luther so much in his 95 reasons why the Catholic church was wrong on the topic of indulgences.
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The very first one that he stated was that all of life is repentance.
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That means according to Luther, and I think Luther was right, that when you've repented, you haven't finished because you still need to repent.
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Tomorrow you'll need to repent again. And then the next day you'll need to repent again. And should you ever believe that you don't need to repent, then you really need to repent.
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You probably need to repent of your repentance because your repentance is too shallow to be any good.
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You and I need confession because we're not holy and we need to be reminded of who we are.
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But I'll tell you the truth, that is such an anathema in modern day Christianity.
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Because we don't like to be reminded of our sin. We don't like being told that we're a sinner and that we're in desperate need of repentance.
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That concept chafes us. We like placations and excuses. We like people to tell us that we're a good person and that we're better than the average bear and that we're
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God's special little snowflake and that he loves us just the way that we are. But that's not what the Bible says.
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The Bible says that we're depraved down to the core of our being, even as believers. We need the ongoing confession and repentance because we still sin.
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And we still fall short of the glory of God and sin still damages our relationship to God.
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I don't know if you ever noticed this or not, but when you give yourself over to sin, there's certain things that happen in your life every single time.
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And as a pastor, I've began noticing that this happens in the life of the believer. When you begin sinning and living in your sin and making excuses for your sin, you will hide in patterns of guilt and shame like Adam.
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You will isolate yourself from God and Christian community. You will avoid prayer. You will close your
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Bible. You will live in feelings of unworthiness and then eventually that will turn into anger against God and then apathy towards God.
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This is Satan's game plan for your life and the antidote for it is confession and repentance.
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Today, confession at best has been relocated to a private act on an individual level and yet when
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I look at the pages of holy Scripture, I see that confession is public, corporate, and it's healthy for the entire body.
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I mean, that would be like saying that hey, my cancer is only in my lymph nodes it's not going to affect the rest of my body.
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And yet when we treat confession like it's a private individual thing, it affects the body.
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Is it any wonder that so many churches are so unhealthy today? Because they're living in their sin, refusing to confess and church services have prioritized the feelings of people instead of what
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God says in His Word. Many pastors have lopped confession of sin completely out of their worship services so that they don't talk about sin, they don't invite people to repent because it makes people feel uncomfortable.
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And if you make people feel uncomfortable, then your church won't grow, your numbers will dwindle, your budget will decrease, your energy will get zapped, momentum will be halted, and then everybody will be wondering why are these things happening to this church?
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When a pastor prioritizes pure pragmatism, they may grow in numbers, but they will grow unhealthy, sick, and decrepit.
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When you cut the confession of sin entirely out of the service so that no one is offended, no one is uncomfortable, and everyone still gets their warm and fuzzies at the end, then you have lopped yourself off from biblical faithfulness.
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Faithfulness. We've got to stop as Christians asking ourselves, what do people want?
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What do the surveys say? What do the church growth gurus say? And we've got to start saying, what does the
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Bible say? And that's what I want to do today. I want to look at the Bible and see what does it say about confession because I see in the
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Bible that it talks about it being essential, that confession should be a part of the worship service, and how does
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God use confession even though it hurts and even though it wounds us and it causes our pride to flare up, how does
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God use that to give us a greater joy than we could have ever had otherwise? I want to know what the
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Bible says about these things, and I want to know that our church is following what the Bible says on these things.
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So what I want us to do now, now that we've talked about these grand themes that are in the Bible and we understand that the church is committed to us re -enacting the gospel every single week through call, confession, consecration, communion, and commission, now that we've done that,
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I want to zoom into confession. And I want to see what the Bible says about it, and I want us to be biblical in the way that we think about it, not just individually, but corporately.
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And what the Bible says about it is that there were men constantly who come into the presence of God understanding that they are unrighteous and they're confessing their sins.
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Every time that you see someone in the Bible come into the presence of God, they come in with humility and fear and trembling.
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And perhaps the classic example of this is Isaiah 6, 5, where God's presence comes into Isaiah's life, and he cries out on Isaiah 6, 5,
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Woe is me! For I am ruined! I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips.
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My eyes have seen the king, the Lord of hosts, and he says it ruined him.
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Look at Ezekiel in chapter 1, verse 28. He says roughly the same thing. The appearance of the likeness of the glory of the
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Lord was shown to me, and when I saw it, I fell on my face, and I heard the voice of one speaking. Isaiah fell, or Ezekiel, fell flat on his face because of the glory of God.
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John, the apostle writer, you may think, okay, well, that's what the Old Testament people did, but now we're in Christ.
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Now we don't need to fear. Look at what the disciples did when Jesus pulled back the veil and showed them his glory at the
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Mount of Transfiguration. They didn't leap. They didn't rejoice. They saw the awesome, terrifying holiness of God, and they hit their faces on the earth trying to hide themselves from how wonderful and beautiful his terrifying and dangerous holiness actually is.
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And maybe you say, okay, that was before the cross, but now Jesus has covered all my sins. Look at John.
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30 years after Jesus rose from the dead, this is what he says in chapter 1, verse 17 of the book of Revelation.
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When I saw him, he's talking about Jesus, I fell at his feet as though I were dead, but he laid his right hand on me saying, fear not, for I am the first and the last.
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Isaiah didn't cry out in terror because he did not understand the gospel. Ezekiel did not fall flat on his face because he misunderstood it.
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John did not collapse like a dead man because he did not get the gospel. In fact, they did these things because they understood it, because they understood that God is holy and that they are not.
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Anytime that a believer is confronted with the amazing and awesome holiness of God, you can't help but be confronted by your own finitude and your own unrighteousness and your own depravity.
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We know the gospel and we share it every week that at just the right time
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Christ Jesus came and he died for all your sins and he covered you with his robes of righteousness so that there is therefore now nothing that stands between you and God, that the court case against you has been legally dismissed so that you can stand and walk away free in the grace of Christ with the righteousness that he has deposited to you for his glory.
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And yet, even though the punishment for our sin has been eliminated, we have not been purged of our sin yet.
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Even though our sin won't eternally damn us, we still live in a world where it will greatly damage us.
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Christ has not fully dealt with the issue of sin. He has cancelled the debt of it.
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He has crucified the punishment of it so that you therefore now have no condemnation, but that does not mean that you have conquered sin.
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Your relationship with Christ is intact because of his work on the cross but your experience of his relationship is very much dependent upon confession.
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In the same way that a husband is not going to lose his status with his wife if he doesn't wash the dishes and she is not going to lose her status as wife if she doesn't do something that pleases the husband, but if you think about it in the sense of enjoyment, you may be fully married but miserable.
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And there's many Christians here today who may be fully a Christian, but not enjoying the beauty and the depth and the riches and the treasures forever that Christ has to offer you because you are mired in your sin and because you refuse to confess it and you refuse to deal with it and you refuse to lay it at the foot of the cross and walk away from it.
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We need to confess our sins and to acknowledge the power of it.
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Paul tells us in Romans 7 15 and again in 18 through 24, For I do not understand my own actions, he says, for I do not do what
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I want, but I do the very thing that I hate. For I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh.
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For I have the desire to do what is right but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do what I want but I do the evil that I do not want is what
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I keep on doing. Now, if I do what I do not want is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells within me.
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So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand.
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For I delight in the law of God in my inner being, but I see in my members another law that's waging war against the law of the mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members, wretched man that I am.
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Who will deliver me from this body of death? This is the apostle
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Paul who's examining his own life and calling himself wretched, crying out and saying, who will deliver me?
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Who will rescue me from the wretchedness of my sin? Paul's not hiding here because hiding doesn't solve anything.
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Non -confession doesn't solve the problem. Running away from confession and pretending like, well, confession's a
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Catholic thing and we're not Catholic or confession is a work and we're saved by his work, not our work.
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When you play those games and you hide from confession, you allow the enemy to wreak havoc in your life.
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Yeah, sure, you're saved but you're miserable. Because Christ has treasures forever for you and yet you won't do the work that would open up the storehouses of his mercy.
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That would be like Ukraine pretending that Russia no longer exists so that they can make themselves feel better while they're being attacked.
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Our flesh is fighting us. Our flesh is waging a war against us.
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And it's not just on an individual level. Our flesh is waging war on us corporately, pretending that it doesn't exist and and refusing to deal with it is making the gangrene worse.
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The rot stinks when you don't confess your sin. It's like going into a doctor's office and him telling you that you have a disease.
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It's curable if you deal with it but you refuse to deal with it because you don't want to deal with the frustration and the discomfort of knowing that you have a disease.
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So you eventually die from something like gingivitis when all you needed to do was go to the doctor, get the medicine, do the thing, and be done with it.
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How much more is that true with the great physician who's given us the medicine to deal with our sin, which is called the gospel.
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To lay our sin down at the foot of the cross and trust in his finished work. Why do we neglect that?
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Why do we let something as small as soul level spiritual gingivitis rob us of so much misery or rob us of so much joy and comfort in our
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Savior? Why do we think as churches that we can gather together and and take confession lightly when
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Paul talks about it as being this great evil and this great power that is afflicting us?
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Confession of sin reminds us that the estate of man is pretty frail. Romans 3 11 through 12 and 23.
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None is righteous, not even one. No one stands. No one understands. No one seeks for God.
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All have turned aside. Together they become worthless. No one does good. Not even one for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
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We confess our sins every week in worship not only because we need to be confessing our sins individually at home in our prayer closets and in our time with the
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Lord, yes, and amen to that, but we do it every single week because we want to remember not only individually, but as a people that confession is essential and it is an important that there's this great power to sin, but there's also a great scope of sin and that sin has affected all of us.
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If you're in this room, you are plagued by sin and we prioritize confession in our churches because we know you need it and we know that we need it.
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And like I said, the Bible doesn't talk about things in an individual way. It talks about things in a corporate way. Every you in the
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New Testament that's talking about the church is plural for a reason. Confessing sin is a plural activity as well.
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2 Chronicles 7 14 says, If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways
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Then I will hear from heaven And I will forgive them and heal their land Do you notice that it doesn't say if my people who are called by my name will individually get together and and pray and confess
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Their sins then no, he's saying if my people collectively will call upon my name, then I will heal their land
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Because there's a correlation to a nation and its health and how a church and how a community confesses its sin
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And it's not just an Old Testament thing is a New Testament thing Acts 19 18 Many also among them who had believed kept coming and confessing and disclosing their practices and it says in verse 20
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So that the word of the Lord was growing mightily and prevailing Luke is telling us in Acts there that when the word of God is mighty powerful prevailing winning back territory from the kingdom of satan
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It's when it's causing people to repent of their sins and to confess them publicly
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James 5 16 says is therefore confess your sins one to another. I don't think he was joking He says the prayer of a righteous person availeth much he's saying
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That one of the aspects of of god's word mightily and faithfully prevailing on a congregation of people
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Is that this congregation come joyfully to the service to confess their sins to god?
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And they confess their sins to one another knowing that confessing our sin leads to healing Look at the passage in james 5 16 confess your sins to one another and pray to one another that you may be healed
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Yes, we're eternally saved by the finished work of christ, but we're also temporarily And iteratively in an ongoing state of confession so that we will be healed
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When you have a cold when you have the flu, you're not subhuman. You don't lose your status as being a human But you've lost your experience of it
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You're miserable you're sick you go to the doctor you get the z -pack you get the vitamins you do whatever you need You drink the tamiflu you get better because you don't want to be miserable.
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Why do we accept misery in our christianity? Because we're afraid that if we admit our sin to someone else that they're going to use it against us
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Now I know why we do this because you and I've grown up in churches with imperfect people who don't really
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Mean to hurt us but they fall into their sin too and they gossip about us and they weaponize this our sin against us and they
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They treat us like we're the only one who's a sinner and and when you're early in your faith
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You're sort of naive and you say well i'm a sinner. You're a sinner I'll share my sins with you. And then when somebody beats you over the head with it and bashes you for your sin
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You stop talking You stop sharing you stop trusting and then you get to this place where you're like It's just me and jesus because I don't really like his church.
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I get why you've done it I get why you've locked up I get why you stopped sharing
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I get why you stopped confessing but let me tell you the lie that satan has given you
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Because even though we're not perfect And we will not perfectly handle your situation
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And we will not perfectly empathize with you and we will not perfectly love you What satan has done is he's got you alone in your thoughts and Though you're scared that one of us is not going to handle your situation and we're going to use it as a weapon against you satan in your isolation
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And in you're not sharing your sins is beating you over the head Constantly with your sin and you have no defense because you've not let the community in We confess our sins every week here because we want to be a confessing community
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Because our sin needs to be healed Our soul needs ongoing healing from the lord by his means of grace
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That's why first john 1 chapter 8 through 10 calls it cleansing He says if we say we have no sin, then we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us
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But if we confess our sin, he's faithful and just to forgive us our sin And that's where most people stop reading
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But it says he's not only faithful and just to forgive us our sin, but also to cleanse us from all of our unrighteousness
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We read that passage and we say amen, he forgives me of my sin, but it's also not just net neutral He's not just forgiving you of your sin.
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He's cleansing you of your unrighteousness He's healing you He's wiping away your stains.
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He's making you white as snow in your confession He is Benefiting you
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Helping you Giving grace to you when you Begin isolating and refusing to confess your sin to god and to confess your sins to others and to live
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Open for rebuke open for discipline when you stop doing those things because you are worried about what other people will think
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Far worse things come upon you One of them is that you've cut yourself off from mercy
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Proverbs 28 13 says whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper But he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy mercy
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Is when someone gives you what you don't deserve? How could you ever receive something so beautiful as mercy if you're stuck
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In a life of complete isolation and no one knows your sin No one knows what you're struggling with No one has the opportunity to love you in a way that you don't deserve because You've projected that you're perfect Solomon says whoever conceals his sin will not prosper because solomon understood it and at least in the beginning of his life that authenticity
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And vulnerability are nowhere close to being as bad as being isolated and alone
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The mercy that we receive from being vulnerable with another human being or being vulnerable with god or being vulnerable
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To a church being held accountable to a people into a body That mercy that we receive is worth it sin cripples kills rots and festers and pollutes us into perpetual habits of guilt and shame
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Think about what you're saying. Yes to when you say no to confession Confession also reorients us to the divine redeemer
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Sin causes us a separation Between us and god and i'm not talking about eternal separation.
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I'm talking about temporal experiential separation Isaiah 59 2 says
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But your iniquities have made a separation between you and your god And your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not hear you
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Your sin Hides the beautiful glorious face of god
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And the only thing that I know biblically that will erase that gap that will remove the cloud that will showcase his glorious face
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Is confession and repentance the same book isaiah 55 5 through 7 just two chapters earlier says seek the lord when he may be found
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Call upon him when he is near Let the wicked forsake his way the unrighteous man his thoughts.
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Let him return to the lord That god may have compassion on him
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For god will abundantly pardon Isaiah is telling us that your sin has hidden the face of god, but if you'll turn to him when he is near You'll confess your sins if you'll seek after him in repentance, he will forgive you and pardon you and bless you
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James 4 8 says draw near to god And he will draw near to you Cleanse your hands you sinners and purify purify you hearts you double -minded
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He's saying repent Of all the ways that you've used your hands to pursue evil instead of righteousness
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Purify your hearts that hate god purify your mind That is constantly wayward and double -minded
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Trawl near unto god and he will draw near to you This is not about salvation
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This is about christians Who are already saved? Who eternally have their names have been written in the lamb's book of life and yet?
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On earth they're miserable because the face of god the experience of god
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Has been hidden from them because of their sin if you don't repent you're not a christian
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And I hate to say it so bluntly but it's true I know that you don't repent in order to be saved because christ saves you and then
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He awakens your heart so that you will repent I get the order The order is that christ does his work first and our work flows out of it, but trust me
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If there's no flow If you don't have repentance If you don't have a heart that desires holiness
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If you don't have a heart that hates your sin and wants to repent from it If you don't have a heart that longs for righteousness and wants to Have the fruits of the spirit and the gifts of the spirit wants to live according to the spirit
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All to the praise and the glory of god if you don't have that then the work of god that always
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Causes these things to happen probably hasn't happened to you If you don't want the things of god, then god has not deposited his spirit in you
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We see that all throughout the scripture You don't obey to be accepted But if you have been accepted by god, you will want to obey if you don't want to obey
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Then god has not redeemed you Because his redemption causes a change in you
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It causes new habits new thoughts new passions new attractions new
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New all everything you have become a new creation So that if you don't look new smell new talk new think new feel new if you don't do that Then you've not been saved
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Because his work produces Mercy grace
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Passions affections in your heart that change you if those things haven't happened to you, then you're not his
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This is why this concept of mortification, this is the last thing i'll share is so important Paul says
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For if you live according to the flesh you will die But if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, then you will live if you're a christian
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If the spirit is inside of you if you're living according to the spirit Then you are going to be the kind of person that hates your sin
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And that fights your sin and then attacks your sin And then you will live
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I remember john owen who wrote this incredibly long book called mortification of sin
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Incredibly dense book. I love it, but it's a hard read i'll be honest with you The value of the book came in a single quote
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Be killing sin or sin will be killing you and he gives this great example of what sin is he
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He likens it to a soldier who shoots dead an enemy an enemy soldier who's coming after him
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He shoots it dead. He turns his back He's thankful that that that that awful evil wicked person is now dead and while his back is turned
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It rises up and stabs him in the back And his point is is that you think you've killed your sin
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But it's only wounded It's only pretending to be dead so that when you let your guard down It'll come and afflict you and and and stab you and fight you all over again
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He's saying that that our sin is so pernicious that we have to be fighting it every day every minute every hour
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Mortifying it putting it to death and if we do that, then we will live As a church, this is let us close here
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Every week we participate in corporate confession for a couple of reasons. Number one.
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We want you to confess your sins to god because we know that you need to confess your sins to god if by the spirit you
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And you and you and you and all of us here are putting to death the misdeeds of the flesh then we will live and if you're not
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Individually and corporately we will die. We may get large numbers.
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We may get nice buildings We may get nice stuff But we'll be like the church at sardis that had a reputation of being alive.
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But jesus says you are dead Today we've talked about two themes
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We've talked about the themes of redemption in the bible like the redemptive historical gospel We've talked about eden to new jerusalem as the story of a city we've talked about naked and ashamed and clothing
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And we've talked about these themes that showcase aspects of the gospel and then we've applied those aspects to the way that we do church
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And then in the second part we've zoomed in to one aspect of what the church is which is confession and we've talked about how
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We need confession Individually and corporately we need to be confessing our sins so that we will have a vibrancy
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Vibrancy and vivacity to our life with christ The thing that I would remind us of as a church is
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I want you and I To see how necessary our time of confession is
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I want you and I to see That it's one of the most important parts of the service
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I Want you and I to see that we need to be here for that section I want you and I to see that every time we do confession of sin in this church that you're going to participate
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That you're privately praying and confessing your sins. I would even love to hear that somebody
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Was at home journaling the sins That they've been struggling with this week coming into the presence of God to confess those sins to the before the spirit of God knowing and trusting that you are going to be declared pardoned and Declared righteous and that you're going to receive healing and cleansing from your sins
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My heart in this is that you would understand that we don't do confession of sin to make people uncomfortable
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We do it because it's a great blessing We do it because God gives life to us through confession
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We do it because we want to remember the power of sin as a church We want to understand how lowly the estate of man is as a church.
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We want to be reminded that confession Blesses us corporately and privately it heals us and cleanses us.
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It brings mercy to us It imparts more of God's spirit to us It brings life abundant to us so that we can make war with it so that we can experience more life to the glory of Christ we
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Confess our sins publicly as a church because it's life -giving And I hope that both privately and corporately that you and I will participate
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With all our heart And that we will receive the blessings that God has promised us
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Through confession. Let us pray Lord, we thank you so much for your word
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Which prioritizes these things lord, I pray that you would help us to have the courage To confess our sins to you
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To leave our sins at the foot of the cross to build relationships in this community where we can be held accountable to Participate meaningfully in the liturgy of this church, which prioritizes confession
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And lord, I pray that in these things that you would heal us cleanse us and bring mercy and life to us in a way