John 7:17-24 (The Unwelcomed Christ)

The Shepherd's Church

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I think all of us have walked into a room before where we felt like we were unwelcomed. I certainly have.

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Maybe it's a bedroom with a spouse that you've disappointed. Maybe it is a conversation that you're not supposed to hear.

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Maybe it's a table full of people who are laughing, talking, and joking until the moment that you walk up.

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Then as soon as they make eye contact with you, everyone is quiet and it's this very awkward moment.

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Maybe you haven't felt that before, but I'm sure that you can identify with how that would have felt. I think that that's how

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Jesus probably felt in John chapter 7. Jesus has a complicated relationship with the city of Jerusalem, much like his father had a complicated relationship with the city of Jerusalem.

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Jerusalem was the city that God made to be a light to the Gentiles. It was the city that was to house

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God's holy presence on earth. And as the holy presence of God was housed in the temple, all of the

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Jews who were learning about the knowledge of God were to take that and share it with the nations. So Jerusalem was supposed to be the point on earth where heaven and earth combined, where they collided.

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And the Jewish people were to take that knowledge and share it with the world. Now unfortunately, time and time again in the

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Old Testament, we see that the Jewish people don't do what God has required. They don't share the knowledge of God.

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And in fact, Israel hated the nations. We see that in the book of Jonah, the prophet who hated none of us so badly, he didn't even want to preach the gospel.

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And then we also see that in their hatred of other nations, they end up ultimately hating

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God. And we'll see that in today's passage as well. In John 7, for the third time in the book of John, God in the flesh decided to visit his rebellious city.

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And the people who were supposed to be laughing and rejoicing because of this great festival, the

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Feast of Booths, are now angry and grumbling and quiet. Jesus has walked up on the city.

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The city has descended into an awkward silence of rejection. Now, of course, the tension in this had been building over several chapters.

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Jesus visits in John 2, and he embarrassed them, and he overturned their authority, and he subverted their leadership, and he corrected their bad theology.

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John 5, he does it again. But really, the heart of this text is what happens in John 5, where they've accused

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Jesus of being a lawbreaker. That's why the city is ultimately rejecting them. Last week, we learned that there were 10 reasons why the city was rejecting them.

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Under all of those, at the heart of that is that they believe Jesus has broken the

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Mosaic law. They believe Jesus has sinned, and that as a sinner, he's not only sinned in a generic way, they believe that he sinned in a very specific way, that he has broken the second commandment, which is you shall not make

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God in your image because Jesus claimed to be God. And they believe that he's broken the law in the fourth commandment, which is you shall set apart one day out of the week as holy, the

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Sabbath. So they believe that he's broken the law, that he's blasphemed against God, and he is worthy of death.

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If you remember in John 5, 18 months before John 7, Jesus enters the city during the

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Passover. The Passover was the holiest of all feasts, and he, during the holiest day of the feast, which was the

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Sabbath, he heals a man. He heals a man who for 38 years had been broken in his paralysis.

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And he heals him so that he stands and he commands him, and he says, take up your mat and walk. And that man carried his mat, probably ran with his mat to the

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Jewish temple. He went straight away. He went so immediately to the Jewish temple that he didn't even stop to say thank you to Jesus for what he's done.

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Now, we have to understand why. Jesus just healed this man after 38 years of sickness, and he doesn't even stop to say thank you.

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Why? Well, the Jewish temple hung over the narrative so profoundly that this man, that's all that he wanted.

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If you were a Jew at this time, you had a temple -centric identity. Everything about you was connected to the

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Jewish temple. If you were a man, then the brotherhood that you would have gotten from all the other men in Israel would have been shared in the court of the

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Jews, and you would have went in there, and you would have represented your family, and you would have brought the very animal that you would have handed to the very priest who would have sacrificed it on behalf of your family.

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Every part about this building was central to your identity.

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You could not know God without the temple, and your family could not know God if you didn't go, and you didn't represent them before God to the priest.

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It's a fascinating thing. So here you have a man who's been sitting on the sidelines for 38 years, and that should remind us back to the wilderness, the people who wandered in the wilderness for 38 years, incapable of entering into the land of promise.

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Here this man finally, after 38 years, is able to enter into the temple of blessing, and he runs.

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We get the impression of a man who doesn't even stop to take a breath. He sprints, and he runs out of this little courtyard where he's at, where there's this pool, and he runs straight to the temple, and he bursts through the gates, and you imagine this man like David running into the city of Jerusalem, running to the temple, praising

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God, at least until he meets the pleasure police called the Pharisees. What was his crime?

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He's carrying his mat on the Sabbath. He's carrying his mat. Now, I challenge all of us to go back into the

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Old Testament and find chapter and verse where it says not to carry your mat on the Sabbath. It doesn't, maybe in the book of 2nd

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Hesitations. This wasn't a violation of the Torah.

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This was a violation of their tradition. The Jews took a few passages, four or five, and they turned them into 35 categories of Sabbath laws so that there was an exact distance that you could walk on the

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Sabbath or you were a lawbreaker, and you couldn't carry your mat because that was work, so if you did that, then you were a lawbreaker.

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So this man has now violated the tradition of the Pharisees, which in that time held equal to or maybe, practically speaking, even more weight than the

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Bible. How often do we see that today, though, where our tradition rises up to the level of supremacy over the

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Bible? It happens all the time. The punishment for this violation was severe.

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They could have, in that moment right there, picked up stones and stoned him to death, just for that.

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Now, I'm not saying that's a legitimate punishment. That's according to their tradition, but that's what could have happened. If they were merciful, they would have kicked him out of the synagogue.

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The synagogue is where your family went during the week. It's where your children played. It's where your children were educated. It's where you did potluck suppers, and it's where you spent time with people.

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It was like a small group or like a midweek type of thing that a church was having. That's where community life happened.

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So if they kicked him out of the synagogue, they were kicking him out of his ability to have a social life at all in the nation of Israel.

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And then they would have returned with that, and they would have kicked him out of the temple. So that would have been his religious life.

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So in one moment, they would have kicked him out of being able to know his neighbors and have a social life, and then in the next moment, they would have kicked him out of the temple being unable to know

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God. You think about the severity of this. Jesus said that the entire Old Testament is summarized under two commands, love

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God, love neighbor, and the Pharisees have picked up the hammer of God's Bible, and they've used it as a weapon to say, we will take everything away from you for not obeying us.

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Now, you can imagine that this man was fearful. He spent 38 years without this.

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You can imagine the sort of depression and the isolation, the loneliness that he faced.

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And in a single moment, he took an awful situation and he sold out

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Christ. He said, it wasn't me. It was Jesus. He's the one who healed me. He's the one who told me to pick up my bed and walk.

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And he did just like Adam. He turned the blame off of himself. He didn't take the consequences, even though they were unjust.

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And he took that unjust moment and he put it on Jesus. And the Bible says it was from that moment that the

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Jews were seeking to kill him. John 5, 18 says, for this reason, the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him because he was not only breaking the

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Sabbath, but he was calling God his own father, making himself equal to God.

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18 months later in John 7, they're still mad about it. They're still angry about it and they still wanna kill

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Jesus because of it. Time has not healed this wound for the

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Pharisees. Now today, we're gonna examine Jesus's response. They've accused him of breaking the law.

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So we're gonna examine Jesus's response. And we're gonna do that in three ways. The first, Jesus is going to prove to them that he is not a lawbreaker, bar none.

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That's the first thing that we're gonna cover. The second thing that we're gonna cover is Jesus flips the tables on them and shows how they are actually the ones who've broken the law.

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And they've broken the law in three specific ways. And then finally, because we know that all of us also have broken the law, we wanna see what the hope there is for all of us who are lawbreakers here today.

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So if you will, turn with me to John 7, 17 through 24.

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We'll pray and then we'll cover this together. This is what the word of the

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Lord says. If anyone is willing to do his will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak for myself.

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He who speaks of himself seeks his own glory. But he who is seeking the glory of the one who sent him, he is true and there is no unrighteousness in him.

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Did not Moses give you the law? And yet none of you carries out the law. Why did you seek to kill me?

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The crowd answered, you have a demon. Who seeks to kill you? Jesus answered them,

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I did one deed and all of you marvel. For this reason, Moses gave you circumcision. John puts a parentheses here, says not because it was for Moses, but from the fathers.

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And on the Sabbath, you circumcise a man. If a man receives circumcision on the Sabbath so that the law of Moses will not be broken, are you angry with me because I made an entire man well on the

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Sabbath? Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment.

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Let's pray. Lord, I pray in this passage that we would see all of the wonderful things that you want us to see.

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And Lord, I pray that we would see how you so clearly and so beautifully and so cleverly answer the

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Pharisees and how you showcase your purity and your holiness in this passage.

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And how Lord, you level the playing field of all humanity that everyone has fallen short of the glory of God and everyone has broken the law.

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And we need you. We need you more than anything. So Lord, I pray today that we would see that, that we would not rest on our own strength and our own sufficiency and our own righteousness.

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But Lord, more than anything, that we would turn to you. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. It's clear that the

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Pharisees want to kill Jesus. They say it in verse 19. Jesus says, why do you seek to kill me?

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He says in verse 21, I did one deed and all of you marveled. That's not a good marvel. Verse 23, you're angry with me because I made an entire man well on the

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Sabbath. They want to kill Jesus. And the reason that they want to kill Jesus is because they think that Jesus has broken the law.

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And the first violation that they're gonna accuse Jesus of is that Jesus, or first, the first one is that Jesus is a lawbreaker.

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Now, they're gonna do this in five different accusations. The first one of those is, or Jesus is gonna prove that he's not a lawbreaker and he's gonna do that by saying that he has divine authority.

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They've accused him of being a lawbreaker. Jesus is gonna prove that he's not. And the first point is that he has divine authority from God.

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Now, it seems clear in the passage in John 7, 17, where it says, if anyone is willing to do his will, he will know of the teaching, whether it is of God or whether I speak of myself, it seems clear that Jesus is saying that anyone who is willing to obey the will of God will see that Jesus' teaching is from God.

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So what Jesus is doing is he's putting his own teaching on par with scripture. He's saying that God's words are my words.

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My words are God's words. And what I'm saying, not your tradition, is the words of God.

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Now, at this point in time, the Jews almost worshiped Moses. Other than their tradition, they held

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Moses to such a high esteem. And they made the Mosaic law a part of their entire identity so that they could not even see that Christ the greater

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Moses is standing in front of them. And Jesus dismantles this view with just a very logical argument.

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He says, if you are willing to do God's will, then you're willing to obey God's law. And if you're willing to obey

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God's law, then you must see that I am speaking God's words because it's self -evident.

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And if you see that I'm speaking God's words, then you will know that I have authority from God. And if you know that I have authority from God, then you will not seek to kill me.

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You will bow down and worship me. That's the argument that Jesus is making. I have divine authority and you have pitted yourself against God.

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Jesus is the exact opposite of a lawbreaker. He's the one who wrote the law. Now, I don't want us to have a

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Trinitarian confusion here. I am arguing that Jesus wrote the law. And this is why

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I want to show you. In Deuteronomy 9 .10, Moses admitted something very important to us.

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He said, the Lord gave me two tablets of stone written by the finger of God.

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And on them were all the words which the Lord had spoken with you at the mountain from the midst of the fire the day of the assembly.

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I want us to understand something from a Trinitarian perspective. God the Father is spirit.

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God cannot be limited to a human body because he is unlimited and he is infinite. God doesn't have a hand.

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He doesn't have an arm. He doesn't have a leg. God is infinite. So if the law was written by the finger of God, which member of the

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Trinity has a hand? Which member of the Trinity comes in human flesh? Jesus is the one who walked with Adam and Eve in the garden and spoke with them face to face and knelt down on the ground and shaped

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Adam in his own image. Jesus is the one who Abraham spoke to and negotiated with about the destruction of Sodom and he worshiped him.

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Jesus is the one that Jacob wrestled with and Jesus changed his name to Israel, the man who wrestles with God.

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Jesus is the one who led Israel through the Red Sea because it says they were led by the angel of the

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Lord. Jesus is the warrior that Joshua bowed down to. Jesus is the fourth man in the fiery furnace in the book of Daniel and Jesus is the one with his very finger wrote the law.

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Think about the fact that the one who wrote the law is now being accused by his servants as being a law breaker.

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The entire law pointed to him. All of it was fulfilled in him. He came to earth to obey it perfectly because he knew none of us could because he had the very authority of God.

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He speaks with all the power, wisdom, and authority of Yahweh. He has divine authority.

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Their authority is too low to comprehend it. You think about it this way. While Jesus was writing the law on the tablets of stone on the top of Mount Sinai, the people were making a golden calf and you think how awful that is.

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But at least they were well -intentioned. At least they were trying to make God an image.

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It was a great idolatry, but they were trying to worship Yahweh in a dazzling golden way.

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These people are surrounded around Jesus and they're not good intentioned at all.

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They're hurling insults at him. They're calling God a law breaker and they want to murder him.

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This is infinitely worse than the golden calf. This is covenant breaking from Israel.

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And it was blasphemy of the highest order. You think about how illogical it would be if we say that God broke the law.

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If God broke the law, then God cannot be good. If God is not good, then God is not God. So if Jesus, for a moment of his existence, broke the law, fell short of the law, or didn't uphold the law, then

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Jesus is not God and our salvation is in vain. This passage is not just a mosaic meandering that we're gonna talk about for 50 minutes today and then we're gonna go home.

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The whole gospel hinges on this. If Jesus was an obedient, we are not saved.

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What a blasphemous thing that the Pharisees accused him of. And Jesus responds with, I have the authority of almighty

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God. That's the first evidence that Jesus gives. And with that authority, he was not exempt from the law.

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He actually purposely chose to be born under the law in submission to the law. He chose to live his entire life under the law, why?

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Not just to prove that it could be done so that he could set us free. Jesus Christ was locked up in the same cages that you and I were locked up in and he powered out of it through holiness and obedience and through his divine authority so that he now is the one who rescues us.

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John 17 says, if anyone is willing to do his will, then they will obey the law of God.

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Now you may be asking yourself, why do I keep saying that they will obey the law of God? It keeps saying that it's gonna obey the will of God.

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Why do I keep connecting will and law? Well, because if you're a faithful Jew during this time, you would have understood that the two concepts really go together.

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You can't obey the will of God if you don't obey the law of God and you can't be obeying the will of God and not be in the law of God.

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Those two things work together and it's all over the Bible, but I wanna show you very clearly in Psalm 40, verse eight.

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I'm getting excited. Psalm 40, verse eight shows how these two thoughts are connected together.

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David says in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, I delight to do your will, oh my God. Your law is written on my heart.

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Jesus connects the will of God with the law of God or David does. So David is saying that in order to be in God's will, you have to obey

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God's law. So for us today, apart from Jesus, if we wanna be in God's will, then we have to obey and obey perfectly

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God's law. That's what salvation is without Jesus. You have to perfectly obey the law of God.

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If you fall short in one point, game's over. So what

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Jesus is saying is that he is the one who was willing to obey the law of God.

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That's what he's saying. When Jesus himself, he doesn't use this as a hypothetical. When Jesus says he in this passage, he's saying if anyone is willing, he's talking about himself.

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He was the one who was willing to obey God's law and not just willing, but joyfully obey

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God's law. Listen to the argument that Jesus gives. If anyone is willing to do

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God's will, then they will obey God's law. And if they obey God's law, they will know that Jesus' teaching is from God.

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What is Jesus saying? I know my teaching is from God. Therefore, I have perfectly obeyed the law of God.

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Do you get the point? If Jesus says he knows that his teaching is from God, his life is an apologetic that proves it by perfectly obeying the will of God.

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So Jesus not only has the authority of God to write the law, he's the one who came and was born under the law and perfectly lived out the law so that you and I could be saved.

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That's the first two evidences that he gives. He has the authority of God and he's the one who perfectly keeps the law.

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Verse 18 now is where Jesus gives three more lines of evidence. Verse 18 says, he who speaks from himself seeks his own glory, but he who is seeking the glory of the one who sent him, he is true.

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So not only does Jesus have the authority of God and not only does Jesus obey the law of God, Jesus lives every moment of his life to the glory of God.

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That's the heart of the law. Now I wanna explain this from the Apostle Paul because I think that this is an interesting point.

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Maybe you'll tell me later it wasn't that interesting. I think it's really interesting. Romans 3 .23 says, for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.

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That means every human being has fallen short of glory. That means no human being has any glory.

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So that means that when we die and we report in front of the Father in heaven, the reason that we are sent to hell is not just because of our sins, but it's because we have no glory.

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We come into the presence of God with our hands full of sin and we have no room for any glory so that God's payment to get into heaven is the payment and the weight of glory.

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You're not only prohibited from heaven because of your sins, you're prohibited from heaven because you can't pay the payment to get in.

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So what does Jesus do? He lives all of his life, no sins.

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Hands are empty, has no sin. And yet he claims here that he's the one who has glory.

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Jesus in his lifetime amassed such a storehouse of glory that he had infinite glory.

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And you think about us, Jesus forgives us of our sins on the cross. Yes and amen.

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But he takes the glory that he earned through perfect righteous living and he shares it with us.

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We not only walk into heaven with empty hands, we were billions of sins in debt to God.

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We not only walk into heaven without a debt, our bank account wiped clean. No, we are walking in with it filled full of the glory of God because he not only canceled our debt, he deposited his glory so that when you and I get into the presence of God, we can make the payment that is due to enter into God's rest.

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And that is the weight of glory. He earned all of that in his life so that he could put it in you.

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That's why heaven's treasures now live inside of you if you're a Christian. This is the exact opposite of what the

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Pharisees are. People who seek their own glory, their own fame, their own righteousness. And in the end, they don't have any glory.

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That's the third evidence that Jesus gives. He has God's authority. He lived out God's law and he lives perfectly to the glory of God.

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The fourth is that he is truth. Verse 18 says, he who speaks for himself seeks his own glory, but he who is seeking the glory of the one who sent him, he is true.

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Jesus is saying that he not only does all those three things that we've already talked about, those three things attest to the fact that he is true.

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And he's not only true just in a limited way or a general way, he's true in everything. His words are true.

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The things that he does are true. His thoughts are true. His actions are true. His heart is true. His mind is true. Every part of Jesus is truth incarnate.

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There's no falsity in Jesus. So therefore we can trust Jesus infinitely because he is true.

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And this is a point for us. If we disagree with Jesus, Jesus is true and every other person on earth has become a liar if we disagree with him.

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If we disagree with the reality that Jesus has created, then we have become a liar because he alone is true.

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Therefore, if you want to be in the truth, you have to be in him. So he's done these four things.

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The final thing that he has is perfect righteousness, which is why he's able to not only not be a lawbreaker, but be the law keeper.

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This is how the verse ends. He who speaks from himself seeks his own glory, but he who is seeking the glory of the one who sent him, he is true and there is no unrighteousness in him.

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I don't want to belabor the point here. He has God's authority. He's lived out God's law perfectly. He's glorified the father.

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He's true and there's not a single stain of unrighteousness in him. He is perfection in the flesh and he cannot break the law.

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He has perfectly triumphed over the law. That's the general case that Jesus makes before he even gets to their particular accusation.

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So when he gets to their particular accusation about he broke the Sabbath, he's now already built up his case against them so that they have no room to stand.

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The case against him was that he broke the Sabbath, just as how Jesus addresses that case particularly.

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Did not Moses give you the law? And yet none of you carry out the law.

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He goes on in verse 22, for this reason, Moses has given you circumcision, not because it was from Moses, but from the fathers.

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And on the Sabbath, you circumcise a man if a man received circumcision on the Sabbath so that the law may not be broken.

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And you were angry with me because I made an entire man well. Jesus has just exposed them.

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He takes the most glaring hole in their own theology and he turns it against them in a stroke of brilliance.

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Jesus is gonna ask a rhetorical question here that exposes their fallacy. And the question is, is it lawful to do good on the

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Sabbath? Is it lawful when one command, being obedient to one command causes you to be disobedient to another command?

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Is it lawful to do good on the Sabbath when it calls you to violate another command on the Sabbath? Jesus is asking them this question.

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And we remember what he does in Matthew 12, because I think this is on Jesus's mind and it's on Jesus's heart, because this is a common argument between Jesus and the

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Pharisees. Matthew 12 is another example. Jesus says to them, if you had known what this means,

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I love when Jesus says that. He's saying, you claim to know the Bible, but if you knew what it really meant, I desire compassion and not sacrifice, then you would have not condemned the innocent.

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For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath. And departing from there, he went into their own synagogue and a man was there whose hand was withered.

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And they questioned Jesus asking, is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath? And Jesus, so that they might accuse him.

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He wanted them to accuse him. He said to them, what man is there among you who has a sheep?

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And if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, he will not take hold of it and lift it out. How much more valuable than the sheep is that man?

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So then it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath. That's the argument

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Jesus advances in John 12. He's gonna advance a different argument in Matthew 12. He's gonna advance a different argument in John 7.

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In John 7, he's gonna offer circumcision as the argument for why good can be done on the Sabbath. Now, we're gonna talk more about circumcision next week.

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We're gonna talk about it for the whole sermon. And it's not gonna be weird or gross. We're just gonna talk about it from a covenantal perspective.

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But just in case you don't know what circumcision is, we need to define it. This is the most awkward part of the sermon on a sermon where Jesus walks into a city that's filled with awkwardness, right?

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Circumcision is when the mother and the father, because God commanded it in his law, would cut away the foreskin of the male child's penis on the eighth day.

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And on the eighth day, that was the covenant ceremony that God had commanded for all generations at all time for his people.

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Circumcision was so central to the Jewish faith that it was an unbreakable covenant.

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And it even goes back, John says, before Moses to Abraham. So this is where it comes from in Leviticus 12 .2.

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This is the Mosaic version of it. When a woman gives birth and bears a child, she shall be unclean for seven days.

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And in the day of her menstruation, she shall be unclean. On the eighth day of the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised.

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Now, if you think about this, if she had a child on the Sabbath, she's already broken the law, because she's working.

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She's laboring, literally, on the Sabbath. My mom gave birth on, what's the holiday that's for workers?

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Labor Day. Isn't that funny? My mom was on labor on Labor Day. My mom was a lawbreaker. So if a woman gives birth on the

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Sabbath, the child will be eight days old on the next Sabbath. And on the next Sabbath, for 1 ,000 years, they had been doing this.

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They had been doing work on the Sabbath, circumcising their sons. So Jesus is saying, none of you had a problem with this.

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All of you understood the nuance of the law, that it is okay to do good on the Sabbath, and that some commands actually are more pressing than other commands.

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That circumcision was a law that was never to be forsaken, even if it fell on the Sabbath. So you have a legal quandary that they understood how to navigate.

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When you're gonna break one law, either way, they chose, rightly, that you would break the law of the

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Sabbath in order to circumcise your kids, because the covenant of God for that sign was more important than the law of the

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Sabbath. They understood how to navigate this perfectly. Another example is what

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Jesus says in Matthew 12. If you have a sheep and it falls into a pit, which is really common.

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Sheep are dumb. There's this great YouTube video. Type in sheep falling in a pit.

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It is hilarious. They fall into pits all the time. So if a sheep falls into a pit on the

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Sabbath, you are, it is right for you to go and dig that sheep out of the pit and bring it back into the fold.

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It is loving to do that, which showcases that they understood the heart of the law for an animal, but they didn't understand the heart of the law for a man.

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Think about this. This man is sitting at the sheep gate, at the pool where they wash the sheep, and they were willing to pull a sheep out of the pit, but not him.

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He had been in a pit of paralysis for 38 years, stuck there.

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And in their self -righteousness and smugness, they walked right past him thinking, well, I can't help him. That would break the law.

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And yet they'd go get a dirty beast out of a pit. It's ridiculous. What Jesus was doing was infinitely better than circumcision here.

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And it was better than pulling a lost sheep out of a pit. See, in circumcision, you cut away a small portion of the flesh, and the promise is that new flesh will grow in its place.

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And that represents the new covenant that God is gonna bring when he circumcises our hearts, like Moses said in Deuteronomy 10, 16.

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He cuts away our heart of stone and gives us a new heart of flesh. The circumcision in the

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Old Testament was just one part of the body that was set aside for God. Jesus has taken an entire man and given his whole body new flesh, new muscles, new skeletal structure.

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Whatever it was that caused his paralysis is now instantly healed. And that man is perfectly able to walk and jump and leap and dance for the first time in 38 years.

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And they can't even see the connection. They falsely accused him of breaking the law, and yet they don't even follow the law themselves.

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Jesus has laid out five cases of general reasons why he didn't break the law.

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He has God's authority. He joyfully and willingly obeyed the law. He glorified God in everything that he did.

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He alone is true, which means they are liars. He alone is righteous, which means that they are sinners. And in this specific case, he proved it from their own law that they're the ones who are lawbreakers and not him.

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Now, Jesus is gonna turn from here. He's been talking about his innocence and he's proven it.

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Now he's gonna turn and he's gonna pronounce their guilt, and it is striking. The first thing that he's going to do is he's gonna look at the ones who falsely accused him, and he's gonna accuse them of false witness.

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The reason that they're not carrying out the law, first and foremost, is that they have falsely accused the

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Son of God of breaking the Mosaic law. They had no evidence, no proof, and this, of course, foreshadows the mock trial that's gonna happen in seven months where they could trumped up charges on him and crucify him on no evidence.

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They are breaking the law by being false witnesses. Unless we not realize how severe this is, that made the top 10, thou shalt not bear false witness.

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False witnessing is a heinous sin in the Old Testament. And it's one of the things that God himself hates.

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This is what it says in Exodus 23, one. You shall not bear a false report.

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Do not join your hand with a wicked man to be a malicious witness. This was serious to God.

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In Proverbs 6, 16 through 19, God says something that is shocking to us who, for most of our life, have been given verses on Hallmark cards.

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This verse is really severe. There are six things which the

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Lord hates. Seven things which are an abomination to him. Haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that run rapidly to evil, a false witness who utters lies, and one who spreads strife among the brothers.

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Do you see that they are breaking all of these? Jesus is saying that they're false witnesses, but this whole passage is seven examples of how they've broken the law.

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They have haughty eyes, meaning that they have stood over Jesus in judgment of Jesus, thinking that they're better than Jesus, looking down their nose at Jesus.

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That's an abomination. They have a lying tongue. They've accused him of something he didn't do.

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They have hands that are ready to shed innocent blood. In seven months, they're gonna kill him. They have a heart that devises wicked plans.

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What could be more wicked than killing the Son of God? They have feet that run rapidly to evil.

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What could be more evil than running into the city of Jerusalem, grabbing Jesus and murdering Him, the only righteous man?

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They're the false witness who convicted Him. They're the ones who spread strife among the people. Seven abominations this people have done, all wrapped up in one accusation of false witness.

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The punishment for this would be utterly severe. Proverbs 19 .5 says, a false witness will not go unpunished.

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And he who tells lies will not escape. What is he saying that they wanna escape from? Well, they wanna escape from their day in court?

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They wanna escape from a slap on the wrist? He's talking about the fires of hell. Revelation 21 .8

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says, but for the cowardly and unbelieving and abominable, murderers and immoral persons and sorcerers and idolaters and all liars, false witnesses, their part will be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.

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In this passage, God says that He hates what they're doing. And it's so abominable to Him that it's gonna end up that they are going to be plunged into the lake of fire.

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This is really serious. That's just the first accusation that Jesus gives. The second one's murder. And it's all over this narrative.

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And the passage that defines John 7 is John 5. In verse 18, it says, they were seeking all the more to kill

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Him. In John 7 .1, after these things, Jesus was walking in Galilee for He was unwilling to walk in Judea because the

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Jews wanted to kill Him. In verse 19, why do you seek to kill me? In chapter eight, which is in the same week,

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Jesus says, I know that you're Abraham's descendants, yet you seek to kill me because my word has no place in you.

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They wanted to kill an innocent man thinking that they were somehow self -righteous and innocent by murdering

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Him. Do you see how perverted their hearts have come? Do you see how much sin has twisted and mangled their soul?

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That they would believe themselves righteous for killing Him. They are the lawbreakers.

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But it's the third that's even the most shocking. In a way, these are normal ways to break the law.

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All of us have lied. All of us have borne false witness and the punishment for us should be severe. We'll talk about the hope in just a moment, but without Christ, the punishment for our sins is severe.

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Those are normal ways to sin when you bear false witness. That's a normal and awful way, but it's normal.

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When you murder someone, and there's many ways to sin, many ways that you can murder someone. You think about abortion today.

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That's a million murders a year. You think about a crime of passion. That's many murders per year. You think about an angry look.

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How many people will be murdered with an angry look? Jesus says, if you have it in your own mind and you call your brother a fool, then you've committed murder in your heart.

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It's a normal way that all of us have been found guilty by the law. But they go a step beyond normal.

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They go to something unthinkable, extraordinary, unforgivable.

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They go to the place where they commit a sin that Jesus is unwilling to forgive, an unpardonable sin.

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John 7, 19 says, did not Moses give you the law? And yet none of you carries it out.

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Why do you seek to kill me? And then the crowds answered and said, you have a demon. They've just looked at the son of God and they've seen his teaching.

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They've heard his sermons. They've watched his miracles. They've seen his character. They've listened to his explanations.

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And they say that the best explanation for the power that emanates out of you is not

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God, but Satan. They are so twisted and mangled in their depravity that all they can say is

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Satan is responsible for you. And I say that this is unforgivable because the

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Bible says that this is unforgivable. Look at Matthew chapter 12 again. Matthew 12 is a key passage that tells us how we should interpret

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John 7. This is what it says in Matthew 12. A demon possessed man who was blind and mute was brought to Jesus and Jesus healed him.

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And the mute man spoke and he saw, all the crowds were amazed and they were saying, this man cannot be the son of David, can he?

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But when the Pharisees heard this, they said, this man cast out demons by Beelzebub, the prince of demons.

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And knowing their thoughts, Jesus said to them, any kingdom divided against itself is laid waste. Any city or house divided against itself will not stand.

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If Satan cast out Satan, then he's divided against himself. How then will his kingdom stand?

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If I by Beelzebub cast out demons, by whom do your sons cast them out?

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For this reason, they will be your judges. But if I cast out demons by the spirit of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you.

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And how can anyone enter a strong man's house and carry off his property unless he first binds the strong man?

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That's Jesus promising that he's gonna bind Satan when he came on earth and he did. And then he will plunder his house.

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He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters. Therefore, I say to you, any sin and any blasphemy shall be forgiven people, but blasphemy against the spirit shall not be forgiven.

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Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him, either in this age or the age to come.

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This is a debated passage, but if we look at it carefully, it's really easy. Jesus has just done a work.

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The Pharisees trying to delegitimize Jesus has attributed the power of that work to Satan instead of the spirit of God, and Jesus says that is unforgivable.

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You can spit in Jesus's face. You can punch him while he's blindfolded.

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You can put a crown of thorns on his head. You can beat him until he collapses. You can crucify him on a cross.

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You can disavow him and disavow him and disavow him, and all of that can be forgiven, but when you look at Jesus and his power and his glory and what he's doing, and you attribute

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Jesus's work to Satan, that is so far gone that you are beyond grace.

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You are unforgivable at that moment, and the punishment could not be more severe.

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In the short term, they're gonna live in a very, very awful punishment, and that punishment is

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Jesus is going to let them sit in their sin. Sometimes punishment is not

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Jesus coming against us or God coming against us. It's letting us sit in our sin, and they're gonna sit in their sin for seven more months, and it's gonna destroy them.

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It's gonna pervert them, and it's gonna cause them in their fury to turn on Christ and seal their fate and kill

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God's son. We get this view that God sent his son to die and that he was completely happy about it.

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It did please the father to crucify his one and only son, but for the people who murdered him, for the people who turned on him,

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God's people who were supposed to love him and welcome him, Malachi 2 says, your

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God is gonna visit you in your temple. They knew for those people to kill Jesus and to attribute his power to the work of Satan is totally unforgivable.

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So there was a near term judgment that they were gonna sit in their sins. There's a far term judgment that they're gonna be utterly destroyed.

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This is what it says in Matthew 23, just days before Jesus dies. Woe to you.

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That means curses fall on you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. For you build the tombs.

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Yeah, I have a hole punch right where that word is. I'm sorry. I just had NBS, okay.

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For you build the tombs of the prophets and adorn the monuments of the righteous. And you say, if we had been living in the days of our fathers and we would not have been partners with them in shedding the blood of the prophets, you testify against yourself.

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You are sons of those who murdered the prophets. Jesus says, fill up the measure of guilt of your fathers.

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He's saying, grab a container and let it be filled with the wrath of God. You serpents, you brood of vipers.

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How will you escape the sentence of hell? Therefore behold, I am sending you prophets and wise men and scribes.

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Some of them you will kill and crucify and some of them you will scourge in your synagogues and persecute from city to city so that upon you may fall the guilt of all the righteous blood shed on earth from the blood of righteous

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Abel to the blood of Zechariah, the son of Barakiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar.

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Truly I say to you, all of these things will come on this generation. Jesus is saying that there is a container of God's wrath and it has been stored up since Cain murdered

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Abel. And all of it will fall on that generation for crucifying

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God's one and only son. And what their punishment is, is a picture of hell. Rome comes in 40 years later.

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Hell is both fire and suffering. That's a good way to reduce it down to the Jews suffered immensely in AD 70.

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The Romans came in and cut off their supply lines. They circled around the city so that no food could get into the city.

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And it was during the Passover, ironically. So everyone from Israel was inside the city, a million or more people.

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And they became so hungry that they were starving to death. And in their insanity, Josephus, who's a

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Jewish historian, records that some of the women were roasting their children in the fire so that they could eat.

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They were suffering a hellish punishment for killing God's one and only son. And not only that, because hell is both suffering and fire when most of them were dead from starvation, the

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Romans tore down the wall with their military equipment. They came in and slaughtered the rest of them.

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Over a million Jews were killed. And just to put that in perspective, the population of Jews in the 1930s and 40s was more than the population of Jews back then so that this was in fact a greater

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Holocaust than the one that happened in the 30s and 40s by percentage of population and by suffering.

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And Rome set their city on fire. Suffering and fire fell upon this generation.

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Woes and curses fell upon this generation because they killed God's one and only son.

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As awful as that is, it would be very easy for us to look at them and point our finger at them and say, why would you do that?

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How could you do that? And yet the finger also needs to point back at us as well.

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We're like the crowds in the fact that we've broken the law. We've lied, we've bore false witness, we've murdered people in our own hearts.

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The punishment is for us as well. We deserve it. They got it physically in Jerusalem and eternally in hell, but we deserve eternity in hell.

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And we're not like Jesus. We are like the crowds, but we are not like Jesus. We have not possessed the authority of God.

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We have not ever once joyfully obeyed the Father in every area of our life. I challenge you to find one instance of your life where you obeyed

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God perfectly out of pure motives. It just doesn't exist. We've not glorified

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God because we've fallen short of the glory of God. We've not been true because we've been liars. We have not been righteous because all of our life has been marred by sin.

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Honest question, what is gonna stop God from giving us the same punishment as the

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Jews? We deserve it as well. And the reason is because Jesus did not come to keep us in our sins.

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He came to forgive us and free us of our sins. You see, the point of salvation is not that we can do anything.

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We can't do, if I'm gonna speak as I grew up, speaking in the South, we can't do nothing.

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Everything that we've ever done has fallen short of the glory of God. Therefore, we need someone else. We need a

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Savior. Jesus says that every sin that you've ever committed, every lie, every false witness, every lust, every corruption, every anger, every curse, all of it that nailed

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Him to the cross, all of it can be forgiven in Him. You don't have to be perfect, and that actually is the point.

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You are not perfect, He is. So the point of the gospel is that we would stop looking at ourselves and we would start looking at a

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Savior because if we look at ourselves, we'll be just like the Pharisees who watched themselves to the gates of hell and plunged right in.

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We gotta stop looking at ourselves and start looking at Jesus Christ because He's the only one who can take away our sins.

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And what I find so fascinating about this is that there's this exchange that happens like we talked about earlier. He takes our sin and then

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He gives us His righteousness. He doesn't just forgive us of our shortcomings,

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He gives us His glory so that the passage that's talking about Jesus now becomes true for us.

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Those things that Jesus said, He alone possesses God's authority. He alone joyfully obeyed the

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Father. He alone glorified God. Those things are now for us if we are in Jesus so that in Jesus, now we have the authority of God on our life because the

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Holy Spirit has come inside of us. Now we have the Spirit of God who makes us joyfully and willing to obey the law of God.

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Now we have this alien glory from Jesus that holds us up and makes us able to, whether we eat or whether we drink, to give glory to God.

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We have that because of Christ. Our life is now true because it's true in Him.

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Our life is now righteous because it's righteous in Him. Everything we have has been given to us by grace.

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And all it takes is just to say, I want You, Jesus. I don't want myself anymore.

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I don't want my failure anymore. I don't want my power. I don't want my strength. I want You. Yeah. The point of salvation is not our power.

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The point of salvation is our gratitude toward Christ. When we know how low and helpless and powerless we are, everybody wants to run away from this because we live in a culture where participation awards and everybody's a special snowflake.

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We are not. We're falling short of the glory of God. We're worms in our unrighteousness.

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That's a good thing to acknowledge. We can't do it, but Christ has done it.

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Get our eyes off of ourself and onto Him, and that produces gratitude. And the whole point of this passage really is summed up in this simple phrase.

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The one who was unwelcomed in Jerusalem welcomes us into His kingdom, and He does it by His grace, and He does it so that we will praise

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Him, and He does it so that we will have gratitude in our hearts. Amen? Amen. Let's pray. Lord, thank

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You. Lord, thank You that we're out in the middle of an ocean of sin, and we can't save ourself.

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At best, we swim a mile, we swim two. We're swallowed by some big fish.

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We drowned. And yet, Lord, in the moment of our greatest pain and our greatest trial,

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You, from a superior position, reached Your hand down and grabbed us out. Lord, for everyone here who is in Christ, Lord, let that never become dull.

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Lord, every week we celebrate the same truth, and every week it's new, and it's precious, and it's beautiful. You deserve all the glory.

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Lord, if there's anyone here who is not, a Christian, who they're still trusting in themselves, they're still trusting in their righteousness, they're still trusting in their religiosity and obedience,

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Lord God, would You bring them to their knees so that they can see they cannot save themselves, so that they'll stop looking at themselves and start looking at You.

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Lord, we pray that all of us in this room, now united as one congregation, blood -bought by Christ, that we would look to You.