Romans Chapter 12

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Romans Chapter 13

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The Bible is in Romans 12.
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What we've been doing, I know a lot of y'all haven't been here, been on Work Blessings and stuff, so many of you have not been a part of this series.
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I was out last week.
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My daughter had a fever real bad, so I had to stay home and help her out, help my wife out.
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So we've been going chapter by chapter through Romans, and I haven't been doing a pure exposition just because time does not allow.
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If we're doing a whole chapter in one lesson, to do a deep dive.
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But basically, we've been doing an overview of each chapter.
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And what's interesting about chapter 12 of Romans is it begins the last movement of the book.
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Everything alright? That's fine.
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No worries.
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No worries.
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No worries.
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While y'all are doing that, I'm just going to kind of remind you that if you look at Romans and you break it down into its parts, you could say the first three chapters deal with the subject of sin.
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Now this is a very, very...
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I wrote it wrong.
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I know, I said it's tentative.
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The first three chapters deal with the subject of sin and the universality of sin.
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Chapters, so that's one through three.
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Chapters four and five deal with justification.
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Chapters six through eight, we could argue, deal with sanctification.
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And this is broad, broad stuff, guys.
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We could dive deeper into this.
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But sin, justification, sanctification.
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And then nine to twelve deal with...
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Or rather, nine to eleven, excuse me, deal with...
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Paul makes an excursus on the subject of Israel and the question of how does Israel relate to the New Covenant.
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And we did three weeks on that.
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The last time I was here, we finished chapter eleven.
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Now chapter twelve, we could say chapter sixteen, but chapter sixteen really is Paul's greeting to the Romans.
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So we say chapter twelve through fifteen is, we would say, Paul's application of his doctrine.
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So application of doctrine.
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Because one through eleven is Paul's doctrine and really it is an expanse of Paul's understanding of soteriology.
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Soteriology being the doctrine of salvation.
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And so we get to chapters twelve through fifteen and Paul's going to apply this.
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How is it that salvation applies to the life of the believer? When we get saved, does it change us? And how does it change us? And how should we then live in light of what God has done? So with that in mind, I'd like to just read the entire chapter.
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It's only twenty-one verses.
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I'll read the entire chapter.
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I'll pray and then I'll begin to break it down.
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I'm in the ESV so it may read a little differently from what some of you have.
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I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
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Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
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For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned.
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For as in one body we have many members and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ and individually members in one of another.
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Having gifts that differ according to the grace given to us, let us use them if prophecy in accordance to our faith, if service and our serving, the one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in his exhortation, the one who contributes in generosity, the one who leads with zeal, the one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness.
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Let love be genuine.
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Abhor what is evil, hold fast to what is good.
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Love one another with brotherly affection.
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Outdo one another in showing honor.
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Do not be slothful in zeal, but be fervent in spirit.
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Serve the Lord.
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Rejoice in hope.
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Be patient in tribulation.
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Be constant in prayer.
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Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.
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Bless those who persecute you.
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Bless and do not curse them.
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Rejoice with those who rejoice.
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Weep with those who weep.
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Live in harmony with one another.
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Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly.
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Never be wise in your own sight.
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Repay no one evil for evil, but get thought to do what is honorable in the sight of all.
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If possible, so far as it depends upon you, live peaceably with all.
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Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God.
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For it is written, vengeance is mine.
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I will repay, says the Lord.
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To the contrary, if your enemy is hungry, feed him.
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If he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
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For by doing, you will heap burning coals on his head.
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Do not be overcome with evil, but overcome evil with good.
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Father, I thank you for your Word.
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I pray even now that as we seek to understand this chapter, first and foremost, that you would keep me from error.
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For Lord, I am a fallible man, incapable of preaching error.
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And Lord, I do pray for every man under the sound of my voice that you would open up his heart to understand what your Word has to say.
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And Lord, if there are those here who know the Lord, may it be that their hearts are encouraged and challenged by these words.
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But Lord, for those who do not know the Lord, I pray, Lord, that they would understand the call of repentance and recognize the distinction between law and gospel.
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And Lord, that we would all understand that salvation is not by what we do, but what Christ has done.
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Lord, help us to trust ever more deeply and rest in Him.
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In Christ's name, amen.
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Amen.
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There's a key word in the Bible most of you are probably...
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Yes, sir.
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I don't remember.
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There's a key word in the Bible, and it's a word that we need to always keep an eye out for.
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Most of you probably know this.
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Many of the other Bible teachers here have probably recognized it and mentioned it to you.
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And it is the word, therefore.
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Yeah.
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Anytime the word, therefore, comes up, that word is immediately tying the context of the statement that follows it with the statement that came before it.
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So, when we see the word, therefore, in Romans chapter 12, verse 1, we have to ask ourselves a question.
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Is Paul tying Romans 12, verse 1 to what he said just immediately prior, which was his discussing the subject of Israel and the church? Or is he now turning a page in the letter where he is saying, based on everything I have said up until this point, therefore, now do this.
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And I would lean to the latter of those interpretations.
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Certainly, we could go back into chapter 11, and we could see some things that Paul may be alluding to when he says, therefore.
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However, it is my contention and the contention of many scholars that Paul's letters follow a basic plot line, whether you're reading Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, or Romans, they all follow a basic plot line.
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And the plot line is this.
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Paul gives us doctrine in the beginning, and he gives us application at the end.
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He says, this is what you have in Christ, therefore, this is what you do in Christ.
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And so we have, in that sense, the promise of who we are and then the pointing to what we should do as a result.
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So I do think that in Romans 12, verse 1, the word therefore indicates a turning point not only for the chapter, but for the entire letter.
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And remember this, when these books were written, they didn't have many of the things that your Bibles have right now.
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When you look at your Bible, it has a title.
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None of these letters had titles.
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Your Bibles have chapters.
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None of these were written by Paul or John or James with chapters.
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Those were added many centuries later.
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And then even further still down the road were the verse divisions added.
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In fact, the verse divisions are only a few hundred years old.
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We, the idea of chapter and verse didn't exist when Paul was writing this.
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So what we see in the Bibles, we see words that are used to delineate new ideas, words that turn the reader from one concept to another.
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And one of those words is the word therefore.
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And so we get to chapter 12.
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And in some of your Bibles, chapter 12, verse 1 begins with the word therefore.
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Anybody got one, a Bible translation that begins? What translation do you have, sir? The CSV.
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CSV, read your first line.
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Thank you.
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And sir, you have one? NLT.
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NLT, also read just the first line.
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And so dear brother Tyne, he will find acceptable.
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This is truly the way he works with me.
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Okay, so yours doesn't use the word therefore, it uses and so.
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But still, and so being the translation of that.
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You had your hand up, sir? I have NIV.
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Okay, also begins with the word therefore.
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Therefore, our dear brothers and sisters.
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Yes, sir.
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Christian Stanley.
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New King James here.
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Mine starts out, I beseech you, therefore.
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Okay.
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All right.
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Well, good.
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Well, the word that actually begins the sentence in the Greek is not the word therefore.
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But the first word in the Greek text is the word, I exhort you.
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And then it's, I exhort you, therefore.
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So it's not that that really matters, because in the Greek language, word order is not as important as it is in English and establishing things like subject and predicate and things like that.
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But in the Greek, it does.
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It begins parakalao, which means I exhort.
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Un, which means therefore.
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Humas, you Adelphoi brothers.
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This is how it begins.
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And it says, I exhort, therefore, you brothers, through the compassions of God, to present your bodies or the bodies of you a sacrifice.
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And so this is where we begin this idea of turning the page.
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Paul is giving an exhortation.
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Now, I want to ask a question, a definition.
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What is what is an exhortation? Paul says, I exhort you.
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What is that? What is an exhortation? Okay.
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Somebody says challenge.
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Somebody says urging.
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Right.
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Yeah.
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So we talk about this is actually someone who is when the pastor gets up to preach.
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Often we say it is an exhortation.
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An exhortation is a call to action.
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All right.
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It's a call to do whatever.
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You know, the sermon in that sense is an is an exhortation.
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And Paul says in the ESV says, I appeal to you.
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I really I don't know if the word appeal is is is the most dramatic of words as as much as some other translations might say.
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I exhort thee or I challenge thee or I call thee.
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But he's he's he's he's telling them now what is the result of all the things that they have learned before and what have they learned before? They have learned that they are sinners.
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They have learned that salvation comes by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.
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They have learned that grace is not a license for sin.
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They have learned that to live in Christ is to walk as Christ walk.
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They have learned that God has chosen them and God has drafted or grafted them into the family of Israel.
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All these things are things that they have learned in the letter.
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And now he says, based on all this, I urge you, I appeal to you, I challenge you or I exhort you by the mercies of God to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.
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Now, the word living sacrifice is what we typically refer to as an oxymoron.
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An oxymoron is what? Yeah, two words that go together that have two opposing meanings, therefore creating a word that's somewhat paradoxical, like jumbo shrimp.
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All right.
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Microsoft works.
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Or yeah, or Dodge Ram.
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Think about it for a minute.
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A water heater.
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What? Hot water heater.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Okay.
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So what we, I would say that military intelligence, yeah, hot water heater is more of a, well, let's say, doesn't matter.
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It's a redundancy.
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Hot water heater is a redundancy.
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Yeah.
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So anyway, give me a second.
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He says, I want you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice.
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Now, the reason why I say that's an oxymoron is because sacrifices don't stay alive.
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If you think about sacrifice from the Old Testament concept, what was a sacrifice? Sacrifice was something that was killed, right? The very concept of sacrificing was something that wasn't alive.
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It was killed.
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It was brought up to the altar.
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Its throat was slit.
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Its blood was poured out.
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It was dead.
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And so Paul uses this very novel concept of saying that we are calling you, if you believe in Jesus Christ, we are calling you to live a life of daily living sacrifice.
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And think of this, how this fits into some of Paul's other writings in regard to how we are to live in Christ.
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Think of what he says in Philippians when he says, I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.
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And the life I now live, I live by faith in the son of God who gave himself for me.
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Paul talks about living a life that is a dead life.
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Dead to what? Dead to sin and alive in Christ, right? And so this is the call here.
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He says, I'm challenging you.
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I'm urging you by the mercies of God.
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And by the way, that's the only way we can be a living sacrifice is by God's mercy.
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He says, I'm calling you.
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I'm challenging you by God's mercy.
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And he actually uses the plural idea, the mercies of God.
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As we know, the Bible talks about God's mercy.
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His mercies are new every morning.
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And so God is not just once merciful to us, but He's constantly merciful to us.
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Therefore, He speaks of the mercies of God.
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He says, I'm appealing to you by these mercies to present your bodies as this living sacrifice.
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And then he uses two words to describe what the living sacrifice looks like.
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He first says the word holy.
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And then he says the word acceptable.
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Now, by definition, what does holy mean? It means to be set apart by its simplest terms.
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We say something is made holy by setting it apart from everything else.
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Like the word holiday comes from the word holy day, which means a day that is set apart from other days.
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So, huh? Well, we're going to get there in a second.
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But just thinking of the etymology of the word, the idea of something that's set apart, right? But when things are set apart for God, they're set apart for cleansing.
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They're set apart to be that higher standard.
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So, yeah, there's...
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And when we think of God being the ultimate example of holiness, God is different than everything else in the whole world.
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In fact, the one attribute of God that I stress the most in my teaching is not God's love, even though God's love is grand, or God's grace, even though God's grace is absolutely wonderful.
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I stress God's holiness.
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And the reason why I stress God's holiness is because God's holiness demonstrates His distinction from His creation.
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God is not a part of this universe.
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God is outside of this universe.
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God is not in the things that are made.
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He is above the things that are made.
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He sustains the things that are made.
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He created all things, and in Him all things hold together.
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Pantheists believe that God is in the tree, right? And God is in the bushes.
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And God is in the...
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Because Pantheists say God is everything.
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That's not what the Bible teaches.
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The Bible says God is everywhere, but not intricately connected to everything because God does not depend upon any of these things.
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God existed prior to creation.
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By the way, that shouldn't even be a surprise.
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He had to exist to create, right? There had to be an all-sufficient, all-objectively living creator who lives outside of time and space.
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God is not bound by time.
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God is not bound by space.
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God is not bound by matter.
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God is not bound by anything.
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And therefore, when we talk about God's holiness, we're talking about the fact that God is wholly different than everything else in creation.
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Nothing is like unto Him, the prophet said.
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Your God, there is no other.
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Your God, there's none like unto you.
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Remember, Isaiah said that.
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So when we talk about holiness, we have to first say God is holy.
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And then we go to 1 Peter, and 1 Peter says, as God is holy, so you too are what? To be holy as He is holy.
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So we're called to a life of holiness.
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But we can't be like God because we can't exist outside of time.
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We can't exist over creation.
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We can't do those things.
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So when God calls us to holiness, I go back to what my brother said here a few minutes ago, it is calling us to a standard.
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It's saying we are to live a life that is actually set apart from the rest of the world.
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There's an old saying, and I don't always think it's the easiest to apply, but it is still true that we are to live in the world, but not of the world, right? And the idea of living a holy life does not mean that you come out of the world and go live in a monastery somewhere.
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See, that became very popular, especially during the Middle Ages, between 500 and 1500, living in monasteries for many Christians was something that they did because they felt like that was the only way to live a holy life, was to come out of the world and live with other men who had decided to live a life of asceticism, which basically means to separate themselves from everything in the world and to go and live in a monastery.
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And you guys may think that set free feels like a monastery sometimes, but let me just eject that idea because you guys ain't got nothing on the Augustinians, all right? The monastery that Martin Luther lived in had none of the creature comforts.
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First of all, it even had the idea that each of you have your own Bible.
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The fact that each of you get three square meals a day The fact that we have air conditioning and heating.
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You're not taking a stick and whipping yourself with it every time you sin, I hope.
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But those are concepts that were part of the ascetic lifestyle.
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And asceticism means to be set apart, to set yourself out apart from the world.
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That's not the call to holiness.
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The call to holiness is the call to live as Christ.
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Christ lived in the world and yet was different from the world, didn't He? What did it say? He ate with tax collectors and sinners, but He wasn't like them.
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By the way, don't ever use that as an excuse next time you want to go to a bar.
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Well, Jesus drank with...
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Well, if you go in there to drink, you ain't going there to be Jesus.
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Just to be clear.
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If you go in there to get drunk, you're not going there to be Christ.
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Just to be clear.
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Christ didn't go out getting drunk.
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Christ didn't go out philandering with prostitutes.
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He lived a holy life in the midst of those people.
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He lived a holy life in the midst of all that.
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It says in the text, we are to offer up our bodies.
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Why do you think Paul says bodies here? The reason why he addresses the body is because the body is what we use to sin with.
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In other places of Scripture, he talks about our bodies as those things which we have to take under subjection.
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But what do we do first? We subject our mind.
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Paul says we have to take every thought captive.
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Why? Because it's our thoughts that lead into our actions.
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It's our thoughts that lead into these things.
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And your mind is part of your body.
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So when he says here, he says that we live a holy and acceptable lifestyle.
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And I'm going to come back to the idea of spiritual worship in just a minute.
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He then very, in the very next sentence, he says, do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your what? Mind.
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You see, if your body is going to address and deal with sin, it first has to begin in your mind.
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And your mind has to be renewed.
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Why do you think you guys come in here and spend weeks and months just pouring over the Scriptures, doing homework and things like that? You think we're just trying to kill your time? No, we're trying to renew your mind.
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We're hoping that by God's grace, He will give you the gift of regeneration which leads to genuine faith.
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Because that has to happen first.
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If you don't have faith, none of this is going to change you.
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But if you come to faith, these things, these spiritual disciplines will grow you in that faith.
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Yes, sir.
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What does it say to take care of your tongue? Brother, I'd have to look it up.
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Yeah, I'd have to look.
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I know it says it, but right off the top of my head, I don't have that.
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I don't have the address in my mind.
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But I do want to go back to one word in verse one before we jump past into verse two.
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He says that to live this life of living sacrifice, which is holy and acceptable to God, is your...
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And in the ESV, it says spiritual worship.
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Uh, give me some other translations.
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Don't read the whole text.
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Just tell me other...
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Reasonable service.
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I can only do this one at a time.
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All right.
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Reasonable service.
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What's another one? True worship.
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All right.
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What's another? Anything else? Rational service.
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All right.
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Anything else? What's that? True and proper.
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Okay, we'll just go with true.
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True and proper.
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That's fine.
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The reason why I bring this up is because I do think the term spiritual worship can be confusing to our modern context because when we think about worship, what is our initial thought? You had your...
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It's okay.
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Chameleon.
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Chameleon? Oh, corporate worship.
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Gathering.
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Yes, corporate worship.
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Okay.
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Worship, bowing down.
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But if I said, hey, we're going to go worship.
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What do y'all think? Church.
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That's kind of what I was saying.
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When we hear the word worship, we tend to think about what we do on Sunday.
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Not that we don't worship other days, but we tend to think about the Lord's day and what we do on the Lord's day.
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And Tuesday night, you guys go and worship on Tuesday nights as well, right? But that is not what Paul is referring to here when he talks about worship.
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In fact, the word underlying this word is really not even worship in the sense of what we think about as worship.
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It is latreon, which is it can be translated as worship.
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But I think the word service is probably more in line with what Paul is getting to.
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And even more so, the word before that is not the word for spiritual.
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This is why I always take this issue when I come to this verse, because the ESV translates to spiritual worship.
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Neither one of those is a clear translation because the word here is logikon.
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Logikon is where we get the word logical or reasonable.
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So I do think the word reasonable or rational is the better word.
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And then latreon can mean worship.
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But in this sense, what Paul is saying is Paul is saying that we need to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, pleasing and acceptable to God, because that's the right thing to do for a God who loved us and saved us.
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It's the rational response.
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Does that make sense? That's the best part, because people get caught up in how this is spiritual worship.
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And there is a...
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Historically, there is a reason why the ESV translates it this way, because during the time of Paul and the writing of this, these words were akin to the idea where there was worship of animals.
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You know, there were times where there was animalism and people worshipped, you know, they would make statues out of cats and dogs and cows and stuff like that.
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And those animals are not spiritual in the way we are spiritual.
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And some people think that what Paul meant here by spiritual worship is that this is the worship that is akin or proper to truly spiritual beings, humans.
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And that could be the case.
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In fact, that's what Doug Moose sort of leans towards in his commentary on this.
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And he's a guy that I don't like to argue with because he's pretty smart.
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But I keep coming back to the idea that what Paul is simply saying here is the most reasonable thing in the world that you can do when you realize that God has saved your soul.
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The most reasonable thing that you can do is to give yourself to Him fully, body and mind.
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See, I don't understand people who say, yeah, I can follow Christ, but I don't need to obey.
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Or I can follow Christ, but there's no...
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And there are movements out there that teach that there's no expectation of obedience in the Christian life.
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And I think that's a serious issue because this came out very popular back in the 60s.
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There's a movement called carnal Christianity.
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Carnal Christianity was the movement that taught that essentially you could be a Christian in name only.
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That you could simply name Jesus as your savior and that was it.
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It didn't matter whether or not your life changed.
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And I think there's an issue with that.
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That carnal Christianity movement became really very popular as people began to just, you know, have this idea that I can be a Christian and live however I want.
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And there's no expectation or call to holiness.
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And then you get to verses like this and they say, well, this doesn't really affect your salvation.
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Paul was talking about salvation chapters one through nine or really chapters one through eight.
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So this really doesn't affect your salvation.
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And I would say this.
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If we are claiming to be believers, should we not also expect that not only will we change our name but that our lives would have some effect? And Paul says, I appeal to you brothers.
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By God's mercy, to offer yourself a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God.
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Because that's the reasonable response.
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That's the reasonable service.
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I mean, if someone gave you a gift that was beyond measure and you looked at that gift and just said, ah, I can take it or leave it.
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That would be foolish.
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And think about the gift that God has given to you if you are saved.
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He's given you his son for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son.
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He didn't give his cousin.
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God don't have a cousin.
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He didn't give you some illegitimate child.
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He gave his only begotten son that whosoever believe in him will not perish but have everlasting life.
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God gave the greatest gift in the world.
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And the most reasonable response to that would be absolute allegiance.
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Now, do we fail? Absolutely.
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Can we talk about what happens when we fail? Well, the Bible says if anyone sins, he has an advocate with God, Jesus Christ the righteous.
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And when we sin, we are to do what? Repent and go to him and know that he'll cleanse us and all those things.
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I'm not saying that we live a life of perfection because it just ain't there.
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But Paul is calling us to live a life which is a life of reasonableness.
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Reasonable response.
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Reasonable service to the Gospel.
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And then he goes back and he says, again in verse 2, Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
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What is he saying there? He's saying that there's two ways to be conformed.
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You can be conformed to this world or you can be conformed to Christ.
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You say, well, if we're conformed to Christ, it's going to be imperfect.
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Yeah, but an imperfect confirmation to Christ is still better than a perfect confirmation to the world.
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And you understand what conforming is.
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When you pour water into a glass, it becomes the shape of that glass.
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When you pour sand into a vase, it becomes the shape of that vase.
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That's conformation.
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And when we are in the world, are we being conformed to the world? Do we look just like the world? Does our worship look just like the world? Does our living out of our Christian life...
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And let me tell you something, and again, I don't want to get too far off the subject here, but a very, very dastardly thought entered into the Christian life relatively recently in history, and it was the concept of a distinction between the secular and the sacred.
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Now, we often think of the secular and the sacred as being things like secular authority and sacred authority, right? Secular authority is the governor and the president and the police, and the sacred authority is the church and all those things, the Scriptures, right? And so we can make a distinction in our minds, but here's what happened because of this.
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By the way, if you think about historically, when did this happen? Really, it happened with the introduction of the separation of church and state, the idea of the separation of God and government.
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Very recently, a senator in our United States was in a challenge discussion in one of the committee meetings, and somebody says, well, it is not God's will that we murder infants in the womb.
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Somebody said that, and this man stood up in our government, and he said it is not the purpose of this committee to be concerned with what is God's will.
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It's not the purpose of this committee to be concerned with God's will.
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I was going to be like, step back.
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I'll let you take that one because honestly, the further we get away from being concerned with God's will as a nation, the further down we go into utter depravity.
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Utter depravity.
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Look at what we have today.
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Drag queens reading storybooks to kids in a library.
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Oh, there's nothing wrong with that.
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There's everything wrong with that.
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Don't be stupid.
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Don't be stupid.
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Don't come and argue after with this.
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Don't come to me and argue with me why that's okay because it isn't.
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The point is we have come in our mind with the idea that it's okay to have an entirely secular life that has nothing to do with the sacred, and that's the way Christians have decided to live.
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I got my work life.
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I do my work thing.
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I cuss.
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I drink.
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I spit.
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I stink.
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I don't care because I'm at work.
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My work life don't have to match my church life.
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And you know what the Bible says about that? It uses a big word, starts with an H, and it's called what? Something I can't write apparently.
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Hypocrisy.
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Like a doctor.
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It's hypocrisy.
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When we go into church on Sunday morning, clean and nice and everything looks good and sounds good, it's called being fake if that isn't who we are in real life.
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Who you are in the dark is who you are for real.
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Go ahead, brother.
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Whitewashed tombs.
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Whitewashed tombs.
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Very good.
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That's a very good biblical example.
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That's what the Pharisees were, right? They looked good on the outside, but on the inside, they were full of dead men's bones.
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So Paul says don't be conformed to this world.
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When you go into the world, be different.
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What's so funny about the modern culture? Oh, we want everybody to show their individual colors.
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We want everybody to show how different and unique and distinct they are, unless they're Christians.
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If they're Christians, they need to shut up and sit down and not say anything because we don't want to hear that.
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If you think I'm exaggerating, just look at things like social media.
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Where social media, you proclaim Christ, you get banned.
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You proclaim the virtues of transgenderism, you're applauded.
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It's not a secret.
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So anyway, before we get to verse 2, yeah, we're basically out of time.
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I don't mean to do that.
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I do want to mention two quick things about the rest of the chapter and then we'll begin to draw to a close.
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Verses 3-8 deal with the subject of spiritual gifts.
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Now, maybe I'll, after we get through Romans, maybe I'll come back and we'll do something on spiritual gifts because I do think it's important that we understand that if we are believers, God has given us spiritual gifts for the purpose of actually having a function in His body.
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And His body is the church.
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And therefore, people say, oh, if I'm a Christian, I don't have to go to church.
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Well, that's stupid too.
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Don't be stupid because that's not right.
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The Bible calls us to be faithful to the local body and the local assembly.
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And God gifts us for the purpose of having a place within the local body and the local assembly.
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Therefore, if we are not a part of the local body and the local assembly, we're actually robbing from the church what God has given us to give.
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Not just your money.
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It ain't all about money.
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It's about the gift that God gave you to be to the church.
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And you say, well, I don't want to do that.
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We'll go back up to verses 1 and 2.
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Offer your body a living sacrifice.
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Ain't about you, Jack.
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It's about God.
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He calls you to live a holy and acceptable life.
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He calls you to live that life for Him.
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And if our want and our desire has not changed by coming to Christ, I would ask if we would truly come to Christ.
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Now again, you're not going to be perfect.
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But I will say this.
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I had a professor in school and in seminary, Dr.
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Jerry Powers.
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And he had a lot of southern colloquialisms.
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In fact, if you've ever heard me say, the Greek word for this is baloney.
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That's his.
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That is Jerry Powers.
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One of the other things he used to say though, is he said, when I came to Christ, I didn't stop sinning.
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He says, but God did change my wanna.
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He says, if you don't know what a wanna is, he said, a wanna is what you want to do.
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He says, and before I came to Christ, there's a lot of things I wanted to do.
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A lot of things I wanna.
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He says, and now I want to serve Christ.
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And that's the difference.
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That's the change.
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Has God changed my wanna? And so it's not about perfection, but it is about that changed heart.
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Has Christ changed you to want to serve Him? And we see in verses three to eight, an example of spiritual giftedness.
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Last, he begins to give marks of a Christian.
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The most important mark is in verse nine.
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He says, let love be genuine.
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And then he goes into talking about abhorring what is evil, loving one another, outdoing one another, and showing honored, not being slothful and zeal.
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Then he says the hardest thing in the world.
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Verse 14.
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Bless those who persecute you.
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Brothers, I am imperfect.
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And I announce my imperfections with shame, but I know who I am.
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And blessing those who persecute me is the hardest thing in the world.
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But remember this, Paul is not just simply stating something.
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He's actually mirroring something that was already said by Christ.
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Because if you go back to Matthew chapter five in the Sermon on the Mount, what does Jesus say? Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.
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It's probably the most difficult thing in the Christian life is we're called not to be people of vengeance, but people of patience.
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Not people who strike back, but people who pray back when people do evil to us.
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And I love the next to the last verse.
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He says, if your enemy is hungry, feed him.
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If he is thirsty, give him something to drink.
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For by so doing, you will heap burning coals on his head.
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Now, a lot of people take that to mean this.
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Well, if I'm nice to a person who's mean to me, I'm just going to make them even madder by heaping those coals on their head.
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That's not what that means.
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I do think it has an idea of repentance.
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That's right.
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Yeah, yeah.
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So when we say we're doing these things, we're not doing this just to get people more angry.
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No, we're doing it because our hope is that they would actually repent and know the same Christ that we know.
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You see, the easiest way to vanquish an enemy is to make him a friend.
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And therefore, if we pray that our enemies know the same Christ that we know, then they're no longer our enemies.
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They're our friends.
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So that's Paul's call to us is to love our enemies, just as Christ called us to love our enemies and pray that they would know the same Savior.
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You know, I think about my political opponents.
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There are people in the government, as I said, that are promoting all of these alternative lifestyles and sexual perversion and murdering of babies in the womb.
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I can't stand it.
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It drives me crazy.
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I get angry.
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I want to shout.
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But my prayer for them is that they would repent and know Christ.
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Because if you know Christ, you're not going to be on the side of murdering babies.
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If you know Christ, you're going to be on the side of what is right.
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So I pray that they would repent and know Christ.
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And that's how we should treat all of our enemies.
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That's hard, though.
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It's part of that being not conformed to the world, because the world says this, you hit me, I'm going to hit you back.
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Jesus says, love your enemies, pray for them.
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And in doing so, you may, in fact, encourage them to repent.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you for your word.
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I pray that your word would dive deep into our hearts.
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And Lord, if maybe there's men in this room who have issues with other men in this room, and maybe they've been considering them enemies for a time.
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Maybe, Lord, it's time for them to become friends through the gospel.
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And Lord, maybe in any one of our hearts, there has been a desire to be conformed to the world.
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I pray that we would seek to not be conformed to the world, but to be conformed to our Savior, Jesus Christ.
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In fact, your word tells us, Lord, that's the very thing we have been predestined to.
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Predestined to be conformed to the image of your Son.
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So I pray, O God, that you would, by your mercy and grace, conform us to Christ today.
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In Jesus' name, Amen.