True Freedom Brings True Love

Covenant Baptist Church

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The reason I looked back at verse 12 was for the beginning of that verse, and it really is the crux of the whole book of Galatians.

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The problem is that false teachers had come in and they had upset the Galatians. The way that they had upset the

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Galatians was by upsetting the clarity of the gospel itself. And so you have to imagine that the

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Galatians who had come in heard the gospel given by Jesus to Paul and had accepted it and believed in Christ and started eating together, where the old wall of hostility between Jew and Gentile had been demolished, and they were sitting at the table with one another, worshiping one another.

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And then these Judaizers come in and they start to upset by saying, you need to be circumcised.

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Yes, Jesus is good. We affirm that. We affirm that Jesus died for you, but you need to be circumcised because God requires it.

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And what this did is it brought division. It was no longer comfortable to sit at the same table together.

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It was no longer comfortable to have loving relationships within the church with one another.

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And ultimately what happened was the Galatians, the reason this teaching permeates and upsets them is because they lose their assurance.

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They're waffling. They're wondering, what happens here? Am I really right with God if I don't get circumcised?

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What about us Gentiles? Don't the Jews have a point? God always said that this was the covenant sign of circumcision.

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And so Paul comes in and he's very frustrated. If you remember back through chapter five and in chapter four,

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Paul says things, I'm perplexed. I can't believe that you would do this. Remember how you took care of me when

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I was there and now you want nothing to do with me. There's some that would say that I was a burden to you, that maybe

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I was grifting off of you. How did this happen? And the way that it happened was that the

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Galatians are in great danger of losing the gospel because their faith is being waffled.

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It's being messed with. It's being upset. I remember my long experience in,

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I would say, conservative evangelical churches that I remember as a teenager and a younger boy praying in the depths of night when things would be quiet and praying,

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Lord, am I really saved? Please save me. Please save me. And thinking to myself as the time in my early 20s when

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I would fall into besetting sin and just be hopeless, thinking, Lord, am

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I ever going to please you? Am I ever going to be able to stop doing this? And thinking to myself, am

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I really, am I a faker? Am I an imposter here? Am I faking this whole thing? And I remember in my mind and in my heart being upset, being upset.

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And I think that Christians sitting in the church today suffer from this. I think there is a suffering for the lack of assurance.

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And there are good things we say that do not help in the suffering. And that's what I want to clarify today.

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Today, the main drive today is, what are Christians like? What do we do?

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How do you know? How do you know you're a Christian? And we'll hear things that are very good. These are good things. You'll hear, hey, you need to preach the gospel to yourself, right?

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You need to remember what you are. There's nothing wrong with that. You Romans 8 .1,

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you need to remember our new inner man agrees with the law of God while our natural members rage against it.

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So you're going to keep sinning. That's Romans 7 .22. But sometimes it doesn't stop with the upset.

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We are upset. We wonder, has this really changed me? And I think that's because in our culture and what we've done is we have ripped the concept of Christianity away from the practical, natural world.

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And so what we do is we have an ethereal idea of holiness. And the idea is my whole

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Christian confession results on me having some sense of personal devotion and piety.

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And it's very difficult to measure that. It's very difficult. How much do you really believe what the

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Bible says? How much do you really believe in your heart that Jesus is your Savior? And we run into problems because the measuring stick is broken.

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Because once again, we're trusting in our own heart to understand what our heart believes.

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And our heart is deceitful. It's difficult. And so today, what

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I want to do is I want to mainly answer the question, how do we tangibly see the spiritual reality of our faith in Christ being played out in our lives?

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In short, how do I know that I'm really a Christian? And can I bank on that and never ask this question again or never suffer from this crippling doubt again?

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Well, let's look at the text and backtrack. We're going to pick up the first part of verse 13. Paul does a strange thing here where he gives an idea and then he jumps to another idea and then he kind of explains with a law sandwich in the middle.

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So we'll deal with the first part. And the first part is what we look at, what does a Christian have to do? What must a

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Christian be? The first point is Christians have to love freedom. They must love freedom. Verse 13 says, for you were called to freedom, brothers.

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You were called to freedom. The word means summoned. It's kind of a military sense here. This verse has a sense of you've been summoned by your commander.

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You've been summoned by your Lord to be free. And I think the freedom that's in view here is pretty obviously the freedom of conscience.

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Because that's what's plaguing the Galatians. There's then this albatross that's been put on their conscience to think,

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I'm not right with the Lord because I haven't done this thing. And what Paul's telling them is, don't worry about that.

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That thing is nothing. Don't worry about circumcision. It doesn't matter at all. In fact, if you get circumcision to try to make

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God happy with you, then you're cut off from the gospel. But at the same time, circumcision is nothing. It doesn't matter if you get circumcised unless you're doing it to try to get right with God.

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Then it's a problem. So we're called to freedom of conscience. And then there's always this thing.

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We get uncomfortable with that. Just as Bart said last week, we get uncomfortable when we're called sons of God.

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We think, yeah, but we want the balance to that. Are you really a son of God? Yeah, but I do bad things.

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We don't introduce ourselves, hi, I'm Joshua, son of God. We don't do that.

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There's a sense to where we have a humility. We understand that there's a gravity to that statement.

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But we also understand that it's true, that we are the sons of the free woman, that we are free, that we're in the household of God, that we are in his inheritance, and that he is our inheritance, and that there's a family thing going on there.

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But then we feel this, and Paul says it, because what Paul does in Galatians is he says, grace, grace, grace.

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Remember how he talks about the law. The law is your slave master. The law is your school teacher. It's your school marm who's scolding you all the time, right?

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And the law makes you feel, the law exposes that you can't measure up to God.

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It does this over and over again. There is no way to follow the law. If you think you're following the law, you're insane. You just don't know the law, and that's what

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Paul is saying. You don't even understand it. These Judaizers who are upsetting you, they don't understand what they're talking about.

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If they think circumcision is going to make God happy with you, these guys are crazy. That's not going to work, okay?

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That's stupid. But we're summoned to freedom, and we always want to give up this freedom of conscience, because we as Christians walking around can understand one thing, and this is the truth, and it can make you feel uncomfortable.

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We are righteous. Did you know that? Because the one who is suffering from the lack of assurance is not assured that he is righteous.

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That is a misunderstanding of the law, because the law definitively says you are not righteous.

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There is none righteous, not even one. But the one who is righteous, the

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God -man Jesus Christ, he imputed his righteousness to us. It's one of the most important aspects of his work on the cross, is that through him, he who knew no sin became sin, so that we might have the righteousness of God.

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When God looks at you, he sees perfect obedience and righteousness, and that is an encouraging thought.

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But for us, when we're thinking of the ethereal personal piety, how much time did I spend in the quiet time this morning?

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Ooh, I haven't done my Bible reading for three days. I need to read 25 chapters today, this kind of thing.

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And we start to get on this treadmill thinking, am I even a Christian? I didn't read the Bible this morning, and I didn't really want to.

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Lack of assurance. So he says this, you are free. And we think, yeah, but what's the responsibility, right?

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You're free. Because in our culture, we think of freedom as being able to literally do whatever you want, right?

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Unless it's say certain things in the public square. But you can do whatever you want. And what

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Paul does is he comes into this other side, and he says, don't turn this freedom, which is absolute.

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You have absolute freedom. You are a son of the king. You are a son of God. Do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh.

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This kind of carries the idea of Cain. It kind of carries the idea of military opportunities.

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Like, there's an opportunity to engage in a battle here. This is a battle. This is a place you don't want to engage.

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It's like with Cain, there is sin crouching at his door that its desire was for him.

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Cain took the opportunity to sin against his brother when he shed his blood. He should have not done that.

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He should have resisted the opportunity in the flesh. He should have gone to his father. Paul understands that when he's telling the

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Galatians, there's going to be a recoil to this. Because the Judaizers are telling them, you have to follow the law in these particular ways.

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And Paul's saying, you don't have to follow that at all. In fact, the law is your slave master.

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Throw that shackle off. Remember what Barth preached, I think, about a month ago, right? That servant, the covenant, the allegorical covenant, needs to be thrown out of the house.

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We have nothing to do with that anymore, okay? Oh, that's bold. And the

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Galatians think, man, okay, so we have freedom. And then Paul says, yeah, but don't turn that into an opportunity for the flesh.

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And thankfully, I think Barth's got the junk drawer sin texts coming up soon, and so he'll get to highlight that more.

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There are two ditches that we think of, right? When we think of freedom, what we can do is, there's this road that we're going down, and we think freedom and Christ is the middle of the road.

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And on one ditch is the Judaizer heresy of legalism. Like, I've got to make God happy with the things that I'm doing.

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That's a heresy. That is the way to lose the gospel. That's the way to be a son of perdition and a vessel of wrath instead of a son of God.

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That is not the gospel. On the other ditch, we think of licentiousness, right, as being the opposite to legalism.

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Licentiousness says, well, I'm going to take my freedom, and I'm going to do whatever my flesh wants to do.

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You know, drugs, sex, and rock and roll, right? Or greed, lying, and swindling. Or dishonoring our parents, or whatever it is.

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Like, what our hearts desire, we're going to run around like a rebellious wild donkey and do that. That's licentiousness.

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But I think the misunderstanding that we have is that these ditches are actually just a circle that's self -repeating.

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Because licentiousness always leads to legalism. The idea is that when I can do whatever

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I want, I start to understand, man, if everybody's doing that, we can't have a civilization here. And I kind of like my civilization.

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Like, I like when I stop at a stop sign feeling pretty confident that when I go into that intersection, somebody's not going to just annihilate me from blowing through the other light.

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We like some rules. Even the licentious one likes some rules, as long as the rules are that they enjoy.

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And so what happens is licentiousness makes a new moral code that says, these things are important because I like those.

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These things absolutely can't be crossed. And it just circles right back into legalism. Because Paul is going to explain the law in different terms today than he has in the past.

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We get this several times in Scripture. Peter writes that we should act as free people. That we don't use that as covering for evil.

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There's this idea that when we give opportunity to the flesh, that what we do is we take our Christian liberty and we say, see,

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I'm free to do these things. And it's a covering for bad deeds. And we act like the bad guys when we do that.

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We don't need to fear those ditches as Christians. We need to stay out of them. We need to stay out of the circle.

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You're not pleasing God whatsoever by your actions. That's not the way this works. God is perfectly pleased with you right now.

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But because we're pleased in Him, it changes the way we act.

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This is the idea. And it's important to put them in the correct order. Freedom from sin, simply put, is not freedom to sin.

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We are not free to sin. Because that actually is what we, in our foolishness, in our idolatry, we think that that is true freedom.

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The freedom to sin. To go live life to the fullest. But actually, that is the freedom to walk straight back into slavery.

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And that's what Paul's saying. Don't sin because what that's doing is going back into the shackles that you've already been freed from.

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There is nothing more free than having a clean conscience. When we have a clean conscience, we can invite people into our homes.

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We can have hard -hitting, honest conversations as friends. We're not afraid of what someone might learn about us.

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When your wife takes your cell phone, you're not terrified that she's going to look at the history and find something.

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You're not worried about what your boss is going to find if he comes into your office and sees what you're doing right now.

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Free conscience is free men. Free conscience brings courage. Because we're not afraid of what they're going to find out.

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And I think that it could be noted culturally that part of the problem that we have in the country is that we do not have many free consciences.

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We do not have many clean consciences. As Christians, we're afraid to speak up because we're afraid of what they might find out.

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And friends, that is slavery. We have to throw that off.

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And the way that we throw that off is by measuring ourselves accurately but understanding that truly freedom comes through Christ only.

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Jesus said to the Pharisees in John 8, he said, truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin.

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And the slave does not remain in the house forever. The son does remain forever.

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So if the son makes you free, you will be free indeed. You don't want to be in the house as a slave.

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The slave gets turned out of the house. The slave is doing works to please the master. The son knows that the master is pleased.

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The son acts out of love and freedom because he is free indeed. And remember, the one who sets us free is how we know that we are truly free because he has the power, the authority, the wisdom, and the stick to it just to make sure that we stay free forever.

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We will never be unfree, ever. We can think that we're going to go back into slavery, and we can for a time foolishly walk into slavery, but you know who set us free?

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He's going to complete the good work that he started in us. He is going to bring it to perfection.

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He is going to bring us into glory, and we are going to praise his name because ultimately it's about him and not us, and we are glory vessels to the of all creation.

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It's not about us. That's what Paul says. It's so short, and I hope to expound on that.

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Remember who we are. We have to remember who we were. When we're fighting against the flesh, we have to remember that we were that.

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Titus 3 .3, there's a lot of verses like this, but Titus 3 .3 says, we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, deceived, enslaved to various lusts and pleasures, spending our life in malice and envy, despicable, hating one another.

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There is a reason I picked that verse, and it's because we're going to circle around to it at the end of this text. We have the freedom to approach

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Christ as sons. We're unrestricted. It's a sweet thing.

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I've been gone for three days, and I walked in this morning, and Noah was in his bed, and when

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I walked in the door, Noah said, hey dad, you're back. It's good to see you.

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Are you going anywhere today? And I said, we're going to church.

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He said, okay. I want to get up now. All right. Noah's not afraid of what he tells me.

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Noah understands that it's not his good works that make me happier with him. Noah understands, even as a little one, that he's perfectly fulfilled in sonship.

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He doesn't have to worry about it. He's free. My girls are free. We have to ask ourselves the question.

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Cooper said a couple weeks ago that I always make him feel bad. There's going to be some of that today, so let me get that out of the way.

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We have to ask the question. If there's an opportunity to give into the flesh, to cover up evil with your freedom, to make it as a cover, we have to ask ourselves, where are the temptations that you have in your life to indulge the flesh?

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Where are they? They're not the same for everyone. We have to identify them, and we have to fight them. The temptation steals our freedom by burdening our conscience.

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When we give in and indulge the lust of the flesh, the pride of life, when we indulge those, we have taken steps back into slavery, because at that point, we are going to be afraid of what people are going to find out, and we will not stand.

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We all imagine ourselves to be William Wallace, screaming at the tyrannical king, but in reality, when we have skeletons in our closet, we're going to hide, and we're going to tuck tail and run.

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That's what we're going to do. A good test to see what your indulgence in the flesh is, what are these opportunities, is to ask this simple question.

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What would make you uncomfortable when it's taken away, or it's disputed with you?

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If someone asks you questions about it, does it make you feel defensive? If it gets taken away, is that something that makes you recoil and make you want to grasp on?

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These are the things that clutch hold of our heart. It could be comfort and food, it can be sexual immorality, it can be money, it can be all kinds of things.

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What is it? What is it when it gets taken away, it makes you recoil? It can be free time, it can be recreation, things that are good that have gotten taken out of place and they're leading you back to slavery.

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Ask yourself that question, but then in hope, read on as Paul will say, those who belong to Christ Jesus crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

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Did you know this? Christ died for those temptations too. Christ has taken those away already.

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They are crucified to the cross. They're gone. Now we walk in it. So we have to be free.

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We understand that. As we move on, we'll see that Christians also have to love the law and their neighbor. Let's pick it up in verse 14.

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Curiously, Paul says, for the whole law is fulfilled in one word, and this is, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

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We have a couple of questions. Wait, isn't the law our slave master? You've been telling us this whole book, Paul, like throw off this law thing, right?

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It's very important to get the order right. Let's deal with that first. The law is our slave master when we look to the law as our

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Savior. The law cannot be our Savior. The law has three good purposes.

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The law teaches us of our need for Christ. The law teaches the nations how to do good to one another, and the law teaches us as Christians what is the order to life.

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How are we to live this Christian life? But for me, more curiously, I The law is a terrible

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Savior. That's a fault in the law is that it's not perfect in the sense that the law cannot save. The law can only condemn, and the law does a great job of condemning because it tells you you are condemned.

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If you've broken any piece of it, you've broken the whole thing. But then on the other side, we have to understand that what

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Paul is playing with here is this weird idea because we know, and the Jews would have known, and even the Gentiles would have known, there's a simple thing.

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We know that the law is actually summed up in two words, right? Is this a contradiction in the Bible? You will love the

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Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind, and you will love your neighbor as yourself.

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So why does Paul say that it's summed up in one wording, takes the second part, and to us seemingly the less important part?

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This is what clued me into the main drive of this sermon is because what I think Paul is doing is he's saying you're going to be able to evaluate and measure your obedience to the first most important part of the law by looking at the tangible second part of the law.

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Because as James said, we need to be doers of the word, not hearers only. We can say that we love

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God all day long, and when we don't love our neighbor, we lie about the first part.

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That's out of 1 John. Anyone who says that he loves Christ and yet hates his neighbor is not of us.

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That means he's a son of hell. That means that that's not an option for Christians. That's not an option.

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So the law is fulfilled when we love our neighbor, because we can't love our neighbor without loving

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God with our whole heart, soul, strength, and mind. It's impossible for us because we are lovers of self.

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Look back up at Titus. We're full of envy and malice. Does that not characterize the fleshly heart?

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That we look at someone who has something we don't have, and we think, man, I want that, and I'm really jealous.

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I'm better than them, and I should be able to take that. And that's how we don't love God, because we grumble against him and think, if God only understood my circumstances better, he would give me all the things

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I want. And so we say, God, you're not really that great, and then that carries out, and we hate our neighbor at the same time.

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That's why you can't love your neighbor without loving God. So Paul is actually doing shorthand here while making a theological point, and the theological point is that you

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Galatians, you don't need to be upset anymore. There's a pretty simple test for you here, and you're failing it miserably right now to the extent that Peter even sinned because he wouldn't sit at the table with the dirty, rabble

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Gentiles. You are hating one another, and therefore you don't love

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God. So let's fix it. We know this. John 14, 15.

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Christians do not have an adversarial relationship with the law. That's not of God.

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God wrote the law. God loves the law. God instituted the law. He wrote it on our hearts.

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That's one of the promises of the new covenant. That's the substance that was realized is that we understand that the

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Holy Spirit has written the love of the law on our hearts so that we don't have to be taught it.

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What that means is as Christians, we instinctively and naturally will gravitate towards his law.

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His law is good. That's why we read the passage that we did this morning in the call to worship. Jesus said the same thing.

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Lest you think that I'm purely Old Testament, the word of the Lord himself, John 14, 15. It's one of the great memory verses.

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Simply, if you love me, you will keep my commandments. The negative to that is always true and instructive. If you don't love

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God's commandments, you don't love God. It's that simple. John 15, 4. I love this because it's the vine and branches.

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It makes us feel flowery inside. Look, it's indicative of the problem. John 15 with the vine, abiding in Christ, right?

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And what we do is we have conferences and retreats to go figure out how to abide in Christ. Do we not?

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We meditate for 10 hours and do some spiritual journey to figure out how do I abide in Christ?

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How do I abide in Christ? Well, maybe we should read John 15 more carefully because in verse 4 he says, abide in me and I in you.

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As the branch cannot bear fruit from itself unless it abides in the vine, so neither can you unless you abide in me.

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How can you tell if you're abiding in Christ? You will bear fruit. You will bear fruit.

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What is the fruit? If you love me, you will keep my commandments. Do you know what the fruit of the Christian life is?

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Is that we look into God's law and we think, I love this. This is what I want.

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This is water on a thirsty desert day. This is food that's a feast. As we come to the table and we open the

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Word of God and we think, man, can you give me more? Can you just give me more and more and more? And it's our flesh when we think,

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I'm kind of bored reading the scripture this morning. That's a problem with us. That's not a problem with God's Word. That's where we tire of being fed.

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To quote a very polarizing man in the country, we kind of got tired of winning, right? That's what happens is when we get tired of reading scripture, we're tired of winning because the

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Word sets us free, because we understand who God is. It is a mirror into our own depravity, but it's also a window into God's glory and his holiness.

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It's an amazing thing. What does Jesus say to abide in Christ? If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my

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Father's commandments and abide in his love. Look, it's good to get away. It's good to read scripture.

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It's good to meditate. It's good to think. It's not good to go on a 10 -hour, navel -gazing, introspection, ethereal spirit journey that looks more like New Age seance to try to figure out if I'm actually abiding in Christ when in the same chapter that we do this, it's right here.

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If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love. Why? Because the person who is lost, the person who's the

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Ephesians 2 before but God, that person has no ability whatsoever to abide and love

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God's commandments. The lost are not worried about God's commandments. Those who are fake

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Christians are not worried about God's commandments. They're worried about taking a little religiosity and sprinkling it over themselves so that they can cover up their conscience that's not clean at all, and so they can hide under it and think, well, got a little spiritualism here.

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I'm probably offering this to God. He's going to feel good about that, and I'll be okay. And that is foolishness, foolishness.

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And we have too much of it in our nation and around us. So that's one way we can think.

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We can think, well, I can abide in God by having spiritual feelings, and this leads to the lack of assurance.

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We can also think wrongly that we actually do follow the law when we don't.

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This is a story that you all know out of Matthew 22. One of them, a scholar of the law, asked

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Jesus a question testing him. That's your first problem. You're not to put your Lord to the test.

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But testing him, he says, teacher, which is the great commandment in the law? And he said to him, you shall love the

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Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment, and the second is like it.

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You shall love your neighbor as yourself. Of these two commandments hang the whole law and the prophets. What was happening is he was testing

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Jesus to see if Jesus understood the law when he didn't understand that Jesus, the author of the law, was standing right in front of him.

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And the Pharisee was trying to justify himself with the hidden thing being, I follow the law.

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Do you follow the law, Jesus? And Jesus points it right back at him. He says, yeah, I know the law, and that's what all of the prophets hang on.

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What are you doing? Are you loving your neighbor? No, because the Pharisees at that time were not.

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They were making their disciples twice as much sons of hell as they were themselves. They were falling into the

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Judaizer heresy. They missed the Savior because they were trying to make the law the Savior. And ultimately, when we try to make the law our

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Savior, we try to make ourselves our Savior. It's just a proxy. No one wants to say that they are the

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Messiah for themselves, but what they will say is their obedience is the Messiah. We don't want to be

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David Koreshes in here. That's what happens. We know we sound crazy when we say that, so we take it one step removed and we have a proxy.

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Now, to something that I think I missed a couple weeks ago, and I regretted it, and I wanted to get there.

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So if Christians have to love the law, which I think I've thoroughly explained here, Christians also have to love their neighbor, because that is the law.

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The law is that we love our neighbor. The key point here in our context, what does it mean to love your neighbor?

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Because there is no word more misdefined in our culture than the word love.

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What does it mean to love? I think many of us don't even know what it means to love our spouse. I think we have some kind of intrinsic idea, but it's very simple.

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Sorry, I'm a simple guy, so I'm going to put this simply. Romans 13, the chapter of our last five years, right?

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Romans 13 is so simple. Here's what Romans 13 says. Owe nothing to anyone except to love one another, for he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law.

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How do you love your neighbor? By obeying the law. That's what we do.

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That's what love is. How do you love your wife? By obeying the law. You don't bear false witness.

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You don't covet. We go to 1 Corinthians 13. This is a rebuke against the Corinthians. How are they polluting love?

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By envying, by boasting, by being proud, by being rude, by basically breaking the whole second table of the

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Ten Commandments, thereby proving that they've broken the first table. When we don't love God, we're full of envy.

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We're full of malice. We're full of boasting and pride, and we're full of rudeness.

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And so it comes out in bad fruit, and we understand that we don't love one another. Paul says, you want to love one another, you have to fulfill the law.

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Fulfilling the law is by living in Christ, and that has an outflow to where we follow the law with each other. Back to Jesus, John 14, verse 12.

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He says, truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me, the works that I do, he will do also.

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And greater works than these he will do, because I go to the Father. Did you catch that?

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The works that Jesus did, the works that Jesus did, his disciples will do greater works than those.

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How? Because he's going to send his Comforter. He sends the

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Holy Spirit, who enlivens Christians to love one another. Whatever you ask in my name, this

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I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name,

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I will do it. If you love me, you will keep my commandments. How do we neglect to love our neighbor in God's law?

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Do we meditate on the word? Is it our food? Do we even read it?

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Do we hold ourselves to its standard and confess? Do we treat one another according to its standards? Do we measure our love against the law?

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I don't want us to be ethereal, though. Sometimes the answers to those questions get like, oh yeah, I think I believe that stuff.

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No, I want you to evaluate your life, the people around you, and I want to ask this question. How would your neighbor describe your fruit?

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Ask him. Ask your neighbor. So that begs the question, like the great

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Good Samaritan story that's also been butchered in our time, who is my neighbor? So to ask that question is to say, yeah, you're dumb.

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Your neighbor is the people that you're in contact with, right? The people that we are around, those are our neighbors.

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And so Christian and non -Christian, when we are around our neighbors, they are going to describe, as Peter said, they may hate us, but it's not because we're doing evil.

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They're going to hate us because we stand on the word of God and because that does point at and prick their guilty conscience.

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It's something that I've understood as I've kind of come into actually doing something, to my shame, in the pro -life world, is that the reason those who are pushing for the slaughter of the unborn, the reason that they are so angry is because they can't be wrong.

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If they're wrong, if they're wrong, then they know they're murderers. And that is a difficult pill to swallow.

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And so what they will do is they will engage and they will rage at those who are trying to point out their sin in love so that they would repent.

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Because there is repentance for the abortionist. And there is repentance for the mom who kills her child.

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There is acceptance in Christ for those because all of us are vile sinners and Christ's blood covers that.

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All you have to do is confess, you repent, follow. How would your neighbors describe you?

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And here's where we finish up, where I pick up the beginning of verse 13 and we'll go into 15. Christians must love one another.

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We have to love one another. But through love, serve one another.

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But if you bite and devour one another, beware that you are not consumed by one another.

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We're not slaves to sin. We're not slaves to the law as a taskmaster.

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But in a very real way, we are slaves to one another. We are. Paul writes in Romans 13, love does not work evil against a neighbor.

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Therefore love is the fulfillment of the law and do this knowing the time that is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep.

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For now salvation is nearer to us than when we believed. The night is almost gone and the day is at hand.

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Therefore let us lay aside the deeds of darkness and put on the armor of light.

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I think the most grievous thing for me to see in our world right now, and when you step on social media, when you step into the church culture we got, is for the tendency for Christians to devour one another, to bite, to devour.

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I've known this that when we take a stand, and I've seen it over and over again, when we take a stand the fiercest opposition is going to come from other

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Christians. This is because we've lost it. We don't serve one another.

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We serve our own platforms. We serve our own piety, our own holiness, our own selfish desires, and we forget that that is making us slaves to the former lust that we used to have.

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So we have to ask this. Paul says, he gives us a warning here, and he tells us in the negative we understand what we have to do in the positive.

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The positive is that we serve one another. The negative is that we can't bite and devour, and there's a warning in that.

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If you bite and devour one another, you know what's going to happen? You're going to be consumed. You're going to be consumed by one another.

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That means eaten alive, gone, and deceased. So we have to ask, how do we devour one another?

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How do we do that? I would say this, we spiritualize the law into mere personal piety.

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The idea here is that I can fulfill the law while having basically no interactions with anybody else.

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That's not how the second table works. Fulfilling the law is not about spending time in prayer in the morning.

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That is a good thing. I'm not preaching against that. But fulfilling the law is most observed in how we treat one another.

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And if we're going to treat one another according to the law, guess what? We have to be around one another. Christianity is not a one -man struggle with a hermit living in a cave who has a

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Bible, who has his personal self. He thinks he's all right there, and it never touches the world whatsoever.

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When we look around, we know that judgment starts in the house of the Lord. And when we look around our culture, especially one in northwest

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Arkansas, that if you've been here a long time, you can know that what's going on here even now is unrecognizable to what it was just 20 or 30 years ago.

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And the reason for that is because the church has invested in an idea that we can follow the law of God while minding our own business and not prophetically speaking to the evil that's around us.

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Because to love our neighbor, to love one another, is to trustingly and lovingly correct one another, exhort, rebuke, and encourage.

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I love what you're doing, and I don't like what you're doing here. And let's talk about it.

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When your brother sins against you, do you know what church discipline mostly is? It's when someone sins against you, you go talk to them, and you say, hey, you sinned against me when you did this.

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And you know what Christians do when confronted with that? They say, I'm so sorry. How can I make this right?

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How can I fix this? And then you've won your brother back. Do we lose it in church discipline? Church discipline is not about excommunicating people.

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Church discipline is about winning a brother back. It's about the relationship being restored.

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It's about us having Christian fellowship and community. But when we make it merely personal piety, we lose the whole game.

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And we have a culture that doesn't care what we say because there's no influence, because we don't have anything valuable to say.

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Because we post coffee mug verses that people don't even know what they mean out of context, and we live our lives among people, and they never even know that they're going to hell when they see us every day.

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We can't be that. Another way, gossip, selfishness, lack of hospitality.

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It's a difficult thing, but we have to invite our neighbors into our home. And when

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I talk about hospitality, I'm primarily talking about the lost. How are they going to know?

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How are they going to see? When the lost come into our house, when they come into our place, and we feed them, and we sit with them, and we eat with them, do you know what they'll usually do?

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They'll usually listen to your faith. And I'll tell you this, when we are practicing

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Christian discipleship with each other, we're going to have houses that the people out there want to have.

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Even those who disagree with us can see that they want a house that's in order. They want kids who are obedient to their parents.

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They want parents who are together, who are working, who have stability. That is attractive, I can tell you.

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I'm in the world, and having fathers at home and having stability is attractive to the world.

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And when they come in, they're going to ask the question, how is this happening? And our answer is very simple, Jesus. Jesus did it.

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Jesus did it. There's nothing I could have done here. I just follow. Gossip and selfishness are plagues that we have to get better at calling out on the spot.

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I've failed in this regard. It's a thing that when it slips into that, gossip is when we're trying to destroy someone's character when they're not there.

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And when we hear gossip, we should shut it down. Say, brother, you're sinning against them right now.

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If it's important enough, we need to take it to them this moment. And it stops the whole thing.

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And it brings us closer together. Because when we ask for forgiveness, we have this idea that we're going to lose our relationships by being truthful with each other.

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And I'm just going to tell you right now, we lose our relationships by not being truthful with one another. Every single time in my life that I've had a hard conversation with someone, we have left that conversation being closer brothers than we were before as Christians.

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The closest relationships that I have in my life are with the people who absolutely call me out on my nonsense over and over again.

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Those are my best friends. My best friends are not afraid to say, Rice, you screwed up. Rice, you talked too much.

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They're not afraid to tell me that. They told me it first thing this morning. I get it.

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What we have to understand is hospitality, cutting off gossip, building these, that has evangelical, it has evangelistic significance.

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Because it invites people into our home. Can you imagine the church that stops devouring each other and starts loving their neighbor according to the law?

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There is no, Paul's going to get there later, there is no law against these fruits of the Spirit. There is no law against when we treat each other as though we are actually indwelt by God himself.

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We have to do it. We must. And then the warning. I put exclamation points. Warning. Warning. Judging and condemning one another leads to destruction of oneself.

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It's limitless. Sin is limitless. There's no brakes on it. We fool ourselves.

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And we think, I'm going to indulge just this little bit and I'll be able to keep this right here. It's not going to stay right there.

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It's going to become a gigantic monster who takes over your whole house. And when you look back, you have nothing left.

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You're like, what happened there? Sin. Sin happened. So when we judge one another, when we devour one another, when we bite, when we gossip, when we don't show hospitality, when we hate our brother, when we bear false witness against them, when we lie about them, when we dishonor them, what's going to happen is that we become consumed with this characteristic and we become devourers.

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And what that makes us be is all the laundry list of stuff. We're envious. We are covetous.

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We are full of malice and full of envy. And if you've ever been around someone who's full of envy, they're not very fun to be around.

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They're jealous and negative about everybody all the time. That should not be so with Christians. Why are we sad,

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Christians? Why are we sad? We serve the King of everything. He has given us new hearts. He's given us righteousness.

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Why are we devouring one another? Do we not trust the King to bring us all to the table together? It's going to be glorious.

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It's something that we should love that we should wait for. And I'm going to quote John Stott on this. He says, love is expansive and limitless.

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It's not possessive. It does not envy or boast. Love is not small.

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Love is, there's no breaks on love either. Have you ever realized that? Is there an end point in your love for your wife or your kids?

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It's like, well, you know, Abby's 10 now. I think I've maxed out on love. It doesn't happen.

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Am I not going to love Abby more in five years than I do today? Of course I am. Because to know someone is to grow in love for them.

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And as Christians, that escalates exponentially. To know Christians, to get into those deep conversations.

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I come away from a weekend in Seattle, and there are men now that I love in a way that I couldn't before because I didn't know them.

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And I wish I could know them more, especially guys like Jim Fickert. There was kind of a thing. I caught on with him, met him on the trail.

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Kelsey was calling me. I lost the connection. She just gave up on it because I got in this 25 -minute conversation with this guy that I've met twice.

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And it's just like, that's Christian unity. I love this guy. And if I was around him more, you know what?

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I would love him more and more. And to talk with each other, to know each other is to love. But to envy and to be possessive and to hold this and say, mine.

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This is mine. That has a limit. That's going to be self -contained. But at the end of it, it doesn't have a limit in your heart for how you're going to start looking at other people as being envy.

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I want this. They're a threat to me. They're a threat to what I'm trying to do. And I'm going to cut them off right here.

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That's devouring. And you'll be consumed by your anger and bitterness. And nothing will happen in ministry with that kind of attitude.

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That's what Paul's warning the Galatians. If you want to have your lampstand snuffed out and taken away, then by all means, continue devouring one another, sitting at different tables.

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And you'll wonder if you're even a Christian because the Christian knows he's a Christian because he does the things Christ said to do.

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It's very simple. How do I know in ending the whole thing? How do I know that I'm a Christian? It's because I hope,

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I hope if you ask the people who are closest to me, what they're going to say is, that man loves the

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Lord and he loves people. And if that's the testimony that follows me, then

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I look at that and say, there is no way that I can possibly accomplish that. That's what Christ has done in me.

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And if Christ has done that work in me, then he will surely complete it and no one will ever take me out of his hand.

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And so I have full assurance, blessed assurance, Jesus is mine. Oh, what a foretaste of glory divine.

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Isn't that to follow the law is the foretaste of heaven? Because in heaven, all the brakes will be taken off.

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We will have no natural flesh that rebels against God's decree and God's law. And we will follow God's law all the time to the maximum.

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And we will love one another and it will be glorious. I want to leave you with this, John 13 verse 34, a new commandment

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I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.

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By this, all will know, all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.