What Love is Not

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I want to invite you to take out your Bibles with me and turn to the 13th chapter of the book of 1 Corinthians, 1 Corinthians chapter 13.
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And we are finishing up, hopefully, today where we began just a few weeks ago, looking at verses four through seven.
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Verses four through seven, though, fit within a context, so I'm going to ask that we begin at verse one and read down through the beginning of verse eight.
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So this is the words of the Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verse one.
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If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal.
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And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.
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If I give away all I have and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
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Love is patient and kind.
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Love does not envy or boast.
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It is not arrogant or rude.
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It does not insist on its own way.
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It is not irritable or resentful.
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It does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
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Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
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Love never ends.
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Father in heaven, I thank you for your word.
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And now, as we seek to go to your word for an understanding of it, I pray that you would first and foremost keep me from error.
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Lord, I am certainly capable of preaching error and do not want to for the sake of my heart and the heart of those who will hear me.
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For Lord God, your word is worthy of our attention.
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It is worthy of our study.
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It is worthy of our focus.
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And Lord, so much so is the subject of love.
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We have looked last week, Father, at what love is.
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And today we will look at what love is not.
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Oh, God, may it be that we see in this a mirror for ourselves.
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And that we would not walk away from that mirror without looking at what we need to change, where we need to repent.
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In the area of love, oh, God, there is so much that we need.
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In Christ's name, amen.
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Sometimes giving a definition of something is difficult, and sometimes the best way to give a definition of something is to give the opposite of it as what it's not.
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We talk about this in systematic theology when I teach on God as being eternal.
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Even the very word eternal has within it built into the etymology of the word without end.
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So eternal doesn't say what something is, it really more so says what it is not.
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Eternal is something that does not end.
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And so oftentimes how we define something, sometimes we're able to give the positive definition of something, and sometimes the best way to give a definition is to simply say this is what it isn't.
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And so that's where we find ourselves today in the words of the Apostle Paul.
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Paul has been teaching us and we have been at his feet studying the words that he has written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God.
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We have been listening to his words now for many months that he has given to the Corinthian church.
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And what is the one thing that we know about this church? This church had problems.
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This church, in fact, I don't know if you remember this, but when we first started, the title of this series was different than it is now.
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If you look at your bulletin, the title of the series says, An Exposition of First Corinthians.
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But that's not what the title of the series was when we first started.
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The title of the series at the beginning was A Church With Problems, because that's what First Corinthians is.
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It's being written to a church with problems.
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And you say, well, why did you change the title? Because I got tired of looking at the bulletin every week and seeing a church with problems in the bulletin.
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And I said, Pat, I said, we need to just change that because every time somebody comes in who's new, they're going to look and say, what in the world? He's been dealing over a year and a half with a church with problems.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, in a sense.
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But but I did change the title, but in that sense, that's what this whole book is about.
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Paul begins the book by challenging them because they had problems in regard to their allegiances.
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Some say I am of Paul, some say I am of Paulus, some say I am of Peter, some say I am of Christ.
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The problem is they were trying to focus too much on where they found their pride and where they found their their status and where they found their positioning in the church.
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And that positioning in the church came for them, not from who they were in Christ, but who they were in someone else, some leader.
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You know, that happens oftentimes today.
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We just we just finished I didn't get to go.
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But over the last three days, there was this massive Bible conference in Georgia called the G3 conference.
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I've never been yet.
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I plan to maybe go one day, but at the G3 conference, there's everybody there of any note.
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Votie Bauckham is there and James White is there and all of these other major notable teachers.
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And oftentimes you'll hear people say, well, I I really like John MacArthur or I really like R.C.
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Sproul or I really like James White or I really like Votie Bauckham and all those men are great and I really like all of them.
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But the problem is when we start saying I'm I'm a I'm a I'm a white follower or I'm a I'm a Bauckham follower or something, the issue is that they begin to create a pride based on that.
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And that's a problem.
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That's one of the problems in the first Corinthians or in the Church of Corinth in the first letter is there's this issue of pride that's risen up.
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The problem with the church, I'm building to a point here, the problem with the church at Corinth, it was so much so so much of the problem in the church was it was all about them.
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It was all they had a me problem, as one pastor said years ago, the problem with a lot of people in the church is they have eye problems and not that they need to wear glasses.
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But the problem is they're always thinking about I, I, I.
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It's all about me.
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I don't like this church because they don't satisfy my needs, so I'm going to go elsewhere or I don't like this church because it doesn't do what I want it to do, so I'm going to go elsewhere.
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It's all about me.
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It's not about how God is glorified.
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It's not about him.
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It's just like the one pastor had the lady come to him at the back of the church and she said, Pastor, I didn't like worship today.
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He said, well, that's fine.
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It wasn't for you.
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It wasn't worship when we weren't worshiping you.
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So if you didn't like it, that's OK.
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Wasn't for you.
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But that's a problem is we live in such a consumer based society that everything is about you.
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Everything is about me.
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And I got to tell you, this is really the heart of what we're going to study today.
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First Corinthians 13, Paul is talking about love and he he says, if we have not love, we're nothing.
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And he said, OK, Paul, we understand that if we can speak with tongues and men of angels or whatever, and we have not love, we're nothing.
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If we if we can do all of these wonderful things and we have faith to move mountains and we can even give ourselves all the money we have and give even give our bodies to be sacrificed for Christ, even if we do all that, if we have not love, we are nothing.
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OK, Paul, we agree with you.
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Now, what is it? You say we got to have this thing where you say we got to possess this one thing.
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You say this is the thing that rivals all other things.
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You're saying that this is the thing that even if we have every other thing, this is it.
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What is it? Paul gives us two positive statements about love.
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Love is patient.
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Love is kind.
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Last Sunday, I dealt with both of those, but just a quick reminder what they mean.
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Patient in the King James, long suffering.
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That's literally macrothymia in the Greek means to be to suffer long with someone.
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There was a Hebrew idiom that I think Paul is basing this on.
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It's not the same, but I think the idea in the Old Testament, there's an idiom about being long nosed.
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Long nosed, he said, what is was long nose? The idea is that as the nose gets redder, the madder you are.
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Right.
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And you've seen people who when they get mad, their face gets red and everything starts to just become blood red.
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And the idea of being long nose, not Pinocchio, but the idea is that it takes a while for your nose to get red.
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It takes a while for that anger to fill your face.
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So you're long suffering, you're patient, you're willing to endure.
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That's what macrothymia and the idea is.
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And then the converse of that or the addition to that, not only are we patient, but we're kind.
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Love is patient.
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Long suffering, but it's also kind.
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It does positive things.
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Kindness, if you remember from last week, is the idea of being constructive, not destructive.
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The idea of building up rather than tearing down doesn't always mean that everything we say to each other is going to be something that people want to hear.
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Because I got to say, sometimes the greatest kindness, as I mentioned this last week, sometimes the greatest kindness I've ever received is the kindness of the rebuke.
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And if you can't handle being rebuked, if you can't handle someone being honest with you, who's coming to you in love, it's either you have an issue of pride that you cannot allow yourself to be spoken to in any way that you don't consider to be something you would accept.
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Or you have an issue of maturity, either you're prideful or you're immature or a connection of both.
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Because the Bible says that faithful are the wounds of a friend.
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Faithful are the wounds of someone who actually cares enough about me to say something to me.
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And that's a kindness.
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We learned that last week.
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Scripture says there's kindness and rebuke if it's done in love.
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Not that you just go around like a little fruit inspector trying to find everything wrong with somebody so you can kick them while they're down.
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That's not good either.
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And that's what we're going to talk about today a little.
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But there is patience and kindness that make love.
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And that's the positives.
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But then Paul begins on the negatives.
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And what's interesting about the list, there's so many more negatives.
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And that's why I titled today's lesson What Love Is Not.
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Love is patient.
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Love is kind.
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And then he gives us a list of several things.
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Love is not.
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So that's what we're going to do today.
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We're going to begin with the first of these.
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In the ESV, it's separated by a semicolon.
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Says love is patient and kind.
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Semicolon.
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Love does not envy.
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Remember what I said about the Corinthians? What was their issue? And it talks about at the beginning of the book, they were one of the first things they were fighting over was who they had established their position in.
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I'm of Paul.
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I'm of Paulus.
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I'm of Peter.
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That's a position of envy.
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It's a position of status.
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It's a position of caring about who I am versus who you are.
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I want to show you a verse of scripture.
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Turn to me to turn with turn to me.
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Turn with me to James chapter four.
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I'm teaching through James at Set Free on Thursday mornings and really enjoying this study with the men.
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But in James chapter four, this this says something that I think a lot of us need to hear.
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James chapter four, beginning at verse one.
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James asked the question, what causes quarrels and what causes fights among you? Is it not this? That your passions are at war within you? You say, what does he mean by that? Well, in verse two, he tells us, he says, you desire and you do not have.
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So you murder, you covet and you cannot obtain.
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So you fight and quarrel.
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And then he goes on to say, you do not have because you do not ask.
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And you ask and you don't receive because you ask wrongly to spend it on your passions.
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See, the idea that James is getting across here, that word passions comes in twice there.
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And that word passions is the idea of what I want.
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I am the sum of all things.
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I am the center of the universe.
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I am it.
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You don't matter.
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Or if you do, you don't matter as much as I.
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In fact, it's interesting here.
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He talks about being at war with other people.
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I wrote a paper when I was in actually when I was in university, I wrote a paper on the subject of what causes war and what causes conflict.
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It was a sociology paper.
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And one of the quotes I found very helpful in writing that paper was this.
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When two men have a desire for the same thing that they both cannot possess, they by nature become enemies.
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When two men have a desire for something they both cannot possess, by nature, they become enemies.
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That's sort of what James is saying here.
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So you want what you want and somebody else wants it.
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And by that you war with each other and you're willing to kill each other for it.
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It's OK.
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So now go back to First Corinthians 13, it says, do not envy.
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What is envy? Envy is you have it, I want it.
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I mean, in a very simple way, right? Simple envy is this.
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I wish I had what you have.
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That's simple envy.
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I wish I have or had what you have.
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And it can be anything.
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I wish I had your hair.
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I wish I had your beard.
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I'd tease Mike on that.
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I wish I had your waistline.
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Or your build.
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Wish I had your car or your house or your spouse.
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Simple envy.
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He said, it sounds like coveting.
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Well, yeah, it sort of is.
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Zelos is the Greek here.
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And it's where we get the word zealous.
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And zealous can be a positive, right? We talk about the zealots, right, people who are zealous for their faith.
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That can be a good thing, but it can also be a bad thing.
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So context tells us how to interpret the zealots, whether it's a good, positive zealous or a bad, envying zealousness that you're so consumed with wanting something else.
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And like I said, there's simple, simple envy.
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You have it.
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I want it.
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But then there's a more nefarious type of envy.
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You have it.
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I don't want it, but I don't want you to have it either.
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You have it.
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I don't care about it, but I don't think you should have it.
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I want to show you a good example of that from the Old Testament.
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If you and we're sort of doing Bible drills today, if you would turn with me to First Kings, the Old Testament.
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You'll find in First Kings chapter three, verse 16, there's a narrative here.
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Most of you are familiar with it, but we're going to read through it very quickly, just very quickly to see something in this narrative.
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First Kings three, 16.
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I'll give you a second to get there.
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Verse 16, then two prostitutes came to the king and stood before the Lord.
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Or stood before him.
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The one woman said, Oh, my Lord, the woman I live in the same house with.
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And I gave birth to a child while she was in the house.
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Then on the third day after I gave birth, the woman also gave birth and we were alone.
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There was no one else in the house with us.
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Only we two were in the house.
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And this woman's son died in the night because she laid on him.
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And she arose at midnight and took my son from beside me while your servant slept and laid him at her breast and laid her dead son at my breast.
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When I rose in the morning to nurse my child, behold, he was dead.
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But when I looked at him closely in the morning, behold, he was not the child that I had born.
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But the other woman said, No, the living child is mine and the dead child is yours.
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The first said, No, the dead child is yours and the living child is mine.
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Thus they spoke before the king.
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You guys remember this story, right? First of all, if you read it with fresh eyes, man, there's so much of this that we don't remember.
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It just popped.
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First, they were prostitutes.
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A lot of people forget that part of the narrative.
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Second, just how it happened.
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I mean, this is something that still happens.
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People sleep with their children.
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Sometimes they'll roll over and people die.
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This still happens today.
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So there's a there's a sense in which you can really understand the urgency and the weight and the pain of this.
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That's why I say I always read existentially, right? Not as an existentialist, but read understanding.
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These are real people going through real pain at a real time in real history.
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Right.
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Two women are fighting over the same baby because one of their children has died.
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And rather than accepting the mortality of their infant, they can't take it.
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And so they take it from someone else.
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Verse 23, then the king said, the one who says, this is my son that is alive and your son is dead and the other says, no, but your son is dead.
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My son is a living one.
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The king said, bring me a sword so that a sword was brought before the king.
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And the king said, divide the living child in two and give half to the one and half to the other.
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Then the woman whose son was alive said to the king, because her heart yearned for her son.
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Oh, my Lord, give her the living child and by no means put him to death.
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But the other one said he shall be neither mine nor yours.
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Divide him.
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That is nefarious envy.
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Not it's not that I want it.
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Neither of us get to have it.
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If it's not mine, it's not anyone's.
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And by God's grace, he was he led Solomon in his wisdom to see who was the rightful mother and who wasn't.
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But that's a picture of what envy can do.
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Not just cause us to want what somebody else wants, that's simple, that's in a sense that I want to say something, be careful and elders, brace yourselves.
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There's a sense in which sometimes envy can drive us to doing better things because we see something that we want to work toward and we work toward it and we accomplish it.
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But that's not envy.
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That's that's that's goal setting.
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Right.
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And so the idea, though, of what is envy, it's looking at what someone else has and thinking that you, for some reason, either deserve it more or they don't deserve it at all.
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It's a form of self exaltation and putting someone else low.
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It's building up you and tearing them down.
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It's a form of selfishness.
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And that's why Paul says it's antithetical to love.
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Love does not envy.
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It does not be selfish.
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You cannot love rightly when you make yourself and your wants the center of everything.
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And you cannot love rightly when you're upset, when another person has something that you feel like you deserve more.
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Now, I'm not going to get political, but I am going to say something that may sound political.
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So, again, brace yourselves.
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I have elders that will correct me if I go too far.
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So I'll be careful.
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I read a book recently by Thomas Sowell.
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Thomas Sowell is not a theologian.
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He is a sociologist.
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He's a he's an economist, a brilliant man, though not a believer.
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And he said this in the book.
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He said that used to envy was one of the seven deadly sins.
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But now we've rebranded it and we call it socialism.
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Because what is socialism? If it is not, you don't deserve it.
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I deserve it.
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We have to be absolutely equal.
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And you see, the problem with socialism is everybody becomes equally poor.
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It's a class system of envy.
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And that's why Douglas Wilson, who is a theologian, said God hates envy, thus God hates socialism.
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Now, if I get scolded for that, I'll take it.
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But I will say this.
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If nothing else, it is not love.
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It is not love.
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It is not love to see something that someone else has and think they don't deserve it for whatever reason, because you don't have it.
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And that's the heart of envy.
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And that's not love.
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Love does not envy.
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The second thing, and there's several of these, so I'm going to have to begin to sort of knock them down because I don't want to be here another week.
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We've spent a lot of time on this and I want to get through these.
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Love does not envy.
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Love does not boast.
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What is boasting? Boasting, the definition in the lexicon for this particular word, which is a long Greek word, it simply means to praise oneself excessively.
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You ever met anyone? Who just made it their life's mission to praise one, this one.
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That's their life as they live in a constant, perpetual state of self-exaltation.
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And again, this stems from a sense of self.
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Notice a pattern between envying and boasting the issue of self.
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It's self-importance, it's self-centeredness.
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I envy because I don't have, I boast because I do.
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I envy because you have something that I don't have and I don't want you to have it.
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I boast because I have something you don't have and I want you to know it.
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Right, that's how these two fit together.
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It's all based on the false idea that we are constantly competing with one another.
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If I love you, I shouldn't care if you are better off than me financially or that you have something that's nicer than what I have.
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I should actually praise God that you are able to have whatever it is you have.
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And man, ain't that just opposed to everything in us? I mean, I'll be honest with you, from the flesh's side, we get these urges to envy and to boast because the flesh wants to be the most important thing.
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And so it's that battle with the spirit.
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If I love you, I should never make you feel beneath me, which is exactly what's motivating anyone who boasts.
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Have you ever been in a situation and you have to have been in this situation before where you're having a conversation in a group of people and there are people who are telling stories and somebody will say, I'll do you one better.
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You've heard that, right? That's a subtle form of boasting.
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You got a story, Mike, I'll do you one better.
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I got a better story.
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You hush.
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My story is better than your story.
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You got five people saved.
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I got 20 people say, whatever, you know, you talk to a Muslim, I talk to a mosque, whatever, you know, we're going to tell our story.
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And that's a form of social hierarchy building.
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We're creating, in a sense, bettering ourselves, establishing status.
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But it's not out of love.
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It's not motivated by love of anything but self.
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And self-love is not agape love.
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So it doesn't envy, it doesn't boast.
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Third thing, it's not arrogant.
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You say, what's the difference between arrogance and boasting? Well, arrogance is boasting on display and arrogance is also the idea of being puffed up.
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The word here simply means to be expanded or to be puffed up.
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Actually, the lexicon says to bear oneself loftily.
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I thought that was pretty interesting.
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To bear oneself loftily, what does it mean, to high, to lift up self.
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Again, third thing that love is not, it's not about me, it's not about me, it's not about me.
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That's the issue here.
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That's what's the not.
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Alistair Begg said this, he says, arrogance has a big head and love has a big heart.
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Arrogance has a big head, but love, a big heart.
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So it's not envious, it's not boastful, it's not arrogant.
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And remember, these are all verbs, right? So it's in the sense of we are not doing these things if we're loving.
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And if we are doing these things at that moment, we're not loving.
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And I don't know about you, but these are all things that we all battle against.
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So it's not as if we're in a constant state of perfection because we know we're not.
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It's like we have to battle to get out of these things.
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I've been the guy who says, I'll do you one better.
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That's how I know.
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And how I know what motivated me to say that stupid thing.
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The fourth thing on the list of the nots is that it's not rude.
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Askemone is Greek.
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It sounds like you're asking for money.
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Askemone, it's kind of an interesting word.
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And this is what it means.
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It means to act in defiance of social and moral standards with resulting disgrace, embarrassment and shame.
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Because if I asked you to define rude, right, it's hard.
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That's a hard thing to define without seeing.
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If you saw it, you'd know it.
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You'd say that's rude.
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But it's hard to really put a defining word on it, right, to define what rude is.
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Rude means you're acting unseemly.
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It means for the position or place that you're in, you're not doing what you're supposed to do.
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Maybe you're not listening in worship, behaving unseemly.
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Now, we might consider this as something as an embarrassing gesture, the use of foul language.
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And those things are rude.
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But in context, the rudeness is directed at others.
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You ever been with someone whose demeanor is just plain uncomfortable to be around? Rude to waiters, waitresses, they're rude to their spouse, their children, they're just rude.
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How do you define rudeness, Pastor? A person who doesn't care about the feelings of others because their mind is only on what they want at that moment.
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They do not care what the other person is dealing with.
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They don't care what the other person's going through.
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They don't care about whatever the struggle is.
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All they care about is self.
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Is there a pattern? What's the pattern? Self, me, I.
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Whether you're talking about envy, boasting, arrogance or rudeness, it's all based on a lack of a care for others.
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This is how when somebody says, oh, man, I don't like it.
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This guy shared the gospel with somebody.
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He's being rude.
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That's not rude.
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It's not.
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I'm not saying somebody can't be rude in sharing the gospel.
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There are people who have really outdone themselves to embarrass Christ and the church in their activities of just completely ignoring the gospel.
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Complete asinine behavior.
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But the very act of doing something like sharing the gospel is not in and of itself rude because it is a concern for others.
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Why is it that we do what we do with the gospel? Because I care about this person.
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If I didn't care about someone's soul, if I didn't care about being used of God to share the gospel with people, I wouldn't do it.
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I certainly don't do it because it's fun.
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I do it because God has commanded me to, and I know they need it.
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The same is true with all of this.
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If it's about me, if it's about my lack of concern for others, then it will demonstrate itself in envy, boasting, arrogance and rudeness.
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Now, moving on, because, again, time, not that I'm limited necessarily.
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You guys will stay, right? OK, yeah, I just saw a very nervous few folks, but we have a few to get through here.
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Does not insist on its own way.
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This is actually a compound phrase.
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It's not one single word in Greek, but it's a compound phrase.
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And the idea here is not insisting on its own way.
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You say, well, what does that mean? Well, what has been the common denominator in all the things so far? Self.
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And so I think that this is sort of codifying all of that.
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It's not a person who is always insistent upon their own desires, whims, wills and wishes to be fulfilled for them to be happy.
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Gordon Fee, in his commentary, says this, in some ways, this is the fullest expression of what Christian love is all about.
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It does not seek its own.
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It does not believe that finding oneself is the highest good.
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It's not enamored with self-gain, self-justification, self-worth.
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To the contrary, it seeks the good of one's neighbor.
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That's what it does.
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Now, I don't want to spend, I don't want to chase a rabbit.
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So I'll just simply say this.
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This does not mean that we can't take stands.
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OK, because somebody says, well, you know, well, if it means we don't seek our own way, that means we can't ever take a stand theologically because you're seeking your own way.
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That's not the same thing.
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We don't take a stand theologically just because we because I want to or because you want to.
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We take a stand for something because it's the truth.
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You understand? So so be careful not to read into these something that makes it what it's not saying.
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It's not saying that we never take a stand.
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Like sometimes sometimes in my home as the husband with my wife, sometimes I have to make a decision.
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And sometimes it's not the popular decision.
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Sometimes the kids don't like it.
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Sometimes Jennifer doesn't like it.
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I try my best to always work together and to partner with her.
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But sometimes I just have to make a decision.
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And I'm going to face God and have to answer for that decision as the husband, as the leader of the house, I have to do that.
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That is not seeking my own way.
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However, if it were that I were always coming home and everything my wife cared about and everything that my wife wanted and everything that was always subject to me, me, me, that seeking my own way.
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That's the difference.
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Yes, sometimes the hard decision has to be made.
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And yes, the the father, the elder, the the man will have to stand before God and give an account for how he leads his home, how that man of God leads the church.
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But that's not seeking our own way as long as the heart of the people that we are leading and the heart of the people that we are serving is more important than what we want.
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What matters is God and them before us.
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So understand doesn't mean we can't take a stand, but upon what are we standing? It should be the truth of God, love for our neighbors and for our spouses and for ourselves.
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It's not about me.
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Can I just can I just say that that's the thesis today? All right, moving on to the next one, this is not irritable, not irritable.
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That kind of goes along with what I was just saying, because that leads itself into Holmes as well.
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What is an irritable person, an irritable person, according to the the etymology of this word, meaning of this word, an irritable person is a person who is easily provoked.
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There's a there's a qualification for an elder and it's not the same word.
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I want to clarify this, this word and the word for the for elder is not the same word, but has the same idea.
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Because the word for elder is a plaque tone.
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Plague tone means not a striker or not violent.
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Actually, deterrent, not pugnacious.
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You know what a pug is, right? A boxer, somebody who's not given to just fits of violence.
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Right.
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And that's the idea here.
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This is a person that's that's mad at the drop of a hat.
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Again, not the same Greek word, but the same.
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I do believe the same idea, because the elder is supposed to be a man who loves his family.
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Elder is supposed to be a man who loves the church.
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Elder is supposed to be a man who you can go to and talk to and not expect that immediately he's going to burst out in anger.
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Right.
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If you if you are afraid to come and talk to me, that partially is on me.
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If I have set an atmosphere where you are afraid to talk to me.
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And I'm talking about as an elder, but even in my home, if I've set an atmosphere where my children are afraid to talk to me.
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Now, they should fear discipline, but they shouldn't fear me.
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And discipline is what leads them into hopefully doing the right thing.
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But they shouldn't feel like I'm always ready to explode.
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Dad's home.
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We got to put the eggshells out.
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You ever been around somebody had to walk on eggshells with? Did you really feel like that person loved you? I mean, really? That's what Paul says, right? It's not not irritable or easily provoked.
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If you are easily provoked, if people have to walk on eggshells around you, there's something wrong.
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And it might not be with them.
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Might be.
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It might be just they're overly sensitive and they can't ever take anybody telling them anything wrong.
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And that happens, too.
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There are some people who just can't be if you if you speak them in any way sideways, they freak out.
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There's the opposite, the overly sensitive.
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We've and we've created a generation of people that are overly sensitive.
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Amen.
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We've just built up a society of people that just the wind blows the wrong way and knock them over.
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It's like they're wet noodles or something.
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So there's so it goes both ways.
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Right.
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But if you are a person that everybody's afraid to talk to, that's a problem.
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Because then it's it ain't just one is you as if there's a situation and it and it's you.
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This next one is hard.
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In fact, it's really hard.
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So I was kind of I was kind of rushing my time to get to this one.
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Because I if you look at if you look at the ESV, it simply says not resentful.
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But if you look at the NIV, interestingly enough, because I don't really I'm not a big NIV guy.
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But if you look at the NIV, I do think the NIV captures the Greek here in a very in a very close way, because the expression in the NIV is it keeps no record of wrong.
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Logitsytae, logitsytae, the idea in the Greek is the idea of a log, the idea of a ledger.
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Right.
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And it's logitsytae ta kakon, kakon means bad, easy Greek where you think like kaka is bad, it's bad stuff, you know, it's it's it's kakon, kakon, right, it's bad.
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Right.
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And so the idea is logitsytae, it's a ledger of the bad.
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And I said it's this is the hard one, not because it's hard to understand, but because this is one of the hardest ones for us to apply.
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Because here's something that we all have to understand, you you don't have the capacity to simply forget something.
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You can't just forget it.
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And people always say, why don't you just forget it? Well, why don't you just lose 100 pounds? It just don't work that way.
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I can just snap my fingers and and that I mean, I'm going to diet and spend some time with it, but you ain't just going to forget and you're not just going to stop whatever this it doesn't just happen that way.
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We don't blink, say a chant or hit a pressure point and we're done.
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Now we don't remember.
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Right.
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And somebody sends us sins against us, hurts us.
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That's there.
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And sometimes and sometimes it's good.
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Oh, please listen to me when I say what I'm about to say.
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I want to thank Brother Mike because we talked about this a little bit.
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He helped me with this thinking on this.
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Because sometimes keeping a record is necessary.
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Why? Well, we haven't we have you know, we have in our church children.
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And if we were going to have a nursery where we had workers in the nursery and someone's background check came back and said that this is a person who'd hurt children.
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Well, that love keeps no record of wrongs.
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Well, we're going to remember that one.
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Well, you're not loving the person.
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Slow down.
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Because sometimes the safety of one situation is paramount to the necessity of another situation.
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And anybody who's truly repentant of something that they have done that is that evil would understand the fear.
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And would understand the trepidation of saying, OK, we're not going to put you in charge of the kids program.
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Not today.
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You understand? He said, well, you're keeping a record of wrong.
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Well, think of it like this, guys.
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You know what church discipline is? Church discipline is given to us by Jesus Christ.
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Matthew 18, it says, if your brother sins against you, you go to him and you tell him privately.
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If he repents, you've won your brother.
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If he does not repent, take two or three, go to him and call him to repentance.
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If he refuses to repent, you take him before the church.
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If he refuses to repent, even when brought before the church, he's to be treated like a tax collector and a sinner.
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Which means he is to be removed from the fellowship.
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He is no longer to be a member of the church.
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He's no longer to be welcome in the assembly of the saints.
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He is to be put out.
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And that's a record of wrong.
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When is the record expunged? When he repents.
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But until then, he is no longer welcome in the assembly of the saints.
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We're not showing love to him.
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No, contrary, I believe we are.
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Because the Bible says the whole reason for putting him out of the assembly is that you turn him over to Satan and to the world for the destruction of the flesh, that he would be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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1 Corinthians chapter 5.
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It's a loving act.
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And you've heard this phrase probably more than you want to hear it.
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Tough love, tough love takes stands sometimes.
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But here's the difference.
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You say, well, what's this saying then, Pastor? I want you to remember in the Gospels, Jesus told a story about a boy who squandered his father's wealth.
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You remember that? Most of us call it the story of the prodigal son.
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Some people like it so much they name businesses after it.
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The boy goes away, takes his father's wealth, squanders it, ends up in absolute squalor to the point that he's living with the pigs.
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And him being a good Jewish boy, that would have been the worst of the worst of the worst place to be, living among the unclean animals, eating what they eat to survive.
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Horrible condition.
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And so, the Bible says he came to himself.
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I like that passage because I think that's a statement of repentance on his part.
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And he remembered something about his father.
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He said, my father has servants and even his servants live better than I'm living now.
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Even his servants don't eat the pig slop.
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I'll go home and I'll be my father's servant.
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Contrition.
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Repentance.
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Right there in the heart.
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It's seen.
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He's not wanting to go back and be reestablished as a child or a son.
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He's willing to go back and be his father's slave because he knows his father's slaves live even better than the squalor that he is now currently living in.
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And so he says, I'll go back and I'll live as a slave to my father.
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And you know what his father was doing? His father was looking for him.
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Because it says when his father saw him afar off, he ran to him and he hung on his neck and he kissed him and he restored him.
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There's a song.
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Mercy came running like a prisoner set free.
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The father ran to his son and restored him in his repentance.
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Beloved, if we have a repentant person in our life, we have no right to hold them accountable for past sins.
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And here's where the danger really lies.
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And I know not everybody in here is married.
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So if this don't apply to you, it's got to apply somewhere in your life.
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But I want to point right now to husbands and wives because I are one.
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And.
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I got to say, some of the most dangerous times in counseling between husbands and wives have been when both of them come in with a list.
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Of how the other one.
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Has done whatever, whatever, whatever, and they're unwilling to forgive.
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An unwillingness to forgive is at the heart of keeping a record of wrong.
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Does the person you spend your life with, whether it be a spouse, whether it be a child, whether it be a father or mother that lives in the home with you, whatever the situation is.
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Do they constantly hear from you how they have failed you? Do they constantly hear from you how they have wronged you and how they have ruined your life with whatever they have done to you? Or do they hear from you? The word of God.
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And if they're in their sin, a call to repentance, loving call to repentance.
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And if they have repented, have they truly received your forgiveness? So I can't forget it, Pastor.
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You know, God can't forget anything either.
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He's all knowing, right? I mean, in the sense of what does it mean to forget? The Bible doesn't say God forgets.
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The Bible says he casts it.
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As far as the east.
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Is from the west.
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That's not forgetting.
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That's choosing not to hold them accountable for it once it's been forgiven.
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That's the difference.
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That's the difference.
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And beloved, I'm going to tell you right now.
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That's the hardest one for all of us.
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But here is and I have to end here because, you know, I can't go into the next two and we'll connect the next two to what's coming next.
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But here's the thing.
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Here's the thing about that.
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If we for a minute could even consider the fact of what God has given us forgiveness for.
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The Bible says God took the record of our sin.
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And by the way, it's a pretty hefty record.
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And what did he do to it? Nailed it to the cross.
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God took our debt and nailed it to the cross.
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Remember the story of the man who was brought before the.
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This is Jesus's parable of the man who was brought before his master and he owed.
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And his master said, you can't pay.
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I'm going to put you in prison.
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And he begged.
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He says, please give me time to pay.
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And because of the man's contrition that he was given freedom and his record was expunged.
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But then he went out into the marketplace and he saw someone who owed him.
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And what did he say to that person? You pay me right now.
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And the guy said, I can't pay.
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I'll pay you soon.
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He says, no, it's to prison with you.
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And that man's brought back before his master.
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His master says, I just forgave you.
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You couldn't extend that to someone else.
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How dare you hold back what has been so freely given to you? Such is the love of God.
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Who loved us and forgave us, whose son put us before himself by dying for us.
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And now he calls us to love others as he has loved us.
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Oh, God of mercies.
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Give us a strength.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank you.
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I thank you for loving us.
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God, thank you.
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We have failed in so many ways.
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And if love is the standard, we have fallen in every way to meet that standard.
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But God, may it be.
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May it be, oh God, that we understand that the call to love is not a call to weakness.
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It's not a call to not take stands.
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It's not a call to never have to discipline.
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It's not a call to never have to make hard decisions.
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But it is a call to not seek our own.
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Not put ourselves first.
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Not live in selfishness.
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To not live with envy or arrogance.
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But to count others more important than ourselves.
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We pray it in Jesus' name.
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Amen.