Good morning. Will you join me in prayer?
Father, we thank you for this opportunity to share Your word,
and I pray that you open our hearts and our minds, Your
Spirit, and pray that He would be able to speak to us
unfiltered, that His Word would penetrate our hearts and our
mind, and that You would do a deeper work in US today.
Father, help us to desire to be more like you and help us Lord
to see ourselves as you see us. In Jesus name we pray and all
God's people said Amen. Well, I've heard it said from a
lot of people that all religion leads to God.
And if that were true, that means that there really is no
different than any religions. If we all lead to God, then we
all basically have the same end result and we're good to go.
But as Christians we struggle with that for good reason.
I mean, Jesus said I am the way and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father, but through me.
The writer of the Hebrews tells us that Jesus is superior in
every way. The Bible tells us that He's our
Creator, our intercessor, and our Savior.
So what do we do when somebody says our religions are the same?
Now I will say this, that most religions, including some forms
of Christianity which I do not think are credible, the goal is
to be good enough to make ourselves ready.
That mean religion is basically man's effort to reach out to
God. What makes Christianity
different? It's the only faith that says
I'm dysfunctional, I'm a Sinner, I'm broken, and I can't put it
together without help. Every other faith in the world,
including some forms of Christianity, it's you can do
it. And I'm telling you this
morning, without God in our lives, we cannot.
Now, I had the distinct privilege as a young pastor
because I started at 20, right? Yeah, I started at 20.
My mind is not working super good today.
So you can pray for me. And my wife will be more than
happy to fix me if I go off into the weeds.
What was I talking about, Ed? What was I talking about?
All right, Well, that's a pretty safe place, isn't it?
Christianity is the only faith where God reaches down and
surrounds us and helps us. Now I get when we tell the world
that Christianity is the only way I get it sounds arrogant
doesn't it? It sounds like who does this guy
think he is? But the but the problem is what
do I do with the words of Jesus? I am the way and the truth and
the life, and no one comes to the Father except through me.
I mean, Jesus said that. Jesus said that.
So what? What do I do with that?
Where does that leave me? I mean, it's really not me
saying that Jesus is the only way.
It's Jesus saying he's the only way.
And this is the other thing that you'll notice in most religions
or faiths, they like to consider Jesus a good man.
I personally don't think that that's a possibility.
Who did Jesus say he was, Son of God?
What else did he say about himself?
He's the way that he that he lives for the Father and the
Father lives in him. I mean, he told us in so many
ways that he is God. So if he's not who he says he
was, if he's not God, then he is a liar.
Are liars good men? No way.
And so we need to take a look at that now.
I also wanted to take a look at John 17 one through 5.
I'm going to ask you to read it with me because Jesus is pretty
clear, or John is pretty clear. Well, as clear as John gets,
let's put it that way. He's pretty clear about what
eternal life is. So let's read it.
When Jesus had spoken these words, read with me, he lifted
up his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hours come glorify
your Son, that the Son may glorify you, since you have
given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to
all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that
they may know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you
have sent. I glorified you on earth, having
accomplished the work that you gave me to do.
And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory
that I had with you before the world existed.
All right, Jesus is saying some pretty key things here.
Can we go back to 1? He and one he's saying, well,
here he sounds like a lawyer. I don't know about you, but when
somebody says I'm come to glorify you, you glorify me.
And by the time you're all done with this whole thing, I'm a
little confused. It's like when I read legal
papers. And so I, I think John had to be
a lawyer because he writes this kind of confused way all the
time. So let's go to two.
And John says that Jesus has been given authority over all
flesh. Think about that.
And Jesus is the one who will give eternal life to us.
So for you and me, Jesus is it. He's the judge, He's the jury.
He's the boss and all of the authority has been given to him.
And we know that because Jesus created.
Jesus created the heavens and the earth.
He was the agent of creation. He, and as the Scripture says,
he has always been. He's always existed.
He was here long before any of us were, for sure.
And so we need to depend on that.
Now, let's take a look at Romans because if we recognize that
we're only saved through faith and that we're saved so that we
can eternal life as a we get to know God, I want you to think
about that. I know that they're, well, I
don't know, but I assume that there are people here who voted
for our president three Times Now.
Do any of us really know him? Know about him?
We know the facts about his life.
We see enough of him on TV to know what we do and don't like.
It's OK to say Amen. Nobody's going to shoot you.
But we really don't know him. And here's what Jesus is trying
to tell us. They are giving us the privilege
of knowing God the Father, the Son.
Through the guidance and under the leadership of the Holy
Spirit, we get to know the living God, we get to see His
goodness, we get to see his love, we get to see his grace.
We have all experienced his forgiveness because He's there
and He's real and these are His qualities.
And so now we are being asked, I haven't read Romans yet, have I?
OK, thank you. I'm, I'm finding that doing 2
services is just a little confusing.
You try to say, well did I say that yet or not or if or when
so. But I want you to see that this
whole thing of eternal life is God's gift to us.
God didn't come here to condemn us.
He did not come here to send us to hell.
That's not his purpose. Now He will let us go there.
Make no mistake, He will allow us to go there.
But His heart's desire is that we come to Him and allow Him to
work in our lives. So if you have this faith, what
does it look like? What's next?
Well, let's take a look at Romans 12/1 and two.
I appeal to you, therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God,
to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and
acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the
renewal of your mind and that by testing, you may discern what is
the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.
All right, what Paul is saying, and I think he's a little
clearer, he's saying we need to say to God, my life, it's yours,
it's yours. Whatever you want me to do,
whatever you ask me to do, my answer is yes.
Now, can we be honest? It's not always that easy, is
it? Sometimes we grapple with the
Lord wants me to do this. Well, I'm not so sure.
Have, have you, have you been there or am I the only one?
You know, we, we grapple with that, we struggle with that.
And yet, and yet we know some things.
And this is where the whole transformation comes in.
We're transformed by the renewing of our what mind, our
minds as natural people is I have to take care of myself.
I have to provide. If I can't do it, well, I just
have to find a way to do it. I don't have a choice.
I mean, this is what I have to do.
Isn't that human life? It's the way it goes.
But Paul says we need to be transformed in our thinking.
We need to tell ourselves things like God really does love us.
God really does have the power to help me overcome the
obstacles of my life. God does want me to be a more
loving, grace, giving, Christ like individual and if he wants
that, then he's going to give me the power and the help I need to
accomplish that. These are things that we need to
tell ourselves because as human beings, we're like Moses.
I can't do that. Are you kidding me?
You're asking me to do what God? And frankly, I don't get too
upset with Moses. I mean, would you volunteer to
lead those people? Not me.
You got to be crazy. And so I personally am forgiven
Moses a break. You OK with that?
And maybe that's because if Moses gets a break, maybe I will
too. Because no matter, No matter how
close to God you are and how smart you are, you still make
mistakes. There's still times when you,
there's a lot of times when you second guess yourself.
You may have done the right thing, but by the time the
devil's done with you, you're not so sure.
And so we need to work on this transforming our mind.
Now let's kind of practically talk about this for a few
minutes. How are you going to transform
your mind? Well, one, you need to expose it
to God's Word. You just do.
If somehow you think your Bible's going to stay closed and
you're going to grow spiritually, well, I would think
about that again and again and again until you change your
mind. You've got to be in the word.
There's no, there's no replacing that.
And I want to tell you why David said that.
The human heart is deceitful above all things.
Who can understand it? How many times have you deceived
yourself? It's OK, not that bad, not a big
deal. We can move on again.
Am I the only one that's ever had that problem?
So, so we need to, we need to really think about ourselves
honestly. And Jesus has got some some
things for us to to focus on. So let's take a look at 12,
three through 8. I think it is.
For by the grace given to me, I say to everyone among you, not
to think himself more highly than he ought to think, but to
think with sober judgment, each according to the major faith
that God is assigned. For as in one body we have many
members and the members do not all have the same function.
So we, though many are one body in Christ and individually
members of one another, having the gifts that differ according
to the grace given to us. Let us use them if prophecy and
proportion to our faith, if service in our serving.
The one who teaches in his teaching, the one who exhorts in
his exhortation. And that's kind of a preaching
thing. It's more of an encouragement,
the one who contributes, and generosity, the one who leads
with zeal, the one who does acts of mercy with cheerfulness.
Yeah. I mean, how many of us want to
lead? It's been such a tough week this
week. I don't know how I'm going to
make it. I mean, doesn't that just
inspire you? Well, it's been so hard.
The devil's been on me all day long.
I don't know what I'm going to do.
No, that's not what we want. Leadership.
All I got to do is listen to the Evening News to get depressed.
I don't need my pastor to do it to me.
And our pastor doesn't. He's awesome.
He's a good teacher. So here Paul, our Paul is saying
that as Christians, we need to start with humility.
Don't consider yourself better than somebody else.
You might be smarter. You might be more gifted.
That doesn't make us better. And those whom God has given
much, he requires a lot too. And I don't think that's just
for us. I think that's finding ways to
be a blessing to others around us.
But we start off with humility. It's one of the first traits we
need because it's like, like when I said I when I was a young
pastor, people would tell me they hadn't sinned in over 20
years. OK, now here's my question.
I know that all man has fallen, broken, dysfunctional.
Would we agree with that? All man, all mankind has sinned.
So if a man is going to go a day without sin, and I do think I'm
just going to say this, I do think it's possible.
I probably said that once already, but the issue is
there's no way I can go without sin without the help and grace
of God. So it's not I did this or I
haven't sinned. It's the Lord has worked with me
and he's helping me clean up my act.
He's helping me get it together. He's helping me improve.
He's helping me see areas where I need help.
And every one of us, every one of us needs help because Paul
also goes on to tell us that we are part of a body.
We belong to each other, we're connected to each other.
We need each other. We need that encouragement.
We need some people have the gifts to to think through
problems. Every church has got problems
they need to think through. Some people are really good at
communication. Some people are excellent
teachers. There are people like Dale who
are just faithful, Faithful works his butt off behind the
scenes. They're people like Ed.
Ed, I'm trying to figure out what you do.
I think, I think, I think you basically just are.
And you're an encouragement to all of us.
Perseverance, faithfulness. I don't know about you, but I
need those kind of examples in my life because I need the Lord
to remind me. You know, Bob, there's ways you
could be more like Ed and maybe a little some cut some of the
edges off of you. I need you.
We need each other and in the body of Christ, you need people
who can teach, you need people who can encourage, you need
people who can lead. And and it's and it's OK not to
have somebody else's gift. You know, one of the saddest,
saddest things for me is when somebody thinks they're a leader
and it's not really their bag. You know, anybody like that and
they want to lead. They want to lead so bad.
And the problem is, is when you say no, boy, they can make you
feel like the meanest dog in town.
But you know what's meaner? To allow somebody to do
something that they don't have the gifts for.
And that not only hurts them, it hurts the church.
Now, just just so you know, in 45 years of ministry, I probably
didn't say no more than a handful of times.
I don't think that's where you get your frequent flyer miles.
Because everybody in the body has place.
And we need to cherish. We need to cherish everybody in
this place. All right?
So we focus on humility. We focus on understanding that
we need each other. Those are keys.
Those are just keys. We need God to guide us first
and foremost. We need His wisdom and His
strength. Now we want to talk about
another section of Scripture. And then I think I'm going to
close out. I'm beginning to realize that
this service starts at 10:30, but we're usually done at 12,
right, Dale? Well, I'm not going for 25 more
minutes. All God's people said.
Amen. All right, now that we've got
that out of the way, let's talk about.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's talk about 9 through 13.
Would you read this one with me? Well, we'll be able to read it
in a second. You know, we don't give those
guys enough credit at all because, because here's the
deal. You know, when the the sound
guys are doing their job, when nobody notices.
And we do notice this stuff, but that stuff is just normal, and
it's part of being human. So I want to thank you up on top
for everything you've done today.
I thank you for responding to me at the last minute.
I mean, I came in here with 15 minutes to go, and they did all
this for me. So you blame me.
Things don't go right. Not them.
All right. Would you read this with me?
Let love be genuine. Abhor what is evil.
Hold fast to what is good. Love one another with brotherly
affection, Outdo one another in showing honor.
Do not be slothful and zealed, but fervent in spirit.
Serve the Lord, rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be
constant in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the
Saints and seek to show hospitality.
All right, can we go back to the first verse of this section?
Let love be genuine. This is one place where we need
to be real. But I've been pastored long
enough and I've been in places where they were the wannabes,
the pretenders, you know, not really understanding.
And I'm going to tell you that in some churches, love is not
genuine. It's pasty, it's fake, it's not
real. Now, they're different
personalities and we all love different ways.
So sometimes we just need to give grace to people.
You know, if you've noticed around here, I love to pick on
the kids. Well, everybody's going to see
pics on everybody. Oh my Gods.
People said get it out of your system, OK?
I love little kids. Always have hope.
Hope that I always do. I'm watching my dad.
He's 94 now, and he's not always so excited about little kids.
He used to be. He used to be all right.
We want to love what is genuine. We want to be real.
And I think that's one of the key things is people today need
to see the church be real. That doesn't mean we pretend
that we're holy. If you're holy, you don't need
to tell somebody you are. They're going to notice it.
And if you're unholy, you don't need to tell them that either
because they'll pick that up pretty fast.
And one of the things that I've noticed in my years of ministry,
I think when I started, we focused an awful lot on
behavior. You do this, you don't do that.
There were certain words, if you said you were going to hell
straight away, I'm not, I'm not going to repeat them because you
might be some of you who still feel that way.
But we've come, we've come to learn that, you know, swearing
the Scripture talks about is taking the Lord's name in vain.
Don't do that. That's not a wise thing to do.
And you want to make sure that your language, I mean, when your
language is so vulgar, you can turn a marine's face red.
You've crossed some lines here. But we need to remember that the
measure of all of this is our heart.
You may do things that are unsavory, but do you love
people? Do you love people?
Do you really love people? And you're not going to say or
want to do anything that's going to hurt them?
Not intentionally. So we need to let love be
genuine. What's the next part of that
line? I lost my screen.
Oh, we need to have this thing now.
Go back love. One of the one more.
Go to 11. There we go.
We, we need to hang on to what's good.
We need to not be slothful in zeal.
I'm finding as a retiree that it's pretty easy to be slothful.
Can I admit that, you know, before I retired, I said, well,
I'm not going to have any problem.
You know, all my friends would say, man, I don't know.
However, phone time to go to work, I do.
But but I will admit that that was by design.
You know, as a pastor, my life was going 150 miles an hour.
I didn't want my retirement to be that way too.
Want to slow down a little bit? But I may stretch into that
slothful zone every once in a while.
So, Ed, you need to kick me in the butt.
Get going. So we need to be fervent.
We need to be excited about what God wants to do innocent through
us. We need to serve the Lord with
some enthusiasm that, well, you know, I'm doing this for the
Lord. I'm suffering for Jesus, OK?
Doesn't inspire me, does it, you, James?
No, we see we need to be in the business of inspiring people.
This is what I love about Barnabas.
Barnabas took a look at this guy by the name of Mark, whom Paul
said I'm not trusting him again. He's not going with me.
And Barnabas said, I think this guy got some purpose.
I think there's something that we can do this productive here.
Barnabas saw the nugget of gold. Paul just saw the problem.
If you had people like that in your life, all they do is see
the problem. Here's the deal, here's the
deal. It's true of you, it's true of
me. It's true of everybody in this
room. Everyone of us have strengths,
and we have weaknesses. You want to make sure that your
weaknesses aren't sinful, because sinful weaknesses can
undo your life. You don't want to do that.
And we need to make sure that our weaknesses aren't crippling
our positives. But when I was young, they
taught us, they always taught us this.
Turn your weaknesses into strengths.
OK, so what's happening to my strengths while I'm spending all
my time working on my weakness? What do you think?
Think anything happened to them? You got to develop what you're
good at. God made you good at something
for a reason. Now I know we spend a lot of
time looking at people and we wished, I wished I was more like
so and so. I remember as a young man, as a
young pastor, I was going to Spring Arbor for pastors classes
and I rode with a guy who was about then, he was about my age
now. And I just really impressed with
this guy. And I asked him one day, I said,
how, how do I get to be as spiritual as you are?
He said, well it's easy. I've been a Christian for 45
plus years and I was obedient to the Lord.
And so over those years, being obedient to the Lord, I grew.
If you want to walk with the Lord 45 years and be obedient,
you'll probably get there too, you know, and, and that's what
makes sense because we have this idea that I'm going to be
spiritual. I'm going to flip a switch and
I'm going to go from here to here right now.
It'd be great if it worked that way, but is there anybody here
who'd say it does work that way? It's never worked that way for
me. In fact, I'm, I'm pretty
convinced that if I'm going to grow, I'm going to choose the
hardest way there is. I think it's a brain damage
thing. But we need to be committed to
grow. But we need to understand that
what we're entering into is a relationship.
And so our growth is a process. And the other thing we deal with
is human beings. It's not like being a banker or
an engineer. If I'm an engineer or a
scientist or a finance guy, I have a a formula that everything
fits into boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And it works. Human beings, what works on me
isn't probably going to work on James or on Paul or on Gary or
on Ed, because we're different and God made us to be different.
And that's OK, because if you're going to compare yourself to
somebody, compare yourself to Jesus.
Not not to beat yourself up, but to keep yourself humble, you
don't want it. We don't want to compare to each
other because what Paul Freeman's called to be and do is
completely different than what he's called me to do and what he
called Ed to do and what he called Dale to do and Brad to
do. And we need to allow for that
freedom. We have to allow for that
freedom when it comes to personal convictions.
You know what I'm saying? You might be a person who has a
weakness for alcohol, so you need to stay away from it.
That doesn't mean that everybody else has to.
They may not have that weakness. They may have a weakness with
watching the wrong stuff on TV or the Internet, or they may
have a weakness with how they spend money.
And This is why we need to give each other room to be who God
made us to be. Now there's a couple more
things. Can we get back to the
Scripture? I think we're on 10 or 11 now.
12 and 12. OK, rejoice.
They're just trying to tell me to get done.
Rejoice and hope. Be patient in tribulation.
Be constant in prayer. Now that is an awesome formula,
but it's pretty lofty, don't you think?
Rejoice and hope. This is a good thing.
Why are you hopeful? Why do you put your confidence
in God? How have you seen Him work?
When's the last time you took time as a family and just talked
about these are the things God's been doing for us?
Isn't that cool? I mean, those things are
important. Be patient.
In Tribulation, we need to understand that sometimes our
journey takes us down paths that are challenging, to say the
least. Here's where my faith kicks in.
I believe that everything that happens to me is for a purpose.
I choose to believe that there's nothing that happens to me that
is caught God off guard. And because of those two things,
I believe that everything He allows to happen to me, He can
use as a building block in my life if I will allow him to My
that my. My belief in those areas has LED
me down some dark paths, but I'm not so sure they haven't been
good paths. I remember it's been 10-11 years
now since I ruptured both of my quads.
I went from walking to not walking in about 10 seconds.
And I was in the hospital for a month to the hospital and
nursing home. And I've I've tried to make my
wife promise that she'll shoot me before she sends me back to
the nursing home. That's not something I get
excited about, but I'm telling you the lessons I learned while
I was in that state, the things that God spoke to me about
because He had me on my back and I couldn't do anything else.
I wouldn't give those lessons back for anything.
Now I'm in no hurry to do it again, but I'm thankful for the
things that the Lord taught me through that challenge and
through that difficulty. Be constant in prayer.
Do you really know where your help comes from?
Yeah, but how sure are we of that?
I mean, when we get into trouble, when something happens,
what do we do? I mean, I know when we're
driving down the road and we think we're going to get next
and go, oh, God, save me, You know, almost always then that
kind of a thing. But what do we do when we're
faced with moral choices? What do we do when we have to
make business decisions? What do we do when we have to
make decisions at home? Are these things we pray about?
Are these things we say? God?
I need your input on this because that's important.
Because when we do that, we're saying He is my Lord.
And that's the whole point today.
The whole point is, is we need to be people who realize that
we're not going to heaven because we're good little
people. We're going to heaven because we
put our faith and confidence in Christ.
And because we've done that, we're going to allow Him to use
us words and all. We're going to let him use this.
We're going to let him enable us to use things that we may or may
not know. I'm going to tell you before,
I'm not so sure. Today's a good example.
But before I became felt the call to preach when I got up in
a speech class, I mumbled all over myself, couldn't give a
talk to save my life. And then the Lord called me and
that seemed to change today. It seems to come back.
But that's OK. I'm old.
We'll excuse it for that. So can I ask you a question?
Do you just wake up one day and say today's the day I'm going to
be transformed? How do you get there?
Time and and you have to make some decisions.
You have to make a decision that I need God in my life, I need
the Spirit. I need to commit myself to
something outside of myself, and God here I am.
Have you done that? Have you done that?
I mean, there are a lot of people that know about God.
They know about Jesus, but somehow they're missing that
deeper connection. And I want to say to you, don't
miss it. There are people in this
sanctuary right now, and I'm not going to name everybody because
I'm going to screw it up and miss half of them.
But there are people here that you could talk to you about your
faith who would be happy to talk to you about your faith.
You say, oh, I don't want to do it.
I don't want to bother. You know, here's the deal.
Somebody comes to you and they want to talk about faith and
you've got to leave. Make an appointment with him
before you go and make sure you contact and get back to him.
We need to ask. We're, we're supposed to be part
of a body. So that means we can ask
questions of each other. We can ask favors of each other.
We can ask for help. It's OK.
This is supposed to be the one place where we can be ourselves.
I'm not sure it is all the time, but it's the one place where we
should be able to be ourselves. So have you asked God to
transform you? Are you asking Him to renew your
thinking? Are you giving Him opportunity
to do that? Feel free to reach out.
There are people here that want to talk to you and we would love
to pray with you. If you want to come forward, we
would pray with you too. But most of you probably, if
you're not a Christian yet, you just, you need a conversation.
You might not be ready to make a commitment yet.
So we're ready to talk. We're willing to talk.
Let's stand together, Father, we are your people.
We are called by your name. We are here to represent you and
Lord, we admit that we're not always good representation.
And Lord, we ask for your forgiveness for that.
And we ask, Lord, that you will inspire us to commit ourselves
fully to you, that we will accept the gifts and the rules
that you have for us and that we'll use them for your glory.
Lord, speak to us, speak to our hearts, draw us close to you.
In Jesus name we pray. And all God's people said Amen.