MAY 7 2017 | Things Adam Wants to Talk About S1E3 | Galatians 5:13-26

Sea Change Church · Things Adam Wants to Talk About S1E3 · "Galatians 5:13-26" · Adam Stadtmiller · May 7, 2017
Galatians 5:13-26
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Now we're going to worship the Lord through the reading of a scripture before Pastor Adam comes up to bring the word. It's out of Galatians 5, verses 13 through 26. It should be in your bulletins, and it is right behind me. And my name is Joe Brandi. I'm missions pastor here. Thank you, Adam. All right. Yeah. You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free, but don't use your freedom to indulge in the flesh. Rather, serve one another humbly in love.

For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command, love your neighbor as yourself. If you bite and devour each other, watch out, you'll be destroyed by each other. So I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the flesh desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the flesh.

They're in conflict with one another. So that you are not to do whatever you want. But if you're led by the Spirit, you're not under the law. The acts of the flesh are obvious. Sexual morality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy, drunkenness, orgies, and the like.

And I warn you, as I did before, that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. And against such things there is no law. Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.

Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking and envying each other. This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. I only had one cup of coffee today. It's true. Whether you believe it or not. I was so encouraged. You know, there seems to be no limit to how low we can go when we get discouraged, right?

You know, it's so easy. And when you see people getting married in godly ceremonies, and you see, you know, babies getting born, and people being helped in the streets of PB, and surfers and young groms out, you know, making a difference and stuff in Africa. Just so encouraging. And when I think about who I used to be and who I am now, encouraging.

And hopefully you were on that journey as well. If there's one thing that we're going to talk about today, as we talk about the part two, and this is my series, Things Adam Wants to Talk About. Okay? So, I had a four-week window here, and we're going topical. I'm not a huge topical preacher, but on occasion, I think we can have that as an appetizer.

I like going through the Bible chapter by chapter, and we're going to be getting back into 1 Samuel, which was actually one of the four books of the kings. It used to be 1 Kings, 2 Kings, 3rd, and 4th, and then they split that up, made it 1 and 2 Samuel. We're going to be looking at the early life of David and how he fought his giants. It's not so much a character study on David, but about helping you identify the giants in your life, and we're going to go giant hunting over the last year.

We all have giants. We're going to go. We're going to survey the land like Joshua did, and we're going to go stand in front of our giants, and we're going to do it together through things like prayer like Kai spoke about. One of the giants in our lives, and one of the giants that we often need to fight, is the giant of our own personal sin. We sing songs about Jesus freeing us, but so many times, Jesus, I feel like the Holy Spirit has said back to me, you know, I'm saying, Jesus, break my chains, break my chains.

He's all, well, you have the key to those ones you just put around your hands, and so maybe you can just unlock the key by deciding to commit to holiness, and I won't have to break that chain because some of the chains in our lives or for, you know, not a great use of this word, but are self-inflicted, if that makes sense. But we put ourselves into self-sabotage.

We put ourselves into bondage, and few things will bind you up like sin. Now, we know that the culture and the enemy would love to say that God is a great killjoy in the sky that has created these arbitrary laws so that you can have no fun and wants to put you in bondage to the law, that you should be free and diving into whatever your flesh wants, whatever your flesh desires, whatever you can dream up is freedom.

You can have the ability to be anything, to do anything you want, and no one should be able to stop you unless you hurt someone else. Everything is open, is wide open. Man's will has supplanted God's will as highest on the totem pole or highest on the ladder. And as we look at that, we see that to break the will of man or to deny the will of man is sin today, although the word would not be used, sin.

And as I said last week, in this first part of this secular humanism, talk on secular humanism versus Christ following or faith-based life, that sin has been replaced. And a lot of times you'll hear the word, and I believe, this is just my take, is that sin has been replaced by hate. You hear the word hate a lot, and you will never, rarely hear secular humanists, actually you will never hear a secular humanist who knows their stuff use the word sin, but they will use the word hate.

Because hate now, and oftentimes, and there is such thing as hate, you know, you see genocide and things throughout the world, there is hate in the world, the Bible talks about that. But to deny someone or to tell someone that not being able to fulfill the desires of their own personal will, or what the scripture would often call your flesh, would be called hate.

And perhaps you've seen that in modern society today. To tell someone that they cannot follow after their will will put you into a dry and waterless pastures, or at least that's what a small group of people in the world would hope, that would put you into the realm of hateful people, of bigots, and so on, to try to limit your voice. And like I did a comparison, the church has been great at this for years.

The Puritans, and there's some great Puritans, Jonathan Edwards and others that have come on, but the Puritans were fantastic at regulating morality and trying to legislate morality and doing things like giving scarlet letters to people and putting people on the stocks and things when they broke the law that they considered God's laws. Well, the pendulum has changed, and now oftentimes we see secular humanists in society, and a lot of people who are pushing for things don't really know that they're secular humanists.

Many people today have a poultice of religious, conflicting religious beliefs, a little bit of Buddha, a little bit of Jesus, a little bit of what I want to do, and we are self-prescribing our own religion these days according to a moving target of what society thinks, sourcing our morality because of consensus rather than a stalwart anchor, which is the Word of God.

And one of the things that we rely on is the Word of God to find our truth. The thing that I want to set before you as we talk about sin today is this, is that sin steals your identity. Let me say that again. If you only get, we could be done. I could tap out right now, and we could be done. I want to let you know that sin is meant to steal your identity.

God has a beautiful picture of who you are. It says in the book of Revelations that in heaven he will come to you with a white stone, and it'll have a name on it that's your true name. And there's an intimacy and a secrecy and a sacredness in having that intimacy. And this is why Christian human sexuality seeks to have one partner for life to identify with God's complete commitment to you and having a holiness of one-on-one relationship that's why we're not polygamist and so on.

I could go through the list. But this stone is when God will come to you and say, this is who you truly are, and he has a vision of who you are, just like he had a vision for me when I was driving the streets of La Jolla and PB with my car filled of different drugs and paraphernalia, and God was thinking, you know, of who he had called me to be. And are we willing to submit our own personal will to see the view of who God sees you as?

C.S. Lewis said that if you were to see a person when they will be in their fully glorified state worshiping God in heaven, you would be tempted to bow down and worship them. God has a picture of the eternal, and he sees you in that, and just know that there's an end to the story. And so what he wants to do is get you as close to that identity on this earth as possible, and I believe that we will be saved by grace, but some of us will experience a closer identification with the true self if we commit ourselves to holiness.

Now, we will make it to that place under the blood of Christ if we have a faith-based life in what he did on the cross, but how much of you that you want, how much that you want of that, or how much of the true you that you want to experience today through a commitment to holiness, really is God leaves it up to us often. On occasion, he'll come in, and he'll clamp us down.

But I've found God to be a God that wants to be in collaboration. He doesn't want a bunch of robots that he programs, but he says, hey, this is the goodness. Do you want to see the grace that I have? Do you want to experience that? Do you want to taste it? Do you want to walk beside me? Do you want to truly become who I've called you to be? And not only who I've called you to be, who I've created you to be.

Sin will steal your identity. When I was living at the Oakwood Apartments, and some of you remember the Oakwood Apartments, a bevy of debauchery back in the 80s. And I moved there when I was three days after my 18th birthday. I moved out to the Oakwoods, and I got a studio. My mom remembers. I'm sure you were incredibly happy when I did that. And I moved there with my ninja, or excuse me, my Honda Hurricane motorcycle and my spandex pants that I would ride around.

And yeah, yeah, I thought I was George Michael. Rebbing that thing around town, and it was a bad season. And my eyeliner, and all that. It was cool back then. It wasn't saying anything about my sexuality. It was just cool. And people are like leaving out the back right now. It looked good with my high top Reeboks. And my bad boy shirt, whatever it said.

in the midst of that, God's like, I know who I've called you to be. Trust me. Thank you. I remember being in that Oakwood apartment and crying, because I was getting high every single day. And I remember thinking to myself, I don't know who I am anymore. 19 years old, by myself. It was 9 o'clock in the morning. I got up, smoked marijuana, and I thought to myself, I don't know who I am.

I don't remember who I am. Matter of fact, I don't know if I ever, ever am who I, ever known who I am. I don't know if you've ever hit in that, hit in, great word. I don't know if you've ever hit that rock bottom where you all have a different rock bottom, but I just knew that I wasn't being who God had created me to be. And I didn't want to be that person anymore, but I just didn't know how to get out.

Does that make sense? And so I began to cry out to God and a heart attack later and a few other things and some ODing, and finally I hit my rock bottom and got sober and started a long way out. Somebody asked me the other day, you know, you became a head pastor a lot later in life than I thought you would have. And I said, you know, I think I just had a stunted growth.

I think if I would have had the father that I've tried to be to my daughters, I look at Lily, I look at Lucy, my daughter, and I look at Lily especially because we're very similar, and I think that should have been me. I should have enjoyed school. I should have had joy. That picture of her, if you know my daughter, I'm so impressed by her. She just bubbles joy.

She's just happy. Joe said to me this week, he said, you know what, it must be amazing to come home to her to have somebody like that, that you come home and have that joy in your house. Let me tell you, Joe, and the rest of you, it is. She's amazing, and we've given her the ability to step into God and to follow. I'm saying that sin will try to take you from being who you are and mask your identity, but we are being told in the culture today that to give in to all the desires that your flesh might want will actually make you closer to who you are and that this, as Lady Gaga said, I was what?

Born this way. And you know what? We are born with the fleshly desires, and I would agree with Lady Gaga on that, but like we say at this church, come as you are, but don't stay as you is. God has called us to move on. You don't have to follow Jesus. He never forced anybody to follow him. Never forced him. He never put anybody in an arm lock, in a head lock, like Harry does, our youth pastor, and says, I'm making you come with me.

Do you want to follow? The question is, do you want to follow Jesus? Do you want holiness in your life more than you want your own personal self-gratification? And do you want to walk and see what it looks like to taste of the bounty and the free-range life of holiness? I believe that, you know, you see this free-range movement that God wants us, when we commit to holiness, there's actually more margin.

The boundaries expand for your life. I feel when I was in sin, I felt incredibly bound up. I felt incredibly contracted. I felt incredibly, my relationships weren't good. My relationships with my family wasn't good. Sin led to bondage. And as the scripture we'll see here in a second, sin leads to death. Let's look at sin quickly. And then next week, we're moving out.

I have a few more things Adam wants to preach about. We'll save that to the fall. But we're going to move into our giant series. And maybe sin is one of your giants, and this is an early preemptive start to that breaking of sin. Sin as you'll see, excuse me, sin as you'll see in your notes is what? What is sin? Sin is the breaking of divine will or law. And what I would say even more than that, if you want to write this in, I gave you some margin, that sin is the things that are contrary to God.

Sin are the things that are contrary to God. God's will is not really a law. God has a nature. To go against the nature of God is to be into the realm of sin. God turned it in and presented it as a law to make it more understandable to us. And so what the law does in many ways is it represents the complete holiness and perfection of his character. Now the Old Testament shows this law, but God also knew that it would be impossible for sinful human beings that were born in sin.

We were already behind the eight ball. Romans 5.8 says while we were yet sinners, what? Christ died for us. We were already behind the eight ball. We could never walk and become who he wanted us to be. But he showed us what sin was and then he had to fulfill the law some way. There was a temporary fulfilling of the law through sacrifices because animals don't walk in the human sin that we do.

And so there was a temporary sacrifices. He's not into killing animals. He's not into those kind of sacrifices. He had to provide us a perfect sacrifice. That perfect sacrifice was Jesus who came as humankind and lived a perfect life and paid the price for our sin. What I think is so interesting is the original sin was the enemy saying to Adam and Eve, do you want to be like God basically?

Do you want to deny your humanness to become like God? And in order to save us, you know what God did? He denied his divinity and became like us. I mean, do you see that? Humans are like, I want to be like God. And God's like, you know what? I'll become like you. Do you see the difference there? Do you see how fascinating the gospel is? The story of Jesus, the story of the gospel is so fascinating that God wants to be a father, that God presents himself as a father, that he says, I know you, I want to have an intimate relationship with you.

It's not some arbitrary God in the sky that's working out good and things like that. He's a father. I mean, he's a father. He sends his son. The story of the gospel fascinates me. I have never found a religious narrative that is anywhere close to fascinating me in the way and touching my heart in the way of the gospel of Jesus Christ. It is the story that many have died for in this story.

Sin is the breaking of divine will or law, but more than that, it's going against the nature. I read this week, if you Googled, you know, did God create sin? There are a lot of people that believe that God created sin. God did not create sin. Sin is just doing the opposite of what God's nature is. If God never would have created human beings, humankind, with the ability to choose against his nature, sin would never have existed or created angelic beings.

It gave them the ability to choose against his nature. Sin is a creation that happens when free will is put into work. And free will allows you to choose against the nature of God. When you choose against the nature of God, it automatically becomes sin. This is just basic theology, Christian theology of how it works. God did not create sin. Sin is contrary to his nature.

Sin, as you'll see in the notes, separates us from God. Think of oil and water. It is impossible for God to mix with sin. Although on the cross, even though his divinity was not touched by sin, the human nature of him, the sin was poured out and he became sin that we might be saved. This is the gospel. But God did not create sin. God is not sin. And sin separates us from God.

Now here's the thing that I think is so important because God cannot dwell. He wants, he so desperately wants to dwell with you. You see in the garden, it was walking alongside mankind and then there was man saying, I don't want that. I want to be like God. And so they bastardized themselves and they denied their father because if you want to be like God, you can't be his child.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. And so God said, I will need to start from scratch again. And so he created a system where he gave, you know, his name. He said, this is my name. I want you to call me Yahweh. And he began to show who he was through his grace to reveal himself. The revelation of God is grace. God could walk away and just say, I don't need, you know, I don't need this anymore.

The fact that he would come back and reveal himself is grace. He said, fine, put me in a tent and I will travel with your people. I will go before you in the day like a pillar of fire at night and like a cloud in the day. I just want to be near you. I want to dwell near you and you can't contain me. But if you put a little tent there, I will put my name upon that tent and just let me be in your presence.

I want to be near you and take me around the wilderness and I need to train you how to live holy lives. I just want to be near you. But that wasn't enough for God because he didn't want to just be near you. And so God said, you know, by the sending of my son and his death on the cross, I can now make us perfect again according to sight in regard to sin.

And now my Holy Spirit cannot just dwell with you in the wilderness. I can indwell you. And now humankind has become the temple of the living God. You see, God wants to be with his people. He will pursue you. He will send his son. He is so sacrificial and his love is unrelenting. It is an unrelenting love. And he wants to just indwell. And this is what sexuality between a man and a woman shows and what God shows and the metaphor and why we are so committed to that metaphor is this ultimate intimacy where the two become one because God says, I want to become one with you.

And that is why we hold to that because the narrative reflects, the metaphor of marriage reflects the true nature of God. And to move away from that and for me to say, I want seven wives, the intimacy is lost or whatever you're going to see happening in society, what it does is it moves away from the pure image of what God is trying to say. In all of creations, the book of Romans says in Romans 1 and 2 that everything in creation will tell you something about God.

You will look at the creation but it says that many have looked at the creation, they've seen God within the creation and they've begun to worship the creation as opposed to the creator. And so they worship the creation and we see that in secular humanism today. Everything is physical. There is no spiritual. As you will see, everything is arbitrary. And we'll talk about love in a moment and where love comes from and does it just come from a thing like the physical.

That was a little spoiler alert there. Romans 7, 7. Look at your verse. What shall we say then? Actually, before I read that, I want to read what I wrote just to preempt it. Due to God's, and this is why God let us know what sin was. Sin is not a buzzkill to keep you in check. God let us know through the law what sin is because he wanted to indwell you and once again be reunited to his children.

That is why he showed us what sin is. And so what the enemy wants to do is to say that sin is meant to inhibit you. No. The gospel says this, that due to God's deep desire to be united with his beloved children, our creation, us, he revealed sin according to the law and provided a perfect sacrifice for that sin. Romans 7, 7. It says, what shall we say then?

Is the law sinful? Certainly not! Exclamation point. Nevertheless, I would not have known what sin was had it not been for the law. Do you see the grace of that? I wouldn't have known. We would just walk around and continue to sin not even knowing that we were through sins of omission which means you don't know. Sins of commission means I decide I'm going to do this.

Sins of omission, you just sin and you don't know but both of them can separate you from God. And so out of grace, God said, I've got to tell you. I've got to tell them. You think God wanted to write a big law book for us to follow? Do you think he wanted to do that? Or do you think he wanted children of their free will to say, I want to be like you so much.

I don't need the law. God, I know who you are because I walk in the garden with you. I don't want to be like you. I just want to be with you. That's what he wanted. I think it broke his heart to write a law. I think it broke his heart. I don't think he hates the law because it is in alignment with his nature. But I don't think he wanted to write it down.

He didn't, you know, he had one command. We couldn't even figure that out. One command. Don't do this one thing. Just one. You know what? He made it as simple as possible. And then he had to go into this complexity because he's eternal and he had to show it. And that's why the Jewish law is so complex. There's so many things that we have to try to do and follow.

So I think he really hated writing that law down. But the thing he loved about it is he said, okay, this is going to get me back home. This is going to get my children back home. God's not a lifeguard. An arbitrary lifeguard. He's a father. And there's a difference between a lifeguard saves your life and when a father saves your life out in the ocean. I've seen them both happen.

And I've seen the reuniting of a family on the beach after someone didn't drown between when the family's there and when a lifeguard just saves them. Lifeguards go slap high fives and go get a beer. Father's going to come and embrace his daughter. And I've seen that on the beach before. I was a lifeguard and I've seen people reunited with their family. That is it.

That is why we have the law. And so to hell with this notion that the law and the church is just trying to, you know, stop everybody. You can't have fun. We're trying to hold you back. We hate you because we're telling you what sin is. It is grace to tell people what sin is. And God forbid that we don't tell people what sin is in the world. God forbid. Why? Because of the love of God.

And it can't be a rule-breaking system in society. We're about the love of God. We want you to experience the love of God. We want you to be who you are called to be. Today's removal of divine will today has removed divine will from morality. And it shifts the moral compass of morality to mankind's shifting will. If you read the secular humanistic or the humanist manifesto it'll say that this is self we should update this on a regular basis based on new discoveries and what man thinks.

I want to say I've seen what happens in society when they begin to take a consensus of morality. I regularly point to Germany in the 1930s but you could go back to the Huns you could go back all through society you just read history books and you will see what happens when man is in charge of regulating morality without the compass of God's love and the compass of God's will and that's where we are today.

Morality is on a sliding and shifting scale. I won't go into that if you want to hear about that look at the human sexuality talk I did at the beginning of the year. I know that with the sexual norms of our day I will say this that there will be no end to how far man will push because as soon as we push the one there will be a new line because we are built to break the law.

The scripture says that. Whatever line we will try to normalize the next line and when that line is normalized mankind will normalize the next line. There will be no end and at some point we are going to have to draw a line in the sand. We'll stop there with that. We move on that we've removed the divine will. Go down in your notes. Today's secular morality now is continuing to talk about this word love.

Right? Now the law is fulfilled by love it says here in the scripture that to love others like yourself but we need to be careful that we don't remove God from love if that makes sense. And let me just explain this to you. Today as you'll see in the notes secular morality is supported by love and a call to love. You're going to see this all over the news. Love, love, love, love.

You're going to see hate love, hate love, hate love. You're going to see it everywhere. It's a very powerful banner to unite your troops underneath. Very powerful banner. But we have to dissect love to understand if it truly is love and we're going to do a little dissection here and look at it. It says let me say that again. Today's secular morality is supported by a call to love to love and sin has been replaced by hate as I said earlier.

Today all things are allowed in the name of love as long as it does not violate another person's will or fleshly desires. One of the arguments you'll see in secular society is that to kill someone is wrong but if they ask you to kill them because of their suffering or whatever and you help and then you aid in their death that's okay because you've not violated someone's will.

We are once again wanting to take the and there's a lot of complicated things. I just had a clergy discussion about that so I understand there's about 12,000 rabbit trails to everything that I'm saying but what I'm saying is man wants to take the place of God and make God's decisions for him. Either God's going to be in charge or man's going to be in charge. It's one or the other.

You just have to choose what you have more faith in. It says if you go down it says today all things are allowed in the name of love as long as it does not violate another person's will or fleshly desires. Now here's a key thing if you are in a conversation and as believers you have to understand this. Star this point. It's what I wrote. God is love. We know that.

God is full of love but love is not God. God is love That was a great hmm. I love that. That's what I was looking for. In our society today love has replaced God and now we have a love God. So if you look at certain religions they will have the God of this the God of the harvest the God of love. Today love has replaced God. Now God is love but love is not God.

Love is a characteristic of God and all things that are loving have to also come into alignment with the nature of God. And so when love becomes God anything done in the name of love is okay. Hey it's loving. You know if two people love each other what the heck? You know it doesn't matter because love and love has been lifted up and I understand that. If I wasn't a believer matter of fact even as a believer it makes sense to me.

I look at that argument and I think that's a really good argument. It's a profound argument. I can look at it. I don't want to deny the power of that. But when I start understanding that God has more characteristics to his nature than just love and that the things we do in the name of love whether it be help a spouse to die in her end years or whatever it would be in the name of love also has to come into alignment with who God is and the rest of his nature.

Today we have made love God. Now here's the interesting thing because we've removed often times in secular society God from love. One of my questions is this then where does love come from? If you're going to remove love from God and if you were now go Google where does love come from scientists scientists scientists right now they're just starting to look into this they have no idea it has not been scientifically proven where love comes from let me tell you where we are scientifically at the moment scientifically it is a chemical reaction in your brain that is what we've landed that love is a chemical reaction that was part of evolution that has that helps society that helps because move things in a progressive manner to make the world better I gotta say you know Schlitz malt liquor is a chemical reaction in the brain and we don't highlight it to the place of this thing called love you know I asked last week what is love I almost had the song I won't sing it again for you I went and listened to it all what is love I did sing it you know we have we have no idea where love if love is a chemical reaction in the brain when I see something and I agree with hey we should love and not hate I love that but if it's just a chemical reaction in the brain why why should I love tell me why I should love because it's nice why should I be nice if we're gonna believe in evolution which believes in survival of what the fittest you know why should we not have natural selection and what they call sociological Darwinism you know or social Darwinism which means hey the best races will rise to the top why not if we're gonna hey look if we're gonna buy hear me out I don't believe this but if we're gonna buy in we're gonna remove God say do everything for love and we're also gonna hold to evolution we can't have conflicting philosophies within it that are hypocrisy the same with our Christianity and when we walk with sin to say that I believe in evolution but we don't believe in social Darwinism where the best races or whoever are the best cream of the top should survive and the rest should just you know figure it out just die yeah should be preyed upon tell me where is your love tethered to don't give me a call to love if the only reason I should do it is a chemical reaction because you know who I'm gonna love me it's all about me I got no desire I might you know just to get along better I might fake that I love you but there's no reason where is love coming from so when someone gives me let me just give you some tools for the discussion right because we're discussing this on a public platform the discussions in the country today are better I think than they've ever been I think there is a time for dialogue I was listening to Charles Barkley he's doing a thing on race in America incredibly profound he was on the Mo Kelly show look up Mo Kelly and listen to Charles Barkley it was very profound about race in America I find him very intriguing this discussion is happening so when we're having this discussion and someone brings up love just ask him this question where does love come from where does love come from ask him where it's tethered ask him where love is tethered and where it comes from why do we love well let me give you the answer for as believers we believe that love is divine that love is in a chemical reaction that love is a characteristic of God that he has allowed us to harvest from his own nature from heaven through prayer through forgiveness and that when we love it is actually an act it is implementing the nature of God that we become transcendent we become almost immortal in a way because we are taking the eternality my word of God and we are presenting it to the world you cannot truly love it says we love because why say that again why do we love you cannot love truly in God's economy unless you understand the deep love of God for yourself this is the platform this is why on Easter when all the people come who only come on Easter or Christmas and I said to them is it easier to believe that Jesus rose from the dead or that God loves you it's never been a problem for me to believe that Jesus rose from the dead believing that God loves me has been incredibly difficult David Levy one of my friends here at the church and my prayer partner texted me this week I just felt like God wanted me to tell you he really enjoys you don't you want to have friends like that I thought God likes me he likes me I got all the reasons why he shouldn't to know the love of God we have to be committed to diving deeply and drowning in the love of God I think one of the things that's interesting about a baby and I look at creation it says something a baby is actually breathing it's drowning and as it drowns it breathes so you know once we're born we're no longer allowed to do that but they live drowning what does that show us you know what it shows me that God wants me to drown in his love he wants me I can look at that I can live God you see I believe in love too I believe in love over hate I believe in equality I believe in these things but for different reasons why because they are presented by the love of God are you in touch with the love of God I've almost run out of time the wheels I'm circling the tower I'm touching the wheels down keep going Carol alright well part two we're almost done here quick keys to the passage I'm going to go through these quickly let's look at the passage in verse 13 I think it is gosh that's so small you know when the font goes really small you my brothers and sisters were called what to be free it is a battle for bondage or freedom holiness is going to make you free do not use your freedom to indulge what the flesh but serve one another in love I want to say that God wants you to be free it is a battle the battle in this world is a battle for freedom versus bondage and a battle for identity and anytime we step into sin it will always even the smallest sin will always find its way back to a main road and that road has a signpost that says death it says in James 1 5 then after desire has conceived it gives birth to what sin and sin when it is full grown gives what death we're called to be free how how how free do you want to be you just want to live in the courtyard you don't want to be in solitary right no one wants to be in solitary but if you've got courtyard privileges and you can go to the prison store you know get your you know your raisin cakes and your Twinkies you know you're happy play on the you know the small correctional facility is that enough for you with your sin or you know do you want to just live in view of the prison or do you want to get the heck out of there into the grazing pasture land where you can roam free where God said this is your inheritance I want to expound the boundary lines of your life sin is going to bind you up and it's going to lead you to death the acts of the flesh I love this the acts of the flesh are obvious we're trying to make the acts of the flesh a lot less obvious these days well why shouldn't why should you know what go to the end of that in the notes there holiness rarely needs rationalization let me say that again holiness rarely needs rationalization rarely needs rationalization when I find myself like three sentences in but yeah you know but probably it's probably not holiness let me just tell you have a barometer there it's probably not holiness for the freedom of society to follow after what the bible would say are fleshy desires are full of discussion and arguments and why and I'm not saying we shouldn't have a well thought out faith we don't leave our mind at the door when we follow Jesus but rationalization is rarely synonymous with holiness and sometimes you just gotta say I just need to quit talking and follow Jesus somebody asked me all these questions the other day they come to my office and whenever they want to get in what does the Greek word for pornography I'm like I don't really want to have the conversation you know like if you're really seeking like I'll talk to you about it but don't come in and try to convince me that God said you can have sex with whoever you want whenever you that's sin I don't need to discuss it much more I love how simple the Bible is keep finally keep in step with the spirit those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh and its passions and desires since we live by the spirit let us keep in step with the spirit how do you know you're in step with the spirit look your fruit it goes on to !

if you look afterwards and world war three happened because of the decision you made and you don't see the fruits of love joy peace sometimes they have to work out you know I'm not in step with the spirit you know how I know the spirit quiet boys it's quiet it's not chaotic it's peaceful that's one of the things we want to lead here we want to lead in peace and comfort and quiet following our Savior in the dust of the Messiah amen amen Chris you want to come up