Judging Observance

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While they're going back to take their seats, want to ask you guys to keep Issachar Hellerman in your prayers today. Woke up early this morning. They wake up fairly early on every Shabbat. They're here early to set up for the worship team, do rehearsals and all that. When they woke up this morning, little Lizzie had a pretty high fever.

So not only for him but also for Alyssa as she's home today with him, that not only will his fever break and he'll be healthy, but also that she won't get ill as well and all of the other kind of gunk, RSV, TGJ, ElementOp, all the things that are going around in this season. Don't worry, we're going to enter into winter this week possibly and then we'll probably get back in the 50s and the 60s according to the extended forecast. So Jennifer, it is really good to see you back. I am glad that you are feeling better. It is always great to see you and Tyson in the front row one because Tyson always has a really awesome beard and I always kind of get a little bit envious and so it's a humble moment for me.

But also because you're always smiling and so it's good to see you guys. We're going to be running out of here a little quick today. Cam, Matthew and I, we are headed to our Dallas campus as well immediately following this to preach and help them with some technical issues and so keep us in your prayers today. We will be on the road most of the day, but I love what I do. I love to get to serve the Kingdom of God.

I love to get to do that not only here but also in the region. And so it is definitely an honor to have that opportunity. The last four weeks we have spent talking about remission, the remission of sins, the need to cancel debts, all of those types of things. Anybody who has been in debt in their life knows you would love to cancel that debt. You would love to be debt free.

Dave Ramsey has made a living off of debt free and allowing people to yell debt free on the radio and on television and all of these things. And while financial debt is awesome to get out of, in the end I will take financial debt over the debt of my sins and my shortcomings. And so I am glad to have a savior who I can know is perfect and spotless when I continue to struggle to be like him. But the next four weeks we're going to five weeks actually, we're actually going to dive into the Mission series. What is mission.

You know, it is the start of the year. Some of you, you've gotten to that place and time in your life where you guys write your family mission statement. Some of you make fun of the people whose families at this time write their family mission statements. And some of you are just trying to get marriage counseling because one of the spouse wants a mission statement and the other one doesn't. All of the above.

We all fit in it at some point in time, and that's okay. But as believers in Jesus, I would assume most of you in this room fall under that category. We don't get to just be. We're called to do. And over the next couple of weeks, we're gonna look at what does the Bible actually say about what is the mission and the calling and how do we go about that in our lives.

I think that's crucial for us because not everybody in this room, but a lot of people in this room have come from a. What's known as a Torah observant or a Torah pursuant or a messianic lifestyle. Hebrew roots, Hebraic roots, Hebrew passionate. Brent's come up with a couple of names the last couple of years. I hadn't before, but there's a lot of terminology that is used.

In the end, it is trying to define your Christianity in how you pursue God with your walk. I think almost all of us would agree that it doesn't matter whether you're Catholic or Methodist or Lutheran or Torah observant or whatever. You love Jesus and you're trying your best. What do we do in between there? Well, that's what we need to look at.

Because ultimately, in our mission, there are two things that God tells us that we should get from his teachings. One, we should learn how to multiply the kingdom. Apprentices around us. You're gonna hear me use that word a lot the next couple of weeks. Apprentices.

Apprentices versus discipleship. Discipleship has been used in our modern culture in a way that traditionally makes us think of a classroom setting. And so we'll have discipleship classes. We'll have discipleship courses. We'll have this.

Well, discipleship in biblical times was courses. It wasn't classes. Jesus didn't offer, you know, a sermon, a seminary.com course on discipleship. He offered doing life with other people. And we see that throughout the Gospels.

We see that throughout Joshua and Moses, even before the times of Jesus, we see that there was an apprenticeship. And so I'm going to use that terminology a little bit more. It's supposed to multiply Kingdom apprentices. And two, it's supposed to produce fruit in keeping with those teachings. So we have a problem if only one of those two is being employed.

If we're bearing fruit, but we're not multiplying, we're not necessarily on mission. If we're multiplying, but we're not bearing fruit, we're not necessarily on mission. It's absolutely possible to multiply things that are not of God.

Anybody ever been around somebody who's angry? You multiply that anger real quick. Multiply that anger real quick. Anybody in their younger days? Nobody does this now.

Anybody in your younger days ever be around somebody's kind of hot headed, kind of loose? He was the guy who, like, you know, he'd be the first one to throw punches in an argument, but he's the first one to run into a party. Anybody follow a guy like that into a place, that you instantly regret it at some point in time later. Okay, just me. Awesome.

All right. You're not allowed to ever talk to my mom. She's got some stories. So multiply the kingdom apprentices, produce fruit. Those two things are important now.

I've spent the last two and a half, almost three years of my life spiraling down these places of. Wait a second, Lord. If I'm supposed to be multiplying Kingdom apprentices and. And I'm supposed to be producing fruit, why is that not happening? Why is that not happening?

If on one hand, we believe in Jesus and so we should be obedient to what he tells us to do, and that obedience as we go along should produce fruit, Right? Just like, let's get another example. I go to Home Depot or Lowe's, I get an apple tree, pear tree. They were out of apple trees. Get a pear tree and a partridge, and I put it in the ground.

I bury it in the ground. My expectation of that tree is as that tree grows, it is going to produce fruit. Right? Now, the fruit obviously is not for the tree, right? I mean, yeah.

Have you seen cannibal trees? Dude, I want to go on walks with you. The tree produces pears, but you don't see the tree eating up the pears. The pears are there for Eitan to come grab or for Elias or for Nathaniel so they can come grab the pear and eat and be nourished by it. What happens if you go and you get a nasty, rotten fruit?

Does it nourish you? Are you like? Man, that's awesome. Ah, man, I want some more of that apple. Whoo.

No. What happens when you Bite into it and there's a worm in there. You're not like, oh, that's awesome too. Like now you're like, ah. Most of the ladies would be like, I'm never eating that again.

I'm going to Walmart. So in the end, you plant a tree with the expectation that the tree would produce fruit. Guys. Every time we read throughout the scripture, we see these agricultural things being used in storytelling from Christ. That's not unusual because that was the culture they lived in.

They didn't get up and they weren't architecture and they weren't electricians and they weren't computer software programmers. They weren't all those things. They were, for the most part, they were farmers. Farmers. And they produced animals, they produced grain, they produced agricultural things.

And then they came together and they bartered. Every once in a while you'd have a blacksmith, you'd have a carpenter, which honestly, for my messianic loving people was more like masonry in that time. You know, we think of carpentry now as like, we're going to go get some two by fours and we're going to frame up a house. And that time, what did they have? They kind of had bricks and clay and stone.

So it was, they. They weren't out there cutting down the fig trees and turning it into a second, a second floor extension onto their house. It was more stone based in general. But all of those things were to show us in a day and age where now almost nobody farms. I mean, I would classify our modern farming for the most part is making sure that I shop my organic produce against three different stores.

Whether it's Crest, Walmart or whatever. I'm farming at that point. I'm farming with my double coupons on Kroger delivery. I'm farming. That's how far away from the biblical culture our current culture in America has become.

Yet I believe the word of God is inspired and holy, which means that it has to stand the test of time no matter what our civilization does, no matter how different we might be. So we must multiply. Kingdom, apprenticeship, and we must bear fruit in keeping with those teachings. So Isaiah says he hates your foolish feast. Paul tells us in Corinthians that we're to remove or ensure that we aren't coming to the table of the Lord with malice or wickedness.

So are the feasts of the Lord bad? No. But what we do with it can be bad. So how do we get there? The fruit we produce, the heart we approach with.

This is important. You cannot tell me you're obedient without bearing fruit. It's not possible to be obedient to the commandments of the Lord and not bear the fruit that the Bible says you must produce in that time. In Ephesians, Paul outlined some of the things we should ponder when we're looking at accomplishing the mission of multiplying people into the kingdom of the Lord. He tells us, and I'm gonna put this up on the website tomorrow or Monday.

Cause I'm gonna kind of go in a bullet point list today and over the next couple weeks we're gonna have some bullet points of like, this is what we should do, this is what we shouldn't do according to scripture. So if you wanna go back and look at that, they'll be there for you to do that on the website. Paul says, don't attempt to further the kingdom by doing these things. One, spiral back and forth between the teachings of men, whether in person or on the Internet. Don't spiral back and forth to and fro.

Two, don't engage in evil schemes. Evil schemes are far more than you plotting to murder somebody. If you're plotting to take advantage of somebody, if you're plotting to harm somebody, if you're plotting, if you have ill intent in any capacity, you're plotting an evil scheme. Most of you in this room are not mental murderers. So don't just immediately check out and say, well, I'm not a mental murderer.

I'm not thinking I want to kill somebody. But if you've plotted to take advantage of somebody at any point in time, that's an evil scheme. Don't allow your heart to become hardened. Sometimes you don't know your heart got hardened. Just like sometimes until you take the cellophane off an English cucumber, you do not know that it is rotten.

Looks beautiful. Until you take the cellophane off and you go to chop it up and you're like, ain't nobody gonna eat that. You know it's bad when even the pigs won't eat it. Don't be greedy or giving in to the desires of your flesh. This is a real modern issue in America, but it's one we've talked about extensively over the last couple of years.

Don't be corrupt. Most of us think of like, you know, some guy in an ivory tower working to take advantage of people. Now people are corrupt all time. If you're trying to take advantage of an insurance company, if you're trying to take advantage of a business, if you're trying to weigh the scales to your Benefit. That's corruption.

Don't remain in anger. I'm a work in progress, guys. There's no judgment here. Don't remain in anger. Don't remain in your transgressions.

This is what we talked about over the last couple of weeks in the conditioning of the wineskin. Sometimes people will repent for something or they'll ask for forgiveness and they immediately expect it to be gone. Like you see in the movies. Like the Catholic priest comes in, he's like, the power of Christ compels me. And then all of a sudden they never struggle with that again.

That's not a reality in most situations. Most of the time you have to first abstain from the transgression of the sin you're in. Allow God to heal you, recondition you, then you get your deliverance. Some people live their whole entire life and don't get deliverance. There's something you have to do.

Don't remain in your transgressions. If you remain in your transgressions, you're not furthering the kingdom of God. You're furthering the kingdom of darkness. Don't speak in a way to bring destruction to the body of Christ. You're not to tear down the body of Christ.

This is hard to do. There are ministries and ministries and ministries on the Internet that just spend their entire time talking about the nonsense they see at other ministries. And they're popular.

Don't tear down the body of Christ.

Throw away all bitterness, slander, malice and mindless speech. Do not resent or desire vengeance or punishment on others. Don't desire revengeance. Don't desire their punishment, grace and mercy. And let the Lord do what the Lord's going to do.

Again, work in progress.

A very Paul like thing to do. After he says, these are things you shouldn't do. He also says, hey, let me encounter it with things you should do. So here's some things that you could replace that malice, that wickedness, that mindless speech, those types of things with. He encourages us to use these.

Speak the truth in love. This is grossly misused. Well, I love you and that's why I wanna tell you why you're wrong. That's one of the ways a lot of people in our corner of Christianity approach this. I love you, but this is why I wanna tell you why Christmas is pagan.

I love you, but this is why I wanna tell you that you can't celebrate Purim. I love you, but this is why I wanna tell you that your wife is not allowed to wear that I love you, but you have to first truly love a person in order to have the ability to speak into their life. Otherwise you're a clanging cymbal and nobody's listening to you. I've been the chief sinner of this. You can go back and look at my Facebook page over the last 15 years.

Chief Sinner here. Little by little, being reconditioned. You have to develop a relationship with individuals in order to be actually able to speak truth in love. And then we also have to understand you have to speak truth in love, which means you must love them and you must speak truth. Your truth isn't necessarily their truth.

What's right for your home in the practice of being obedient and producing fruit in this season isn't the same. I testified to this with many examples. There was years early on where I literally wouldn't turn a light switch on in my house for the Sabbath. I was so worried about being obedient to the commandments that I produced no fruit. Because nowhere do I see even in the book of Hebrews where it says Jesus is my Sabbath, that I should be riddled with anxiety on the Sabbath day, especially self inflicted anxiety on the Sabbath day.

And there's many other things in there. It's different for every person. Thank God. He's been uber gracious to me and my wife for many, many years because we've learned to see that my kids, whoa, my kids are not happy with that. Something's not right.

And rather than immediately just walking away, we tweak it. We're testing, we're failing, but we're failing forward. You're to mature in your faith. You're to grow in your faith. Now this is important because the next one I think, ties together with it.

Not only are you to mature in your faith, you're to grow, but you are to grow into Christ. This is important because we can look and we can say, well, you know, I don't want to grow into Jeroboam. Cool. On the same page with you. I want to grow into Moses.

There's a part of me that wants to learn from Moses, but we are to grow up into Christ. Remember all the positive people, Deborah, Moses, Enoch, all these people, they led to Christ. They had attributes of Christ. Christ, in the end, was perfection. So when we say I want to grow up into Stephen, I'm only going to be able to grow up into a portion, what's there.

So I want to grow up into Moses, I want to grow up into David, I want to grow up into all these people. No, you're to grow up and grow into Christ. You are always to lead from love. You don't lead from obligation. You don't lead from anger.

You lead with love. If you can't lead with love, you should probably go back to last week's message and sit in a wilderness season and get reconditioned. Allow yourself to be renewed by Christ. That's a constant, constant thing that's happening. It's a constant thing.

Kind of like your Netflix subscription renews. We like to say, I have Netflix. No, you renew it every month. So how come we can accept having subscriptions and renewals every month, but we think like, oh, when I get. I get saved by God and I get baptized, that somehow I don't need to be renewed?

No, we need to consistently be renewed. Why? Because he's the only one who can refine. He's the only one who can temper. He's the only one who can help us.

The Bible says the Holy Spirit, which Paul calls the Spirit of Jesus, is what leads us to all wisdom, knowledge, and understanding. It doesn't say the Spirit of Chris. It doesn't say the Spirit of Philip or Michael or Brent or the others were men and women to walk alongside you, but it is the Holy Spirit that leads you to that.

Allow Christ to be your measuring stick of righteousness and holiness. And this is the entire work of Christ.

We can't get into the shortsighted nature where we say, hey, I met Chris Franke in 2002. Well, if you met me in 2002, I was a horrible person. I don't care who you thought I was in 2008 or 2020 or some of these other times. I was worse in that time frame. So that is a portion of who I am, and that is a portion of my story.

But the measuring stick is all of Christ. And the measuring stick of a man or woman should be the complete narrative of their life. Some seasons are good and some seasons are not. Give no opportunity to the devil in thought, action, or speech. Hard one.

Because not only do you have to give no thought to the devil, you have to give no thought to your own fleshly thoughts. Like, man, that person really made me mad, or that person didn't give me enough attention. And then the adversary can come in and say, you know, you're right, I feel justified. Give no thought to it. Push it aside again.

If you have that situation, wait, let the Lord heal you. Labor and honest work. You're to work hard. You don't get to come to the Sabbath day and have a rest. If you're not a hard worker, you're to labor in honest work.

And that doesn't mean you can be the godfather. That doesn't mean you can join the mob. Labor in honest work, and then you're to share the fruit of that labor with anyone in need. This comes with your tithe, your offering. It could be money, it can be spiritual gifts, it can be resources.

It's not just financial. The Book of Acts told us when we went through two years ago, the spiritual gifts you are given, you're supposed to share. So if you have fruit, if you're getting fruit in your labor, let's say you have the fruit of joy. I'll take a delivery of that, please. Can I get a little bit more joy in my life?

I've got the wonderful love of my precious Redeemer way down in the depths of my heart. Hey, I know. They don't even sing that at Sabbath cult anymore. Jacob, get on it. Little less.

Father Abraham had many sons and a little bit more of like the bi b L e. I could use more joy in my life, but sometimes I don't have the fruit of joy in my life, and so I can't share that resource with somebody else. It's funny how God interweaves people's seasons and cycles to where, you know, Mark, you might be on a spiritual high of joy and peace and love. And, Monique, maybe you're in one of the hardest seasons of your life, and so your dad's fruit is there for you to be able to eat of and be nourished to move forward. Remember, trees grow up to produce fruit.

And when you produce fruit, you are not cannibal. You don't eat your own fruit. Your fruit is for somebody else. This is why I tell people over the last two to three years of my life, judge the other people the same way you judge me. If I am bad, if I am evil, I will not produce good fruit, and you want nothing to do with it.

If the Lord is working in me and I'm producing fruit that is of a good tree, judge me the same way you judge them. Don't judge them with a harsher stick or me with a harsher stick. I'm either producing fruit of the Holy Spirit in my life or I'm not.

And this is why we created added structures in the church. If I'm not producing fruit in my own life, the elder's job is to come and say, we need to give you iron. We need to chop down those branches, whatever it is, or hey, by the way, you've kind of reached the profit moment here. We just need to take an ax to the roots and start all over and replant all of those things become on the table.

Produce fruit so that the fruit that's produced in your life can be shared with others.

That's important. Kingdom, multiplication. Only speak what builds up the body in the right time. There are some times I have to ask the Lord, and I never did before. Lord, you've given me this revelation, Lord, you revealed something in the scripture to me, Lord, you caused my wife and I to have this moment to change something in our life.

Lord, you did this. What am I supposed to do with it? And sometimes he says it's for the church. Go tell the Church. Sometimes he says it's for you.

It's for me and you, son. And for. Sometimes he's not gonna answer me. And I have to sit on it and wait until I get into a conversation. And then all of a sudden, it's kind of like a aha moment.

It's like it was for this moment. Not everything you're told, not everything you're shown, not everything that happens in your life is for this moment. It might be for some time in the future. I testified recently to a friend who walked with me for many, many years, that I believe I had to go through what I went through for 10 plus years in order to bear fruit now, because if I hadn't have done that, if I hadn't have gone through that time and I tried to do this season of life 10 years ago, it would not have been in God's time, and it would not have been the right time. Which means I wouldn't have the proper sunlight, I wouldn't have had the proper rain, I wouldn't have the proper iron.

All the other things that are necessary for somebody to grow, give grace to those around you.

This is hard. I understand this is hard sometimes. I'm a type A cleric. Temperament. I don't even afford grace to my children most of the time.

I am not military. You can tell by looking at me. But in the end, I run a military household. I expect direct obedience the first time I ask. Then we can talk about it.

Then you can tell me what's happening. But if I ask you to do something in my home, I expect it done immediately. And then we talk. As my kids have gotten older, I've realized that that doesn't always work. Especially when they have a brain, especially when they start talking.

Especially when you realize that they're actually your DNA.

God has a sense of humor.

And you start looking at your children and you're like, I can't even be mad because I 100% taught them that. They came out of the womb with that, and that was me.

Nothing is my wife. All the good parts is my wife. All the bad parts are mine. But when you see that I am definitely being real, I want to be able to sleep with both eyes closed tonight.

I am giving grace to those around me in my moment. It's always great to give grace. I had what's known as a Bill Belichick mindset. You have jobs and tasks to do. It doesn't matter who shows up to do it.

If you don't show up to do it, we're going to fill the void and we're going to move forward. It's called Next Man Up. Now, that worked for a really long time. You have one of the greatest football players to ever play the game in, Tom Brady. It doesn't matter who's playing.

It doesn't matter how many people their tight ends killing, how many times they got to go to jail. Tom Brady's going to win Super Bowls with Bill Belichick. It doesn't matter. It's next man up until it's not until you have to grow and evolve. I used to be like Bill Belichick, running international ministries.

People came and went. The amount of undiagnosed mental health issues that some people had and just spiraled off into places was very frequent. So you just fill the void and you move forward. Till the last couple years, when I realized how damaging is turnover in a company. There's some business owners here.

You don't want turnover and you don't want that cycle. You only want to let go of an employee. If you absolutely believe that, there's no way they can thrive. Well, if corporations run that way, and the Bible talks about people like that, like, we just don't want to throw away people, then why do we throw people away? Why?

Especially in obedience. When people say, well, I'm not obedient like you do, we immediately throw people away and go start the First Church of the Nazarene on the corner next to the Second Church of the Nazarene. This is not one denomination, as many denominations as a human heart problem. Show grace to those around you and do not grieve the Holy Spirit with your fruit. This is super serious.

Don't grieve the Holy Spirit. Who is the power that's supposed to Be producing fruit in you. Don't grieve it with the fruit. If the Holy Spirit is at work with you, you still have a choice. You have free will.

Your choice can be, I'm not going to exhibit this fruit or I'm going to hoard this fruit for myself, or I'm going to cannibalize and you can grieve the Holy Spirit by what you do with what the Holy Spirit gives you.

Be kind, tender hearted and forgive others.

I struggle to forgive others that don't see my point, but Paul tells me I'm to be kind, tender hearted and forgive others. He doesn't give me another six bullet points in justification. He says, forgive others. Be kind hearted, tenderhearted and forgive others. I think it's because the more we want to justify whether we should or should not forgive somebody, the more we hold onto it, the more we allow the bad fruit to grow, the more we allow the poison of the bitter roots to grow.

And by the time we realize they've taken hold, we've lost an an entire season of crop again for somebody else to eat on, let alone if we've shared the poison fruit. See, a lot of times we're walking around thinking we're Snow White. For those who are allowed to do Disney, we're thinking we're Snow White and we're really the. We're the evil witch with the like, eat this pretty apple. And then because we don't recognize in ourself the roots of bitterness or the roots of anger or the roots of contempt or whatever those roots might be.

So God says, be tender hearted and forgive others. If your obedience to God produces malice, corruption, anger, greed, destruction to any fellow believer in Christ, it doesn't say Messianic, Catholic Jews, anybody in the body of Christ, bitterness and slander or desire for vengeance, then you're against the words of Paul, John, Matthew, Jeremiah, Luke and James, and they were the original Beatles. Come on, come on. Your obedience has to produce fruit in order for it to be in line with what the Lord wants. And so if you're not experiencing the fruit, then you have to question your implementation of the obedience.

I like to use this terminology and I know there's a lot of different definitions and I'm not a scholar, so I don't get to set this, but doctrine is what you believe the Bible says for you to do. So let's just say it's the commandments for you. My core doctrine. I believe we should keep the Sabbath. I believe that Jesus is the Christ.

I believe those types of things. That is my doctrine. My theology is how I think about that and implement it in my walk. So I believe in my doctrine that I should keep the Sabbath. Now I need to read the Bible and think about what I should do in order to keep the Sabbath.

And in the end, I have philosophy and wisdom that comes from whether or not it produce fruit. So at any point in time in that space, we can change our beliefs. Brian and Taylor, you're fairly new to the church. I'm guessing that the Sabbath wasn't even necessarily on your radar a couple months ago. So your doctrine can change lots of times where we come from and where we exist, our doctrine changes based upon whoever seems to be the rightest on the Internet.

That's the day and age we live in because we have a plethora of information at our hands. And I'm not mad. It's just the reality of where we are. And so we have to say, okay, I read this, I watched this, I see this, I believe it. But if it doesn't produce fruit in your life for the lives around you, then we have to be honest and transparent enough that it's not aligned with the Bible because something you've tried to do with what you heard doesn't produce Bible fruit.

These are the works of the flesh and it should be alarming to us to make adjustments. This is where the grace comes in. A lot of times people don't want people to adjust. We use terminology like backsliding. We use terminology like they never truly believe.

Why? Why is it only progressive Christianity that's allowed to deconstruct their faith and rebuild it up with the Holy Spirit? If we weren't allowed to do that, you wouldn't see people coming from the Baptist movement who believed in laying on of hands and seeing people get healed. There are things in our doctrine, there's how we think of things, that we need to be reconstructed. Because the Holy Spirit is the one who should lead us, not our own knowledge.

And this is why you have to leave room for grace and mercy for those who are in this season. Because just because I was raised a Baptist and I was raised a Presbyterian, you don't see no presbytery robes up here, do you?

You haven't been to the right church, my bro. I'll take you to a Presbyterian church.

We see throughout the Bible that there's a conflict between what we think in trying to be obedient to God, whatever that might be, whether it's a doctrine standpoint from a denomination. You know, when I was growing up, the Baptist said, this is what we believe and this is what we do. And it was different than the Assemblies of God, and it was different from Messianic Judaism. And it's different from different ministries and things like that, but it's what you believe. But we see the conflict with that, with fruit.

There's nobody in this room, from my opinion, who understands the Torah, the prophets, and the Gospels the same way as the people who are walking in that time. And the reason why I feel fairly confident in saying that is because, and this includes me, I'm a part of this family. The reason why I feel confident in saying that is because this was their culture. It was their DNA. It was the stories passed down from their families.

We're trying to reframe our mind from a Western cultural perspective into more of a Hebraic understanding.

The Israelites struggled with their obedience, and they grew tired and weary, angry and bitter. They put the Lord to the test consistently throughout the Scripture. You want to have some fun reads? You want to have a good, feel good moment this afternoon before watching the Bengals not make the playoffs? Let's go to the Book of Amos.

That's how you know. That's how you know I have the fruit of long suffering. I'm a Bengals fan. 43 years and only 4 years of them. They've been decent throughout their life.

Go to the Book of Amos. There's not a lot of like, yay, let's feel good about this. No. The Lord is growing angry and tired and weary for what the Israelites have done, not only to the relationship with the Lord, but to all their neighbors, the fruit that they've served them.

And we see that rather than trusting the Lord, when the Lord is trying to recondition them and trying to get them back in that remission time, that their answer is, hey, we don't know where Moses went, so just build us some gods that look like the things we saw in Egypt so we can just follow them. I need a God to see.

This is why my family doesn't preach from the pulpit every week. This is why my family doesn't. We take sabbaticals on a regular basis. You're not following one man in this church. I don't care who the man or the woman is.

This church is rooted on Jesus, and it's always going to be Jesus at the center. And if you start following me, then you got a.

We see Moses grow weary and angry, and this is a pattern that we see over and over and over and over again. We see the apostles wrestle with the same thing. Peter. Peter knew Jesus didn't want him to pick up that sword. He knew Jesus was not a military leader, like what he experienced, and still picked up the sword.

And he cut off the guard's ear. He still did it. Everybody is being reconditioned for some new season to produce some fruit that somebody else in the body of Christ is going to need. It might be a check you write. It might be a joy you bring.

It might be a letter you send to them. Sometimes the best thing you can do is send a text message saying, I love you. There's a couple other male pastors who've made this transition into Saturday churches with us over the year. And it took me a long time, but finally, sometimes I just randomly text, I love you. And at first I had to say it because I knew I actually loved him in my heart.

But, like, I was kind of like, I don't know how I feel about this. Like, you know, and then after a while, I was like, this is stupid. I love you. I care about you. You need me.

I'm coming.

I'm here for you. I don't care what you think about that. It's the truth. There ain't no denying the truth. Almost 200 times, the word fruit is used throughout the Scripture to inform us of what the product should be of our obedience.

Fruit is the goal. Obedience is one of the methods to produce fruit. The implementation of how we are obedient varies a lot. And I do think there's some elements in the Scripture that affords us for those seasons. Obviously, how they kept the Sabbath when they transgressed, going out and gathering manna was not the same as they did in the Bible.

But I want to make it abundantly clear to you. I believe, and it's one core element of me, when we talk about obedience and fruit. Before you get to the Sabbath day, which is one of the things our church really loves, we're a Saturday church. We meet on the Sabbath. There was a commandment and an instruction that was given from God to humanity, and it was to protect, maintain, and provide for the garden.

In the garden was a wife, a family, a household, and a home. And because Adam did not do that, he did not get to have the Sabbath ongoing with the Lord like the Lord wanted with him.

If your house is out of order and it's not producing fruit, it will spill into this house. And when it spills into this house, I get to deal with it and the elders get to deal with it. We don't want to. I would much rather you bring bundt cakes and fruit that I like than rotten fruit. I don't know a single pastor who sits around like, you know what?

I just want somebody to have a marriage issue so I can get another phone call. I don't know of any pastor who's done that. We want to eat in the fruit with you guys. It's one of the reasons why I love the Hanukkah parties, because we get to actually just go and chill and be a part of the family with no expectations. We just get to be a person.

Contrary to popular belief, I do have a soul and a spirit, and we enjoy in that time being in those moments with you.

This is why what you do in your home is so important. And I've heard a lot over 18 years, and it's looked very different. Well, we're obedient. We're obedient to the Torah. We're obedient to the Ten Commandments.

We're obedient to the words of Jesus. Then why is your marriage falling apart? Why is your home in disarray? Why are your children angry all the time? Why are you angry all the time?

The fruit of your obedience is not good for somebody else. And we are creating apprentices. If you hang out with an angry person and you're more inclined to become angry, yet humanity gets weary in our pursuit of trying to live a kingdom life not only for ourself, but then trying to figure out how to multiply it in somebody else's life. We grow weary. We grow tired.

We'll have one success where somebody just blows up and they're just awesome. And it's like, this was super easy. And when it's not, it's very, very hard for us. And this is why I'm reminded of Moses. God didn't wait until he sent Jesus.

He used it. In the earliest time. Moses, one of the most entrusted men in the entire Bible, was told to pull up a staff on a mountain while Joshua went to fight Amalek. And as long as he held the staff of the Lord, up in the wilderness, the Lord fought the battle. But Moses was like me, and he couldn't hold the staff up that long.

I'm not sure what the staff's weight was, but his arms grew tired. And so he needed Aaron and Hur. Aaron and Hur saw that Moses when Moses arm would drop, Moses wasn't winning the battle. There was nothing Moses was doing except being there and obeying the Lord. And when he did so Yahweh fought the battle, and after a while, as he got tired, they set a rock behind him and they propped up his arms.

This is one of the earliest times we see that you were never created and you cannot walk in obedience and fruit by yourself. You're going to need somebody at some point in time.

Your wife, your husband is going to need somebody other than you at some point in time. There are things I can't help my wife with. I'm not a woman also, I'm a work in progress. I have no desire to learn about those things. Being honest.

She's going to need to be able to have a Nicole come over and hang out and watch a movie. She's going to need a Misty, she's going to need a Jennifer Sarah. She's going to need these people. You're going to need those people.

Some of the hardest things for us to bear fruit in and to be obedient in is when we're tired, when we're getting hit from all angles and God is saying, well, don't you need Stephen to show up so he can help you? Don't you need. Don't you need somebody else to show up and hold your arm? This is why you need a community. Guys, 18 years, and some of you have been in this corner of Christianity a lot longer than me.

One of the things we didn't do well was community. We multiplied the kingdom a lot through division. Oh, we don't agree with each other on what the Mitzvot says. It's Vayikra, not Vayikra.

We create new congregations and that bleeds into our life now. And we are looking for reasons to not grow in intimacy, to not need each other and to not bear good friends. Fruit, even. Subconsciously and honestly, I think most of it is subconsciously. Why?

Because we're being reconditioned. We're being healed, and that's a process. It's not something that just happens overnight. And as we do that, we need a Stephen Drews in our life to come and say, hey, I'll cut a tree down. I'll pray for you.

I'll cook you dinner. Chop a chicken's head off. What do you need? I will do it all. Dude is like a utility man in all of those areas.

He's like, you need me to fast for you, I'll fast. I mean, I can also cut down a tree. You want a fence, and I'll fast.

When we get tired, we need people. I've actually found myself more over the last year by Having elders in this church asking for more counsel than ever before.

Because sometimes I grow weary and sometimes I want to interject my thought process or my scenario in. And what I realize is, am I trying to hand them bad fruit?

If I'm angry, I don't know what to do, or I'm frustrated, am I trying to feed them bad fruit? So am I actually doing the very thing Paul tells us not to do? What a hypocrite I would be as a pastor. A community bearing fruit is essential to walking in obedience with God, not because the community can win the battle. We clearly see this in Exodus 17.

The community and the persons cannot win the battle. It is Yahweh alone who can win the battle. But together we can prop each other up so the Lord can recondition and fight the battle in his time versus us trying to make the Lord fit into our timeline. The Lord doesn't care what's on your Google calendar. He doesn't care what's on your I calendar.

If he wants to meet with you and he wants to do something at that point in time, he doesn't need your permission to do it. But he does give us an invitation a lot of times to engage with Him.

This is why we've said worship team, you can come back. This is why we've said for many, many years on our little cards. Here do so. I haven't really spoken a lot about that. Our building blocks on the bottom of it says here do so.

We've kind of just had it there as kind of a tagline. I like taglines, but not just because I came from marketing. I like taglines because they're easy monikers in my brain to help me to remember things. We're going to go over this more this year. Here do so is the three word progression model of HFF's apprenticeship.

And it starts first and foremost with you and your home. You can't apprentice anybody else if your home's not in order. You can't apprentice anybody else into being a good husband. If you're not a good husband, you can't apprentice somebody with bad fruit.

We hear the word of the Lord and it should produce fruit in our hearts and mind. You don't get to move on to the doing until it produces fruit. When we then adjust our habits and our actions to actually do something about the fruit of what we hear, then we can progress the next section. We hear something, we find value in it. Then we make an adjustment to our thought process, to our actions, to our habits.

Then we Start walking it out. Everybody's like, that's when I get to go make a disciple. Wrong. Then those adjusted habits and actions should produce fruit. I have a lot of people, like, I don't yell at my wife anymore.

I was like, we're four days into marriage counseling. Good for you. You've been married for 18, so you suck for 17 years, but now all of a sudden you're good for four and whatever. Like, are you going to be the lead elder of the church? No.

It should produce fruit. Why? Because fruit doesn't come when you plant a tree. You have to plant a tree, nourish the tree, let the tree get. And sometimes it takes multiple seasons for the tree to produce fruit.

So you must produce fruit in your walk. Then others will see the fruit in your walk, and they'll want you to help them sow that fruit in their life.

Then through that development of sowing, it produces fruit in your relationships, and you share that fruit with the body of Christ for the edification of the body of Christ. You can't do anything about the soil. You can't do anything about when it receives water or when it receives sunlight. That's not your job. That's God's job.

The power of the Holy Spirit. Our job is to plant the seeds and continue to till the garden while. Until the fruit comes. Sometimes that happens a lot. Sometimes it doesn't.

Like when we're Oklahoma, sometimes we have really wet weather, and sometimes we don't get any water. And so what happens if it's not being watered? You have to keep the garden ready until it comes. Obedience must produce fruit as determined by God. You don't get to.

You don't get to be a family on mission just by saying I'm obedient. Everybody in this room, I think, would say I'm obedient to the word of God in some capacity. But is it producing fruit in your life? Is it producing fruit in your marriage? Is it producing fruit in your children's life?

And then is it producing fruit in the relationship of other people? People?

Those are questions we need to ask. Because if it's truly obedience, according to the scripture, it will bring forth good fruit. And that fruit will be something that somebody else will need in that season. If it's not bringing forth good fruit, then it's not obedience. I don't care how many times you tell me you're obedient.

I'm a good husband. I'm a good husband. I'm a good husband. If my wife isn't glowing and bearing fruit, then obviously I'm doing something wrong and I can look at myself in the mirror every day. I can say I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn people like me.

And it doesn't make it a reality.

Rather than forcing God into our obedience, we must be transformed into God's obedience to by his leading. And then we must understand that we don't get to determine the fruit, we don't get to sway the metric, we don't get to. To change anything.

Joy is joy. Morning is morning.

Talking with a brother in the church this week and we were talking about is it even possible to have a real joy aside from the Lord? And the more I thought of this, like, yeah, I mean, I think so. Like you could have that momentary joy of like, oh, I beat this guy@madden25 or whatever it is, but like, the more I got to think about it, that's not really joy. There might be a moment where I'm not sorrow or moment when I'm a little arrogant because I beat you, or haha, I had a really good hot dog or whatever it was, but it's not really joy joy. It's something you have to keep continuously going back for.

And yet in the moments that I've experienced joy with the Lord, or I've experienced peace or patience with the Lord, I don't need to keep going back because it seems like it's overwhelming me like a fire hose. I don't have to ask the Lord to pour out more joy in my life because he's making me laugh and cry all at the same time. And people have known me for years. No, I don't know how to do either one of them. That's how I know the Lord, because it's real, it's his fruit.

And so as we move forward with the mission and what does it look like to walk in the ways of Jesus? What does it look like to be apprentices of Jesus? We have to first remember that in order to be obedient to the Lord, no matter what that means, we're not even going to go down that far. This week we will. The next couple of weeks you must be producing fruit.

Fruit. So if you are being obedient, there's fruit. If you're trying to be obedient or you think you're being obedient and there's no fruit, that means somehow the implementation is wrong and you need to adjust. God's not wrong, his fruit's not wrong, his commandments are wrong. Your interpretation of them is wrong because your interpretation leads to your implementation.

And if your interpretation leads to an implementation that doesn't produce the fruit that God says that we should see in our life, then we know God is not doing it, it is us. And we have the ability, because he's so gracious, because he's so merciful, because he still gave us breath today, to do something about it so that we can produce fruit that can then feed somebody else.

I look around the room and I see people who need more joy, who need more peace, who need more patience. We need to start producing that type of fruit out of our obedience so that we can help the other people who need it. If you will stand, let's respond.