The Law of Christ
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Complete List of Commandments given by Jesus with Scripture references.
This FREE PDF offers a bullet point list of each commandment Jesus gives, the scripture verse, and verse reference for each commandment. Use this tool to help teach yourself or your children the law of Christ.
If you got your phones, if you got your tablets, if you got these computers like Misael that are a tablet and a phone and a laptop all in one. Go ahead, take a picture of this QR code right here. I understand some might think it's the mark of the beast. It surely is not. But take a picture of that.
The reason why I asked you to take a picture of that is today I felt we were supposed to go in a completely different direction than I had originally intended in my notes. And back on sabbatical, I started creating what I consider to be kind of an easy help guide. So this will take you to a PDF. If you don't see it today or you forget about it today, it'll be on the website this weekend. And this week.
This PDF is a listing of bullet point commandments of Jesus in the New Testament with scripture verse references. So it is started off, I think the first time I sent it to Alyssa, I think it was like 41, 42, and we're somewhere like 80 at this point. But it's just bullet point directly from the scripture. What did Jesus command us to do? I think it's important when we, we call ourselves full Bible believers to understand what does Jesus say?
You know, because some will say, well, Jesus nailed the Torah to the cross. And when Jesus nailed the Torah to the cross, this makes the Torah irrelevant. Well, when you go through a bullet point list and Jesus says you're to honor the ten Commandments, seems like there's a little bit of a contradiction from God himself and his mouth. And so putting together that list for you guys, you can go ahead and take that down. We'll help.
You have kind of just a cheat sheet. It's a PDF. You can print it out, you can keep it on your phone. You can use it as a Bible study tool with your children. We'll have another one next week for next week's message.
But as I was back there listening to worship, I want to start off by reading a scripture today because I think it's important for us to understand as we continue on through the mission series and then as we continue into finalizing the the Time between the Sermon on the Mount series. I think it's important to understand what heart posture we approach the Scripture and approach the throne of God. If we approach the throne of God and we approach with a heart posture that is wrong, the result will be wrong. It's that simple. It's just like if you skew the metrics in school, you're going to end up with A skewed test result, you're going to end up with skewed results in the end.
And so I want to start off today reading Revelation, chapter five, which isn't necessarily relevant on point for the scripture we're going to look at today. But it's more in line, I think, with the overall heart posture, with how we approach God in general. Sorry for reading off my phone. It's on airplane mode, so if you try to call me. Ha ha.
Then I saw a scroll in the right hand of the one who was sitting on the throne. There was writing on the inside and on the outside of the scroll, and it was sealed with the seven seals. And I saw a strong angel who shouted with a loud voice, who is worthy to break the seals on this scroll and open it? But no one, I want you to understand that not a person in heaven and earth, or under the sun or under the earth was able to open the scroll and read it. Then I began to weep bitterly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll and read it.
But One of the 24 elders said to me, stop weeping. Look for the lion of the tribe of Judah. The heir to David's throne has won the victory. We know the lion of the tribe of Judah, the heir of David's throne to be Jesus Yeshua, the Messiah. He is worthy to open the scroll and its seven seals.
Then I saw a lamb that looked as if it had been slaughtered, but it was now standing between the throne and the four living creatures. And among the 24 elders, he had seven horns and seven eyes which represent the sevenfold ministries of God that is set out into every part of the earth. He stepped forward and took the scroll with his right hand, the right hand traditionally being known as a hand of power from the one who's sitting on the scroll. And when he took the scroll, the four living beings and the 24 elders fell down before the lamb. Each one had a harp, and they held gold bowls filled with incense, which were the prayers of God's people.
And they sang a new song with these words, you are worthy to take the scroll and break its seals and open it, for you were slaughtered in your blood as ransomed people for God, for every tribe and language and people and nation. And you have caused them to become a kingdom of priests for our God, and they will reign on Earth. Then I looked again, and I heard the voices of thousands and millions of angels around the throne and of the living beings and the elders. And they sang a mighty chorus. Worthy is the lamb who was Slaughtered to receive power and riches and wisdom and strength and honor and glory and blessings.
And then I heard every creature in heaven and earth and under the earth and in the sea they sang Blessing and honor, Glory and power belong to the one sitting on the throne and to the Lamb forever and ever and ever and ever.
Part of the Remission series and the Mission series is super profound, but yet super basic. You were never intended to be enough. You were never supposed to be enough. You were never supposed to be perfection. You were never intended to be perfection.
The one who created you loved you so much that they knew in your free will that they would need to step in at some point in time and save you. Just like most parents in this room know, at some point in time, we will fall short and our children will fall short. But we would rather step in and get hit by a car than allow our kids to be hit by a car. We know that just as much as the physical things happen, emotional, mental and spiritual things can be far more damaging to our children. And this is why I'm still a man in need of a savior today.
The mission of every person who professes Jesus as Lord is to walk in a manner that would uphold your oath to that king. If you walk into my house, there's rules of my house. Those rules help you honor what we believe to be the status of our home. Every home is a little bit different. This is why when you walk into somebody's home, one of the first things you say is, would you like me to keep my shoes on or take my shoes off?
It is a respect you're showing to the people of that home. There's rules in a home. Well, there's rules in a kingdom as well. And before Christ came, everybody in this room knows that there was multiple rules. There was a set of rules that were given orally to Abraham.
There was a set of rules that were given on tablets of stone to Moses. Those continued to be fleshed out and developed throughout many, many years of doing what's right and doing what's wrong. From Sinai to the Promised Land, from the Promised land to exile into the days of Jesus Christ coming to this earth, a part of us professing that Jesus is Lord is to walk in a manner that would uphold that oath. So what does that look like? It should cause you to form your thinking around his thinking that you would have the mind of Christ, to form your heart around the heart of Christ, to empty out your spirit to all of yourself and be formed in the spirit of Christ, to be Transformed through the spirit of the Christ into the image of Christ to be a new creation.
This is why, personally, I don't care how you were born. I don't care if you were rich or you were poor. I. I don't care if you were born liking certain people of certain sexes or not. The Bible says that all who are born in the flesh must be born again into the spirit so that we could multiply the fruit of Christ in others, so that we can multiply the kingdom of Christ through the bearing of that fruit and teaching others to do so.
You see, where I come from, we spend an awful lot of time on the books of Moses, the law of Moses. What does it look like to uphold this commandment? What does it look like to uphold this commandment? And in the end, one of the hardest things for us to realize is that we still pick and choose. Just like we argue over others, which ones we want to uphold and which ones we don't.
The reality is we can say, well, we like the cleansing laws and the ritualistic laws and that, but most of you would not participate in a service here if we were to check anything. And I'll just leave it at that. Nor should you. Honestly, you shouldn't. You should run.
I don't have a medical degree. It would be weird for all of us. Jacob's already, like, I'm out. He's Googling other churches to look at.
Does that mean that we throw away our oath to the king, and with our oath, the responsibility of walking in a manner that would cause us to have a new spirit? Surely not. Yet the law of Christ is different from the law of Moses. In one, Christ is perfection. He's the only one who could actually model what the Torah was supposed to be.
Not only could he model it in his actions, but he modeled it with his teachings and his words and the deeds he did to others. The heart posture by which he approached it. Christ actually upholds the testimony of the law of Moses while calling it to a higher standard. Some of us in this room have just struggled to say, like, I'm just trying to honor my father and mother. I'm just trying to.
I'm just trying to do right by other people. I don't need Christ to call me to a higher standard. I'm struggling with the current standard that was there in humanity. I feel that. And that's okay.
God's grace is sufficient for you, no matter where you're at in the journey. Christ tells us that we no longer approach the commandments with pride. Self reliance, rebellion and self exaltation. Brent has said many times, I believe that everybody is a narcissist. The most dangerous narcissist, people will say are the Type A that you can see as a recovering type A narcissist.
I completely disagree with that. You know exactly what you're getting with a type A narcissist. You can see it. You can see it as clearly as driving down Highway 9 and seeing the Devon Energy Building all the way up in there. Ian knows what I'm talking about.
He works down there. You drive up on that little hill on Highway 9, you can see all the way to Oklahoma City at the Devon Energy Building. That's how clearly you can see a type A narcissist coming. It's the passive narcissist that doesn't realize they are a narcissist. That's the most dangerous.
It's the one that doesn't realize that all persons wrestle with pride, that all persons wrestle with self reliance, that all persons wrestle with some form of rebellion. And all persons wrestle at some point in time in self exaltation. One of the most freeing things is to be able to say what everybody already knows. I have a problem. I struggle with my problem.
I wrestle with my problem. I make good decisions some days and bad decisions with my problem. And in the end, I'm okay because God's grace is sufficient for me on the highs and the lows.
The law of Christ differs from the law of Moses in that it approaches the commandments with humility, repentance, and a desire to carry out the burdens of others, to help them by loving them more than we love ourselves.
See, one of the most loving things you can do is point out the flaws of somebody else. But it's also one of the most damaging things you can do as well. Why do I say that? Because obviously my wife of all people sees me in the most intimate of situations. She knows when I'm having good days or bad days.
There's a little kid on TikTok. Literally he is sent by God. His name is Jude. And he walks around and he's got this southern accent. And there's one he did that his parents talk and he's just talking to him and he's very animated and he's like, I just cranky.
I just tired. I just do a lot at school. I just cranky tired. Well, do you want to wrestle, buddy? Maybe.
Maybe I wrestle, but I cranky and a tire. And I got to figure it out.
Some of us are cranky and some of us are tired. Some of us are just trying to figure it out and the other ones are just lying about it. Because every day we go through life, we're trying to figure out how to put the left foot in front of the right foot. We're trying to figure out how to honor God more. We're trying to figure out how to feel the power of the Holy Spirit more.
We're trying to have God in our life. You wouldn't be in this room if that wasn't the case.
But in the end, what happens when we all have a bad day together? Dearly Father, I thank you for this day. I thank you for your son, Lord, I thank you for removing the pain from Brent this week, Lord, and getting him some rest. Lord, I ask that you would continue to work your mighty miracle in his back as well as in Mark Jeffries, Lord, that you would continue to heal them. Lord, I ask by the power of your spirit, because your word says it's only the power of your spirit, that you would continue to mold, transform and make us into the new images of Christ on this earth, that we would be your ambassadors, that we would be your apprentices, your hands and feet in everything that we do.
And we say that we wouldn't get tied up into our own self righteousness in our own struggle, Lord, but that we would be transformed by the renewing of our mind into the image of your Son. For it's in the name of Jesus. Amen and amen. Galatians 6 says, Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself lest you be tempted.
Bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he he deceives himself. But let each one test his own work, and then his reason to boast will be in himself alone and not in his neighbor, for each will bear his own load. Rebellion, self reliance, self exaltation are all viruses. They're ones that are woven into the very humanity of all people since the Garden.
It's the knowledge of good and evil and wrestling with whether or not you are good or you are evil, or whether you can manipulate or control the good or the evil in other people. The Bible is riddled with stories of men and women who wrestle against these very same things and everything of their life. And I believe that these will be the wrestles of humanity until the day that Jesus comes and he puts an end to the adversary's plans. And that he wins and conquers the moral battle that we fight constantly with our flesh. These weren't things that disappeared when Christ came on the earth.
They weren't things that just magically just gone. You would think, okay, so we have Emmanuel, God with us. Christ. God leaves his throne in the heavens and comes to earth. And now all of a sudden, these things are gone.
But we see these same relian being the very thing that Jesus has tested in the wilderness.
Obviously, the adversary is smart. Obviously, the adversary understands his creator. He was in the heavens with him. Obviously he understands, if I'm going to go after God and I'm going to. I'm going to attack God and put God in a tough place, These are the things I'm going to go after him with.
Yet Galatians 6 tells us that the battle is a battle for freedom and joy. It's a freedom from the curse and the weight of our sinful nature. Something that the law continuously pointed out to us. If I step left and I was supposed to step right, I've fallen short. If I was supposed to do this and I ended up doing that, I've fallen short.
If you're like me, you don't need anybody else to point out the ways that you fall short. You're very aware of when you fall short. You're very aware of your shortcomings. You're very aware of how in a relationship or in a conversation, you could have said something differently. Or you could have acted differently.
Or you could have engaged in that conversation or that interaction in some other manner. You don't need somebody else to point out that you did it wrong. You already know you did. I've been on record for years talking about the necessity of walking in a healthy community. That if you're not a part of a healthy community that's missional focused, Focused on the power of the transformal ways of the gospel.
That your family, your house, your community, your mind, your heart, your walk will all struggle. And it's not because God doesn't have the power to do something when you're alone. God 100% does have the power. But it's in that passage of Galatians 6 that it says, for us to fulfill the law of Christ, we must bear one another's burdens.
A lot of people have a hard time with that. It's like, I just want to come to church. Brian. Whatever's in your closet, you can keep it there. I don't really need it, Reanna.
I don't really need to know how your week was. Just smile, wave, say hi, and let's do our church thing and go home. You cannot fulfill the law of Christ without bearing one another's burdens.
Two weeks ago, we talked about Amalek in the battle and Moses needing Aaron and Hur to keep his arms up while God fought the battle throughout scripture. You need other people to walk with you to help you. You cannot bear another person's burden when you don't walk together. It's kind of like when you read on social media or somebody's like, hey, this is happening. Can you pray for me?
And you're like, yeah, I'll pray. And five minutes later you forgot to even stop and pray or you forgot to stop and pray that day. And you're like, oh my gosh, I completely forgot, like 7 hours ago I was supposed to stop and pray. When you walk together, if somebody falls down here, it's very clear for us to see this person has fallen down and hurt. We immediately rush.
We immediately rush down. Are you okay? Are you okay? Dads are like, ah, spit some dirt in it, you'll be fine. But you know in that moment that somebody needs somebody else because you're in the present.
It's a lot harder when we get caught up in the day to day life of things that are happening through the Internet and all those other things for us to act like we don't need to bear one another's burdens. We've talked many times before in this church about the confessions of sins and the need for repentance. Brent hit that one home pretty hard. On the day of atonement. What good would it be for you to walk into a church, confess your sins, repent of it, and then not have somebody else walk through the healing process and the grieving process of the shortcomings you have, you're more bound to potentially create the same situations you had before without walking in accountability, transparency, and somebody to have your back.
And to quote the ancient philosopher, we all need someone to lean on.
No 90s Christians in this room. Okay. Oh, man. Well, I guess we can win some and lose some. Thank you for bearing my burden of bad jokes.
I was going to wrap it too, but we'll just go ahead and spare you from that one.
You cannot bear another person's problems when you think that they're the problem.
When you have conflicts, whether it's you with the Lord and you're wrestling just like Jacob did, or with one another, how you approach those conflicts either bring blessings or they bring curses. It's not fulfilling the law of Christ when you project onto somebody else. And thus one of the reasons I feel like it's important for us to have an atmosphere of repentance and restoration in this church. Your problem is my problem. Your burden is to be my burden.
And when you're being crushed, my job is to try to do everything in my power to stand in the way of you being crushed completely and vice versa. This is the atmosphere by which Jesus walked into. Jesus walked into an atmosphere where the religious leadership of that day, they knew the law, they knew the Torah, they knew these things, and yet they put a burden upon the people that they themselves were not willing to keep or uphold. Matthew 23:4 says, they bind heavy hearts, hard to bear, and lay them on the shoulders of men, but they themselves will not move with them a finger. You cannot fulfill the law of Christ if you do not bear others burdens.
You are not fulfilling the law of Christ when you take and you use the Scripture to place burdens and weights upon people that they cannot keep. And what type of a leader are you when you have a different expectation for the other people than you do for yourself? See, the Bible is actually the opposite. It's pretty countercultural. The Bible says that if I am a leader, that the responsibility on me is higher than on you.
This is not the atmosphere we see in Jesus time. We see the religious leadership of that day saying, the responsibility is heavier on you than it is on me. We're the keepers of the law. You cannot fulfill the law of Christ without bearing one another's burdens. Jesus comes in and he does this radical thing where everybody felt like, okay, if I'm the Holy One and we're putting this undue burden on people and oh, just to try to walk every single day.
I've got this huge weight on my back, and I've got to just walk around with this weight. And I can't step too far to the left, and I can't step too far to the right. And Jesus says, come to me because my teachings are easy. My burden is light. Some people have taught that's because he removed all obligations of persons, and all grace was abound to cover all things.
I think personally it's because he knew that he could bear the burden for you and that he knew that he would. And in the end, we all need someone to lean on. Surely God wouldn't come to free us from the curse of the law of Moses just for him to place a higher curse upon us. And a higher burden. We couldn't keep the law of Moses perfectly so yet God would come and he would be an abusive daddy.
God, and he would say, well, you couldn't keep the first one, so I'm going to call you to a higher standard and I'm going to put a higher burden upon you. Surely not yet. There's a huge difference between the law of Christ and the law of Moses. Moses was given commandments by God, but no man, including Moses, had the power to change the hearts of and the minds of people, to freely obey and to walk in those blessings, to not look for a loophole, or to use the commandments as a stone to kill their neighbor. Our pride, our sin, our rebellion was not conquered by Moses.
It wasn't conquered by David. It wasn't conquered by Joseph or Solomon or Deborah or Phoebe or any of the prophets. It was only Jesus who could conquer those things. When Christ calls us to him, he calls us to the one who gave the commandments, the one who embodied the right teachings and implementation of the commandments. And in the end, the only one who could actually slay our pride.
Self reliance, self exaltation. He's the only one who could change hearts. He's the only ones who could change minds. And he's the only one who could empower us through the proper spirit to lead us back to him.
You see, one of the things the law of Moses constantly reminds me of is that I'm a sinner who can't consistently walk in a way that God will require of me. One of the things that I see in Christ is that he already knew. And yet he said, come on, hop in the truck with me. I'm gonna take care of you. Come on.
Let me prop you up. Come on. It's okay. I know you're a failure in these areas. I told you so.
No dads have ever said that. Told you so. But come here, let me give you a hug. It's going to be okay in that I find peace and comfort, because in that I understand that. It doesn't change the fact that I'm still a sinner.
It doesn't change the fact that I'm still a man who falls short. But it helps me understand that he always knew that that was going to be the case. And he set a way for me to come and curl up in his lap and be loved. He said a way that he said, you know what? I'm gonna come into this world and I'm gonna take that cross and I'm gonna be mocked and ridiculed, and they're gonna beat me beyond an inch of my life.
And I'm gonna bear your burdens, and I'm gonna bear your brother's burdens. And that guy you don't like or that girl you don't like, I'm gonna bear their burdens too. And I'm going to take it to the cross and I'm going to hang there for every person who has ever breathed to give them the opportunity to come back to me.
The law of Christ commands us to be restored. It commands us to help restore others. And it commands us to be gentle with them, to be mindful, and to war against falling into the same temptation that we're to bear the weight with others. Just a lot easier to just show up at church and be like, hi, how's it going? Oh, I'm blessed and highly favored.
But you're not. You have good days and you have bad days. You have days where you feel like you're one with God, and you have days where you feel like God's not there with you. To fulfill the law of Christ, you need to bear each other's burdens in the highs and in the lows. If the person that is struggling to overcome addictions, by the way, you're not an addict.
You're just struggling to overcome addition addiction. Addict doesn't define you. Jesus defines your identity. But for those who are struggling to overcome those things, God doesn't say, bear each other's burdens for the first five minutes. This isn't a 14 day free trial.
This isn't a seven day free trial. And then you forgot to do it. So I got you on the hook for 999, for an entire year. He commands you to bear each other's burdens the same way that he bore your burdens on the cross. He commands you to walk with one another so that you can restore one another.
Even in Matthew, when you have a conflict, it talks about the very worst case scenarios that you would put somebody outside the camp. Even in putting somebody outside the camp. The whole premise in putting somebody outside the camp was so that they would be restored back into the camp. They weren't the scapegoat from Yom Kippur. They weren't cast out in the abyss to die.
They were put outside with hope. To restore God is about restoration. And every person in this room is at a reconditioning process at some point of time in your life. And you need somebody to help bear those burdens. He wants us to Be gentle with one another, to be mindful with one another where people are at.
For the one who sows into his flesh will reap from the flesh of the corruption of our human heart. It will grow weary, it will grow judgmental, and it will create in us the very same thing we saw happen cycle in and out of the Torah. Humanity used the Torah not the way God intended the Torah to be used. They used it in the first century as a way to try to prove to other people that they were better, they were holier, they were mightier.
There was never anybody holier, mightier or better than Jesus Christ. And he came in the most humble of circumstances and lived in the most humble of circumstances. He didn't walk into a town and say, oh, you've got the greatest restaurant. I'm about to make fishes and loaves multiply like the cheddar biscuits at Red Lobster. He didn't say that, but he did it.
He didn't say, oh, that's awesome, you healed that person. I'm about to drop 782 pages of healings. He didn't do that. His job was about restoration. And he's called us in bearing one another's burdens to be about restoration for other people, not only for those who have no faith or relationship with Jesus, but for those who are struggling in their relationship with Jesus.
Christ came to make whole the law of Moses because he was the only person who could. We must not grow weary of doing good because we have no idea when our reaping season is going to be. So when you're planting and you're sowing in the lives of an individual and you say, well, how much longer do I. This person doesn't listen to me. This person, how much longer do.
This person's never going to be free of their addiction. When you stop sowing, you've absolutely impacted your harvest. We must remember to do good to everyone, especially those first and foremost in the household of faith. What good is it for you to do good to the stranger and the sojourner out there? If you turn around and you judge your home with an unhealthy weight and measure worship team, you can come back doing a little reading this week on men, the psychology of men, trying to understand.
Traditionally in a church, there's two groups of men.
There's the ones who are completely sold out. Sometimes they're really weird. They're like 40 or 50 year olds still trying to be like youth pastors. And they're like, I'm on fire for Jesus and They're just like super, super interesting in their approach. I'm borderline that individual myself.
And then there's the apathetic men in a church. Those are the two main categories of men in a church in America. I tried to understand that because men are very rational. Men are very logical. A lot of times they're very black and white.
Why do we have a problem confessing our sins as men?
Literally, the manual, and I understand we don't normally read the manual. First thing that's thrown out, it's the first thing the wife gathers. Just like this is pure gold. He is gonna screw up whatever this is. So I'm keeping the manual so I can fix it.
But the first thing we normally do is we go and we look at it. It's like, well, what is this supposed to look like when it's all said and done?
Guys, I need you to understand from Genesis to Revelation, you were never supposed to do it on your own. You were never holy enough or good enough or righteous enough or smart enough, whatever adjective you want to use. You were never going to be able to be perfect. You were never going to be able to be righteous. When somebody's like, oh, oh, this person hurt me, you should have expected it.
Oh, well, I don't want to come there because they're uber judgmental while you're judging them, they're very judgmental, says the judgmental person.
It's time for us to lay down our arms. It's time for us to understand. The Bible says we're all to confess our sins. We're all to repent of our sins. Everybody has them.
Then we're to work on a restoration process for people to get and move forward. And then we should understand that at some point in time on the journey, we're going to fall again. Maybe we don't fall with the same thing, maybe we fall with something else. But at that point in time, we're going to need somebody to come who has AAA and does a flat tire repair for us. Or maybe somebody has a tow truck and they, they, they can tow our car into the shop.
Because maybe this is a really bad, you know, thing we need.
If you read Galatians and you look at Paul through the lens of what humanity had done with the nature, the power, the words, the essence of God. You have to come to the reality that you were never going to be able to do it on your own. And you weren't supposed to.
You needed somebody. What is one of the hardest things we do nowadays? Open up to People, we got a lot of self professed introverts, which is, again, stop lying. You're not an introvert. You just don't want to talk to people.
You cannot fulfill the law of Christ if you do not bear the burdens of other people.
Now, please don't take me, take me wrong here. I'm not telling you that. You got to be the 24 hour hotline for prayer and everybody's drama. That's not healthy either. God is not a God of chaos.
He's a God of order.
Personally, I believe it's a hard posture. I believe it's a hard posture where you don't immediately sit in a seat of judgment. When Jeremy calls me and he's like, hey, man, I need to talk through something, I'm not immediately in a heart posture that says, this dude's an idiot. This dude has a problem. This dude needs to wake up and do something.
No, it's. How can I help you? Not only how can I help you, but I want to help you. I want to be there for you. I want to invest in your life.
I want to do these things. Look, guys, there's. I don't know how many thousands of churches in Oklahoma City. I can promise you, you're going to find better preaching and better worship in some of them. I can promise you.
They got a much higher budget. They have trained professionals who do this. I'm not a trained professional. Last time I checked. Alyssa, are you a trained professional?
No. Okay, so last time I checked, we're not trained professionals. But we're here because we desperately want you to experience the power and the presence of the Lord in your life. To be set free, to be empowered and not to have this same history. Some of you have come from religious abuse.
Some of you have come from places that said unless you do these things, you cannot be. God does not honor you or he does not find value in you. And in the end, I believe that that is not what God's intention for you right now is. I believe it. It is.
You need to heal. You need to find God in your prayer life. You need to find God in your readings. You need to find God in your marriage. You need to find God in.
In the presence of your children. You need to find God in your workplace. You need to be able to bear the burdens with one another to bring the kingdom of God to this earth. And first and foremost, it starts by recognizing that you're not going to be able to do it alone.
The greatest asset this church has in the Physical need to make sure. I preface that is you. It's not your money, it's not your gifts, it's not your talents. It's you. Why?
Because God so loves the world that he gave his only begotten Son for you.
It doesn't say as long as you walk in your talent doesn't say as long as you walk in your gifting. This all come later. He loved you.
And so I am required to love and serve you and then let him figure out all the rest. Because God is smarter than we are.
But we all have things that we need to heal from. We all have things that we need to grow in. We all have things in areas that we could say, it's New Year's, it's New Year's, everybody's got a list. Some of you already have. What?
It's like the 16th, 17th, some of y'all quit already. Would it have been easier if you had somebody to walk with you? I think it would. Why? Because we're to bear one another's burdens.
We have to sow seeds of Christ in each person. And like I said last week, what good is it what you're doing in the world if you're not also doing it in the household of faith? Would it not be easier to serve the homeless if you had two or three other people? Would it not be easier to serve in the volunteer outreach if you had a couple other people? How about in those moments when.
When you're at your lowest? You know, I intended to go in a completely different direction with my sermon notes until I stood in the emergency room of bread on Monday night.
When you sit and you watch somebody in pain repeatedly, you learn very quickly that it doesn't matter whether you eat pork or you don't. It doesn't matter first and foremost, whether this happens or that happens. What matters is, is when somebody is in pain and when somebody is struggling and when somebody is suffering and when somebody is bleeding out or whatever, whatever it is, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, physically, all the above. Are you going to be there to bear their burdens? Are you going to be there to lift them up?
Are you going to be there to sustain them until Christ can finish the work that he started in you? That's our calling.
When the process is ours, we need others.
When the process is others, they need us.
And when we look at each other through the lens of Christ and we love each other enough to bear one another's burdens, we thus fulfill the law of Christ.
Just like right now, I'm Bearing Sarah's burdens with Emmett. I'm bearing it, bro. I know you're a glass case of emotion. I get it.
Today as we respond, we'll get a couple more weeks before we start. In the Sermon on the Mount series, we have to position our hearts to be after Christ.
Christ didn't do anything without people. Everything was about people. It was about ushering in his kingdom on this earth and teaching people how to be free. And some of you, right now, you need more freedom than ever. Some of you need to not look over your shoulders for the boogeyman.
Some of you need to be able to have that resistance when your screens are on. Where the dopamine hit is needed. Some of you just need to feel like somebody loves you. Some of you need to feel like it's gonna be okay. Some of you need to understand that it's okay to burn Hamburger Helper.
It's not a sin.
Some of you need to understand that you don't have to serve Hamburger Helper.
I don't know where you're at in that journey, and it's okay to be at different spots in that journey, but I do want to be a church that understands that it's okay for you to be at that spot in the journey. And I'm going to love you. And I'm asking you to love every other person, too, whether they're standing up and shouting hallelujah, or their faces in the ground crying that you're going to stand and support and have their back, or you're going to kneel and you're going to cry, thus fulfilling the law of Christ.
For God so loved the world that he gave his son that if you would believe in him, you shall not perish, but have everlasting life.
Everlasting life, from a Jewish concept, starts now. And some of you are struggling with trying to understand how to live your life. Wouldn't it be easier if you had somebody to lean on? Wouldn't it be easier if you had somebody to give you a hug or send you a text? Wouldn't it be easier if somebody would just send you an anchorman emoji in the middle of the week and say, it's okay to be in a glass case of emotions?
We all need someone to lean on.
We need to start preparing our hearts and our minds. Now for the spring feast, let's not do what we traditionally do as Americans, where we wait till two weeks out from the event, and then we pull our stuff out of the attic and we say, yeah, let's decorate. You can pull your decorations out or pay sock and all that two weeks beforehand. Well, let's start a couple of months out changing our hearts and changing our focus and our minds to focus in on who God is and what God has called us to do and thus fulfill the law of Christ. Stand with me and let's respond.
