Harvest Pointe Methodist Church

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Harvest Pointe Methodist Church

Bread of Life, Pt. 5

August 25, 2024 • Marshall Daigre

The gospel according to Mark, chapter seven. The gospel according to Mark, chapter seven.

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If you're new with us today, you may have noticed that we have several readings that we do together, and that happens each and every Sunday. And it's a good reminder for all of us that these are called, actually, lectionary readings, just kind of a fancy word, three year cycle of readings. The gospel will come from Matthew in year A, mark in year b, which is the year we're in now, and then Luke in year C, and then you have various Old Testament readings, acts readings, epistle readings, also psalm readings. Okay? So every time that we get together, we're gonna read from the Old Testament or acts, and then we're gonna read from a psalm, and we're also gonna hear a new testament reading and then a gospel reading.

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That's every Sunday. All right. And interestingly, that's every Sunday around the world, people are also doing this. So Catholics, Orthodox, Presbyterians, Lutherans, some of what we call more your high church churches and denominations, they use this as well as many, many different protestant groups. And so on any given Sunday, you could be worshiping in Los Angeles or in India.

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And it's the same readings for everybody, which is kind of neat as the church this huge, you know, two plus billion people somewhere, estimated 2.5 billion right now, 2.3 billion christians around the world that are meeting with these various readings. The church has given us these readings. And by the time you make, like, in other words, if you came all three years for every Sunday, 52 times three, whatever that is, I'll leave it to the. To the mathematicians. I can't do that in my head.

00:01:53

If you were to make all of those, you would have read most of the Bible, like, out loud in church. Isn't that kind of cool? I think that's kind of cool. You know, like, we actually get most of the bulk of the Bible, the big stories, all of this, and some interesting stories, too, that we kind of skip over sometimes. And so if you would join with me, this is maybe one of those interesting stories here.

00:02:13

Join with me as we stand for our gospel reading this morning, found here in the Gospel according to St. Mark, chapter seven. I'm reading from the NRSV here. And our pew bibles, by the way, are esv. Just to note that, notice these words here.

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When the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them for the Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders. And they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it. And there are also many other traditions that they observe. The washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles. So the Pharisees and the scribes ask him, why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?

00:03:17

He said to them, Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites. As it is written, this people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. In vain do they worship me. Teaching human precepts as doctrines. You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.

00:03:41

And then we're dropping down here to 14 and 15, and then drop down again to 21 and 23. Then he called the crowd again and said to them, listen to me, all of you, and understand there's nothing outside a person that by going in can defile. But the things that come out are what defile. For it is from within, from the human heart, that evil intentions come. Fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, wickedness, deceit, licentiousness, envy, slander, pride, folly.

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All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person. Lord Jesus,

The gospel according to Mark, chapter seven. The gospel according to Mark, chapter seven.

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All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person. Lord Jesus, thank you for your most holy word. These words that came out of your lips, may they reach our ears today. Let those who have ears to hear, hear today. And may we not just be hearers only, but doers of what you say.

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We pray in your name. Amen. And you can be seated.

00:05:08

You may have noticed in all four of the readings today from deuteronomy, from psalm 15, and then from James, and now the gospel of Mark. All four readings have to do with the law. Not always do the four readings kind of perfectly align, but they do today. They do today, and it has to do with law. And in particular, the idea here with Jesus is defilement and not following the law and where that defilement comes from.

00:05:42

And so as we begin to look at this, I think we have to just sort of pause and say, okay, our context is an american context, and we kind of are in general, as Americans, you know, don't tread on me, you know, freedom at all cost, right? You want it? You're going to have to pry it from my cold, dead hand. You know, these sorts of things that we. That have been bounced around in american politics and society and sort of this rugged individualism of, well, we shrugged off, you know, England and all its proper laws and king and all of this, and we're just finding our own way, right?

00:06:31

And then we look at the Jews and we say, man, they had 613 laws, but we don't even recognize how many laws are in America. I mean, can you even imagine right now how many laws are on the books of. It's astronomical. That's why we have lawyers for every little thing. Have you ever bought a house?

00:06:47

You know, you're signing away your whole life, right? You ever bought a car, done a loan? You're signing, why? And it just keeps getting longer. We don't even, you know what?

00:06:55

We have so many laws and so many of this kind of thing that we don't even read that little fine print anymore, do we? You know, my phone updates and it says, hey, you want to look at the fine print? I'm like, not really. It's going to take two days to do it. So I just accept it, right?

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And then we're like, oh, no, no, no. We're all about freedom and liberty and, you know, individual way. We're just sort of making our own way. But then what do we do? We protect that way.

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With what? With laws, right? I mean, we advocate. We advocate for laws. Exactly.

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So we pile in laws on top of laws, and in fact, we really misunderstand God's law. Oftentimes I find that when we talk about the law in the Bible, we think only negative about it. You know, like, I can only go 70 miles an hour on the interstate. I really liked being out west, by the way, because it was 80. That was nice.

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Then I come back over here and it's like 60 on the road, and it's like, oh, mandy, that's a bummer, right? But if you notice that laws actually are there supposed to be at least to protect something, you know, like, in other words, around things that are important for us, there's always a gathering of laws, you know, like, you can't assault someone. You can't just go haul off and kill someone without a law being on the books to make sure that you are punished. Why? Because, well, life is precious and we know that.

00:08:38

I don't know of a law about spilled ice cream. In other words, if you spill your ice cream or something, you're not going to get in big trouble for that. But if you spill the blood of another human, well, there's laws about that, isn't it? You see the difference? Ice cream, yeah, you can go buy more of that, but a human person can't go buy more of that.

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Human persons are unique. They're unrepeatable one of a kind. Even when they come in twin form, right? They're one of a kind. Just ask the FBI.

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They can find out right here on the end of your finger, right. Much less your DNA. Super unique to you. And what we know as christians is God created us unique like that. That.

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And so we gather laws around things that matter, things that are maybe precious to us, protecting something there. But we tend to think again of law just as negative. But notice in the negativity there is something positive by which it's protecting. You see how that works? In other words, don't take another life.

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Well, why? Well, because life is actually precious. And no matter how upset you are with someone, it's not okay to take their life. That is not for you to determine. That's above our pay grade.

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And therefore we are told not to or there will be consequences because there's a law that is protecting against that.

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And so in some way, we're obsessed with law. Some of us are law followers. I mean, we could probably split the room up into saying, like, are you a law follower or are you one of those renegades? Are you a maverick? Which one are you?

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I just realized, like in top gun, that's probably why they call him maverick, right? That thought just hit me. So that's what's going on in my head. Yeah. Are you a maverick that likes to break the law and push the law and, you know, see how far, how much you can get away with?

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Or are you one of these ones that just gets really angry with people like that? Right? And normally a room will fall into one or the other, right? One of us is more for sort of this, if we could advocate for it, legalism, if we were really honest, like, that's the. The world would be better place if we just simply followed the rules, man.

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You know, just everybody did their part. I mean, I think this way when I'm driving, quite frankly, you know, and yet sometimes the Lord taps me on his shoulder and says, you are speeding, though, right? Like you're wanting that guy to use his blinker because it's the law, and yet you're speeding along here, right, not giving a safety zone between, you know, and I say, yeah, but he doesn't know what he's doing, right? I mean, that's the. This is the.

00:11:36

This is the problem with us being in charge, isn't it? We want legalism, and yet we're unwilling to follow it. We want libertinism or a sort of antinomianism, which is just a big word to say, nomos is law. So anti nomos, well, that's no law. Right?

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So it's going no law at all. Okay, so we're advocating for this sort of thing, this liberty, and yet how do we enforce it? But by laws, right? I. I mean, the point is, we might as well accept that we live in an ordered world, don't we?

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Yeah, of course we do. The trees are ordered. The cows are ordered today. I love the song that we just sang. It said something to the effect of just that it was proclaiming that everything.

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Yeah, internal harmony is happening all over. In other words, cows are pursuing grass today. They're not going to eat steak. Okay. That's not what they're going to do.

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They don't want steak even. Okay, that's not what they're going to do. They're pursuing what is naturally right to them. It's internal to them. There's an order given to them.

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And in fact, if you feed them the wrong things, they get sick, just like us, right? You say, well, yeah, we consume things, and I used the apple last week, but what if you did a rock? It's not going to work out so well for you because we're not made to consume and digest rocks. Not part of our order. It's not the ordering of the human body.

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And so we live in an ordered world. So we shouldn't be surprised when God tells us the order of things, right? Like he actually gives us the order of things. In fact, the hebrew word for law, every time you come across law in the Old Testament, that hebrew word there, and, you know, it is Torah. It's Torah.

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And if we were to sort of just immediately translate it, it really comes out to be instructions. So when we say God's law, we're saying his instructions, God's instructions, which is a little more positive, isn't it? I mean, wouldn't you kind of give me that, like, law? Oh, yeah, negative. You know what?

00:13:48

I can't do instructions. Sounds like I'm going to build something, right? You know, just like when you open up that bookcase that comes in a little box, right? All those, you know, little boards and little screws. And, you know, I typically know how it fits together in general, right?

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So I try to put it together, and then I realized at the end that I've got something wrong, then I've got to go to those stupid instructions, you know, and see if I got something out of sequence. Does that ever happen to you? To most of us, if we've ever put something together that has an order to it, parts that fit, parts that fit perfectly together. And we think we know better. But the instructions are helpful in building something, in rightly ordering something.

00:14:46

And that's what God is doing with his law. This is exactly why Moses here, receiving the revelation of God, tells the people. And by the way, deuteronomy, you know, that means second law. Actually, you get that same nomi part there. Nomos, remember law.

00:15:05

Okay, so Deutero Dudo is two second, just like deuteronomy. Canonical means second canon. This is second law because, remember, the ten commandments are given twice, aren't they? One in Exodus 20, and then now in deuteronomy five. And guess where we landed today was in chapter four.

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So it's almost preparation for the second giving of the law. And this was, of course, to that generation who had watched their parents disobeyed and die in the wilderness. And now, Moses, old, okay, this is his farewell speech, literally his farewell speech in deuteronomy. He now comes to this new generation, and he can't go with them, remember? And he says, okay, well, what about you guys?

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Are you gonna disobey and then die in the wilderness like your parents? Or are you ready to go into the land? Are you ready to trust God, renew covenant with him? Which always involves law, by the way, always involves God's instructions. In other words, we're gonna go into covenant with one another, all right?

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And here's my instructions to you. You're gonna be my people, I'm gonna be your God. Here's the way we walk together. That's what the law is doing here. It's showing us who God is, who we are, and our unbelievable need for God's spirit.

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Like that would be the third thing we'd need to say about God's law. His Torah is it continually shows our need for God's. In other words, you cannot obey the law by yourself on your own. Left to your own devices, it's not going to happen, but with God's spirit. And this is the promise of the prophets, isn't it, that one day the spirit would come and allow us from within to obey the law.

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In fact, we could say it this way. The difference in the Old Testament law and the New Testament law is that of placement in the Old Testament. It's external. Remember, written on stone, right? The ten Commandments.

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And by the way, the ten Commandments are a summary of all 613 laws that we find in the Old Testament. So thankfully, we get the cliff notes, right? We get the summary of it. And God provides that summary, which some of us like summaries, don't we? And some of us like to just read through it all.

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You know, he gives us this summary. And in the New Testament, the placement changes from what is external on the outside to what is internal, the human heart. Now, the law is written by the spirit on the heart, the prophets prophesy. And when we get to the New Testament, that's exactly what happens with those first believers who receive God's spirit. Well, that's good news, because remember, we're living on the New Testament side of things, so we have full access of both what is external in the law and internally, if we have been born again, born of God's spirit, if we've received his Holy spirit.

00:18:23

And of course, you remember, Jesus even asked, what is the greatest law? Right? And he doesn't say something like this, like, oh, well, you don't need to worry about the law anymore. No, he says, actually, the greatest law, okay, is to love the Lord your God. And the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself.

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When you do those two things, you fulfill the whole law. All of it is fulfilled in those two.

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And yet we have a problem throughout church history, and even in our own lives, of swinging between like a pendulum in trying to overcorrect or to correct something we often over correct, just like in a car, you know, there's on a road, any given road, two ditches, right? You veer off the road a little bit and then you try to correct, but you over correct and end up in the other ditch. And this happens over and over again. So that we move from something like antinomianism, which is no law, like liberty, okay? And we try to correct that, and we move into legalism, which is the opposite of that.

00:19:39

And it's in the middle, what Aristotle called the gold, or what people say of him, the golden mean. You ever heard of that? Between vice on both sides and virtue in the middle. That's where we're to live. Not legalists, in other words, following the law, okay?

00:20:00

You could do all of that and still not love God like the obedient child who does it out of hatred for his parents. On the other hand, no law. We can't go there either, because the scriptures don't go there. Jesus fulfills the law, does not abolish the law. We also often pit against one another.

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Law and grace. I hear this all the time, you know. Yeah, Old Testament's about law, New Testament's about grace. No, no, the whole thing is about God's law. And his law is good.

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Actually, his law is good. In the Old Testament, external law was like a school teacher. But the New Testament brings the Holy Spirit within. So that he is in us no longer externally out here. And so the pharisees here, remember, and the scribes were told, are asking Jesus this question about his disciples.

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And of course, they are literally, in the first century, known as lawyers. Like, that's what a scribe is. Not just writer, but a lawyer, okay? And the law that they were a lawyer of is God's law. So that they could recite the whole old Testament.

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They knew chapter and verse. Just like an unbelievable lawyer today might quote roman numeral one section, whatever, and nerd out on that. That's how they were. That's what they were. And they were lawyers.

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They knew the law forward and backward. But remember what they did. Remember what the Pharisees done. They said, okay, we get it. We get it.

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We understand. Every time that we disobeyed the law, punishment came, right? So in other words, they didn't obey the law. They worshiped an idol and punishment came. So they said, okay, we're just going to never break the law again and God will leave us alone.

00:22:01

Well, how they did that was they said, okay, we want to protect this. This is the law of God here. So we're going to put a fence around it with other laws. And then we're going to put another fence around it with even more laws. So that if you break this outer law of the elders here, what for them was oral tradition.

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It's okay. You're all right. You haven't broken the law still. So they layered the law with more laws. And of course, that happens today, doesn't it?

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Absolutely. It happens. Okay, in our american culture. But here's what their problem was. They're trying to get God to leave them alone.

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That is not God's intention. We just think, oh, yeah, if I just do what's right, then God's gonna leave me alone and, like, everything will go smoothly. No, no, no, listen. If you don't have God, nothing in your life is rightly ordered. Like, nothing goes smoothly, even if it is going smoothly for now.

00:23:04

Because he is the whole reason for the law. The instructions, they're not just meant to be followed for following's sake. They are meant to reveal who God is. And how far away from him we are. And how much we need his holy spirit.

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Because we can't trust ourselves even on our good days. That's why we need the law of God, even today, like the Old Testament, is not obsolete.

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And so it's not law or grace, but law and grace. He wants to bring by his grace and by his power, the law into us. Now, you know, maybe this is a helpful illustration. Baseball has a lot of rules. Did you know that?

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Like a lot of rules. If you don't know baseball, you really don't know a lot of these rules. And being an umpire at one point in my life for about ten years, I actually like the laws of baseball, you know, and I like to try to figure out, I actually watch the umpires when I go to a game, for instance, you know, because they've got their own little signals that they do to each other. You know, we used to call it off, call the play off and do all this kind of stuff like an infill fly rule. You know, this is kind of more bulk, right?

00:24:24

We have all these little, where you're just watching the game. It's like, ah, yeah, they're just having fun out there doing their thing. But if you've ever seen people play a game without rules, it is an absolute disaster. Just come over to my house sometime and listen to kids play. I mean, it drives me nuts in the yard.

00:24:42

I hear them out there on the trampoline. They've concocted some game on the trampoline, but none of them can agree what is in or out because they don't have rules. Has anybody ever had this very frustrating thing happen to them and they're just screaming at each other? I'm like, just make up some rules and stick with them. They really need an umpire out there.

00:25:02

I'm just going to start paying for an umpire, pay for somebody to go out there and enforce the rules on them so that they can have fun. Right? You say, but rules aren't fun, pastor. But let me tell you, you can actually have a lot of fun when you know the rules. You really can.

00:25:20

Like, actually, baseball players think about this. They don't even have to think about all the rules anymore, do they? No, they just go out there and do their thing because it's such a habit for them. Did you know that the term for virtue is habit? It's habit.

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That was Aristotle's term for it, habit. And we actually carry that right into what we do today, because if you're a virtuous person, you're doing it out of habit. You're not forcing yourself, oh, I've got to forgive this person. No, like, you're not virtuous in forgiveness. If that's the way it works out for you, right?

00:25:56

Do you understand how virtue works? If it's a virtue of yours, okay, you're not struggling to do it. If you're struggling to do it, you haven't reached that virtue. Everybody with me still like this really simple kind of idea. And all of us, if we're honest, and I hope you'll be honest in just a moment when we have our confession time.

00:26:18

Some of us need virtue, don't we? In certain areas of our life now, maybe we're doing great in other areas. Like, that's not my. We look at somebody and say, I don't know why they're doing drugs. That's not my thing.

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Yeah, but everybody's kind of got their thing, don't they? Everybody's kind of got some nasty thing that they have as a vice. It's difficult, and we struggle with it. We're tempted by it.

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We need to grow in character, in the character of God. And he has given us, you know, the three theological virtues. You remember what they are, faith, hope, and love. That's the three theological virtues. And he can place those in us by the Holy Spirit as we continue to trust him.

00:27:14

You know, Jessica and I being married 20 years and, like, walking with Jesus, doing our best to walk with Jesus. Throughout things we've been through quite a bit of, you can imagine times where we didn't know what we were doing. Maybe that's most of the time for me, at least, and where we really just have to trust God. And, you know, we look back at some of the times we say, why didn't we ever trust him? In those moments, we were really nervous about this or, like, worried, anxious.

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And we look back now, we're like, why didn't we trust him? He always comes through. He's always faithful. And, you know, the other day I had a rare opportunity to be in the house alone. It doesn't happen much at our place.

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It was the middle of day, and I was jamming out. I was working on my computer, but jamming out to some worship music, so much so that I wasn't even playing it on my computer, you know, because my computer speakers were too weak. You know, I was like, this song deserves the big tv speakers, you know, with the subwoofer and all that I'm talking about. I'm sure the neighbors heard if they were home. And I was just.

00:28:20

I was worse. And I. And I actually just broke down because here's the thought I had, man, what's this? You know, I went, as many of you walked with me through it in 2020 and 2021. I was in a dark place.

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You know, it was a tough, tough time for me and for a lot of different reasons. And in that moment, in that afternoon, I actually. I looked back at that time and I said, thank you, Jesus, for that time. And actually, also, this thought happened to me, and it's true.

00:29:02

He was there all along. You know, even when I couldn't see him, notice I couldn't see him, he could see me. He never lost sight of me. I lost his presence. I lost vision.

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And that's okay. That happens to us as humans. Like being contingent beings, like we are having potential. And all of this, we drop into dark places sometimes, and that's okay. But we're not to lose faith.

00:29:36

Even in the darkness, we're not to lose faith. Even when we don't understand, we're not to lose faith. You see, that's the virtue being cultivated. And just like a good teacher, Christ will always test us. Do you love me?

00:29:55

Yes, lord. Of course I love you. Okay, let's see. Why does he test us? Why does a good teacher test to be mean, right?

00:30:06

No, actually, a good teacher test their students so that the students can come to understand what they know. We think we know until we have to write it down, and then we realize we don't really know as much. We think we love others until we have to love that person. We think we're a forgiving person until we have to forgive that person. We think we're giving people until things get tight.

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And then our giving to God stops and we take it all in for ourself.

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We get tested. And when we get tested, what comes out is the true us.

00:31:03

Isn't that what Jesus says here? It's not what goes into a person that defiles them. Because if that was so, my goodness, we're all tempted by many things, right? Jesus himself was tempted, and if that temptation was sin, then Jesus would have sinned. And he did not sin.

00:31:26

He was tempted. Scripture says, tempted in all ways, but without sin, temptation is not sin. And what comes into us is not sin. What comes out of us, that's where sin is. If we could just do a real quick thing here.

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I'm gonna try to do what I kind of titled is probably titled wrongly. This is just my doing here. The anatomy of a sin. Let's just diagram it here for a second. Notice these words from James.

00:31:57

And this wasn't in our reading today, but this preceded our reading by a couple of verses. Hear this. Let no one say when he is tempted. I am being tempted by God. For God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one.

00:32:17

Now you say, well, hang on, pastor. You just said that God will test us. Yes, but not tempt us. There's a difference there. That the Lord allowed some unfortunate circumstances to happen to me was not a temptation.

00:32:37

It was an opportunity to trust him. You see how this works? Marshall, will you trust me in unfortunate situations and circumstances just as much as you trust me in fortunate circumstances and situations? Because, trust me, the wheel of fortune is always turning. I don't mean the game show.

00:33:06

What happens to you that's good and fortunate, that happens sometimes. And what is unfortunate happens sometimes. Both are an opportunity to trust God, to put your hope not in the things of this world, but in him, and to love. Even when others don't love you, even when others hate you and speak all manner of evil against you.

00:33:42

God doesn't tempt anyone. But he does test all of his disciples. Let's get that straight first. But each person is tempted, notice this, when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.

00:34:03

Then desire, when it is conceived, gives birth to sin. And sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death.

00:34:19

Now, so then what's the anatomy of sin like? How do we sin? First, we're led away by our own desire. It actually comes from within. So it's almost like our great physician puts us in situations where that evil desire is going to be drawn out.

00:34:38

You see what I mean? Almost like drawing out the poison that is from within. Because we can either, when pressed, either our public external show gets put out there or we get squeezed enough where what really is in us comes out. And that's when it can be killed. That's when it can be dealt with.

00:35:07

Otherwise we don't even see it. Because the heart is deceitful above all things, the scripture says.

00:35:18

And in fact, in that James reading Bedouin's word, and not merely hears, who deceived themselves. If anything, they're religious and don't bridle their tongues, but are deceived in their hearts. Listen, we can be deceived.

00:35:42

That's why we need him. That's why we need to. If he's put us in a place with our own purpose and we're there for a good reason. That's right now. It's right now, wherever you're at in your life right now, maybe things are great.

00:35:56

Maybe things aren't great. Okay, listen, listen. It's time to turn to him. He knows. He sees you.

00:36:03

He is with you even when we can't feel. Remember the song we just sang? We're not going to base it on our feelings. We can't. Feelings come and go.

00:36:13

It's got to be something more than feelings. And we have that. We have that. When we have received God's Holy spirit, we're not tempted by God. Each person is lured away by their own desire.

00:36:26

Same thing happens with Eve, doesn't it? Remember, she desired the fruit and desire then gives birth to sin. Sin, then to death. Death what? Spiritually.

00:36:38

Spiritually, between us and goddess.

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You know, here's the good news. God's grace is greater than sin. Which means no matter how tangled up we get in sin. Cause, you know, Jesus is man. He is so.

00:37:03

He pushes all the way to the heart of the matter, doesn't he? In other words, the law says this, I say this, and he pushes it to even our thoughts. You say I'm not even left to my own thoughts? No, no. Even thoughts can be sin.

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Even intentions can be sin. Which is going, remember, it's going more than the external. It's down into the internal. But here's the good news, brothers and sisters. He can make us joyful, obedient servants of his way.

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Like you can actually say no to sins and temptation and be happy about it and free. Just like that baseball player doesn't even think about it anymore. Doesn't even think about their swing. I mean, if you ever try to learn a golf swing, there's like a million things to do all in one swing. I just gave up the first time I ever tried.

00:37:51

I'm never. After, they told me, like, 20 different. I was like, that's ridiculous. I'm never doing that. I'm never gonna spend my time doing that.

00:37:57

That's way too many things to try to memorize. But the point is, actual golfers, they don't think about everyone. If you thought about all that, it's death by analysis, isn't it? You'd never hit the ball. No, no.

00:38:08

You gotta get it in us. Which is why, brothers and sisters, listen to this. It's James. Listen. This is beautiful.

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The implanted word that has the power to save your souls. If we implant the word of God in us, it will do its work. And the holy spirit, he is the one who writes it on our hearts. And if you continue to strive against that vice, that sin in your life, and allow God's power to work in you through his word, there will be happiness on the other side rather than addiction. And a continuous never getting to anything, always leading to condemnation and emptiness, self loathing.

00:38:58

No, no, no. This can be virtue, character, the image of God in us. And we can be joyful about it. We can be joyful about it. I know that some of you.

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There's no way he could do that for me. Yes, he can. Stop disbelieving and believe or pray this prayer. Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.

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Grace is greater than sin. And Jesus is here to give us today his holy spirit.

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Will you receive him? Will you repent of your way, repent of your sins? And believe the Lord Jesus? That is, trust him. Really trust him, you say?

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I don't know how that's possible. I don't either. But I believe him. And I believe his holy word. And that's the starting place.

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So today, let those who have ears to hear, hear. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.