Good morning church. Good morning, good morning. The summer is well underway, isn't it? And again, happy Independence Day weekend to all of us.
We live in a great nation, amen? And that was completely underwhelming. We live in a great nation, don't we? Come on, thank you Lord Jesus.
I don't know about you, church. And I believe that I'm speaking for all of us in this room. But when I say I don't know about you, I don't know. I am proud American.
I love the United States of America. I am grateful for this nation. I'm grateful for this state. I'm grateful that this is a Christian nation.
Come on. Don't let anybody ever tell you otherwise. Don't let culture tell you otherwise. This nation was founded upon God upon Christian heritage.
And values, come on. That is true. No matter, listen, the United States of America, we are not perfect. We got our problems.
Come on, you say amen to that? We got our problems. We got our issues. But you know what?
You got your problems and your issues. I got my problems and my flaws and my issues. We're not a perfect nation. But God has been at the beginning of this nation.
This nation has underpinnings in Judeo-Christian values. No matter what the radical left says, come on, call it what it is. No matter what, all those that are out there that are pushed to say, no, it's not true. No, it's not right.
It is true. It is there. Those that want to rewrite history are the ones that need to go back and study it a little harder. I am thankful that we live in this nation as imperfect as we may be.
We have celebrated 250 years as a nation. I'm not going to be around to see the 500-year mark, another 250. Great, great grandkids might. I don't know about you, but I'm not playing on being here that long.
But listen, we're believing the next 250 are going to be great with the Lord Jesus Christ at the helm of this nation. Amen. Amen. But we are a month in on this series on Ephesians.
We're already four weeks in it. Can you believe it? And today, in this fourth week of Ephesians, we're going to be getting into chapter two. Ephesians chapter two.
And my task today is to work through the first 10 verses of it here. The first 10 verses of Ephesians chapter two, one through 10. I want to start this morning by reading the entire passage to you out of the message. If you've been here any length of time, we love the message around here.
You'll hear me use it. You'll hear others frequently use it. The message has a really unique way of being really clear, really direct, very common speak. Helps you understand things.
If you know me, you know I love the new American standard. That's my personal favorite. Just a great translation of God's word. But the message really helps bring things alive.
And I think the message does great justice to Ephesians two, one through ten. So let's read that. And just going to read it in its entirety here so that you see where we're going. And listen, before we even read this this morning, can I just encourage you with something?
In case that has not been said enough so far. I'm not into this series. That's on us if it hasn't been said enough. But I hope that you know that.
I hope that this church practice that. I believe we do because this is a Bible believing church. This is a strong Bible believing church. We've got a lot of men and women in this room that know God's word.
They know it. They study it. They're not ashamed of it. They live by it.
And one of the best things to do when we are working through God's word is for you to read it on your own. Be reading ahead in Ephesians. How many of you have been doing that so far? Anybody?
You read ahead even if you read in a few verses or a chapter or two. If you're not doing that, let me encourage you wholeheartedly. Start doing that. Read ahead.
Read ahead. Read ahead. Read it. Read it.
Read it. Get it into you so that when you come in here on Sunday, whatever we expose it out of scripture, whatever that speaker brings that morning, that will just really water the seed that the Lord has already planted inside of you as you are feeding yourself and getting that inside of you. Amen? So let's read Ephesians 2, 1-10 in the message.
Here it is. It wasn't so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin. You let the world, which doesn't know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. Whoa.
We just stop and read that one more time. You let the world, which doesn't know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief and then exhaled disobedience. We all did it.
All of us doing what we felt like doing when we felt like doing it. All of us in the same boat. It's a wonder God didn't lose his temper and do away with a whole lot of us. Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, he embraced us.
He took our sin dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own with no help from us. Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus. Now God has us where he wants us with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus.
Everything is all his idea and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. If God's gift from start to finish, we don't play the major role. If we did, we'd probably go around bragging that we'd done the whole thing.
No, we need to make nor save ourselves. God does both the saving, the making and the saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does. The good work he has gotten ready for us to do.
Work, we had better be doing. Now, that's a great passage, isn't it? Then that read well. You get that?
And I want to tell you that I think that arguably there's no better chunk of passage in God's word that has the gospel message right there than Ephesians 2, 1 through 10. Those 10 verses what we just read, that pretty much sums up the whole gospel, doesn't it? That what Jesus did for you and I, where we were, who we were, the life we used to have, Jesus has made that all different. Amen?
Is your life better because of Jesus? Yes. Oh, come on. There was like 20 hands in here.
Come on, you wake this one. Is your life better today because of Jesus? Everything that you and I have ever known is better when you know the Lord Jesus Christ. Now, if you don't know him, then okay, I get it.
Your life is not better. Okay, it sucks. It's not good, right? You don't know how good your life could be, right?
But with Jesus, oh, Jesus changes everything. He makes your life so much better. He makes my life so much better. Now, let's break this down.
Okay, using the NIV now, from this point forward, okay? We're going to break this down as much as we can and I'm not joking with you. When I tell you that we could do like three or four messages out of this. It's these 10 verses.
They're so much here. I'm not going to do that, by the way, but just know that we could, okay? Consider yourself spared, all right? We're not here for three hours.
All right. Ephesians 2, 1, NIV, here's what it says, verse 1. As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins. I'm going to read it that way.
Yeah, that sounds more familiar. You were dead in your transgressions and sins. Now, the key words there, church were, we're dead. Everybody say we're dead.
You and I, we're dead, okay? And what the Apostle Paul is doing right here is he is speaking to Christians, all right? He's speaking to the Christians at the church in Ephesus and he says, hey, you were dead. And I want to tell you this morning that I like the Apostle Paul.
I am not the Apostle Paul, okay? But I like him. I can do the same thing here in this moment today, speaking to this church, speaking to this room that he was doing back here to the church in Ephesus. I can look at this room and say confidently with full confidence, full authority, full biblical correctness to this room today, that if you are a Christian, if you belong to Lord Jesus Christ, you were dead.
Come on. Is anybody here today? You were dead, right? If you belong to Jesus, you were dead.
Now the opposite of that is also true. I can stand here today and say to this room or any other room and say, if you are not a Christian, if you do not belong to Lord Jesus Christ, if you're not living in his ways, his precepts, his plans and purposes for your life, then you are dead, okay? It's not that you are dead. You are dead right now.
I can say that as well. Come on, how many understand what I'm saying? Because when you're in Jesus, when you're alive, you're in him, you're alive. But if you're dead to him and alive to sin, well, you're still dead.
You are dead. Both sides of that coin are true. And before you say, well, wait a minute, I'm not dead. I drove my car here today, didn't I?
Got up and got dressed and brushed my teeth. I'm here. Yeah, listen, it is possible to be physically alive and yet spiritually dead. That is true.
Is it not? You can be physically alive and spiritually dead. Yeah, you can be alive and you can be blind spiritually, right? You can be physically alive and yet be deaf.
You won't have ears to hear anything, right? Yeah, you're alive physically, but arguably your most important faculty is not functioning. It's not working. You are not spiritually alive to Christ in Christ.
You're spiritually dead. So what happens in real simple terms is this. God will speak and you don't hear him. God will move.
He will act. He will do something and you don't see it, right? God cares about something and he makes it clear and we don't care. We don't respond.
You see what I'm saying? You can be physically alive yet spiritually dead. That's what the Apostle Paul is saying here. It says you were dead and your transgressions and your sins.
Can you see that? Now, when it says transgressions and sins, is that the same thing? No, it's actually not. Now, if you're newer in the Lord, if you haven't really studied your Bible much, if you haven't been taught very much, you might think that transgressions and sins, that's the same thing.
Why would the Apostle Paul use it? It's actually not. He's definitely a wordsmith. He's intentional.
He knows what he's saying. He knows why. Transgression and sins. Two very different things.
The word transgressions in the Greek, it's the word parrotoma. That literally means parrotoma means a deviation from truth. A transgression means if you and I transgress, we deviate from truth. Now, let me say this.
There might be some of you in this room. If you have ever been taught or told about maybe some nutty college professor or something, I don't know, you write it on Google, the internet that there is no such thing as absolute truth. Let me tell you this morning. There is such a thing as absolute truth.
That does exist. Truth is not subjective. It's not your truth and my truth. Well, whose truth is truth?
I mean, if truth is relative and truth is whatever you feel it is and whatever, you know, this side of the room feels right, then we have no truth. There is truth and it is absolute and absolute truth is God's and God's alone. Absolute truth comes from Father God. It comes from his written word.
No, can we all say amen to that this morning? There is absolute truth. Okay. And so that's why when he says transgression, that means a deviation from what?
From the truth, you have deviated. You have changed course. You have stepped to the side and we have gone off the reservation and we have gone our own way. Why?
Do we want deviating from God's truth? His truth. Not ours. Not yours, not mine.
His. Amen. We have that? That's transgression.
Okay. Now the word sins here. What does it mean? What is it?
Sin is sin. Do you know that in the Greek there are nine unique words for sin? It's a lot. In English, we just got one word.
We got sin. That's it. Right? But there are actually nine words.
And the word that the apostle Paul is using here out of the nine when he says sins right here in this passage. He is using what is I think probably the most familiar to Christians today. You've never heard that one before. And how much you what does that mean?
That word literally means to miss the mark. That's what that word means. So if you think about it the simplest way is missing the mark. Think of like an archery target.
Right? You think about the if you've ever done archery for shot of bone arrow right? You got a target out there right? And you got the big circles right?
You got like a yellow one and a blue one and they get down like the bullseye right? And what is the archer trying to do? They're trying to hit dead center. I mean they're trying to hit the middle.
If anybody ever shot a bone arrow you know what you want to hit that center right? And so how much it means to miss the mark meaning you don't hit the bullseye. You don't hit that center. There's a lot of reasons today why people miss the mark.
Maybe one of the biggest reasons you know just right off the bat is people don't know what the target looks like. They don't have good target acquisition. I mean I want to hit the target. I want to hit it.
I don't want to miss the mark. But I don't even know what it looks like. I mean my vision is fuzzy. You see I'm new in the Lord and I'm kind of new to this Christianity and given my life.
I don't really. So I don't know what I'm aiming at. I can't see it. That's the reason why people miss the mark.
Maybe an even more common reason that people miss the mark nowadays in their walk with the Lord is they try to do things in their own strength. Oh come on. Is that familiar? It's great.
You can wave and say yes. That's me. If anybody has humility this morning myself included will say I know what that's like. I try to do things in my own strength.
I try to do things in my own power and you will come to a point in your walk with the Lord where you realize that is not going to work. I will always miss the mark when I'm trying to do things in my own strength. When I'm trying to do things in my own power with my own understanding. I need you need the power of the Holy Spirit flowing in and through you so that you can be and live the kind of life that Jesus Christ came to give you.
That's the only way that that works. So you'll speak and listen to him. I'm trying. I'm trying.
I'm trying so hard. You're doing it in your own strength. I'm starting to hear it flow through you and then you're going to hit that mark. Right.
Now it's very important to understand here that when the apostle Paul says you use this word on Marti missing the mark, he is not talking about missing the mark of father God's love for you. That's not what he's saying. In contrary to some of what is taught out there and what you hear people say about that, we say, God, he loves you and I. And God, I hope you understand this.
He is always reaching out towards you. His hand is always outstretched to you and I say, come with me. I know I've got something better. Come on.
His hand is he's never seen it. You know, just get away. It's wrong with you. always in love and mercy and kindness, come on in goodness and all those things that he is that we are not, his arm is always stretched out to you and I.
Even again, when we turn and we shy away and we pull back and listen, what we're talking about here with sins, this can quickly become transgression. We're talking about missing the mark, it's not missing God's love, he's always reaching out to us to man, we're the ones that need to respond and reach out to him. But this is when we are trying, when we are trying to hit the middle, but we're just missing it, right? God's still there saying, come on, I love you.
I've got to play on free, I know it doesn't feel like it, but come on my son, come on. When we take our bone arrow and we say, not this one, I'm gonna go this way, well now we're talking about transgression, right? Now we deviated, right, that's different. But when we got it, his hand is always stretched out to us.
He loves us, that's not what he's saying. He's talking about missing the mark of living in God's truth, in God's righteous way of living. If you and I miss that mark, we miss out on heaven on earth. You miss out on the abundant life that Jesus Christ came to give you, you will miss that.
You will miss this high water mark, you will live somewhere down here. You're gonna miss all the dehats for you. Does that make sense this morning? Okay, we can say it this way.
You are either dead to sin and alive to Jesus or you're dead to Jesus and you're alive your sin. Take your take, you cannot have both. Oh come on, somebody say amen this morning. You cannot have both, you can't have it both ways.
You cannot be alive to Jesus and dead to sin and have it. You don't know, it's one or the other. You will either be alive to him and your sin is dead. It's gone, it's not, you don't pursue it, you don't live for it.
The flesh, we're gonna get to that in a minute. Or it's the other way, you are alive to that stuff and you're dead to Jesus. Either way works and let's make sure we're on the right side of that coin, amen. Paul's saying you were dead.
Praise God that I were. How about you this morning? Anybody else grateful? No, thankfuls that I were dead.
I was dead, come on, yeah? If you know the Lord Jesus Christ, if you belong and you were dead, let's not go back to living that way, amen. Now the next couple verses here, Ephesians 2, 1 through 3 says, as for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, verse 2, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts.
Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. Did you catch that last line there? In verse 3, you were, and I were by nature, objects of wrath. That means you and I were target practice for wrath.
Wrath was dispensed upon you and I. It came straight for us. We were objects of it. For some of us, and maybe you're one of those, some of you, maybe you're sitting here in this room today, I think for some of us, we may have been taught or told, or just maybe we just plain assumed.
We assumed that sin was what you did. And maybe it took, you know, whenever you talk about sin, it's like the sins of commission, right? Sins that I commit and then sins of omission, right? We talked about this before, the things that I just do, you know, I don't want to, like if possible.
I do the things I don't want, the things that I should do. I don't remember, you just going back and forth, right? We've got sins of commission, sins of omission. Some of us, we grew up thinking that sins are just, it's the things we do.
And years later, we figure out that what God is really saying, what His word, it's right here in verse three, is that sin is not just what you did. I mean, there is some truth to that. I get it. Sin is not only what you do though, it's who you were, right?
That you get a greater understanding. Sin is not just only what you did, it's who you were. By nature, without Jesus, we're inherently flawed and broken. We don't work right, right?
It's not just what we did, it's who we were. And not having that harmony with the Lord Jesus Christ, not living that way with Him. Let me tell you, you know what it's a lot like? It's a lot like a guitar that's been broken.
Okay, I'm going to illustrate this to you this morning. I saw this on YouTube and I've been dying to do this, okay, where you breaking? I'm just getting Caleb's nine in here. Okay, this is Caleb's guitar.
He's looking at me, Bart, this morning. Now, I'm a guitar player paying, I'm playing for 26, 27 years, something like that. Let me tell you that what happens, okay? You have this guitar and it's good, it's in tune, it's ready.
Right, sounds pretty good, yes? Okay, now listen, what happens when you and I don't live in Father God's plan? When we are, when we are dead to Jesus and we are alive to our sins, okay? What happens is this?
You and I are not capable of making beautiful music. The way that this guitar was designed to work, when everything is in tune and it's right, okay? You cannot make beautiful music before you can't do what you were designed to do. Does that make sense, right?
And so what happens is we don't, we miss the mark, right? We live less than and we have transgressions, right? I'm not going to break the guitar, I'm not going to break the string, but I'm just going to down tune it, right? And what else do we have?
We have transgressions, we have sins, right? So, you know what's going to happen next? Is it going to sound good? Y'all want me to keep going a little bit?
I can sing too, if you know. No? Okay, next time. That's what happens, we're incapable when we have transgressions, we have sins.
We can't make beautiful, it sounds terrible, right? And so here's what we need to realize. The goal is not to stop playing bad music. That's not the goal.
The goal is to fix what's been broken. And so what happens is you have people that they will try to, they'll say, well I need to just stop sinning. That's what I need to just quit sinning and I need to start living better. Well, that's never going to work, right?
If we get to sing, right? And so they're trying and they're trying on their own strength. Right, what we have to realize is that you have to get repaired. If the people say, I just need to stop sinning and I say, no, no, no, no, what you need to do is you need to go back and fix the problem, right?
You're always going to make, you're not going to be in alignment with the Lord and then pitch with Him and let it, you've got to get repaired. And when you and I are born again, we have been repaired and now we're able to make beautiful music away that the Lord has designed. Come on, can you see that this morning? That's where we're supposed to live.
That's the kind of, your life, your life should make beautiful music for the Lord, yeah? It should. And so how do you see this? People saying, I need to stop sinning.
That's like a broken instrument saying, I just need to play better notes. No, you've got to get it fixed. And we have been made right. Amen.
Now when you look back at verse two, it says, you follow the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work and those who are disobedient. Well, we need to understand something church. We need to understand it really, really clearly this morning. We live on a battlefield.
Come on, do you understand that? We live on a battlefield. There's a battle going on. There's a difference and a cruise ship and a battleship.
And what happens a lot of things in the church, I don't know what, you know that there's just a real deviation from this, use that word. You see the church of Jesus Christ backing up, regressing and saying, I don't know about that. I mean, I was told that when I gave my life to Jesus, everything was just gonna be a walk in the park. I don't know who told you that, but you got sold to build goods.
Because life with Jesus is better, yes, but it's not easier. The Christian life is a fight. It's a battle because we have an enemy. And so what happens in the church of Jesus Christ, when the church of Jesus Christ becomes a cruise ship, you know, it's like you walk out from your cabin and you walk on deck and it's like, what do I smell?
You smell the baby oil everywhere and sunscreen and people just having a good time. It's like, hang on a second. The church of Jesus Christ is a battleship. You come up on deck and it's like, that's just smell like gunpowder in here.
We're at war here. Come on, did that speak to anybody this morning? That's where we're at. We're in a battle.
We are in a war and we most definitely have an enemy. This church is not a cruise ship, it's a battleship. We have been for 27 years this December. This is a battleship that is out at sea.
It is not at port. It's not high it up. We're not loading up. Just hanging out at the harbor that we're out at war.
And we're taking back around from the enemy. Amen? That's what's happened. We're seeing marriages made whole.
We're seeing families restored. We're seeing lives changed. Shackles broken off of people that something been dealing with for 20, 30, 50 years and the power of Jesus Christ comes in and turns them around. This is not a cruise ship with pleasure packages and all you can eat buffets.
Come on, this is a battleship. War, we're in battle. And here in verses two through three, Paul tells us three different fronts, three different enemies, on which these battles are being waged. Here they are.
First one is Satan. Satan, we know this. We look at this briefly in the introduction. We understand that Satan and his demons, they are clearly in existence, aren't they?
They are. You see this all through the Old Testament, through the New Testament? And I want to tell you, it's not like Satan and his minions suddenly evaporated at the end of the first century coming in. They're just gone now.
No, no, Satan is still alive. He is not well, OK, but he is alive. He is an enemy. He is crafty.
His desire is for you. His desire is for your wife, for your husband, for your children, for the people that you know that you work with that don't know the Lord and need to come. His desire is for them. And Satan would love nothing better than to get a foothold in your in my life.
He would love that. He is a real active enemy. He hates God, and he hates God's plans and purposes for this world. And he would do anything to try and draft this, make us switch sides from God's army and come join his army and be a soldier for him.
He would do anything that he can do to get the Christian man or woman to compromise and give him. Make no mistake about that. If you want to believe, if you want to live your life and say, I don't think that Satan is real, and I don't think the demons are real, and I don't think I don't understand all that. So I'm just going to kind of not look at that.
I'm just going to bury my head in the sand. You can bury your head in the sand. You can live under rock and say, Satan's not real. Like old saying goes, if you bury your head in the sand, like an ostrich, the only thing that changes is where you get shot.
OK? Instead of taking it up here, you won't take it down here. You're still going to get shot, right? But it's still true.
It's still going to happen. Satan is real. He is an enemy, and his desire is for you. So we need to understand that's an enemy, right?
But we cannot just blame it all on Satan. That's given him way too much credit, OK? And that's what the Church of Jesus Christ does too many times. We just say it's all Satan.
It's all him. He's all proud. That's not fair. That's not accurate.
You see, there's another enemy. Number two, it's the desires of the flesh. We're in a war. We're in a battle against the flesh.
Do you understand that, Church? Come on. Do you understand what I'm saying? There is the Paul's saying that here.
He's saying, look, there's not just something out there. Satan, and we want to say, oh, it's the boogeyman. It's always Satan. It's always the enemy.
Yes, he's out there. But there's also another enemy that is in here. So it's not just something on the outside trying to get in. We can say this way.
There's something on the inside that's trying to get out. There's the flesh. There's what I want to do. There's the way that I want to live my life.
There's what's fun to me. There's what's enjoyable to me. There's all these things that I love that I shouldn't. And I keep doing them.
But that's the flesh. That's our flesh man in there. We have this internal broken compass that just wants to please ourselves. We all have it.
Every single one of you in this room, all of us have it. Every single man, we inherited that from Adam. That's why it's called our Adamic Sin Nature. It's there.
You can trace it all the way back to the Garden of Eden. And the Adamic Sin Nature that is present in every single man, every single woman, it shows up most often through self-righteousness. Oh, I am this. And I don't have any problems.
And I'm good. Look at me. My life is I'm great. Man, blessed.
I'm good. Yeah, sure. I make a few mistakes here and there. I'm a good person.
And I'm all right. Shows up through a lot of pontification and self-righteousness. It also shows up through justification. I'm the victim here.
I mean, don't you? This happened to me. Don't look at me. Look at them.
They're the one to blame. They made me act that way. They made me respond that way. We want to shift the blame, don't we?
That's that Adamic Sinik. That's the flesh. There's a verse that we use in Kingdom Families, our child training seminar. We do that annually here at Grace.
It is just a powerful seminar that if you're a parent, or even if you're a grandparent, you have a child in the home. Maybe a child that you take care of. Listen, you need to go to Kingdom Families. This seminar teaches you how to pour into your child and how to root things out of your child.
Discipline. And it's not just the discipline part. That's what we want to focus on. And how do you do that?
And you know, this Bible really say to spank your child. Yeah, it does. Actually, spare the rod. And you'll spoil the child, right?
There's a lot of verses, right? It's there. How do you do that appropriately? How do you do that biblically?
Will you come and find out? All right, it's great. But there's the pouring in part, too. How do I raise them to love God and love the ways of God?
How does this work, right? And there's a key verse that we use in there. Proverbs 29, 15. And that verse says this.
A child left to himself will bring his mother to shame. A child left to himself will bring his mother to shame. Did you catch that? What is he saying here?
That verse doesn't, you can't put the blame on bad company. Well, my kid, little Johnny, he just hung out with all the wrong people. And that's why he acts like a terrorist now. He just had Billy and they were just really back.
This says a child left to himself. There's no Billy involved in it. It also didn't speak about the environment. It doesn't say, well, little Jimmy was just, he had a really tough upbringing and that life molded him in shape.
We have all these things. This says a child left to himself. That means I have four children, the youngest of which is four, sitting up here on the front row with my wife. I could take any one of my kids and you could take any one of your kids and lock them away in a room for 15 years, 10 years, take your pig and open up the door at the end of that time.
And they will come out and there is an endemic signature in them. Left of them so even with no outside. It's not about the environment. It's not about friends.
It's not about social media. There is something in there that is not good. It's carnal. It's fleshly.
It's wrong. And it's just there. And God has to come in and through the power of the Holy Spirit touch that thing and make it right. That's the same idea of what Paul was saying.
There's the desires of the flesh. It's an enemy. It's a battleground that we are all fighting on. Satan baits the hook, but we bite.
Come on, that's true, isn't it? We say, well, Satan tempted me. He dangled it. He may have tempted you.
He may have dangled that in front of you. But you're the one that took the bite. You got there all on your own. I got there all on my own.
Satan didn't do any of that helping. There is the desires of the flesh. Amen. Here's the third enemy, the world.
The world. This is the system of values. When you speak about the world, the system of values that governs this world that we live in. You don't need me to tell you this morning.
I hope that the world that we live in, it does not value the same things to the word of God values. You understand that? I hope. Yeah?
You don't need me to preach about it. The world does not value the things of God. The world does not value the word of God in so many ways today. The world does not value walking with humility.
The world does not value fidelity. being married to one man or one woman. The world does not value saving sex still marriage. The world is all about pre-marital sex.
And just try somebody out like Aaron's rent to own, I guess. That's what kind of crooked moral decline. That's where our world is at. The world does not value what the word of God is.
I could go through a lot. You could too, right? The world's current system and governing value, they are completely contrary to the word of God at this point in time. And until Habakkuk 2, 3 is realized that the glory of the Lord will cover the earth as the waters covers the sea.
If your sister says that's going to happen, that means this world is going to be turned upside down for Jesus. Right. Now short of that happening, we live in a world that's completely anti-God, completely contrary to God. That's just where we're at.
And I want to tell you, it is a whole lot easier to say it this way. It's a whole lot easier to be a dead fish, floating downstream in the current than it is to be a live one, swimming upstream in the current. That's always been true and that always will be true. It's a lot easier to just be a dead fish.
Just kind of, I'm alive, but I'm dead. I mean, you can't tell any difference from me in the world. I'm just kind of in the world. We're called to be in the world, but not of the world.
But we're in the world and we're also of the world. We're kind of trying to straddle the fence. We're falling more this way. And so we look like the world.
We talk like the world. We act like the world. It is indiscernible to any man or woman around us that we are a Christian, that we're a Christ follower. We're just kind of floating in the current, bouncing off the rocks like a thing.
Just kind of in the current of the world. It's a lot harder to be a Christ follower. Not just a fan of Jesus, but a follower of his and swim upstream. That's the way we're called to live, but it's harder, isn't it?
It is, it's a fight, it's a battle. And let me tell you, I get this. I understand that this is true. That's the way it is.
Let me tell you, for me, there is no choice. How about you this morning? It's a no brainer for me. This is the way it is.
And really, this is true. If this is the way that for me, it's just total no brainer. I got no option except option B up there. I want to be alive one swimming upstream in the current.
How about that? And there's two reasons for me. Number one, I would much rather be alive than I would be dead. How about you?
But secondly, I love a good fight. How about you? Anybody else here you love a good fight? You know, I said, we're in church.
I don't know, I'm fighting. Is that really, I mean, God is just all about love. Jesus is all about love. The Bible also says that God is a warrior.
That is who he is. That is his name. Our God is a warrior. He is a mighty warrior.
And we are called to be like him. So you might be sitting here today, man, woman. You say, I don't know that. Listen, you have a love for a good fight.
God is the one that put it inside of you. I believe with my whole heart that every man, every woman, God, hardwires into us a love for a good fight. I'm not talking about physically fighting and being aggressive and being a but. I'm not talking about that.
I'm just going to take somebody behind the woodshed. No, that's not being a big, angry, aggressive guy. That's not what we're talking about. I'm having a good fight in the spiritual.
You love a good fight in the spiritual? Seeing marriages turned around, walking with somebody for eight, 10 weeks through counseling and watching them give up addictions and completely set free. You like a good fight? You like seeing ground taken back from the enemy, kicking Satan's teeth in and saying, not today.
We're taking that back, right? You like, I mean, that's there. And if you're sitting there and you're saying, I don't know about that. I mean, that doesn't really, let me tell you, it's there.
And maybe what's happened is life is just piled on top of you. And you have forgotten, you have suppressed. You have ignored that love for a good fight because it's there. God put it there.
You may have just shut that valve off, but it's there. And I would tell you, I would encourage you to reignite that. Love to have a good fight. Let me tell you, it's a big deal.
And then think about somebody blockbuster movies that are out there. Why is it that the church doesn't get it sometimes? Why is it that Christians don't get it? But Hollywood gets it.
They have figured it out. The movies itself, whether you're talking about a futuristic like Star Wars type movie or maybe a good old classic, John Wayne Western or something, they have figured it out. That when you have any story that's good, triumpling over evil, man, people love it, right? I'm an avid movie watcher.
I love a good movie. And some of my favorite movies are those ones where you've got a band of guys and they're all bunkered, they're hunkered down, and they are battling. They're against all odds. And come on, you know what it's like, the Indians have surrounded the place.
And the bad guys are there and they're loading the cannons up. And they're looking at each other and like, man, I'm out. I am out. You got it.
And I got nothing. And they're just there prepared to accept their fate, right? And when it seems like, that's it, what's going to happen next? You hear the trumpet in the distance?
Don't think I'm there. The calories coming, right? And it's like, ah, you know, watch the movie 300, 300s part and hold off hundreds of thousands. I love movies like that.
Let me tell you. And there are such great parallels there from the physical to the spiritual world. This is a fight. This is a battle, right?
And we're in a battle against this world. Absolutely. We are men. I don't want to just watch the Calvree come in.
I want to be part of the Calvree. How about you? And then I want to be part of that. That brings hope and light to people.