Well, hello there everyone and thank you so much for watching. Won't you just stay right where you are for roughly the next half hour? We just get ourselves right into God's holy word. I appreciate you being there.
Help us out. Get on the telephone and phone a friend, a neighbor, a co-worker, somebody that's dear to you and say, hey, there's no preacher on WVLR, Christian television for East Tennessee and invite them and let them join us as well. There's no end world that I can know what's going on in your life and in your circle of acquaintances right now. But I know the Lord does.
I know he cares. I've been in the ministry for decades now and we labor with people every day in the highways and hedges in drug addiction and other addictions and homelessness. So I've got a very keen insight into the fact that so many folks right here in the Bible belt, right here in Middle Tennessee, right here in Southern Kentucky, Northern North Carolina, Southwestern, Virginia, all of our region here, we have a lot of social ills, indeed. The most important need that any of us as a human being could ever have is the great need of the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
I don't make any apologies for that. I believe that with all my heart, soul, and mind. All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. But God commended these love for us and that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.
The wages of sin is death. But the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Are you saved? Do you know the Lord?
Have you been birthed from the family of sin into the family of salvation? I hope you have. But if you haven't, there's no better time than right now to just start looking away from all of this down here and fast the eyes of your soul upon the Lord Jesus Christ who loved you so much that he died with your sin. He was buried with your transgressions and then he arose bodily from the dead on the third day with your justification, your salvation, your redemption.
And if you would trust him and receive him, his Holy Spirit would make your heart his home and he will never leave you and he will never forsake you. But he will be your very present help in trouble as well. So look to him if you're not a Christian and then all the rest of our viewers here this evening, if you're going through a lot of stress, struggle, sorrow, whatever it may be, we are going to pray together right now and we're going to believe God for each other. Heavenly Father, how thankful I am for this moment that we can pray together.
I don't know who that dear one is in that motel room, hotel room, hospital, nursing home facility. They're at home wherever they may be, watching on their little device, whatever. God, I just pray that your Holy Spirit will move and minister right now. You know the need.
You're not a far off. You are near. Help us God, all of us, not to think with our natural mind that will hook us up to the world and therefore get us into all kinds of trouble, weakness and so many other things. But if we would strive to be spiritually minded and look into your word and live by the directions found there in, you will be our strength in the midst of our turbulences and troubles and you will be our joy, you will be our peace.
Everything we need God, you will provide according to your riches and glory by Christ Jesus. Help us not to just argue and fuss and question in the mind of Adam because he just goes deeper into an old pit, darker and darker. Oh God, open the eyes of our hearts, open the ears of our minds, own souls, oh God, that we can get a glimpse of you and hear your word and hallelujah moments together here this evening on the focus of freedom. In Jesus name, amen.
Thank you. Appreciate your prayers for me. And I'll be praying for you just like the Bible tells us to pray one for another. Lord Jesus said to John 14 very simply because I live, ye shall live also.
Revelation 1, Christ declares, I am he who lives and was dead and behold, I'm alive forever more. He is alive. A dear brother in Christ of mine and a friend for so many decades, brother Jimmy Shoop, he's going to come around now and sing a song that goes right along with that. Thank God Christ is alive.
The gates and doors will walk and all the windows nice and down. It's been the night and sickness and the rules of every sound. Having hopeless sorrow, having fear of the day, to find the soldiers breaking through the dragons all the way. Just before the sunrise I heard something at the wall.
The gate began to rattle and the voice began to call. I hurried to the window, I looked down to the street expecting swords and torches and the sounds of soldiers feeding. But there was no one there but Mary so I went down to let her in. John stood there beside me as she told us where she'd been.
She said they'd moved him in the night and none of us knows where. Oh, the stone's been rolled away and now his body isn't there. And then toward the garden and John stood, he went on ahead and found the stone in an empty tune just the way that Mary said. But the winding sheet that wrapped him in was just an empty shell.
Now where they'd taken him was more than I could tell. Oh, something strange had happened there. Something strange had happened there. Just what I did not know.
John believed a miracle but I just turned to go. Circumstance and speculation couldn't lift me very high. I was I'd seen them crucify him and then I saw him die. I came inside the house again but give the name which came.
Everything I promised him just added to my shame. And it lasted came to choices I denied I knew his name. And so even if he was alive he'd never be the same. Then suddenly the air was filled with a strange and sweet perfume.
Right there came from everywhere, draw shadows from the room. Then Jesus stood before me with his arms held open wide. I fell down on my knees and I just clung the hill and cried. Oh, but then he raised me to my feet and as I looked into his eyes, love shining out from him like some light from the skies.
Gilded my confusion, disappeared in sweet reliefs. And every fear I ever had just melted into peace. Amen. Most remarkable, tremendous story that could ever be told.
The Gospel of the Son of God. The good news, we were in darkness that light came. In bondage but the grand emancipator showed up and took care of us and was able to reach down into that old prison of sin and bring us out by his grace and for his glory. Fellow brothers and sisters, it's up to us in these days in which we live.
Let me take just a second and talk to you who possibly may be watching. Though you're watching a Christian network, you're not saved. Now you've thought about churchgoers, you've interacted with churchgoers, you've worked with churchgoers. And I've heard the story ever since I was a little boy, a bunch of hypocrites in church.
Well, don't let a hypocrite stand between you and God, because if you do that, that means the hypocrites closer to God than you are. And I had an old saintly auntie, it was a pastor's wife for 35 years in the same little country church. She used to tell people, well, don't worry about hypocrites and the church come on and be with us, one more ink on her. So I still chuckle at that because that's the fact.
I read this book we've all sinned. So quit allowing the devil to mess with your mind. I've often said there's a lot of things we can say about the devil, but he is a master mental manipulator. And if he can get you, me or anyone else looking for a perfect human before we would ever dare be saved, are there any perfect humans?
Of course not. So why then are you looking for one? If you need to find one of those in order to be saved, you will never find a perfect human on this earth now. But I'll tell you one thing.
I found a perfect human one day. He was born of the virgin in Bethlehem. That means he wasn't tainted by his patriarchal sins of the first Adam, no indeed. He's the second Adam, the only one ever born of the virgin.
That's why the virgin birth is of utmost importance, right from the prophecy of Isaiah. Behold the virgin, she'll conceive and bear a son. That means Jesus had no sinful origin. He had no entertaining soul of Adam.
He was perfect. And you know what? He loved you enough, loved me enough that he took our place in sin. And he who knew no sin was made sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.
So quit looking around at other people. Don't look at me. I'll let you down. I promise you.
But if you'll look to him and to him alone, he'll be there when no one else will be. He loves you even in your unlovableness. I was unlovely too, but he loved me anyhow. I couldn't offer him nothing.
He could offer me everything. What a transaction of grace that takes place at the cross when a helpless, hell-deserving sinner is able to become a child of God, an heir with God and a joint heir with Christ, a recipient and a possessor of eternal life in heaven and abundant life right here on earth. I'm telling you, he can turn things around. He can save your soul.
He can help break that addiction and we'll break that addiction. He'll change your life if any is in Christ. We're a new creature. All things pass away, behold, all things become new.
So precious heart, if you're not a Christian yet, please don't believe the lies of the devil. Turn to the truth of God who is the Lord Jesus Christ, the way the truth and the life. And he can get you out of sin into salvation. As he told on Nicodemus along the goad, marvel out that ascend into thee.
You must be born again and that can happen in your life according to the incorruptible seed of the word of God that I hold in my hand. Join the family of God, the family of faith. Be saved and look to the Lord Jesus. Now with all that said, now let me talk to us who are saved.
We've been saved by the grace of God. Me, you, those of us who know the Lord is our Savior. I've hoped that I listened to what the Lord's Holy Spirit just said from me a minute ago. The only way any of us can be saved is through Christ.
And he takes the chains off of us, liberates us from all the chains of sin whatsoever they may be. He'll forgive us from that original act of disobedience by the first Adam, washing away all the consequential sins of commission due to that original fall of Adam. And everything we lost in the fall of Adam, we now regain through the ongoing faithfulness of the second Adam, the Son of God. So why when Jesus takes the chains of sin away from us?
Would we want then to go on a few steps on farther down life's road and have religionist drop a big cage on us. Enjoy your liberty. Relations chapter 6, stand fast, therefore in the liberty where with Christ hath made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage. Please listen carefully.
Don't change your challenges because you think I might be pecking on a little golden cave or going in a different direction. I know what I'm talking about because when Jesus took the chains of sin off of me so long ago, then some religious people dropped an old cage of religion on me and started telling me about rules, regulations, this, that, and the other. And all that. And so they set various parameters from all four corners, southeast, northwest, northwest, northeast, and just that, I call it a box call it a chain, whatever you want to call it.
Call it by any other metaphor. You don't have to just have to use a cage. But again, serve parameters and you couldn't go out of that. And here Jesus that saved my soul and was leading me and I was following him, that wonderful fellowship within that glorious relationship got interrupted by self-appointed Pharisees and controllers that felt like it was their calling in life to sort of control me and others.
And it started coming pretty crystal clear though perhaps subliminally that if you didn't believe what you were told to believe, if you didn't accept the scholarship and the standards and all like that and using those and far them concerned vulgar terms, this camp or this is our crowd. Let me tell you the crowd that we ought to be happy to be in and that is Christians. Those of us that have been saved by the grace of God do not set there wherever you're watching and try to accuse this preacher of being an interfaith or an ecumenical somebody, a wishy-washy compromises or whatever just because I don't want to get in lock step with you and in your doctrinal denomination or whatever, excuse me. You didn't save me Jesus did.
He's the one who got the chains of sin off of me and he ain't got a cage for me. He made me a prisoner of love. Yes sir, he got me out of the bondage of the devil but the devil is not my boss anymore, Jesus is. I'm not a slave to sin anymore.
Like Paul said, and I wholeheartedly agree, I'm a slave to him. Let me tell you something, there's nothing wrong with being in servitude or in captivity to this man called Jesus because he is love and he will guide us into all truth because he is truth. If you're saved, then you're my brother. You're my sister.
And it becomes sadly once becoming a soldier and a servant of God knowing from Galatians that we are the children of God. I believe it was the other week we were talking about true Christianity is not a list of do's and don'ts. But true Christianity is not doing or not doing but it is being. It is who we are in him.
You see what I do can't manufacture produce who I am. But if I know and celebrate and grasp and try to expand who I am, then what I do is going to be absolutely in submission, surrender and compliance to the indwelling Holy Spirit of Jesus who leads me and guides me like Romans 8 says, if we're led by the Spirit, then we are the children of God. Be advised of one thing, those of us who have been born again now are the sons and daughters of the most high God. Therefore we holy armor ourselves with the full armor of Christ in accordance with Ephesians chapter 6 and we go forward then as God's soldiers of faith and love and light and servants.
Obedient to him. Being obedient to him brings omnipotence from him and that's who we are and that's what we do in our great oneness with Christ. Today is no different than two thousand years ago. Ecclesiastes is playing, there's nothing new under heaven, it has been a four time.
The next three weeks God willing here on the focus of freedom, we're going to take a look at the book of Colossians in the New Testament. We've referenced these last several weeks quite a bit I think from the book of Ephesians. In Ephesus we're pauled, written back to them about our full purpose in Christ, the celebration, the glorious truth of our oneness in Christ, being members of his body, one with him, members of his body, many members, hands, feet, legs, arms, eyes, ears, but individual members, yes, but one with each other because there's only one body, one faith, one God, one Lord. So it was the body of Christ that Paul talked about so much in the book of Ephesians and we've talked about here lately the last few weeks, but the book of Colossians, these four chapters here zero in more on the headship and the lordship of Christ.
I'm not the boss, he is, I'm not the Lord, he is. It's up to me to submit and surrender to his will and follow him and be happy no matter what he's called me to do or what he's enabled me to do in the giftings of the Spirit. If he's enabled me to be a hand, it doesn't make sense for me to be trying to be a foot. I need to be in in sync and in camaraderie with all the rest of my brothers and sisters in the faith so that we could better be credible to a lost and dying world and be bright light and savory salt that the world would see the Lord Jesus in us.
Now we enhance our relationship with Christ like we enhance any relationship by being friends with him, having fellowship with him. So what's happening here in Colossae 2000 years ago in the regions of Galatia where Paul on these three missionary journeys and all the different ones coming out of Jerusalem preaching the gospel, some went to Africa, some went into Asia, others went into Asia minor than across the Aegean Sea just like Paul and Silas did ending up in Philippi, the story of the Philippian jail and all of that and before they crossed that Aegean Sea though they really evangelized Asia minor. One of those towns was Colossae. Now on over to the east in Asia minor, lots of churches had been established, people were being saved and then here came those that we call the Judaizers and spreading false doctrine and telling lies and creating a lot of disfellowship and disharmony and disunity.
And the Apostle Paul had traveled all the way to Rome when this was going on and as a matter of fact he was in prison there and this is just a little setup of the book of Colossae. The Judaizers had come in and now we've got this fella Epiphras who was credited really to be in the one who helped file him in, file him in, and everyone's established the local church there in Colossae. He travels all the way to Rome to seek the help of the Apostle Paul because these Jewish agnostics had infiltrated from Galatia into Colossae pushing ceremonialism and doctrines of legalism, taste not, handle not, new moons, all of that. And if you did not do the rights of the old Jewish law of Moses, there was no way you could be saved.
So while he was in Rome, he met an old boy from Colossae named Onesimus who had was a runaway slave from Colossae. And it amazing how God can enter into our troubles and trials. Listen to this very carefully. Maybe the trouble and the disruption, no question, wasn't offered by God.
It was created by selfish people, by carnal people and all the rest of it. But that doesn't diminish the deity of Christ or the power of the person of God. If you're in a calamity, if you're in some type of evil, Romans chapter 12 teaches we don't have to be overcome by that evil, but we can overcome that evil with good. And so there in Rome, he meets Onesimus, Paul writes a letter back to Philemon.
He also writes a letter here that we know is the book of Colossians and he sins these two letters back with Epiphesus and Onesimus. And these next weeks we're going to look at these four chapters and I think God's going to bless us as we do, as we get our eyes off of us and get our eyes on him. Listen, on this Tuesday night or Wednesday night whenever you're watching, I'll be honest our country, the United States of America, is in a perilous situation. And we're not going to get political, we're going to talk about all this stuff, but the reason why there's darkness in our country, it's not because of all this sin out here, this sin is all around us, because darkness is prevailing because the light has grown dim in the house of God.
And a lot of that stench we smell is spoilage. Why is that? Because the Sermon on the Mount, the salt has lost its savor. So these next few weeks I hope we'll take a look at ourselves and quit looking at other people but look into our own life and examine our own life.
And truly for the first time church, let's get humble and let's repent by admitting that we've let the light grow dim, but Jesus is still, he's from everlasting to everlasting, he's still the same. So let's preach him and let us become the savory salt that he ever lives to enable us to be. And I don't know about you, but I consider that a privilege. And the only power that I have or you have to bring that to fruition is the power of the Holy Spirit of the Living God.
Till next week, may God bless you richly, they may use you for his glory and to be a real blessing to someone else. I have the privilege of pastoring and being the director of Freedom Tabernacle Baptist Church and Freedom Tabernacle Ministries in Atkins, Virginia. And we are going to get to know one another a lot better through the weeks and months to come. It's my prayer.
But right now you can join us on our Facebook page, Freedom Tabernacle Ministries, Atkins, Virginia or our YouTube channel, Focus of Freedom, Atkins, Virginia, our website, ftMinistries.org. Or you can download our app, the Freedom Tabernacle app, download it for free from any apps to our and we can stay in contact that way. As we labor together with our Lord for his glory and for the advancement of his glory as Gospel of Grace.