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Grace saves us—we don’t deserve it, can’t earn it, and have no grounds to boast about it, as Paul makes plain in Ephesians 2:8–9—so what does it look like when a community of undeserving people actually lives that out together as the church God is building?
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Well, hello, hello. It’s another new face. Hi there. Hey there. Hey, you know what? I know Pastor Tim just praised the girl singer, but it was the first time for Alicia to be on the slides and all, and she did a good job. I used to be a tech guy, and you got to be prepared for all kinds of stuff, but she did do a good job her first time, too, and that ties in perfectly, and I’m sorry that little Ellie’s not feeling well, but it ties in perfectly with the message, because the church isn’t just all about one person. It just isn’t about one person does everything, me, Pastor Tim, and Tammy does it all. No, it’s not. Everybody throws in their part, and when someone falls, someone else picks them up.
An excellent time of worship, because we’re all praising God, and so what I’m going through is this is the last of this series, Rambling with Grace, and so what we’re going to go through, I’m just going to do a quick review of everything that went past. Pastor Tim started off preaching a long time ago, not a long time ago, about a month or so ago, in Genesis 1, 26 through 31, and Ephesians 1, 3 through 6, that God’s grace is for all time, not just for this little time for the church age, and what did God create the world for? We always wonder, you know, if now we got to sin, we got to do all this, but he created it so he could share it with us, but man, as he said, man messed it all up by eating and treating the knowledge and fruit and evil and all that stuff, and then our brother in Christ, Jason, took us through Galatians 2, how can we be influenced, how we should not be influenced by works, but we should be influenced by faith in Jesus and Christ, and not caving into the rule of law, where we become legalistic with everything and think you got to live by the law, live by this, but be influenced by Jesus Christ and his faith.
So it has to all do about grace, and that the Old and New Testament are one, they’re not just two separate entities of the Bible, and we should never put a wall between them. Last week, Pastor Tim preached about how God never forgets his promises, and if you go through the Bible and see all the covenants that God made with people, he kept that promise, he kept everything, he even promised to rescue his people from the sin that they created back in the Garden of Eden, and we’re going to see, sometimes we don’t think God really works faithfully through it, but he eventually does. God never is a distance from us also, he mentioned, he’s never way out there, we got to travel 15 miles to go visit him, or we got to go to a temple to visit him, he actually lives inside of us once we accepted him as our personal savior.
We can go through promises, there’s a lot of promises in the Bible that talks about what God promises us with, and Pastor Tim even touched on the seven churches of Revelation. Five were bad and only two were good, I got to think about that today, what was else, a group of number was good and another group was, two were bad, it was the spies, remember only two spies came back, that’s amazing how two turned, well, I don’t know, I just thought that was neat, but anyways, it’s just my little tidbit, wow, does this have anything to do with anything? I try not to be all involved with numbers. So here what we’re going to go through is I’m going to just list all the seven churches and just basically, not going to explain them all, maybe we can do that in some other time or maybe we could do it like this week at Little Hills, but first of all, let’s go with, there’s F, and I’m going to mispronounce some of these, so look at the screen and then help me along, Ephesus, the loveless church, Samira, not Samira, Samira, the suffering church, Smyrna, thanks, my lovely wife, I love her, Paragos, the compromising church, Thyatira, the adulterous church, Philadelphia, the faithful church, Laodicea, the lukewarm church, a lot of times, of course, we want to be close to the faithful church, we don’t want to be Laodicea, the lukewarm church, because you ever had something that’s lukewarm, like have you had a soup that’s not really hot, or like a sandwich or a steak or something like that, we spit it out, anyways, so tonight, we’re going to find ourselves what’s called the church age, and that is where we are living now, and this age, when I speak of the church age, I’m not speaking of how old it is or how long, because Christ knows no time, God knows no time, but we’re not defining a time period, but it’s this time now, most historians divide history into two different time periods according to their defining characteristics, you know, I’ve always heard of the stone age, the middle age, not me, not age, a modern age, postmodern age, rock and roll age, no, I’m just kidding, so old age, yes, you know what’s great about being old, you’re getting closer to heaven, how’s that, got you old, you die early too, as long as you know where you’re going, so I’ve divided this tonight’s sermon into three sections, is what is the church age, what is a healthy church, and how does it affect us, how are we supposed to act, so right now, I’m just going to take the bird’s eye view, because we can really deep in, it’s going to be a whole year series or whatever, but I could be here until 10 or 11 o’clock at night, but I don’t really want to bore y’all, you already started looking at your watches, so anyways, we are here to work, so and I’m not going to try to give you a long history lesson, because we’re here to worship God and learn, see what God has to say for us, so biblical history can also be divided in different epics or time periods, the clearest one in the Bible, a lot of people know about is the Old Testament and the New Testament, but let’s fly down a little closer to the earth and see somewhat a clearer view of God’s interaction with his creation, he wanted to interact with us, but yet sin separates us from that, and so what do we got to get rid of, if sin separates us from God, we get rid of sin, we got to become holy, so one way scriptures divided up is with the covenant theology, and there’s a couple other things, but we’re going to stick with covenant theology, maybe another time we can go through all the covenants, which is really a good study, I did that a few years ago, but the important thing is to keep in mind that there’s various covenants described in the scriptures, like you have the Noah Covenant, Abraham Covenant, yeah, David Covenant, the covenant God made with David, and the New Covenant, all are out working of either the covenant of works or the covenant of grace, that’s my mind, I’m sorry, I’m not really, so the period we are focused on tonight is called the church age, this period starts at, if you got your Bible, starts at Acts 2 and goes all the way through the rapture, somewhere are the time when God calls the church in 1st Thessalonians 4, 13, 18, or we can go to all the way to Revelation, but we’re going to read all that, you ready? I’m just kidding, the reason we are counting, I mean we kind of count this age, but God has, we gotta remember God does no time, so he’s not really counting, because this age can last for longer than 2,000 years, so as we, okay, so it’s, my notes, I was like, why did I put all this up here? Because this is during the era that Jesus is building his church, so as we read Matthew 16, 18, it says this, and I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, and what that is telling us is that God is going to build his church, and he built it through Peter, and he’s going to build it on a rock, it’s not going to, it’s going to stand firm through all ages, through all times, and you think of how long the church has been around, it’s still standing, correct? That’s because we always keep on preaching the gospel, and Peter, it could be other people, upon this rock, I’m gonna build little hills, and it’s gonna stand, it will stand for as long as we can, so this all began at Pentecost in Acts 2, as I explained, and will end when all who are born again by the baptism of the Holy Spirit and by accepting Christ as their personal Savior are raptured out of this world and to be with Jesus himself, as it reads in 1 Thessalonians 4, 13 through 18, but we do not want to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that are not grieved as others do, who have no hope, for since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, we even so through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we would declare to you by a word for the Lord, that you who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not perceive those who have fallen asleep. Y’all know what that’s supposed to mean, falling asleep. For the Lord himself would descend from heaven with a cry and a command, with the voice of the archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then those who are alive will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so will they always be with the Lord. Man, isn’t it a great promise to think of all the stuff we go through, that we can go through this? Therefore, encourage one another with these words, and that’s what we do every day here, every Sunday. We encourage you that through all this pain and suffering, look what the end prize is, you know, being with Christ. You know, through everything that we go through, all of his promises, he’s always there. As Pastor Tim said in a previous sermon, a sermon is that God keeps his promises and never leaves us. He’s there, even though sometimes when we don’t feel like it, he’s still there, because he sees all.
So, what is this grace? That’s my brief history lesson. So, what is this grace? Grace can sometimes be misused. It can be used to encourage your own self into what you’re doing, you know, or it could be used for your own selfish gain, but there is grace. So, grace is God’s benevolence to the undeserving. I don’t know why that word was so hard. It sounded real good when I was practicing it. Grace is a rule of life for the church, and through the church of God, grace is extended to the whole world. As the gospel of Jesus Christ is taken to the ends of the earth, it has been said that grace saves us. We do not deserve salvation. We all sin. We all have been penalized. We don’t deserve it at all, but God, through his grace, decided to send his Son, Jesus Christ, on the cross to pay the penalty of our sins. As it reads in Ephesians 2, 8 through 9, for by grace have you been saved through faith, and this is not of yourself or not of your own doing. It is the gift of God, not of works, so that no one can boast. So, if you really think about that, do you get that? It was Ephesians 2, 8 through 9. There we go. I have a young lady taking notes. I love that. So, Ephesians 2, 8 through 9. So, I can’t say, well, I did more of these. Look at me. I’m dressed all nicely, and I got my shoes on. I got these high-dollar pants, and you know, I really love God. I go to church all the time. He’s not looking for that. He’s not looking that I work. Oh, I do all this stuff at church. It doesn’t matter. I mean, we do it because we love Christ, but it’s by grace you’ve been saved, not of yourself because you can’t boast because you didn’t pay the penalty for everybody else’s sin. Only Jesus did.
So, the church should be able to teach us. It supports us. In Romans 5, 12, it teaches us in Titus 2, 11 through 12, and it disciplines us in 1 Corinthians 11, 28, and Hebrews 12, 5 through 11. When the Holy Spirit’s indwelling in His church, we are able to walk with the Lord and live as He intends. And I got a bunch of verses. There’s Philippians 2, 13. Support said Ephesians 2, 10. Ephesians 5, 17 through 18. Philippians 1, 6, 4, 13, and Romans 8, 14. It is not heaven yet. Of course, we all know that. It’s not heaven yet. And it’s far and sharp from perfection, most churches are, even here on earth. But as the church is being sanctified, and we’ll talk about that later on, it provides a little taste of heaven on earth, just like singing today. You know, a little heaven on earth, what we all be doing. When we come here, we can fellowship and know that that person accepts me through all the trials and hardship that I’m going through, they’re gonna still love on me. You know, you don’t, you know, that’s what the church is. I’m gonna love on you. I’m gonna accept you. I’m gonna take you as it is. I’m gonna nurture you. You know, when I said, oh, you know, you little fool, you shouldn’t have known better than that. No, you know, maybe in private, someone really needs that hard discipline. But, you know, it talks about all that Ephesians 2, 21 through 22 also. So as I go into this, the grace part, so what is the healthy church? I mean, if I could have went through all the seven churches, you would have found that only one of those was really healthy. That was the Church of Philadelphia. So being good stewards of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And what we mean by being good stewards is taking care of the gospel and not mending it to other things so it will please your soul or please your flesh. But this is the gospel. This is where it stands. Like Peter says, it’s like God, Jesus is gonna stay on this rock. You know, you can’t change the rock unless you beat it. It’s still a rock. Beating the pieces, it’s still a rock. Beat the scriptures in pieces, you can still find Christ in whatever book of the Bible you want to. You’ll still find Jesus. So stewards, the church, all believers are ministers of the spiritual fruit and of the holy ministers. We’re all ministers. When we leave here, we somehow minister out into the world. We somehow minister to other people. No matter what, they see our actions and what we do and they know that, hey, you’re a Christian, you go to church, you act that way. So, you know, kind of a little bit of conviction. So 1 Peter 1 9 reads, but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may be claimed the excellences of him who called you out of darkness into the marvelous light. So what happened was, did I do the right verse? Did I give you the wrong verse, Tim? Well, what did I have? Oh, okay. Hey, you know, I’m gonna make a mistake once in a while. It won’t be my first one. But anyway, so anyways, I think I meant 1 Peter 2. So there we go. There we go. But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellences of him who called you out of darkness into the marvelous light. What Jesus is doing is saying, okay, I called you and called you my child, the child of God, like that song we sang. Hey, you’re my child God. Now here’s what they do. It’s just like, you know, if my dad said, okay, you’re gonna Jim, you’re gonna act like a gentleman. You’re part of the Krenning family. Boys act like gentlemen to people. Boys don’t do this. Boys don’t do that. You know, and we didn’t. So just like the church says, hey, when we go out of those doors, we don’t act like the world. We act like we’re children of God. And you’re gonna sing that song and say, hey, I’m a child of God. You don’t really mean it. Then why are you singing it? Just like the Israelites were the chosen race that God used them to show himself to the people. We are now called to be his people because we put our trust in Christ. We’re not putting it into the world system or into this system or that system. Our church is not called to entertain the world, but to make known that God wants to have a personal relationship with you, a personal relationship with you, but God will not tolerate unholiness. Just like as parents, we’re not gonna tolerate our parents being disobedient. Just like if someone is mean to you, you’re not gonna tolerate that, are you? The same thing, God’s not gonna tolerate us when we disobey him and disobey his word, but there still is grace. And once we realize that we are going against God’s command, oh, I gotta stop that. That’s not holy. Then it’s good. God’s not gonna still, you know, punish you for everything.
So another thing, small crowds are good because Jesus had, even though Jesus had these large crowds following him, Jesus was winning their hearts to them by showing them that he cares. Just like we win people by showing, hey, I care about you. You know, thank you for doing that. Thank you for doing that. I care. Yes, we may look at the large crowd, but that is not indicative of the people’s hearts. We can have hundreds of people here, but they’re just coming here because they like our show, our entertainment, and how we flash the lights, how we sing, and how we do all this performance stuff. What are they coming here for? They’re not coming here to hear the word of God. You know, and then too, Jesus is not after an applause. Yeah, all right, you did a good job, Jesus. I appreciate you healing that man’s ear. You know, our fancy buildings with big old tall pillars and marble and gold all over the place. Our fancy worship served with all the amenities. I mean, we got smoke, we got fire, we got, you know, big old booming noise and flashing lights all over the place. And, you know, sometimes it gets flashing lights. Oh, did I, moving lights? Oh, booming. Okay, well, there we go. I’m glad you late. I’m glad these young folks are paying attention. That is praise God. So our fancy prayers, you get up to people and says, oh, my father, how great are thou? Thou bringest me the greatest. You know, it’s like, what are you trying to show? You trying to show them how holy you are? God knows your heart, you know, or fancy preaching. You don’t get fancy preaching from me. And everybody could get a big amen on that, right? But Jesus is after the hearts that are devoted to him alone. Like, what do you really want to do with God? You know, God put a stethoscope. My brother uses this illustration. So he said he had copyrights. He said he had copyrights to it. It’s funny. But anyways, if God put a stethoscope to your heart. Did I say that wrong? A stethoscope. Did I say it right? I’m close. Okay. You know that thing the doctor puts in your ears? And it has that two tubes and it puts on your heart. Okay, there you go. All right. The stethoscope. Whatever. All right. I think you got it. Okay, colder. I’m not lukewarm anymore. Okay. Coffee. Oh, really? All right. Yes, maybe you do. So anyway, so if you put that to your heart, what is he going to hear? You know, you may come in here, these doors and be all this good, great world. I mean, perfect Christian because you know how to act in a church. But does God hear your heart? So you hear the pain and anger and all this other stuff going in your mind? What if God put that same instrument on the church up here where we hear everything? What is He going to hear from us when we pray? Is it all about ourselves or is it all about God’s grace and mercy and what He’s done for us? What if He hears preaching that is just kind of lukewarm and I’m going to make you feel good. Yeah, go ahead and go do it. Whatever you do, just try your best. You know, you’re not going to get that. I mean, what if God really puts it on and hears? What is He hearing from us? You know, I once read this article. I love when Tim gives me time to preach because I dig in. That’s my wife. I spend hours on hours. All this stuff comes in here and I only get to talk for a little bit of it. But I read this article that says churches that don’t have a strong emphasis on preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ start to get a little weird after a while. And God thinks some of us older people can see some churches. They start out good and they start changing changes like they’re way off course, you know. So for as it says in Romans 10, 13 through 14, it says this, for anyone who calls upon the name of the Lord will be saved. How can then they call on the name that they do not believe in? And how can they, how will they call on Him whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? That’s why we preach. But I was saying preaching the word of God. If God, if people don’t hear us, just like one day Devin wants to go in the mission field. She’s going to go out. Those people may never hear God. She can use her music. She can use them in preaching, but she might help another lead worship for another missionary. But she’s using her talent to go out and preach the word of God. How are those people going to hear? How are people outside this all area going to hear God if we just stick with our own 12 or 14 people? How are people going to hear that? You know, do you bring friends in to hear the gospel? Because they are going to hear the gospel presentation here and they are going to, you know, know that Christ loves them. And we’re not ashamed of it because God has that instrument listening in. He hears us. He hears our hearts too. So just not, so if we’re not preaching the word of God, how can we be called a church of God? What will we be called? Hey, this is the meeting place here on Sunday nights. Let’s come up and have a good old time. There’ll be a little bit of singing. The guy wants to give you something positive to say and say everything’s all good as you walk out into the world and God will love you. Bye. Have a good day. You know, let’s have some food afterwards. You know, we need the word of God. We are afraid of a church that loves God. We’re going to be preaching his word.
So number two, not just preaching, but we have other responsibilities and that’s making disciples of everyone. This which is called, which we call sanctification. The church is just not responsible to preaching the gospel, but to be perfect by sanctifying, to loving one another, to exhibit an ever increasing godliness. So we are here to grow. We got a lot of young people here that are new in the faith. We’re here to grow. We’re here to bring them to Christ. We’re here to help them go through their struggles, just like a doctor helps you go through your sickness. He helps you get over it, you know, with all of his, whatever his medications or whatever his different, you know, theories. That’s why they call it practice. I’m just kidding. It’s supposed to be a doctor’s joke. He didn’t. Oh, anyways, it is what is called progressive sanctification. We don’t want to just stay infants drinking milk. You know, we don’t want to keep you here in preschool all your life. You don’t want to stay in our diapers all our lives or in our pull-ups. And so we had, okay, staying in the crib under the protection of our parents. You know, okay, we’ll protect you. Call us if you have problems or, you know, we want to grow and be mature in Christ as we all grow to be mature in Christ. Jesus. So we are supposed to be, I love this saying I heard not too long ago, we are to be the visible representation of the invisible God. Even though we can see God, but if he’s going to shine through us and we try to make ourselves holy through sanctification, people are going to see Christ and they’re going to see Christ in us and they’re going to want that love and peace because the world out there is not very loving and peaceful. It always goes to destruction. So we have the responsibility as a church to grow one another in the faith. It’s mainly me, my Tim’s and ours responsibility as church leaders, you know, to grow us. He grows me, encourages me in the faith also, and I keep on, you know, doing well because of his influence. So to be perfect by sanctification, to love one another, to exhibit an ever-increasing godliness is found in 1 Thessalonians 4, 3 and 2 John 1, 5, but I’m going to read 1 Thessalonians 4, 3, and it says, for this is the will of God. You sanctify your sanctification that you abstain from sexual immorality, and it gives a whole list, but I just thought that one verse, that one word tells you we’re purifying us from the sin that controls us. That’s what sanctification does, and it’s a progress thing. Yes, I realize I’m a sinner. Yes, I need Christ. He’s going to save you through his grace and love, but then you’re going to eventually grow in Christ as long as you’re taking in the good stuff.
So sanctify, oh, I skipped something. To summarize sanctification is a translation, and it’s going to get a little geeky here, I’m sorry, but so you can understand it. To summarize sanctification is a translation of the Greek word hagimos, H-A-G-I-S-M-O-S, meaning holiness or separation. In the past, God granted us justification once and for all, positional holiness in Christ. In the present, God guides us through maturity, a practical progress of holiness. In the future, God will give us glorification, and that’s like a verse I said earlier, when we get called and when we go to heaven, we’re glorified in Christ. In the future, God will give us glorification, a permanent, ultimate holiness. That’s what we’re striving for. One of these days when we go into glory, we’ll be holy forever. One thing we never have to worry about in heaven is I don’t have to ask for forgiveness of my sins. Isn’t that beautiful? These three phases of sanctification separates the believer from the penalty of sin, justification, the power of sin, maturity. As you mature in Christ, you become stronger over your sin issues, and the presence of sin, glorification. When it’s all gone, you’re in heaven. You know, we may have struggles that started years ago, but we’ve gotten better because we matured over life, but we keep on growing. Paul speaks of Christ as the hope of glory in 1 Thessalonians 5.23. May the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless, and at the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ. And that’s what we’re working for. I want to be blameless throughout the rest of the years. Whatever I got, 15, 20, you know, 30 years, I’ll be like 87. So no, 30, yeah, be 87. 40 years, I’ll be 97. So do I really want to go that far? Do I really want to? No, but I mean, if that’s what God calls me to do, I’m going to keep on encouraging people to love Christ, and that’s what we should do, young and old, is encourage Christ as a church. Encourage others. So, but there’s failures in church. Church fails because we’re all human. You may go into church and somebody’s struggling, and you might get offended by it. We shouldn’t. We should pray for them. The lack of maturity is a failure in church. We lack bringing worldliness stuff into the church. Many churches are falling into apostasy, where they kind of like bring in other religions, other non-godly traits into the church. We can fail by being, oh, we can fail by not being the body of Christ that God is, God desires by being a body of a friendly people who comes to me to have a good time and see other friends. That’s how we can fail. I don’t know if that came through. So what I’m saying is, do we only come here just to meet friends, to socialize, whatever he preached about, I ain’t going to remember because I’m going to drop it off the door and go into the world and enjoy myself. So what are we acting? Do we come in here and, oh, now I can put on my church face. When I leave here, I’ll put on my friend’s face. Or do we run into somebody like, well, I like him, but, you know, they don’t like God. They don’t like nothing. So I’m going to act like them so they don’t tell I’m not a Christian. But what if you die during that part? What are you going to tell God? You know, if you go to heaven, it’s like, sorry, Lord, but, you know, that’s a cool dude. You know, I kind of didn’t want to offend him and I want to be friends with him, but we shouldn’t be friends with the world. So do we forget who we invited in our heart? Did we forget we invited Jesus in our heart when things come like that? It’s very hard. I get convicted by it a lot because it’s a very easy thing to do. But I try not to be, you know, when I go there, I know that they may get offended by Christ, but I’m still going to love them as if I’m Christ, as if Christ is in me. I’m still going to care for them. Hopefully they’ll see Christ through me. The image let the Holy Spirit do the work, not myself, because I’ll probably say something wrong or mispronounce a word like stethoscope or say anything like that. What did I say? All right. Yay. Stethoscope, never mind. Stay on the high note, right? That our bodies, we got to remember that our bodies are our temple of the Holy Spirit. That our bodies are the temple of the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit lives in us. But like I said, we make sure we don’t drop them whenever we think it’s inconvenienced or we’re not going to be friends. I know it’s very difficult when we struggle with sin issues. The world is only to get worse. And it says here in 2 Timothy 3, 1 through 5, Paul talks about it going to be like the last days. And here’s what it says. But understanding this, that in the last days, there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, ignorant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving, and treacherous. Does it go on or? There we go. Where am I at? That was pretty good to remember what all that was. Treacherous, is that where I left off at? Lovers of unpleasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving, good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. That’s a good, having the appearance of godliness but denying its power avoids such people. So like I said earlier, we need to avoid those people. And if you look at that, that’s a good verse to memorize. Who should I not be like? What type of personality should I not be? Sometimes it’s easier to figure out what not to be than what you should be because then you eventually erase those out of you. And then that’s really good. We should be wise to whom we bring into our realm of influence and make sure the only thing that empowers us is the Holy Spirit. Who are you hanging around with that influences you well that might draw you away from Christ? We can all fail as a church also if we do it by building laws, walls and laws. You know, well you’re not acting this way, you know, I don’t want you here. You’ve got to act this way in order to be here. I mean there is morals and standards. So the apostle Paul equates here in Galatians 5, 1 through 12, which I’m not going to read all of it. I want to read part of it by 13 through 15 eventually. It says, the apostle Paul equates submission to the circumcision with the attempt to justify by the law. Seeking to be justified by the means outside of Christ is foreign to the gospel message and results in estrangement from Christ. In other words, it brings us away from Christ because we’re doing all these laws. The laws are more important than scripture. When we put something more important than what the Bible says, then we’re, that’s being lifted up against, up higher than Christ. So Galatians 5, 13 through 15, for you’re all called to freedom, brothers, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. For through love you serve one another, for the whole law is fulfilled in one word. You should love your neighbor as yourself, but if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you will not be consumed by one another. Bickering with one another, biting, I like that one there, but what we call the freedom. And freedom is not, freedom is in Christ and in grace. Freedom is not freedom to do what I want because I have grace, like I said earlier. You know, there are standards, there are things, a Christ-like attitude, but a principle, but the principle of grace is freedom. Yes, we have freedom and our freedom is not of the world, but it’s in Jesus Christ. He understands that we are sinful. He understands that we’re going to go through stuff, but yet he’s going to help us as a father to discipline us and help us to get through that part. So when you live in Christ, you must talk to him through prayer, and a healthy church prays. You know, how can you say you’re a church if you’re not going to recognize God? Have you ever noticed that none of these have nothing to do with yourself, but the aim is towards worshiping God? It’s not how well you can play and sing, it’s not how well you can preach or how well you can pray, but you’re doing it for Christ. You’re doing it to bring glory to him. If we come here to gather, then it is not any communication towards our Heavenly Father, then why are we here? Maybe your interest is in Jesus Christ, that is a good thing. So the four most important things, oh no, I got more. The most important reason for prayer is because God commands us to pray. God uses prayer to change us. God rules the world through prayers of his people, and we ought to want to pray. Those four things are very, very, those things are very important to a church, why we want to pray. Through our prayer, God can use us. If someone goes in missionary, we got to pray for our missionaries, you know, we should pray for, you know, like Tim prayed, we pray for each other who’s going to preach because God is using us. I get it, you know, your mind is going through a bunch of stuff, you’re making sure hopefully you’re staying within the doctrine of things. So Philippians 4, 6 through 7 says, do not be anxious about anything but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your requests be known to God, and the peace of God who surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. So through prayer, God will help you in all this.
So how does the church affect us? How is all this affecting us? It affects some people in a healthy way and in a bad way. Sometimes we go to please the flesh more than we do the spirit. Let me tell you right off the bat, some others here have been involved in the church, those older people have been involved in bad churches, and we had to leave because like this is not right, everybody’s bickering, everybody’s fighting, or they really have gotten off on the scriptures and stuff. And I’ll tell you, there’s no perfect church out there in the world, but you know we can strive to be the best church like Philadelphia was, Church of Philadelphia. Like there’s no perfect hospital, there’s no perfect restaurant, vacation place, you know it’s always got something. We’re gonna always have things not work out right here, but we all love each other. We’re here to worship God, and we’re all here to do our part in that. We all have our flaws. The only perfect one is Jesus Christ. So if something’s imperfect, say, well I’m glad Jesus Christ is perfect. Amen. There we go. We tend to forget we are all imperfect and in need of a savior. Hopefully we are working on improving ourselves by being better by what we can do. So by being better by, we can’t do it without Christ. I don’t know why. The Apostle Paul’s first church in Antioch, in which he preached for about a year, his church was doing this. The church preached the gospel of Jesus. It was a church that was actively growing. The Holy Spirit was at work because of their holiness. It had the importance of prayer. That’s how we communicate with God and show where we put his trust. The laying of the hands of people, not to heal them, but the laying of hands of people are going out like we did Brian. We laid on hands. He was going out. He’s going out somewhere else. Hey Lord, bless him, protect him. Same thing like if Devin goes on to the mission field and she’s still here, we’re going to lay our hands on her and we’re going to pray for her. We’re going to be the church of a church that supports her as she goes out. And the same thing with anybody else that decides to leave here and go out. We’re going to pray as long as you’re going out for the mission. The leaders of the church should be focused on leading the way towards sanctification for others in the body of Christ. So let’s be the church of Philadelphia, not like the others. Where our faith is the one, our faith is in the true and one only, powerful, eternal, holy God. That we as a church want to follow his will, not the will of others. That we will keep his word pure in our hearts and the way we conduct ourselves. That we are not ashamed to call sin, sin. If Tim sees me doing something wrong, he can say, Jim, that’s not right. You need to do it that way. He has that permission. But we are willing to help other people’s heal from their sin, not to say, okay, you’re sinful, get out of here. No. It’s like a dog going to the doctor’s office and saying, oh, I’m sorry, you’re sick. Get out of here. I only want healthy people because they’re easy. All right. Here we go. So let’s all work on things. And as we close in prayer, we’re going to have a communion, which is our time that why we were here, because we know that we believe in the shed blood of Jesus Christ. So I’m going to pray.
Father, I just want to thank you for your scriptures, your holy words. Thank you, Lord, for your grace, your mercy, your kindness. Lord, thank you for forgiving me of the things I do wrong, the things I don’t know do wrong. Lord, thank you for the fellowship, these believers that understand my speech impairment and pronunciating words. Lord, thank you, Lord, for your grace. Thank you for their grace upon listening to me. Lord, I made the words of your mouth and the meditation of heart be acceptable to all. And may Lord and may we go in comfort.
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