[Gary Petty] I read one time that this was something that was posted, a notice that was posted on an employee bulletin board at a business. It says, "Due to increased competition and a keen desire to stay in business, we find it necessary to institute a new policy. We're asking that somewhere between starting time and quitting time and without infringing on the time devoted to lunch, coffee breaks, rest periods, storytelling, tickets selling, vacation planning, and rehashing of gossip, each employee endeavors to find some time to set aside as what we're calling the work break. This may seem a radical innovation, but we believe the idea has possibilities. It can conceivably be an aid to steady employment and regular paychecks. While adoption to the work break is not compulsory, it's hoped that each employee will find time to give it a fair trial."

But the six years that I spent working in radio advertising, I came in contact with a lot of different businesses, small businesses, big businesses. And one of the problems they all had every one of them was how do we find and keep good employees? That's a problem that they all faced. You say, "Okay, employees, what does that have to do with what we're going to talk about today?" Are you a good employee? Do you work hard? "What's that have to do with my Christianity?"

Actually, the Bible talks about having a work ethic. What does that mean? What does it mean that we are to have a work ethic? What does the Bible really teach us about work? There's an interesting story that we find in 2 Thessalonians 3. That Paul is making some personal comments here to the people of Thessalonica about a problem that they had. Picking it up in verse 6. He says, "But we command you, brethren, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you withdraw from every brother who walks disorderly and not according to the tradition which you received from us."

Now, these people were disorderly. And he's actually saying, you know, these people have become so disorderly in the congregation that we're just suggesting you don't even talk to them. That's a pretty strong statement. Like what in the world were they doing? I mean, disorderly means that they're causing problems, they're destroying relationships. I mean, what in the world are these people doing to cause that kind of problem? You think well, they must have some heresy, you know that they're teaching or what are they doing? He says, "For you, yourselves know… He says… Let me give you an example here. "For you, yourselves know how you ought to follow us."

He's talking about him and some traveling companions who had been with him when he went to actually visit the church of Thessalonica. "How you ought to follow us, for we were not disorderly among you." Okay, well, we didn't create this problem when we were there so we tried to show you an example. He says, "Nor did we eat anyone's bread free of charge, but worked with labor and toil night and day, that we might not be a burden to any of you, not because we did not have authority, to make ourselves example of how you should follow us." So he uses himself as an example. He says, “You know, when I came there,” with his ministerial companions, he says, “we didn't taking money from you to serve you while we were there.” But they worked day and night. And of course, we know that he was a tentmaker.

So he says, "We worked our own jobs and didn't take money, even though we could have. I mean, it would only be ethically right for the church to support us while we were there." But he says, "No, we didn't ask anything from you." So there's a problem here he's getting to that has to do with disorderly conduct. He says, "For even when we were with you, we commanded you this: If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat. For we hear that there are some who walk among you in a disorderly manner, not working at all, but they're busybodies. Now those who are such we command and exhort through our Lord Jesus Christ that they work in quietness and eat their own bread."

Boy, what kind of major problem were they having? Now, I don't know exactly, but the cause was that there was a large enough group of people in their congregation who just refused to work. They just didn't work. And it says there were busybodies. They spent their time just meddling in everybody else's business. So they were creating this constant problem in the church. Which I mean, that seems sort of odd to us today. I mean, I don't think I've ever been in a congregation where I've seen this exact problem where you had a large number of people just creating all this problem at church because they just refuse to work.

But there's an important statement he makes here. He says, "For even when we were with you…" I'm sorry, he says, "For if they shall not work, they shall not eat… If anyone will not work, neither shall he eat.” That's the point he's making. Now, the Bible is very clear in the absolute command to take care of the poor. Everyone has a responsibility to take care of the poor. Poor people who are there because some calamity has happened, because maybe they just don't have the skills to get certain jobs. Maybe they… you know, there's all kinds of reasons why someone could be poor. And the church is given and ancient Israel were given explicit commands to help take care of poor people. What Paul says here is, if a person is poor because they won't work, you don't take care of them.

Now, that seems strange too in the society we live in. And why would he say that? If the person is hungry, and he says no if it's because they refuse to eat, let them get hungry, and then they will go work. Let them get hungry then they'll go work. So he's making a point here. Now, once again, we have to put this in the context of why he makes this statement. There is in the congregation a group of people who cause nothing but problems in the church. They're meddling in everybody else's business or probably just showing up at people's houses expecting to be taken care of.

Although I have had… I have had as a pastor, a few people that do that. I've come across people who will go from church to church. And they'll come in and they'll spend three-four months in a church living with people, being taken care of by people always saying they're going to get a job. Sometimes I've seen it go on for six months and the people will take them in. A lot of times it's older people. Then they'll wear out there welcome there, and go someplace else. And eventually, it comes down to this person doesn't even look for a job. And so you have a conversation and say, look, "You just can't come in and take advantage of these people." I mean, in some cases, large amounts of money were given to then and then they disappear.

Then I get an email from another pastor that says, "Hey, so and so has showed up at my church and they just moved in with a couple of the elderly people." And I've seen men… it's always men. But I've seen men be able to do this sometimes for a couple of years before they get caught. Now, Paul would say, "Sorry, you don't work, you don't eat. We don't give you anything. You don't work, you don't receive shelter." He's talking about Christians taking care of Christians here. He says, "If you refuse to do certain things, then the church is not to take care of you." So this means work is important. This is an extreme example but this is where I want to start. It must be important for Paul to make these instructions to a church. If a person refuses to work, it's not that they can't work, or maybe they just don't have a lot of skills or whatever. And you know, they're doing the best they can, maybe they have a real low paying job because that's all they can do then we're supposed to take care of them, help them. “But if they refuse to work,” he says, “then you don't take care of them.”

So work is important. Work is an important part of who we are because work is part of our Christian character. Now, I'm going to talk about being a workaholic here. I might mention a couple of times. Being a workaholic is the other end of the scale. Being a workaholic is spiritually wrong also. When we put ourselves into our work so much that we're not having a right relationship with God, we're not taking care of our families, we're not taking care of ourselves. And recreation is part of life. Fun is part of life. So that's that other extreme.

But usually, we as human beings tend to fall on the sort of lazy side than the workaholic side. So we're going to talk about work today. Because it is an ethical issue. Now, I will say this when I talk about work here, and I've seen this happen in the church. I've actually had people come to me and want to counsel because they'll say, "You know, I realized that I'm preparing for the Kingdom of God. And since I'm preparing for the kingdom of God, I'm just a" and you can fill in the blank. “I'm just a construction worker. I'm just a salesman. I'm just a housewife. I'm just a office worker.” And whatever they fill in and they say, "Probably I need to get another job to prepare for the Kingdom of God." Your career isn't the issue, it's your work ethic that's the issue. It's your work ethic that's the issue, not what you're doing.

I used to tell my kids, "Find out what you're really good at, that makes you happy and go become the best at it. You may not make the most money, but you will be happy." When you're doing work you love, you're happy. Now, unfortunately, every job has drudgery. We'll talk about that in a minute. And you can be trapped at a job sometimes for a while that you hate. Okay, what do you do with that? Well, we'll talk about that in a minute, too. These are all real issues. This is practical Christianity, practical Christianity. So it doesn't matter what job you do. God doesn't care if you're an architect. God doesn't care if you're a boss with 100 people. God doesn’t… Well, I say He doesn't care.

What's really interesting is go through all the scriptures about employers. There are lots of scriptures in the Old and New Testament about employers. There's one of the laws in the Old Testament that says, "If you withhold your wages that you owe people as an employer, God will punish you." Is that a little scary? God says, "I hold that, personally, that's a personal issue. If people work for you, and you hold back their wages, then that's personal between Me and you. I will deal with that." So there's a lot of instructions about bosses and employers. But we're going to talk about employees today. Most of us are employees. There's a few here that might own your own business, but most of us do not.

So what does the Bible teach about work? You know, I talked about your jobs. Most people will have multiple jobs in a lifetime. What's really different than say 50 years ago, my dad, his dad, back then, most people had one career. Many times they worked for the same company their entire lives. That's not true today. Most of you, if you're young, you're going to have more than one career. You actually have more than one career. You may start out in something and end up doing something totally different by the end of your life.

In fact, the average person today will have three different careers. Now, we're not talking about three different jobs. You may have a career which you work for three or four different companies, and then another career and you work for three or four different companies. So it's changed from… it used to be you get hired by somebody, you work for that same company maybe your whole life. It's not that way anymore. Remember, it's not the specific job. It's the work ethic that's the Christian part of what you do. God doesn't care if you're a farmer. Be a good farmer. Like I used to tell my son he loved working on cars, I said, "Go be a car mechanic." "I can't make a lot of money." "Just go be the best car mechanic you can be." Now, he's selling insurance and loves it. So I was wrong on that one.

I used to tell my kids, "I can't determine what you're going to do, you have to decide that. You have to decide what you're going to do because it's your life, it's not mine." So, learn the work ethic, and you're going to be pretty much successful in everything you do. Now, I say successful, even if you do it right, bad things happen. In preparing this, I looked up probably 10 websites. They were business websites. They were management websites. One was a college website giving advice to students on reasons people get fired. And, you know, the number one was they just don't do their job. Like, number two was people fall asleep. That kept showing up all over. People sleep, you know. Number three was they're spending all their day on their cell phone, or, you know, they're just not involved in their work. There was all these reasons.

But then I saw another list from a business magazine. It was pretty interesting. It said, "We're going to tell you some other reasons why people get fired. The boss wants to give the job to his nephew,” okay. And then there were reasons why you get fired, which you are doing a great job and your manager becomes absolutely jealous of you and gets you fired. And I've known people that have gone through that. Got fired because they were doing a good job, and somebody got jealous.

So, okay, life, you know, there's no magic pill that says do this equals perfect success, that's not life. Sometimes you do it right and something bad happens. The difference is when you're doing it right you will find something else to do. You can recover from the problem if you're doing it right. If you're doing it wrong… I mean, you get fired from someplace three or four times just because it says you're insubordinate. You just aren't going to listen to your boss. You think he's an idiot, and you've been fired from three places because you think the boss is an idiot. Guess what the next boss is going to do, not hire you, right? They don't want to put up with that. So if you do it the right way, you have a much better chance of recovering from the bad things when they happen. Do it the wrong way and sooner or later you dig yourself in a hole.

What does the Bible say about work? Let's go to Colossians. Say well, this isn't a spiritual issue. Whether I daydream on the job, whether I play video games on the job when I should doing something else, that's not a spiritual issue. Colossians 3:22. Bondservants, now bondservants, so that was you worked for somebody because you owed them something. This is a type of employership. I mean, there were businesses in the Roman Empire where they hired employees. There were people that had bondservants. In other words, "you owe me something so you got to work for me."

There were people who… if you were craftsmen, especially, you would be hired out to different people. Of course, they had slaves, too. So Paul is just talking to a class of people that work for other people. He says, "Obey in all things your masters according to the flesh,” what? Now, not if they tell you to do something against God. Now, if your employer tells you to do something dishonest, you say, "No." And sooner or later, most of us have had to face that. I've had to face it earlier in my life. Or you just say, "I can't do that. That's immoral. That's wrong, whatever you're asking me to do."

I remember one radio station… I probably should have mentioned this before. I was really supposed to go date all the young girls that worked at the advertising agencies after… you know, not date, just go to the bar with them. I said, "I got a pregnant wife at home. I'm not going to go out after work and take these young single women to a bar." He said, "Well, you don't have to let them know you won't do anything." That's literally what I was told. "Just, you know, have some fun with them and then you get the account." And I said, "I don't want the account that bad." The owner of that radio station told me you know… it was the number one radio station in Austin, Texas. He said, "You know, you're a nice guy and in my experience, nice guys don't make it in a lot of companies." I didn't.

So you obey them in their job what they're telling you to do not with eye service as men-pleasers. In other words, you're not doing this because you just want to get on the good side of your boss. But in sincerity of heart. In other words, you do your job, you do it because you want to do the job right. Why? Because you're fearing God. "And whatever you do, do it heartily as to the Lord and not to men knowing that from the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance for you serve the Lord Jesus Christ." What? He makes this a spiritual issue. When you go to work, you give all that you have because you think that you're serving God. "I'm serving God."

Why would you do that? Because to your employer, to the people you work with you are representing God to them. Believe me, they all figure out you're a little bit different. They know your religion is a little bit different. Wherever you are, you represent God. And it's that way when you go to work. So when you go to work you give everything you have. Look what it says in 1 Timothy. Here, Paul writing once again, 1 Timothy 6. He really spells it out here. He says, "Let as many bondservants as are under the yoke…” in other words, sometimes when you work with somebody else, you're under a yoke, right? You don't show up on time. And by the way, that's one of the reasons that kept coming up, people were getting fired. Now, certain companies are very loose with that policy, certain aren't.

And if you work for a company and said, "What time we start?" "Oh, 9, 9:30, you know, just sort of whenever you come in." And there's companies like that. Then you get a company that says, "We expect you here at 8:30." And you're there at 8:40 and they fire you. And you can say, "Well, the last company was like this. This isn't fair." And they say, "But you don't work with the last company. You work for us." And so it is a yoke to work for other people. Now it doesn't mean it can't be fun. I mean, I enjoy being a pastor. No, I love being a pastor. But there are days where it's tough. There's days where it's tough.

He says, “yoke count their own masters worthy of all honor." Why? I mean, all of us here have worked for some person that you know, wasn't worthy of honor, right? We've all been there. So why would you do that? And here's why. "So that the name of God and His teachings will not be blasphemed." So that the name of God won't be blasphemed. They may say, "I don't like you." They may not like you because you are so honest. They may not like you because you are obeying God, but God won't be blasphemed. And that's why I said, when you go to work, you represent God. When you go to work, you are there your work ethic is part of your Christianity. So yeah, we should talk about this. Yes, it is important. And yes, it is one of the keys to success.

And sometimes younger people, you know, struggle with… you know, we all did when… Although I didn't. When I was young, I figured out somehow, I don't know why, when I was about 15 years old, I made a list of all the things I wanted to do in life. You know, get baptized. Find me a good woman that will take me, have children. Okay, that was number three. After that, it was work in radio, become a television talk show host, become an author of books, work as a reporter for… I had all these things I was going to do. Some of them I've done, I tell you what, being a minister wasn't on the list. Some I've done. Some I haven't.

But we all struggle with, "What am I supposed to do with my life?" You will have lots of choices in life and you probably… whatever choice you make at 18, you're going to change. The important thing is, what is your work ethic? Because you can change. I mean, I've known people who were doctors and became something else at age 30 and have been very successful. They were successful doctors. Now, they're successful with something else. I mean, what a change. You become a doctor at 28, at 35 you change jobs. You can have lots of choices in life. The important thing is if you learn how to work, you actually are equipped to make those choices. And you'll be equipped to make the changes if you want to.

If you don't know how to work, you don't have the ability to make the changes. There are people who are trapped in jobs because they've never learned how to work and they can't get out of it. It's all they can do. Now, some people, it depends on your personality. You find a job and you like it, and you stay in it for the rest of your life. And that's great too. But you have the equipment to make the decision. You see what I mean? You have the ability to make those decisions because your character is right, your work ethic is right. Otherwise, other people make those decisions for you. So that's what this is about. And so you are following God. You are doing this because you represent God. Now, that would change a lot of things, how you handle a lot of things at work.

So that's the first point I want to make. You know, when you go to work, you're going to work there as a representative of God. Now, you have to accept that. If you don't accept that it's like everything else. You either accept you're a Christian or not, but we shouldn't call ourselves Christian if we don't believe that we are followers of Christ and represent Christ. If we're Christians, we're representing. What we do at work counts. What we do at work matters. I mean, you spend 8 hours, you know, 40 hours a week at least at work probably more.

And a lot of even your happiness depends on what happens when you work. You know, a lot of times people will drag home their problems from work and bring them home and have a rotten marriage because of the problems they have at work. Especially if they're both working, they both drag it home and, you know, one can't help the other and they're unhappy. And the real issue sometimes isn't the marriage. The real issue is what's happening at work.

The second point… Now, we're going to get down to some real practical… the first thing here is a little bit conceptual. We work to represent God. Okay, so that means what I do is important. The second is that a proper work ethic requires that there's a list, you accomplish the work that is assigned to you in the way that it has been assigned to you and in the time allotted. Here's your job, do it this way and do it in this amount of time. Now, sometimes you go back and say, "Hey, this way doesn't work." Sometimes you go back and say, "Hey, I can't do it in this amount of time." Sometimes you go back and say, "Hey, I finished early so I didn't go to sleep, or I didn't sit around and, you know, just call up and look at pictures of puppies. Instead, I've come and said, "What do you want me to do next boss?"

I mean, one of the reasons we hate work so much is we get bored because we're bored with what we're doing. You're never bored when you're locked into doing something and you're putting your effort into it. Proverbs 26. Here's where it shows laziness is a moral deficiency. It is a moral problem. Proverbs 26:13, "The lazy man says, ‘There's a lion in this road! A fierce lion in the streets!” In other words, "I can't go outside." They have an excuse for everything. I mean, the excuse is there's a lion in the street is silly. There's a lion in the street, it doesn't matter. In other words, the excuse doesn't matter. "I'm just not going to do it. I just make up an excuse."

"As the door turns on its hinges, so does the lazy man on his bed." I love that one. You know, you've heard an old creaky door that's all rusty and will hardly open. Although I have to admit it at 63 there's days that getting out of bed is like that. But it's literal, because that's the sound of my joints, okay. But we have to make ourselves get up and go. And there's a few people, most of us really can't believe it, they just wake up, jump out of bed. They're happy. They're ready to go. And it's, like, the rest of us, we just sort of walk around in a stupor for a while, and grunt for coffee and, you know. But you make yourself do it. More people have lost jobs because they simply won't make themselves do it.

And he calls this a lazy person. "The lazy man buries his hand in the bowl; and wearies him to bring it back to his mouth." Now you can imagine, you take your spoon and you stick it in the bowl and you just sit and stare and say, "Would someone feed me please?" It's an absurdity to this. "The lazy man is wiser in his own eyes than seven men who can answer sensibly." And that's very true. The more lazy we are, the more reasons we have for being lazy, the more reasons why it's somebody else's fault. And the more reasons why, everybody that tells us, "No, that's not how the way it works," we say they're either wrong or they don't understand, or "Hey, get out of my face. You're oppressing me." And so we stay the way we are.

So there is an amount of effort that we have to put into this. A small business had a sign hanging on the wall that said, "If you don't believe the dead come back to life, you've never been here at quitting time." You know, all work does have some drudgery. I mean, I have to admit, when I'm doing paperwork sometimes, I'd rather be out visiting people or, you know, working on a Bible study. I have certain paperwork I have to do. But it has to be done. So you pile through it, you know. I'll tell my wife, "I'm going up to my office. I'll be up there for three hours. I'm doing paperwork." And I find out when I tell her that she won't even talk to me for three hours. It's, like, "He's up there. Leave him alone." But you got to plow through it, you got to make yourself do it. It has to be done. There is a point we have to face no matter what the job you have. And sometimes when you start out in a job, you know, they give you the worst jobs to begin with then you have to do the worst jobs.

I think I've mentioned this before I worked… In the Worldwide Church of God, I worked in SEP. And I worked two summers, where I was in charge of the janitorial crew. Now, one of the things we had to do was the bathhouses every morning after hundreds of teenagers went in and destroyed it. We would get a dorm of maybe, you know, 30 teenagers, and now we had to go clean up something that was, like, out of a horror movie. I can't explain what 200 teenagers will do to a bathhouse, okay. And they would all be, I mean, griping and complaining. They didn't want to go in, So I had to give them the little speech all the time. That little speech was, "in life, you're going to be asked to do things you don't want to do. We have an hour to do this. We can go make this a game and I am…" the other two people I had working with me "we'll go in and help you do it. We'll get right…" I mean, the toilets were always clogged up. It was just horrible. "We will help you do this. And if we work as a team, and you do what we say, we'll be done in a half-hour. And then the other half hour, you have off. You can do whatever you want. You can go sit around." You know, all they ever wanted to do when they were done was just is sit around and talk. "You can do that. If you don't, you'll be here the full hour and only half the job will be done and you will hate it every minute."

And so we would go in, and for, you know, 20 minutes to a half-hour, we told them how to work as a team, we told them what to do, how to motivate each other. When one person slacks, everybody's got to make them work. And you know, they were always done in a half-hour. And then they had a half-hour off. Well, I can't say always. Because sometimes you get a group that just wouldn't do it. And an hour later, they were mad and grumpy. They'd be mad and grumpy the whole rest of the morning. They were upset. They hated it. How dare people make them have to do this? And they were miserable.

Now, everybody had the same job and it was just as bad for everybody. And you know, some groups came out of there, fired up ready to go, "Hey, man, we got a half-hour." Other groups after an hour were, "We hated this." And you know, it would take them a long time to get over it. The idea is at times, we just have to say, "The job has to be done," and we throw ourselves into it completely.

Many years later, I had a man come up to me and say, "Hey, you changed my life." I said, "I did. How did I ever change your life?" He said, "At SEP, that little talk you gave to us every time when we had to go in and clean out the bathhouse." I said, "Yeah?" He said, "I applied that to my life." And he says, "Now I own my own business and I'm quite wealthy." You simply attack the job at hand. And then you go do something else. But you attack the worst job by attacking it. You go into it. You do your work. Now, work ethic requires that you accomplish the work assigned to you, the way that it has been assigned, and in the time allotted. And so you do it.

The third point, a proper work ethic requires you use your time to give your employee a full day's work. You give them a full day's work. Say, "Yeah, but sometimes, you know, eight hours is a long time." I understand. But when I started to look at the reason people get fired, and so many of the times is because they're not working. They're talking, they're gossiping, they're texting, they're doing all different kinds of things.

Understand this, what if a friend of yours said, "Here. I can't go to the store. I'm going to give you $100 to go to the store and get all this stuff for me. Here's a $100. And since you're doing this for me, and it's so nice, you know, get yourself some lunch." You say, "Okay," and you took their $100. And you're supposed to be back in an hour. You come back three hours later and instead of the list, you have two things in a bag. And they say, "Well, wait a minute, you know, I had all this stuff." And you say, "Yeah, but, you know, I was having such a good time at lunch, picked up a couple of other friends and we used your money buying lunch and all I had enough was to get you this." You'd say, "You stole my money," right?

If someone did that to you wouldn't you say, "You stole my money?" When you go and work for a person and agree to work for them for a certain amount of money, and you don't give them a full day's work, I don't care how much the money is, the money isn't the issue. It's you that's the issue, who you are. And you don't give them a full day's work, you're stealing from the employer. You're stealing their time. "Here. I'm going to pay you to work for me." "Thank you. I'll take the money and I won't work." It's stealing. There's a point of dishonesty here. So we don't think that way. There's a point of dishonesty.

Ways that we waste time at work. "Oh good, another survey." No, I'm going to go to the Bible. Proverbs 14, a couple of places in Proverbs. Proverbs 14. There's a lot of benefits to work in our character and even some happiness. We'll talk about that in a minute. Proverbs 14:23. "In all labor, there is profit." There's a benefit from work. And once again, being a workaholic isn't the issue here. It's working that's the issue. When you are supposed to work you work.

"In all labor there's profit, but an idle chatter leads only to poverty." In other words, you spend all your time talking at work, on your computer at work, unless you're working on a computer, obviously, texting at work, sharing all your different plans and, you know, getting together all the people you're going out to dinner with afterwards, and you do all that while at work. You can end up in poverty because you're not going to have a job. You say, "Boy, that employer sure is mean and tough. What's their problem?" Now, remember, they paid you to work. They offered you money to work and you agreed to it. If you don't like the agreement, quit but don't steal from them.

You know, you're going to get in a bad job some point in life too. Once again, if you have the right character, if you have the tools, you'll be able to get out of a bad job. If you don't have the tools, guess what happens? "I can't get out of a bad job because I can't get any job," or you quit and end up what, doing nothing. I've seen people quit jobs. I knew a man one time who had been fired… I don't remember the exact number… It's been so many years ago. This was, like, 35 years ago. But I think he'd been fired from 12 jobs in 16 years all because of the Sabbath. I don't believe that. You might lose a job or two over the Sabbath, but if you're a good employee, you're going to find a job someplace. I think he's a bad employee. Now, a couple of times might be over the Sabbath but I don't believe all of them were.

Look at Proverbs 12:11. "He who tills his land will be satisfied with bread, but he who follows frivolity is devoid of understanding." In otherwise words, he who just…"All I want to do is have fun." Well, there's a time for fun, by the way, God is not against fun. There's a time for fun. And it's great when your work is fun, too. I mean, I have fun times at my job sometimes, and sometimes it's not. But when you just pursue having fun, instead of getting joy out of your work, he says, you don't understand what's going to happen to you. It doesn't work that way.

Proverbs 19:15 "Laziness casts one into a deep sleep, and an idle person will suffer hunger." In other words, when we are lazy, you know what happens? We get tired all the time. We lose a desire to achieve anything. Part of work is achieving something. It's achieving something. Now, some of you remember a couple of years ago, I kept using the example of how I told my wife I would paint the bathroom and then didn't do it. Okay. Well, I don't know, about nine months ago, I painted the bathroom, okay. But I have to tell you when I finished painting the bathroom… she wasn't there I thought I'd surprise her. And I looked around and I thought, "I really feel good about this." And then she walked in and said, "It needs another coat." So I put another coat on, and I felt good about that, too, right. When you accomplish something, you feel good and that is worth… You know, sometimes you don't work because of your boss and you don't work because of the money. Sometimes you work because in the end, "I did a good job. I did that." It's your character that counts. It's who you are that counts. And so you do what's right. Otherwise, you just get… the more lazy you are… Here's the strangest thing. You ever say, "Oh, I wish I had a day off with nothing to do."

Yeah, I do that and every once in a while I try to take a day off with nothing to do. And it's okay for a while then I start getting antsy and sort of nervous and sort of crazy like and then… then I have to tell myself, "Settle down. There's work to do tomorrow. It's okay." So you can't be a workaholic either. But it's funny, if I had nothing to do all the time, I'd be miserable. Wouldn't you? If you had nothing, no goals, nothing to do, nothing to achieve, you'd be miserable.

"Oh, I just wish somebody would take care of me." No, you don't, you wouldn't live life with somebody just taking care of you every moment. We're not designed to be that way. We're designed to go work and produce and achieve. All of us are every human being. Or we just get sleepy.

A fourth point is that a proper work ethic means that we exhibit a very high standard of honesty and morality. Let's go to Titus 2. Titus 2, I'm going to read this from the NIV. In the King James, it says bondservants here which is more of an employee relationship. But here in this translation… this is Titus 2:9. "Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything, to try to please them, not talk back to them." Okay, you just don't talk back to your employer all the time. Now, that doesn't mean you shouldn't give good suggestions. Most employers want a good… I mean, you might get some hard-nosed person that doesn't. But most employers want a good suggestion if they can see it's good. "Hey, if we do this would this make this better?" You know, because they know you now hey, you're concerned about the job. You're concerned about what you're doing. Your work is important to you. But he says, "And not to steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted, so that in every way they will make the teaching about God our Savior attractive." He says you be so honest, such a good upstanding person, such a moral person, that you make Christianity attractive to pagans.

"Boy, I wish I had more Christians like you working, you know, for me because you're good workers. I can trust you, people. You're not going to steal from me. I'm not going to have to worry because I can't figure out why.” You know, “I just bought a box of copy paper and half of it it's gone." "Oh yeah, I took it home. You know, my kids use it." That's stealing. And so we are to make… It's so fascinating here. Paul over and over again says, remember when you're out there working who you represent. Be moral and be honest. We should be very, very, very honest.

And don't think they don't notice. People notice whether you're honest or not. They do. They will notice whether you're honest or not. And this is more important than your job title. This is more important than how much money you make, your honesty. I've seen Christians sacrifice their honesty for more money, or sacrifice their honesty to get a higher position. And that's not what this is about. That higher position or more money means nothing to God. Honesty means something to God. So don't buy into this sort of American dream. "The more power and money I have, the more important I am to God," because that's not true. It's just not true. It's who you are as His child that's important to Him.

Let me just sort of wrap up with a few things here. Why do we work then? Okay, we work to… What's our benefit, if you will, from working? Constructive work gives us a sense of purpose and a sense of accomplishment in your daily life. You know, I'm 63. I know a lot of men and women that retire at 65. I couldn't imagine retiring at 65. I can't even imagine… I’ve got so much more to accomplish. In fact, I'm getting to the place that I'm even more serious about what I have to accomplish because, well, you know, I don't have a lot of time left here. I'm going to live another 30 years. I got more things to accomplish.

And so this constructive work gives us a sense of accomplishment. Even if our boss… see once again it's you get a benefit from working. What did God tell Adam and Eve? Go to Genesis 2:15. Genesis 2. It's a very important passage here. "Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend it and to keep it." "You are to work this garden." He didn't say, “Oh, here's the garden. It'll sort of grow itself. Just let everything run wild, it'll be fine." He says, "You are to tend it and to keep it." "You have work to do here, son, and you're going to like working. You're going to get up in the morning and you're going to enjoy going out and tending the garden." Without a sense of accomplishment, without things to do, Adam would have been bored, even in Eden. We are designed to accomplish things.

There's a study that was done in Harvard. And it's an interesting study because the first time I read of this study was in the 1980s. And it had started kind of back in the 1940s. I just read this week because I was looking at the study. The study continues on. Some of the people involved in this study in the 1940s are still alive and they're still studying them, these people at Harvard. The people who started the original study are all dead it's new, but they've been studying these… I think it was 465 boys. And they were all from inner-city, Boston. And they had all different backgrounds, and all different economic backgrounds, and educational backgrounds, and ethnic backgrounds. You know, they're just from all over the place. And so they started to go through them. What were they like at 15 or where were they at 25? So in the 1980s, these guys are in their 40s and 50s. Well, they're in their 50s at this point. And they found some very interesting things.

Now, as they continued on as they got older, into their ‘70s and ‘80s now, and '90s, they found that there were two things that changed their lives more than anything. One was the quality of relationships they had when they were younger. Were there adults who loved them or not? Oh, yeah that makes sense, doesn't it? That was the most… The number one impact on their lives, whether there were adults that loved them and interacted with them as children. The second one was whether they had work to do as a child.

You say, "Oh, we just put our kids in the salt mines." This was as simple as mowing the grass. It was as simple as cleaning your room. And in doing so, they found out that these young boys who had interactive relationships, people who actually cared for them, and taught them and interacted with them, and then they were made to work. Those were the two greatest factors in their success of life and how happy they were.

People who work and put themselves into their work are happier. They're not bored. They have purpose. And like I said, these jobs were just… "Okay, you're 15. Go get a job," you know. No. It could be as simple as, "Okay, you have chores, and you have to take out the garbage and you participate in what the family does." Or sometimes a lot… These boys came from broken families. Still, there was always some adults somewhere that interacted with them in a positive way. And they always had some value in their work. "I'm producing something, and as I produce something, I have value. I produce something and therefore I have value." And as they grew up that changed their lives.

One of the greatest gifts you can give your children… the greatest gift you can give your children is your love and your time. A second greatest gift you can give them is teaching them God's way. Now, you have to give them love and time before you can teach them God's way. "Okay, we're going to have school today. I'm going to teach you God's way and the rest of the time I'm going to ignore you." That doesn't work. You give them love and time first, and that builds the relationship that you can say, "let me tell you about God," and it means something.

If we don't give our children of ourselves, then somebody else gives them of themselves. And it's probably be the other kid next door. You see what I mean? We can't let other people raise our children. We have to give them our love and our time. Then the second most important thing you could do is give them God's way and teach it and live it for them. And the third most important thing you can do, make them do some chores, make them do some work. That there's purpose in work. There's meaning and work.

I could remember my dad telling me… we’re sanding floors, which is hard work. I was a teenager. He said, yeah, he says, "I worked hard, worked hard. My dad pushed me and pushed me. Because he was pushing me all the time. “Do this better. Work harder, do this,” you know, just all the time. He said that one day, he said, “Okay, you got to finish this job.” And he left. And he said, I thought, "Good. I'm going to take a cigarette break." Because he was a chain smoker before he came into the Church. He said, “But I couldn't. I tried, and I couldn't light it I had to go finish the job."

So when I was about 17, one day he said, "You got to finish the job." I said, "Oh, good." And when he showed up I'm just finishing it. And he said, "Yeah, that's what I figured how long would it take you to finish it." I thought, "Yeah, I just finished the job." He did the same thing to me that his dad did to him. We have to realize we teach them to work. And I sure was proud of that floor. I still remember it. I still remember that it was a Lebanese club and they had, like, a meeting room, ballroom in it. And that looked like a sheet of glass. That floor had been just sanded perfectly and finished perfectly. And it looked like… And I still remember that. I was probably 17 years old. I don't remember any of the girls when I was 17. But I remember that floor.

A secondary reason we work is to support our families. This is important to God. 1 Timothy 5:8. I don't remember any girls because it seems to me that I've been married… it seems to me, I've known my wife since I was a baby. It seems somehow we've been connected since we were children. I know that's not true. But it seems to me that way. So I don't remember anybody else. Yeah, she's always been there. 1 Timothy 5:8. "But if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever." Think about that statement. If you can work… Now, once again, sometimes we can't work or sometimes we're limited at what we can do or sometimes we just don't have opportunities.

I mean, sometimes you look at some… Darris McNeely just got back from a trip to Africa. And some of those people are doing as hard as they can and there's only so much money they can bring in. You can work 15 hours a day and you're never going to get out of a dirt hut. But they work, you know. You do your part. He's saying here the person says, "Nah, take care of me." He says you're worse than a person that's not even a Christian. See how much he ties this into our Christianity?

We have responsibilities. We work for other people. You know, and I will speak to the young men here. Guys, young men, when you marry and you have children, and especially if your wife says, "I need to stay home and take care of those children," your God-given responsibility is to take care of them. I don't care what the cost. If we can't do that don't get married and don't have children. Be man enough not to do it. Our responsibility is to take care of those if they need us. And, you know, sometimes women will have careers and then have two or three children say, "I can't do this. I can't do both of them." And we man up. How many hours a week do you work to do that? As many as it takes. As many as it takes. That's what we do.

And if we aren't willing to do that, you're not worthy of a wife. It's that simple. That's what Paul is saying. There's a loss of manhood that I'm concerned with. We sacrifice what we have to sacrifice for our families. That's part of work. Now, fortunately, hopefully, you have a job you don't have to do all that. But believe me, I know years ago, when I was a kid, I saw men work two or three jobs to feed a family, not because they had a great career. They worked two or three jobs just to feed a family. They would do whatever it took.

People had bigger families. The woman couldn't work. She had six kids. And that's what they did. Did they want to work three jobs? No. Why did they do it? It's what we do. We work to help those who are in financial need. I know sometimes some of these ideas are not popular in our society. The destruction of manhood is one of the most terrible things that's happened to our country. And now what's happening is destruction of womanhood. I mean, what God expects of women. If you destroy the men, what are the women going to do, right, what choice do they have?

And now where we have little three-year-olds that have decided that they're of a different sex. And parents who say, "Okay." A society cannot survive that, understand that. A society cannot survive that. Oh, it won't fall tomorrow, but it will fall. That is totally against the way anything is worked. Even the pagans knew that much. Even the ancient pagans knew that much.

Ephesians 4:28, "Let him who stole steal no more." So he's just telling people in church look, you got to change your… you know, if you used to be a thief, you're a Christian now. You got to stop being a thief. But notice what he says, "But rather let him labor, working with his hands, what is good, that he may have something to give him who has need." Paul actually says to people in the Church, "Okay, not stealing is the letter of the law. You and I have to go way beyond the letter of the law." He says, "Go work so you can help somebody else and give them a hand up. Go work so you can give to somebody else. Somebody gives you a hand up you go work and get somebody…" It's not, like, "Oh, good, somebody give me a hand up," keep giving your hand out. No. If someone gives you a hand up you go work and give somebody else a hand up. You and I are required by God to help each other in our times of need, and our times of poverty, and our times of old age, and our times of widowhood. We are required to help each other. It's at the center of God's way, that kind of love. And he says, start in the Church of God's, start in the house of God. And obviously with our own families, whether they're in the Church or not. That's where we just start.

And then the last reason, of course, is you and I have a duty to pay tithes and offerings to God. It's a duty. We should work because we wish to fulfill that duty. The work habits we form are part of our character. It's part of who we are. This is practical Christianity. "Wow, you've made looking at my cell phone, at my desk, some church issue." "No, it's practical Christianity. This isn't a church issue. It's Christianity issue." Work is important. And every day you have an opportunity when you go to work to be dependable and responsible and to show people what a Christian looks like. We're honest, we work hard, we're trustworthy. Those are all words that came up in what we've talked about here.

Also, you could be a whole lot happier when you just work hard. I don't care what it is. Scrubbing floors, cleaning toilets. I mean I think of all the things I've done in my life, sanding floors, painting houses. Well, I did have one job I failed miserably at. It was being a roofer. And the guy hired me… his son hired me and I said, "I don't know anything about roofing. I know nothing." He said, "Yeah, well, don't tell my dad. We just need some guys to work." So I spent 12 hours on the roof, trying to watch everybody else and figure out what they were doing. So at the end, the guy said, "You know, you're a hard worker, but you know absolutely nothing about roofing." And I said, "I know I don't." He says, "Well, I'm going to pay you because you're a hard worker, but I got to hire somebody that knows about roofing." I said, "I understand. I didn't tell your son I knew anything about roofing." And of course, they all laughed. They thought it was sort of funny. I was so glad I got fired from that job. I hated that job. But you know, I wasn't going to quit. I had told him I'd work the summer. I was going to work the summer and I thought, "By the end of summer I'll figure out how to be a roofer." But I was so glad I didn't have to figure out how to be a roofer. But I said I would. You know why I was going to do that? Not because I have great character because my dad had drilled me so much I had to finish the job. Even it was going to be all summer, I was going to learn how to be a roofer. So I was glad. And don't ask me to roof because I have no idea how to do that.

But these things make us happier. And it's these things that make up our work ethic. These are the traits that God is looking for. And these are the traits, not your job, but these character traits that God is going to use to serve Jesus Christ when He comes.

[Steve Myers] If someone asks you, what is the most difficult thing to do? What might you say? Difficult things to do, especially in this world. Of course, I realize we've just watched the Olympics not too long ago and we might say, a double back flip with a one and a half twist to, you know, beautiful dismount. Okay, I'm not talking about that sort of thing.

What is one of the most difficult things to do? You know what came to my mind? Change. It is hard to change, isn't it? I mean, it's not that we don't want to, we want to change. We look around in this world and people do want to change, at least at some level, don't they? Whether it's changing our weight. Whether it's changing our nose. Whether it's changing jobs. There is a level of how we do want to change so that we're dissatisfied with something in our lives.

But maybe taking a little bit more deeply, we probably know people who are more serious about things beyond those kinds of issues. There are those who want to change substantial things in their life. People who want a better attitude. They want a better temperament, spend more time with their families. Want to develop relationships.

And yet, when you consider those things, especially for our own lives, even with the best of intentions, those things can elude us. And I think it's because when it comes to real, positive, lasting change in our lives, there's only one way forward. There's only one path. And that is through our eternal God, and, ultimately, His purpose for our lives. Because if we don't understand what God's purpose is, what His will is for our lives, how can we make the changes that are necessary?

And when we think about change, it can be one of those things that seems kind of not very clear, kind of ill-defined. It can seem kind of ethereal, if I want to change, "Okay, well, how do I do that?" Well, the apostle Paul had a section of his letter to the Ephesians that zeroes in on several elements that are specific. I think they're true. They are lasting elements that can lead to real change, that can lead to spiritual change.

And so I thought it would be helpful to take time this afternoon to look at these necessities. I think you could call them, even more than necessities, they're requirements. They're essential if we're going to change and ultimately find that path, that path that will avoid the difficulties, avoid the disasters that await out in the world, and can help us to a real relationship and a deeper relationship with God.

In fact, I think we can find those over in Ephesians 5:15. If you'll turn there with me, Paul outlines these essentials so that we can avoid the difficulties and the disaster spiritually, that might otherwise await us. Ephesians 5:15, Paul starts this section by saying, "See then that you walk circumspectly, not as fools but wise, redeeming the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is." And so in these three very short verses, he outlines a plan that we can all put into effect in our lives.

So let's look at these three things for a moment. First, he starts out by saying, "walk circumspectly." And, of course, we all understand exactly what that means because we use that word every day in our conversation, don't we? Circumspectly, it's even a hard one to kind of say, "walk circumspectly." When you get down to it he's saying, "Have a purpose, don't just kind of walk around. Don't just kind of amble or meander, or walk to wander.” He's much more specific than that because he's pointing out the fact, this life that we're walking is in a minefield. If you look back just a couple of verses to verse 8, he says, "You were once in darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light."

You see, we can't grow dim. In this walk of life, we can't blend in with the darkness around us. He says we have to stand out. In fact, verse 11 says, "Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather expose them." And so rather than just thinking that God is light, or Jesus is light, here the apostle Paul says, "You are light." You're the source, and when you walk into a room and you're the light, what happens to the darkness? Yeah, flip on a switch in a dark room and where's the darkness? It's gone. It's gone. And so we're to be that light and think of it in those terms, that we cannot have anything to do with things that are dark.

If you read verse 11 in the Good News translation, it says, "Have nothing to do with the worthless things that people do, things that belong to darkness. Instead, bring them out to the light." And, of course, if they're brought out to the light, they can't be dark. They can't be dark. And so we expose the darkness to the light. We reveal it. We recognize it. We see it. We show it for what it is, and, ultimately, it's sin. That darkness is sin. And so we cannot do those things that others do that are in the darkness, and so we bring it to the light. We dispel it. We put it away.

And, in fact, when you look at verse 15, he uses this word, "walk" I think for a very specific reason. "Walk circumspectly" and it's not just, "Well, I'm walking along and that's the image that I can have," but it's so much more than that. So much more than that, especially when you consider the way that Paul most likely used this word in the first-century because we don't do this.

In the first-century, people didn't walk for exercise, did they? Did you read about anybody in the Bible, you know, that that had a treadmill? That just, "Hey, it's great to walk." No, that's not why they walked. They walked for a purpose. They walked for a reason. Of course, they walked because they had to, they didn't have any cars or anything like that. But there was purpose behind their walk. I mean, you can read of so many different times when this was the exact case.

One of the ones, I think it was Acts 10, where Peter walked 40 miles from Joppa to Caesarea, and it was for a specific purpose that he walked. As I began to think about that, I got totally distracted and I thought, "I wonder how far Jesus walked." Have you ever wondered that? Well, you can actually Google that and it'll, you know, give you several sources that will tell you who how far Jesus walked. How far do you think He walked? Well, according to mywellnesswarriors.com, “In His lifetime, Christ walked over 21,000 miles.” 21,000 miles. They've even got to calculate it out.

Now, He is down in Egypt. Okay, He's a little baby but He did have to, as He was older, walk back all the way to Jerusalem… Nazareth. You walk from Egypt to Nazareth, that's 400 miles by itself. You know, they didn't hop on the freeway and take the car and get there. And, of course, you had to go back and forth and back and forth from Nazareth to Jerusalem and back and forth again. They calculate that would have been something like 18,000 miles in His lifetime.

And then just during His ministry, just during that three and a half years, they calculate Christ would have walked well over 3,000 miles. So can you imagine walking over 1,000 miles a year? Now, did Christ have a purpose? Did He have a reason for walking? You see, first-century disciples, our Savior, during the first-century, walked to get somewhere. They walked to a destination. They walked for a purpose.

And so Paul didn't use this concept of walking as just a nice little idea, he's making a point here. Walking spiritually pictures that constant progress toward our ultimate goal, to that destination of the Kingdom of God. That's what this is about. And so you walk circumspectly. You walk for a purpose. You walk accurately. You walk diligently. Because if you don't know where you're walking, what will happen? In fact, I think they have an old saying for that, don't they? "If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up somewhere else," right? Yeah, you won't get where you need to go.

And, in fact, the Bible says so much about the way we walk and the difficulties. If we get off that path, if we don't walk circumspectly, if we don't walk with a purpose, if we don't walk toward our goal, we're going to end up somewhere else. And when we're somewhere else, we're in danger. We're in danger because this world is a minefield that is out there to destroy us spiritually. It's a spiritual minefield out in this world. And we can get so off track that if we're not careful, it will blow apart our spiritual life.

And so God doesn't want us just to meander through life. He's got a purpose and a plan, and if we do that, if we get off track, we're going to end up where God doesn't want us to be. And so we have to pray. We have to pray about that, because, well, you remember what it says in Jeremiah. Is it in me? You know, do I know the best way to live my life? Most Americans, I think, would say, "Well, of course. We're Americans, we know what's best. I know what's best for me, this is what I want to do."

But, really, is that the way we need to look at life? Do I know the best way to order my life? Do I know the best way to walk through the minefields of this world? Do I know the best way to worship and honor God? You see, most people would say, "Well, yeah, I can take that in my own hands. I can decide for myself. I can do what I want. That's the American way." But God inspired Jeremiah to write, "It is not in man who walks to direct his own steps." It's Jeremiah 10:23. We don't know the way to walk toward the Kingdom of God. We don't know that way. We need God to reveal that to us. God has to show it to us.

Now, of course, He will direct our steps when we submit our lives to Him, but you know what? There's still a little bit of a catch. We have to choose to walk that way, don't we? God can reveal it to us, "This is the way. Walk this way," but He also says, "Choose life. Choose which way you're going to order your steps." And so when you look back at Ephesians 5:15, "Walk circumspectly, not as fools but wise," because there are the minefields that would spiritually destroy us. And if we are to avoid a spiritual disaster and avoid those minefields of that destruction that's out there, we have to walk circumspectly, carefully, carefully.

Now, how do you negotiate a minefield? Well, I thought of that and got totally distracted as I was preparing the sermon. And do you know there's articles out there on the internet that tell you about how to negotiate a minefield? There are, in fact, here was one by a man named Phil Sylvester, editor for Travel Insights. It's a travel site, website. And there was an article, right, called, "Landmines in Cambodia," and it's subtitled, "Why you should watch your steps."

Now, it's been many years since some of the wars and problems that they've had, so tourists are returning to Cambodia. And if you remember years ago with the Khmer Rouge, and even Vietnam and some of the difficulties between the tribes there, nobody would go there. But now people are returning. And, of course, that means the mines that they laid during that time, they're still there. They're still there.

And so in this particular article, he writes about how to avoid landmines. Now, here's one of the first things he said, "It's when you step outside the main areas that you're taking a risk." When you get off the beaten path, in other words, you are in trouble. You are in trouble. He says, “Tourists… are well advised not to wander around." In other words, "Here's the way, walk in it." You get off the path, you wander around, you could walk right into a minefield. And so he says, "You better consider carefully what you're doing. You better watch carefully and pay careful attention so that you don't end up in an area you don't want to be."

And so we have to be careful. In fact, it’s… well, I thought it was a little humorous. One of the things he said to avoid a minefield is to take a guide along. Take a guide. Because he wrote, "Over the years… the locals have learned where it is safe to walk." Probably by a little trial-and-error and maybe losing a limb or a couple of friends, that sort of thing. So he says, "Take a guide." Well, hasn't God guided us? Doesn't God give us His direction as He tells us, "Walk with exactness, walk with precision."

Trust God. Don't trust your GPS. We probably all know how well our GPSs work, right? Because none of us have ever put a little address into the GPS and we follow it faithfully to our destination, and we pull up and we go, "Wait a second, this isn't the restaurant. Where did it go?" It got it wrong and we just blindly followed it. And so we can't do that, especially when you consider this spiritually speaking because if we do, it's going to be a lot worse than not finding the restaurant. We could end up in a spiritual minefield that could take our spiritual life if we're not careful.

So Paul is reminding us, "Walk precisely." And, in fact, this word for "circumspectly," was a word that the Greeks used in accounting. And, of course, if you're an accountant, is it good enough just to kind of get close to the right total? Okay, we all probably have to do our checkbooks. We're supposed to reconcile our account, maybe not our checkbook, but online. "Oh, did they do it? Did they do it right?"

Well, if you go to reconcile your account and you kind of look at it and you go, "Well, is that 1,000 or is that 10,000? Well, it doesn't really matter. Close enough. I'll say it's $10,000." Well, that isn't going to work too well, right? We're to start bouncing out account all over the place. And so you've absolutely got to be precise. And so when you translate that into how we walk, how we live our life every single day, Paul saying, we've got to walk like true believers. We've got to choose the way we walk. We've got to walk that right path and not be wandering all over the place, because our enemy has strewn that path with dangerous mines that will blow our lives apart, because, he says, "These days are evil."

And we're fighting a spiritual battle. We don't want to kid ourselves. And too often, do we find ourselves kind of strolling around life, not really having a straightforward purpose? I mean, do we flirt with danger? Flirt with difficulties. Don't really pay that close attention to what's really at risk. I mean, if you think about it for a minute, what if the Israelites did that as they were to march around Jericho.

“Alright, God said this is the way, walk, walk around Jericho. You're supposed to do this for seven days." "Well, I don't know if we have to do it exactly that way. Well, how about if we just walk down the Jordan? It's kind of a little bit more scenic, a little bit more beautiful. We kind of take in the sights, enjoy the land. That'll probably be… God doesn't mean we have to do it that way, how about if we just go the way that we want to? Probably a lot more fun."

Well, what would have happened? Certainly, it wouldn't have fallen. The people followed God's instructions. He said this is how you walk. This is the way you do it. This is how you spend your time. And, in fact, He said, "Spend your time every day doing this," so they did it the First Day of Unleavened Bread, they did it the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh day, completeness. A number of completion. Their whole walk was following God's directions because you're not going to get through life's difficulties and life's challenges without some spiritual disaster, a mine blowing up, if we don't follow His guide. There's going to be trouble. There's going to be trouble.

Can we walk our own way and expect not to be attacked by the enemy? You see, I don't think we can. And so God points us in this direction. And one of the challenges I think is, we sometimes convince ourselves, "Well, it's not that big a deal, is it? I mean, it's just a minor little thing." And we kind of fool ourselves. And yet that's not circumspectly.

I was reminded about this as I was reading a little bit about aircraft carriers. And so you can tell in my sermon I got totally off track as I was preparing it and started looking at aircraft carriers. But I learned something kind of interesting about them. Aircraft carriers had a problem when they first started implementing them. I mean, it'd be great. You're out there in the water, we need planes, you know, they'd be closer to the destinations, closer to the targets, easier to refuel, what a great idea? And so they came up, “Well, you build a big boat, you make this long runway, voila! This will work great!”

But you know what happened? Where do you put the planes that aren't flying? “Oh, we'll just put them at the far end of the runway. That will be great.” And so that's what they did. And so the planes would come and they'd land and, wow, that's a really short runway. And they'd end up crashing into the planes at the end of the runway. And, of course, “Alright, we can fix this.” So what do you think they did? “We'll have a net that will catch the planes and that will slow them down as they come in.” And you've probably all seen those YouTube videos, right? The planes come in, they land, “Oh, get the net, they're not slowing down.” And then they hit the net and they flip over the net and then they smash into the planes that are at the end of the runway.

But you know what fixed the problem? You think, "Oh, we've got to go back and we've got to redesign the entire concept. We got to start from scratch and do it over again." No. Nine degrees. That was the difference between success and smashed airplanes, nine degrees. Just nine degrees, you know what they did? They offset the runway nine degrees. So instead of going straight along the whole path of the aircraft carrier, they came in on a nine-degree angle, repainted the lines so planes could come in...  guess where they put the extra planes? In that space that the nine degrees didn't face directly.

So they could come in, land and, uh-oh, if it's too short, I could hit the gas again and take off and go around and try it again. Nine degrees, that was the only difference. And the amazing part to me, do you know when they finally figured this out? Not after World War I. It was after World War II, 1952. Long after the Second World War, they figured out with this minor little adjustment, they could save millions of dollars and all kinds of planes. Just with that small, little correction.

And so I think it makes the point that just getting off a little bit, you get into big trouble. And to make those corrections in our life so that we are aimed in the right direction, it can save our life. It can save our life. And so it's not oftentimes these big things that need to be changed. In fact, I read about another circumstance, I think one that probably most of us are familiar with, but you don't think of it in these terms.

There was a man, back in 1972. I know for some of us that's, wow, pre-historic. But for us, "old guys," isn't all that long ago, it seems. But in 1972, there was a man named Frank Wills. And he was a security guard. And while he was doing his rounds one night, he was walking down a certain section of the building and he noticed a set of doors that had a little bit of tape over the latch on the door. And, you know, you've got the handle and you got that little latch that pokes out and it kind of locks the door, well, he noticed there's just a little bit of tape over that latch that was keeping it unlocked.

He thought, "Well, that's kind of funny." And so he took that little bit of tape off of there and kept going on his rounds. Well, on his next series of rounds he came back. He noticed the same doors and there was more tape, just barely sticking out from the edge of the door, that was back on that latch again. This time he said, "Alright, something's up. There's a little piece of tape keeping that door unlocked." He called the police. You know what resulted from that little piece of tape and Frank Wills noticing it? The resignation of the president of the United States. He worked at the Watergate complex and he just happened to notice a little piece of tape that kept the doors open. It's those little things.

Yeah, he walked circumspectly and noticed it. He didn't overlook his rounds. And we can't allow even the littlest of missteps to throw us off-track spiritually because our enemy that is out here is ready to pounce on us. He is a roaring lion that can't wait to devour us. And so just a few missteps, even the small ones, can get us significantly off-track so that we could be devoured if we're not careful.

And so, here the apostle Paul is reminding us of that very thing. That we need to walk circumspectly. We've got to be deliberate. We've got to be intentional. Don't let life just happen, be intentional. Make the right choices. And then we'll get to where we need to be. Where we, ultimately, where we want to be.

In fact, he expands on that a little, back in Ephesians 5:16. So go back to Ephesians verse 16, chapter 5 verse 16. And Paul will talk about a second essential, a second necessity or requirement. If we're going to avoid the spiritual minefields, if we're going to avoid disaster and truly be on the path to real change, Paul focuses on that in a second aspect. Let's notice it. Ephesians 5:16 he says, "redeeming the time, because the days are evil."

And I think that's kind of a given. I mean, would there be that many people whether they're in the church or out of the church, to say that this is in a pretty evil time that we live in? I think most people will say, “Yeah, there's terrorism, there's difficulties, there's ISIS, there's, you know, difficulties with our health, heartache, tragedies. You know, terrible circumstances out here.” So most would probably agree.

But there's so much more to what he's getting at here. Do you see where he's going? I mean, is God just concerned that we recognize the world's a bad place, or is there more to it? Well, yeah, there's more to it. Do you notice what he's saying here? Because these days are evil, here's something we must do. Because of the world we live in, this is what we have to be able to fulfill in our life. In order to change, we've got to make sure that we realize this is the time to do it. This is the time. Redeem the time.

In fact, we've got that famous phrase, "There's no time like the present." Or, "There's no present like the time." Well, they kind of reflect each other, don't they? Isn't that true? There's no time like the present. We need to redeem the time. So, alright, practically, put that into practical terms, what does that mean?

If you were to look up this Greek word, it's the Greek word exagorazó. It's pretty impressive, isn't it? I press this little button on this Biblical site and it pronounces the word for you, and I'm not sure if I got it right or fairly close, but that's, I think that's about what the guy was saying on the site. Exagorazó has several definitions. There's several ways that the Greeks use the word, and when you consider these different definitions, I think it really brings home what the necessity is here. What is the requirement if we're going to change and grow and avoid the spiritual minefields out there?

One of the ways to think about it, are there any of us here who like to shop? Okay, I guess I got my hand up. Don't go make me buy underwear or clothes or socks. I'm not into that kind of shopping. But many of us are into some kind of shopping in our lives. I mean, who of us doesn't like a good deal? I like to get a great deal. It's like, "Whoa, I got a fantastic deal on this." And in a way, this word for redeem, points to that idea, because it literally means “to buy something out of the marketplace.”

So you go shopping, and it doesn't mean, well, I just went shopping and I bought something. No, it means more than that. It should have us picture a merchant, you know, someone that's a shopper, would be another one. And they go to the marketplace, but what they do is they find the best deal. And it's not just find it, "Oh, here's a cheap thing and it's a great price so I'm buying it." That's not the purpose. The point is, this merchant goes to the market, gets the best deal on the best quality item.

And that's kind of the backdrop to one of the meanings of this word 'for redeem.' To get the best bargain on the best item in the marketplace. And, of course, that means you got to look for it. You got to find it. Because if you're a lousy shopper like me, I show up at the store and they say, "Oh, it was yesterday we had the 20% off, not today. Oh, that's too bad, you just missed it by a day." It's like, “Ah!” Yeah, that's the way I shop sometimes. Like, uh, that's terrible.

That does carry the meaning of this redeem the time because this time is an opportunity. And there are certain opportunities that we have that only come along once in a while, right? You miss the half off sale, sorry you got to wait, maybe until next year, we might do it again there. And that's the sense of what he's getting at here. That we don't want to miss this opportunity, we got to make the best purchase at the best price of the best item.

And that applies to our life, because another definition for this word, maybe brings out that aspect even a little bit more. Because it can mean “to make a wise choice,” but not just make a wise choice, “but use that choice for good.” In fact, if you looked it up in Thayer’s, Thayer’s Word Dictionary, it says, "To make wise and sacred use of every opportunity for doing good." So everything we do isn't just for me or my fun or my self-interest. He says we can have it for a sacred interest.

You know, do we use every opportunity for doing good? I mean, that's a pretty amazing concept, when you begin to think about it. Because we have been given the ability to make wise choices and dedicate them for a good purpose, for a godly purpose, for a sacred purpose. That's what redeeming the time can mean, because it also carries a connotation of redeeming a slave. It's another facet of the definition for this word, to redeem. And what that means, you go to the slave market. Now, instead of going to the store to buy something out of the marketplace, now you redeem something from the slave market. Which means, you as a householder, you go to the slave market, you purchase a slave and then you bring them to your household. And it carries a connotation, they're never on the market again. So you purchase them out of the market so they never can be enslaved again.

And I think that brings to mind some interesting connections when you think about it. Because in some ways, don't you think we can kind of be enslaved to time? I mean, sometimes we'll say, "Our boss is a slave driver," or, "My work enslaves me. You know, if I could just get out from under the slavery of my job." You know, sometimes we think in those terms.

And I think there is a connection when you really consider what it's talking about here because there is a price to be paid to make sacred use of every opportunity. Isn't there? I mean, we can just go through life and it just kind of happens. And it just occurs. But can we use those things for a godly purpose? I mean, this is telling us, don't let time pass without the opportunity to make it right. To make it good. Even to make it holy.

You know, can I do holy things when I do them for God's purposes? Yeah, I think that's kind of what He's getting at, and it certainly reminds us, how often does opportunity knock? Yeah, not very often, once, is the way the saying goes. And so if we waste those opportunities, if we waste that opportunity and we fit in with everyone else in the world, yeah, we're going to waste 11 years of our life watching television. Is that what we want? Is that a sacred purpose for the time of our life?

We waste the opportunity, we're going to spend what, 70% of our life in front of digital media? That's what surveys say these days. Is that a sacred use of our time? Now, some of it could be, but come on, what do we get out of watching YouTube videos hour after hour, "Oh, that's a funny looking cat. Wow, isn't that great? Well, you got to see this." How much time do we waste? Is that really using the opportunity to redeem the time for a sacred purpose? I mean, come on.

Surveys show that men waste a year of their life. Do you know what they do? Watching women. A year of their life. I mean, unbelievable, unbelievable. And then there's all those other things that we really become enslaved by. And so I think that's a question we have to ask ourselves, "Are we enslaved in the way that we use our time?" Because Paul is telling us, God… He's telling us here. You can't retrieve it. You can't relive it. You can't stretch it out or borrow it or loan it or stop time, or store it up.

He's telling us, we got one life. We have one opportunity, and either we use it or we lose it, right? Game of life. "Can I have a timeout?" "Sorry, used them all up. There ain't no timeouts in life. Not going to happen." "How about an instant replay? Can I have an instant replay in life?" Literally, no, ain't going to happen. There's no such thing as an instant replay in life.

And I was reminded of this when I read about a survey that was done by a psychologist. This was done many, many years ago. It was by a guy named Dr. William Marston. And he polled thousands of people and he asked this question. He asked, "What do you have to live for? What do you have to live for?" Now, how do you think people answered that question? What do you have to live for?

And after kind of tabulating all the results and the different responses, he kind of boiled it down to something that was really pretty stark, when you consider it. What he surmised is that 94% of the people he polled were enduring the present while waiting for the future. Ninety-four percent enduring the present while waiting for the future. And I read that and went, "That doesn't... how is that true? How would that fit in a poll like this?"

But as I read more about the survey, they were waiting for something to happen. They were waiting for something to happen, like, "Wow, can't wait for my children to grow up and be independent." "Oh, I can't wait to retire and do all those things I never could do while I worked." "I can't wait to pay off the mortgage and then I'll have some extra money." "I can't wait to take that big vacation I've always looked forward to." "I cannot wait for..." Well, fill in the blank. Do we find ourselves thinking like that? Because while we wait, life is passing us by and it's not enjoyed, it's not appreciated. It's not walking because either we're waiting or we're walking.

So, God reminds us, we got some purchases to make, don't we? You better buy those wasted hours and use them for an eternal significance. You've got to grab every opportunity, buy out of the marketplace every opportunity to grow, every opportunity to come to a deeper relationship with God, every opportunity to conform to His image. And whether it's raising children, whether it's dealing with people, that has to be a part of it as well. We have to be good stewards of all of our resources.

And He says to us, invest wisely. Use those opportunities to give and to serve. Purchase those opportunities for the purpose of the Kingdom of God. Because you know what the challenge is, are we handed these things on a silver platter? Does this world just say, "Alright, you're such a nice Christian. Here it is." No way! This world wants to control us, wants to control our time. It wants to encourage us to use those opportunities for pleasure, for self-seeking self-interest, and whatever self you can think of.

It wants us to focus inward instead of outward. And we can get sucked into that way of thinking. We can be drawn into it, even when we least expect it. I mean, we have a wonderful opportunity just ahead of us. We're going to go to the Feast of Tabernacles. What a wonderful opportunity to redeem the time! And yet all too often, we get into pleasure and self-seeking. "Well, this is the time during the Feast. Well, let's go clubbing, because what a great opportunity!” Is that what we should do at Panama City Beach? Is that what we should do in Mexico? Is that what we're going to do? "Well, now is the time to… well, I don't want to party that much, but maybe just a little tape on the door, maybe just one big bash.” Will that do it? “Well, they're doing it, so I guess that's okay.” Well, is that our standard? Is that redeeming the time? Are we going to be a standard of righteousness striving to live by the standard that Jesus Christ set? Are we putting on His mind? Are we growing in that way, using those opportunities for eternal significance? Or has our runway faced the wrong direction? You see, that's what it comes down to. And we can't allow that.

And we talk about that with our young people. Talk about that as counselors at camp. What do we say? Well, we have a camp standard. This is the standard for camp. This is the kind of swimsuits we wear. This is the kind of behavior. This is in the zone, that's out of the zone. Of course, we all know that only applies to camp. “I'm not at camp anymore, so that standard…” wait a second. We kid ourselves like that. How ridiculous to think that way? We're just fooling ourselves. And we're just putting a little tape on the door, and that can lead straight to that ambling, wandering minefield that's out there.

And so when it tells us to redeem the time, yeah, there's a cost. The cost is saying, “no.” No, to what's dispensable. No, to what's temporary. No, for what's not lasting. No, to what's nonessential. No, to the secondary physical things. And it means saying “yes” to what's crucial. Saying, no. Yeah, that means saying no, to endless hours of video games.

I got to say “yes” to reading my Bible. Yes, to not missing services. Yes, to prayer, to growing in that relationship with God. No, to wasting money on… you know, I don't like that word but, "worldly pursuits." Call it what you want, right? Fill in the blank with what, "worldly pursuits" mean. We got to say “no” to that, and “yes” to what will last. And so walk carefully and use those opportunities wisely.

So, redeeming the time means making the most of those opportunities and taking advantages of the opportunities God's put before us. So, can we live with eternal perspective now? You see, that's what God has in mind for us. It means well, quit saying, "Well, if I only had the time." Because we do have time. What do we do with that time that we've been given? If we quit worrying, yeah, it sometimes means I got to quit worrying about what tomorrow might bring and focus on today, because God's going to take care of tomorrow. He promises to take care of tomorrow.

And so, yes, sometimes it's the other direction. Sometimes I got to cut loose of the past. I can't be wrapped up in what's happened before, and so I've got to make sure that I bury the failures, bury the past in that grave of God's mercy. God extends His mercy and forgiveness as we repent and redeem the time.

In fact, there's such a powerful passage right near here. It's 2 Corinthians 6:2, let's notice it. 2 Corinthians 6:2. Perhaps a little bit of a summary of this whole concept of redeeming the time. 2 Corinthians 6:2. Notice what God inspires, what He says. 2 Corinthians 6:2, it says, "At the acceptable time," now this word for time is the exact one we just read in Ephesians, "redeem the time." That opportune moment, that opportune event. "At the acceptable time, I listened to you. At the opportune moment, God called us, opened our minds to His way." And He says, “'And on the day of salvation I helped you.’ Behold, now is the acceptable time." This is it. Now is the time. Now is our opportunity, “behold, now is the day of salvation."

And so we have to respond to that calling that God's given us. Now is the time. And we can liberate our time by dedicating absolutely as much as possible, to grow in our relationship with God and not letting it slip out of our hands and go some other direction. That's what God wants. He's called us right now, so now is the best time. Now is the best time for us. Now is our best shot at this. And so take advantage of that opportunity.

Back to Ephesians 5, we can pick up the third essential, third necessity, third requirement, if we're going to avoid those spiritual minefields, spiritual disaster that's out there and truly grow and change. God inspired Paul to write for us this third necessity. It's not a real complicated one either, once again, chapter 5 verse 17, "Therefore do not be unwise, but understand what the will of the Lord is."

Well, not wanting to make changes, makes it happen, not even just wanting to be serious about making changes makes it happen. If we're really serious about making change in our life, we need to understand, what is our purpose? What is God's goal for us? What is His overall purpose in our life? And so if we don't understand the ultimate purpose for our life, we are going to wander off the path. We aren't going to stay on direction to what God ultimately has for us in His Kingdom.

And so Paul uses much of the book of Ephesians to point out that purpose. And we know that purpose. We know there is an eternal purpose for us. We know that God wants to bring us into His family. He wants us to be His spiritual children. He wants us to be divine members of His family. Chapter 3 of Ephesians talks so clearly about all of those things.

Now, the challenge then is, we have to live our life in line with that purpose. Yeah, we can understand that purpose. We can know that purpose. But knowing it, understanding the truth, that doesn't cut it. We got to do something about it. We have to live our life in line with that truth, because it turns out, if it's not the will of God, if it's not in accordance with His word, it's not of God. I mean, we have God's will. This is God's will before us. It is His word. And if my behavior doesn't match with His word, it's not God's will. That's how simple it is. If my behavior doesn't line up with the word of God, it is not His will. We can't claim it to be His will.

And so then we've got to strive to be like David. Psalm 143, don't need to turn there. David praised, "Teach me Your will. Teach me Your will." We need to be taught God's will. "Lead me to repentance," David said. "By Your Spirit, lead me in that path." And so, as we discover this word and internalize it that much more, we find there is a prerequisite for knowing God's will. A prerequisite is mentioned over in John 7:17. I will turn there. John 7:17. Here Jesus states a prerequisite for knowing the will of God.

Let's notice what Christ Himself said here in John 7:17. Well, first He gives the Father credit in verse 16, saying, “My doctrine is not Mine, but His who sent Me." So we see the humility of Jesus Christ. But then He goes on in verse 17 and it says something, I think is pretty amazing. He tells us, John 7:17, "If anyone wills to do His will," so if we want to do the will of God, it says, "he shall know concerning the doctrine, whether it is from God or whether I speak on My own authority." So he uses Himself as an example, but it applies to all of us.

When we want to determine the will of God, He says it better match up with true doctrine. It better match up with the teachings of the Bible. If we want to do God's will, we better recognize, what is the teaching that really is from God? What is true teaching? And once we recognize doctrine, the truth, it's not just knowing it, now we have to conform to it. We have to live it. We have to do it. We have to really experience.

I think that's another way to think about it. Wanting to do the will of God, knowing the will of God, and then experiencing the will of God, means we put it into practice. And so, like Romans 12 talks about, not conformed to this world but transformed. What is that good and perfect, acceptable will of God? Well, it's being conformed to Him, transformed to His way. That's what it's about.

And so we submit our own life, our own thinking, our own ways, into His hand, and we commit to it. Not just that we're convinced that it's the truth, but we're convicted. We're committed to it. We're committed to each other. We're committed to each other as His Church because if Christ is coming to marry His Church, we better be a part of that. And so we have to have a commitment to each other as well.

So if someone is straying off the path, can we help them? Can we influence them? Absolutely, because if we are to be wise, especially when it comes to His plan and His purposes, then we have to base our choices and our decisions on His eternal plan. That means, “Oh, what I want, what I think might be fun, what I think might be cool, what doesn't line up with the will of God, that's got to take a back seat. I can't go that way. I have to subordinate my plans to God's will and His attitude and His perspective.” It has to be that.

And so, His will dictates the plan, the walk, for my life. And He's going to direct that path. He promises to direct that path. And so, hopefully, it motivates us and moves us to face the tough questions, to face the difficult questions in our life. I think a difficult question is, "Am I completely willing to surrender to what God says?" That's some difficult words right there, "Completely surrender. Completely surrender." Because that means, what, a little bit of obedience? Mostly obedience? Sort of submitting to Him?

You see, it's not in-between with God. He says it's absolute, total obedience. And that goes against our thinking. It goes against our human nature. But it doesn't go against the spirit that God's given us. It doesn't. If we submit to that spirit, we can give up what we want and we can follow what's best. And God promises, that is best for us. And the results will be so much better than if we amble off in our own direction. And so we've got to ask ourselves, "How much sin do I tolerate in myself? Am I drifting into tolerating sin?"

We know those tiny, little compromises. They can take us into a very bad place. And if we focus more on the physical rather than the spiritual, boy, it's going to be pretty tough to go the right direction. So God tells us, don't get caught up in that way. And, yeah, being different might feel uncomfortable at times. We are set apart from the way the world thinks. And it should help us, really, ultimately, to counteract the world's influence.

And that's a tough question too, "Am I really counteracting the world's influence by submitting to God's will, knowing that will, doing that will?" Which means I'm not going to leave my Bible in my car for the whole rest of the week and never take it out until next Sabbath. That's not what I'm going to do. I can't do that. It means I'm going to obey God. It means that I'm going to pray, develop a deeper relationship. It means I'm going to serve others. It means I'm going to fast, and maybe not just on Atonement. I'm going to draw closer to God.

And maybe I ought to ask myself as well, "Have I brought it before God? Have I laid it out before Him?" Have I said, "God, this is tough because it goes against my nature. Help me. Help me to grow. Help me to submit to you. Show me how I can better apply your will and your way in my life. Help me to do that." How do you think God would answer that prayer? He loves us. He cares for us. He wants to help us and direct us and guide us.

In fact, He looks at us and, you know, He sees the ultimate. He sees the completed project, doesn't He? In fact, a couple of pages over from where we began, in Ephesians 5, if you go to Ephesians 2, notice this perspective that God has. I think it's a powerful, positive perspective. Ephesians 2:19, gives us a little insight into God's mind and how He looks at us.

Ephesians 2:19, "Now, therefore, you are no longer strangers and foreigners," right, we're no longer wandering and ambling around this world and its ways. “But” instead, we're “fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God,” we're in the family. We're in the house. We're a part of God's family, “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building, being fit together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit."

And so God sees us in a positive way. He sees us walking that path toward His Kingdom and He wants to keep us on that path. He wants to continue to direct us that way. He wants us to grow. He wants us to be built together. He has all the best plan for us. And so He tells us, "Don't live dangerously. Don't walk out there into trouble."

Now is the time to be more fully committed to God. These Holy Days that we're coming to, they help us. They help guide us through the mind of God, to be that much more determined to live it, day in and day out. And if we're going to negotiate those minefields that are out here, and if we're going to avoid that spiritual catastrophe that we might otherwise face, that means we've got to use the time. And we've got to use that time wisely and for sacred purposes. That means we've got to walk circumspectly and know exactly where we're going, and strive with ever more determination, to continue on that path to the Kingdom. And it means we know God's will, and more than just knowing it, we are going to put it into practice.

We've got a great God on our side. We can do this. And so we've got to take that opportunity because He's telling us, “That's the time. The time is now.” So let's be determined to make the most out of every single opportunity.

[Nathan Ekama] If you were to answer the question… well, I'll just ask the question, how's that? We'll start off that way. What would you say we are called to fight? As Christians living this way, all the study that you've done, all the messages that you've heard, what are we fighting? Now, a lot of times… So I've grown up in church and going through Y.E.S. lessons and going to camp and talking about all the things, you know, we do have to overcome things. And a lot of times you can focus on Satan. Right? We're fighting Satan. We're fighting this battle, and there are a lot of scriptures that we might go to, and we'll go to some of those today. Last week we also talked about some of the other things. In the introduction, we were talking about what we can be enslaved to. There can be addictions. There are all sorts of things that we could maybe write out a list of what are we fighting. What are the difficult things that we have in front of us? Today, I wanted to dig into this. What exactly are we called to fight? Let's go to 1 Peter 5. This is a good reminder, 1 Peter 5:8. This is quite a visual picture. 1 Peter 5:8 says, "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour."

That’s a… if you think about that, you can kind of paint a pretty graphic picture in your mind that there's a lion that's running around. If you've gone to the zoo, you can see the lion. They usually have a rock. If you've watched Disney's, The Lion King, he's got them up… they're on a rock and they're very stately. I'd like to give you a reality, but that's not how lions work. Lions don't sit on a rock and make themselves known in that kind of like grandiose way. We all think about the male lions being the ones who are doing things, and you can have the male lion there, but really the male lion likes to wait until the lioness has gone and killed the animal. And then they try to take what the lioness and the pride has gotten there.

But they are in the open. They are very much in the open. It was one of those things where we had the opportunity, my wife and I when we were recently married, we went with John Elliot when he was the senior pastor for East Africa and we got to go and we worked with the brethren but we did get to go on a safari as well. And what you'll notice with the lions is, they're out in the open. I feel like, well, that's brazen. And there are actually these birds, these Guinea hens, and will go around and they make a racket. Everybody knows that the lion is there. So we read this scripture and we talk about this roaring lion that is seeking who he may devour. You're like, he's out there. We know that Satan is that roaring lion. We know he's there, but the way the lion hunts and works is that the lion relies on everybody knowing that the lion is there. The lion is there, the lion is there, the lion is there, the lion is still there, the lion is still there, and it just waits until you're so used to the lion that you're not watching for the lion because the lion's been there for so long. And then all of a sudden, boom, the lion gets you. That's how lions hunt.

And so when I first read this scripture, when I was hearing this growing up, I'm thinking about this roaring lion going about and I was like, "Watch out for the roaring lion." I'm pretty sure there's going to be a road sign, it's going to be in orange, it's going to say, "Lion ahead." Right? And I'll know exactly what to look out for. I'm going to know what to avoid, it's going to be easy. That's not really how it functions, but we do know that Satan does work that way. He'll have a diversionary tactic over here. We can see in Genesis how he worked with Adam and Eve to consider something else. It wasn't as in your face, but it was just like, "Oh, well, I'll think about this. I'm kind of going to ruminate on that a little bit and I'll consider it," and you get used to this idea of considering something else. And then all of a sudden you find that you're not quite where you started off, but Satan is there. He is, and we do have to be sober. We have to be vigilant because what happens is, if we're not sober and we're not vigilant looking around, if we're not paying attention, well, then it becomes normalized and we're not watching anymore. And that is where the danger comes, especially with lions.

So let's go to Ephesians 6:12. Here, looking at some of the aspects of what we fight. Ephesians 6:12. Let's start in verse 10. Ephesians 6:10 says, "Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord and in the power of His might. Put on the whole armor of God, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil." So we just read about how Satan functions, how he's like a lion. It says, "But we do not wrestle… For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places." So then we go through and we read about the armor of God and the different components of that armor. And we can talk about how it protects us, and we know that we need God to protect us against these… how does it say? These “spiritual hosts of wickedness” or these “principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, spiritual hosts of wickedness.”

And so we know, we're like, we're fighting against these. This is what we're battling, right? This is what we have to resist. What's interesting, so my university studies and background is in sociology and psychology, and so we'll talk about different things in counseling and family studies. They'll talk about what we as humans might tend to do. And one of the things that we like to do, is we like to… Well, there's actually a parable about it, the parable of the beam and the mote, right? It's very easy for us to kind of look outside. It's easier for us to look outside of ourselves and see issues, either in other individuals. It's also easier for us to consider that things outside of us and outside of our control are what are kind of making life difficult or easier or those, and it's called an external locus of control.

I don't quite have control over these other things, and these other things out here are what are affecting me. It's called an external locus of control, and you can have a defeatist attitude as a result of that because, well, it's just, you know, "If only my boss were nicer to me, if only I didn't have this just grinding down on me, I would really be able to be a much better Christian. If only I didn't have…" And we can kind of have that mentality of things, of life, and that external locus of control can kind of, you know, “The devil made me do it. This woman who You gave to me, had You not given her to me, God, I would have been just fine in this garden. It was perfect. I was alone, I was alone. But it would've been great. It was fine.” And you go to woman, "Well, that serpent." It's this external locus of control. It's not really me. It's not you. It's this other thing that's outside of us. It was Satan, and Satan made me do it.

Let's go to James 1. James 1. It is very important for us to really truly consider what we're fighting. James 1:13. James 1:13 says, "Let no one say when he is tempted, 'I am tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He Himself tempt anyone." This is huge. We need to remember this. God doesn't tempt us. He cannot do that. He's not tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin when it is full grown, brings forth death. Do not be deceived, my beloved brethren. That's a pretty powerful section where you're like, "Well, what are we fighting?" Are we fighting Satan? Now, we know that we're not fighting against flesh and blood in that context, but are we actually fighting against Satan? Does Satan make us sin? You know, evil company corrupts good habits, right? So it's these other things that are affecting us. But it's very intriguing. When I read this scripture, it says, "When desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and that desire," it says in verse 14, "each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed. Then, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, brings forth death." Consider again… Well, let's turn to Genesis. Let's go to Genesis 3. I don't have it in my notes, so we're Genesis 3, where we look at the what is often dubbed the fall of man.

Yeah, 3 verse 1, Genesis 3:1. If you wanted to keep your finger back in James, now that you're all turned back to Genesis 3. But if you want to… follow that, follow along with what you're seeing written in James, and go back to Genesis 3. It talks about when there's a desire, we're tempted through that desire. That desire, when it's conceived, grows into sin, and then sin brings forth death. Let's go now, thinking of that, letting that be in our brains as we go to Genesis 3:1. It says, "Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, 'Has God indeed said, 'You shall not eat of every tree of the garden?’ And the woman said to the serpent, 'We may eat the fruit of the trees of the garden; but of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat it, nor shall you touch it, lest you die.'"

“So the serpent said to the woman, ‘You shall not surely die. For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God,” “Let's have a conversation. I'm just here talking to you. I'm not really going to eat you. I'm not really a lion trying to, like, get a meal here. We're just having a conversation.” “God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened, and you'll be like God, knowing good and evil. So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food,” and she knew that God said not to go and eat it. She knew that, but now, huh, okay. So I'm not really going to die. “God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes are going to be opened.” “Oh, this is new information. I did not realize that. Did you know that you're not actually going to die?”

“So she saw it and it was pleasant to the eyes, and the tree desirable to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her, and he ate.” Is that not exactly what we just read in James? Now, did Satan say, "You're going to eat this and I'm going to shove it down your throat. And you have no choice"? If that was a little bit over the top, I'm sorry. But no, he doesn't. He doesn't do that. She chose. Adam chose. Now he presented an alternative, right? But nobody was there. As we might say today, there was no gun to their head forcing them to do this. There was a desire. The temptation was presented, right? The desire was there. It grew, it expanded, and, "Oh, no, what have we done? We have to go hide from Dad now, and we're going to go off over here in the bushes and pretend we didn't do it." If you've been a kid and gotten into the cookies, right? Do you eat the cookies in the middle of the kitchen? Not usually, right? You find somewhere and maybe you made a pillow fort. You go somewhere dark. You go and you do the things in the darkness so God says, you know, the sins that are in the dark, people go and they do them. So they go and they run and they hide from their dad.

But Satan didn't make him do it, and I think that's an important thing for us to remember. There is a quote that goes back, it's attributed to Walt Kelly back in 1970. He was actually paraphrasing Oliver Hazard Perry. But he said this, he says, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." Oliver Hazard Perry were all in Ohio. You remember Lake Erie, the fight over there. Ohio history. Okay, we got some nods going on. So people remember social studies. But Walt Kelly's quote, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." It is so easy for us to look out and say, "I am my way, the way that I am now because of…" whatever it is. And there may be a lot of baggage in our lives, but the beautiful thing about what God does when He calls us, He says, “I don't care about that.” Not like I don't care about that, but it doesn't matter that that's what we came from. It doesn't matter that that's what we have.

He says, "Okay, so, but I've called you now. Even with all of that, wherever we're coming from," He's like, "I called you from that for us to move forward and let go of that. And let's stop letting that be something that we use or blame as an external locus of control for why we are the way we are." And He says, "Let's actually start a fight." And we already read in Ephesians 6 that He's giving us tools, and we know we heard in the first message the wonderful miracle and blessing of His calling so that we understand so that we have hope and all these other things that are outside of the scope of this message. But He's given us so much so that we can actually move forward and actually fight the fight that we're called to fight. Which is not in reality really all that much farther than right here in our hearts.

Because God looks at the heart and He says, “Are you allowing that to be molded and shaped into who I want to have in My family? Or are you saying, you know, ‘I don't think the tools You gave me are good enough. I don't think that I'm ready. I don't think I can do that’ because there are all these other things"? Are we looking outside? So, today, again, we're going to look at what we're called to fight. We've talked about how it's more internal, how really it is about our desires, our choices and how we proceed from there. But how do we do that? That's like, wow, nice light topic to talk about. How do we actually accomplish fighting the fight that we're called to fight? And it can be the easiest thing and the hardest thing for us to fight ourselves because we can be our own worst critic because we know. And if you've ever been working on something, whether it's a project at work, something within your own character and somebody brings up a failing about that one thing, "I know, I know." And we're all on edge because that's what we're working on. We've been thinking about it. It has been just churning inside of us, and the last thing we want to hear is somebody else criticize what we know we're already working on because I already know about it. And so we can be our own worst critic.

But then on the other side of the spectrum, we can also be, "You know, I've been working on that for ages," and we can let ourselves off the hook because “I don't feel I've been making enough progress. God knows that I've been really working on it, so he'll understand if I shelf it for a little bit.” Or we can rationalize why we don't have to work on something or why we can let it slide for a little bit. We'll come back to it. I won't just leave it go, but I'll work on it. And so it can be easy and it can be hard for us to really, really know ourselves. But it's good for us to take stock and to see how we can do this. And so, we'll just do three points today, three things that we can do as we're striving to actually fight the fight that we're called to fight, going over what we're called to fight and how we can do that.

The first thing we want to do is fess up. Like I say, you know, admitting fault or admitting the problem is half the battle, right? I don't think that's quite the case. If it was that easy if it was half. You can admit things all day long. You can have confession. Doesn't mean you're doing something about it, right? It's not half the battle, but fessing up is important. We need to recognize that we are the problem. You see because at baptism, do we repent of having been friends with Satan and say, "Well, I hung out with him, and that was probably not a good choice. I did what he said. I was a slave to him" and that's what you're repenting of? Is that what we repent of at baptism? It shouldn't be. What do we repent of? We repent of who we are. We killed and caused the death of our big Brother. We're responsible for that. Nobody else. We don't stand before the judgment seat of God and say, "Well, Satan made me do it." It's about us. We're repenting about us. We are the problem. We are the one who caused the death.

Now, Satan will have his consequences for his willingness to go about and try to deceive everyone, but he puts it out there. He says, "Consider this, think about it from this perspective," and we say, "That might sound good." And if we're not too keen, he will deceive even the very elect, as we heard in the first message. Right? But we have to be sober and be vigilant in that way. Let's go to Romans 8:7. Romans 8:7. At our very core, and I'll put caveat when we start off, you know, because hopefully as we're growing, what should be occurring as we're growing, and we all grow at different times, at different speeds, right, in different areas of our life. We can look around and we could see someone having great faith in keeping the Sabbath and be like, “That's amazing. You know, I've struggled with that at work.” And then we might be warriors of faith in another area where we just keep in mind people who are going through difficult times and we're really good about sending cards and keeping in touch and making sure that people don't fall through the cracks.

So we all have strengths and we all have weaknesses, but we should be growing and progressing along our growth arc with God and how he's guiding us along. But when we start off, Romans 8:7, this is where we start from. It says, “Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be.” This is something that we need to remember. It's not that this is necessarily how we are, but that's what we start off working with. That's where we begin. If we don't start changing that, if we don't hang out with different company, if we aren't resisting, then we don't get there. Verse 8 says, "So then those who are in the flesh cannot please God." Our mind, our heart, who we are as carnal human beings is the problem. This is not like a, you know, just beating yourself and, you know… I can't think of the word right now, what it is, but just, you know, just we're not trying to just beat and grind ourselves down and say, "Oh, you're the worst, and you can't possibly get out of this hole. And so, why even try?" We're not doing that. But it is good to take stock of where we are starting from because then we can start looking at what we need to do to move forward.

And there's so much there, it reminds me of the… You know, Paul was talking to one of the churches, and he says, he lists all these horrid things. He says, "As such were some of you." Yeah, that was us. That's what we've come from. That's how living a life where we don't stay sober or vigilant, and where we're not resisting Satan. That's who and what we are, and we have to come out of that. We have to resist that. Romans 7, just back a little bit, verse 14, Romans 7:14, it says, "For we know that the law is spiritual, but we are carnal, sold under sin." And we talked about this again last week and we were talking about the concept of slavery or bond service. We're sold under sin. "For what I'm doing, I do not understand. For what I will to do, that I do not practice; for what I hate, that I do. If, then, I do what I will not to do, I agree with the law that it is good. But now, it is no longer I who do it, but the sin that dwells in me. For I know that in me (that is, in my flesh) nothing good dwells; for to will is present with me, but how to perform what is good, I do not find," and that is the struggle. That is such a struggle. "For the good," verse 19, "that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil that I do… that I will not to do, that I practice."

This is just… I mean, if this isn't one of our prayers on a regular basis, it's like… if you've ever gotten to hang around kids for an extended period of time and you realize that they are also creatures of habit, you're like, "I have to tell you this again?" How many times are we there going to God and saying, like, sheepishly, "Yeah, I'm repenting about this again" right? It's over and over. And here we see Paul sharing this. He is like, it is a real struggle. Verse 21, "I find then a law, that evil is present with me, and the one who wills to do good. For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man. But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” And he goes on, who delivers us from that body? It's Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Again, we have been redeemed and we have been bought, and yet our previous master so desperately wants to regain control. Forgot to turn. Let's turn to James 4, just as background here as we're looking at what we're called to fight. We see here James 4:7, it says, "Submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners; and purify your hearts, you double-minded." Tells us what we need to do. We're supposed to cleanse our hands, purify our hearts, and work on our minds. How many of those are an external thing? Those are all us. They're our choices, our actions, and our thoughts. And God says, "I'm going to give you the tools to do that, but you need to resist and not hang out with poor company, not go down the road and, you know, fail to be sober and vigilant and watching what you should be doing." “Oh, I just happened to find myself down this road.” There's another parable about the young man. Is it a parable? I think it's in the Psalms or Proverbs where it's talking about seeking wisdom. There's a young man who just finds himself down in the bad end of town. What do you mean you just found yourself down there? You know where the bad end of town is. Don't go walk past it so you're not tempted by it. It's the same principle. It's all through it. It's throughout the Bible. God is telling us over and over and over, the same thing. As you start reading, you realize He's just a parent repeating Himself to us because we're kids and we need to have things repeated to us.

But anyway, let's go to Matthew 26. We read in Romans 8 and Romans 7 that really at the core, it is us and we have that war going on within us as we're struggling, trying to follow God, just like Paul was. But in order for us to really accomplish that, we have to do what we just read in James 4, we have to resist the devil and he flees from you. Bullies like an easy target. If we don't make ourselves an easy target because we're hanging around with a bigger God, an actual God, our Dad, my Dad is stronger than your dad. That's what God does. And we also reference Elijah in the first message, where the prophets of Baal. He's like, "Oh, we'll see whose God is better, whose God is going to show up." Our dad did. So if we resist and we fight and we push back there, then we get reprieve from Satan. Matthew 26:40. Here, nearing end of life, Jesus Christ has taken His closest friends with Him to pray. And at verse 40, after He had left them to go off and pray for a little while, a little ways away, “He came to His disciples and found them sleeping, He said to Peter, ‘Could you not watch with Me one hour? Watch and pray lest you enter into temptation. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.’"

We may have a desire, but the flesh is very weak, and that is our struggle. The struggle is, we're physical human beings. We are carnal human beings and we're weak. We are the problem. It's not that we're just trying to overcome Satan. We're trying to overcome our own weaknesses, our own failings. But God gives us His Spirit. He gives us His Spirit, and that leads us to the second thing that we need to do, and it may seem obvious, but if once we recognize and admit that we are the problem, the next thing is, after you fess up, you need to own up to what you need to do. Right? You admit that you're the problem, then you need to own up. And that is very easily just… I just lost my train of thought. But we need to repent and become baptized.

Let's go to Luke 22. And if we are baptized, well, that's great. We have opportunity then to reassess, and we do that hopefully more than just once a year as we're coming into Passover. But we take stock in our relationship when we see, who are we listening to? Are we actually using the tools that God has given us? Are we actually making use of what He has blessed us with, with His Spirit? But Luke 22:31, Luke 22:31, “The Lord said,” speaking to Peter here, He says, "Simon, Simon! Indeed, Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat." That's a pretty big statement and kind of hearkens back to Job and what happened there. But "Satan has asked for you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith should not fail; and when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren." That's a pretty amazing thing to say because you actually hear what Christ is saying, He's like, I know you're going to fail. I know you're going to leave. But when you come back to me, when you come back to me… Christ knew Peter's weaknesses. Christ knew what was going to happen.

It says, "when you come back to Me… when you have returned to Me, strengthen your brethren." Peter said to him, "Lord, I'm ready to go with You, both to prison and to death." And Christ responds, He says, "I tell you, Peter, the rooster shall not crow this day before you deny three times that you know Me." So this is kind of the lead up prior to Christ's crucifixion. Now, let's go a little bit farther down to 54, verse 54 of Luke 22, and they arrested Christ and “they led Him and brought him into the high priest's house. But Peter followed at a distance.” They got one, they got the leader. And so, obviously, the logical thing to do is you hang back because you don't want this movement to stop. So you have to allow…  It's not really what you want to do, but you have to allow that individual to be taken so that we can sustain this movement.

Maybe that's how Peter was thinking because, obviously, you don't want everyone to be gone. Somebody has to continue teaching. Whatever his justification was, but he's hanging back. He's not right there with Jesus Christ like he said he was going. “I'll go with you to prison.” Well, he just got taken. So where are you, Peter? He's following at a distance. “And when they kindled a fire in the midst of the courtyard and sat down together, Peter sat among them. And a certain servant girl, seeing him as he sat by the fire, looked intently at him and said, 'This man was also with Him,’ but he denied Him, saying, ‘Woman, I do not know Him.’ After a little while and another saw him and said, ‘You are also of them.’ But Peter said, ‘Man, I am not!’ And after an hour had passed, and another confidently affirmed”. It's not just like, "Oh, maybe in the firelight you sort of look like the guy that was with Him." No, this is confidence, “confidently affirmed, saying, ‘Surely this fellow also was with Him, for he is a Galilean.’ And Peter said, "Man, I do not know what you're saying!’”

“And immediately, while he was still speaking, the rooster crowed. And the Lord turned and looked at Peter… He looked at Peter. And Peter remembered the word of the Lord, how He had said to him, ‘Before the rooster crows, you will deny Me three times.’ So Peter went out and wept bitterly.” That is intense. Peter recognized his failings. He realized, I just… it's just the look across the room. And sometimes as parents, we've been able to do something like that with kids, and you look and they're like, "I know I'm not doing what I'm supposed to be doing." Well, this is that you know, exponentially. Peter knew that he had messed up. He knew that he had just gone back on everything and all the braggadocious words that he had said about what he was going to do and how he was going to be there and how he was going to defend Him, and he wasn't.

Let's go to Acts 2, because this is the amazing miracle of what God does, and it's what He does in each of our lives, what He can do in each of our lives if we get out of the way in that sense and let Him. Because you see Peter before this, I mean, he was on fire, right? He's like, "I'm going to cut off the ear of the high priest's servant. I'm going to tell you, you're not allowed to wash me because that is beneath you. I’m going to do…” I mean he was out there, zealous guy. He knew what was going on. After Christ's resurrection, he's actually… he’s like, "We need to make alters, three alters." He actually gets interrupted by God. God's saying, "This is My Son." You know, but he's just very out there. He's out in the front. And we see now here in Acts 2, what God has been able to do with Peter, 2 verse 14. It says, "Peter, standing up with the eleven, raised his voice and said to them, 'Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and heed my words.'"

So he starts to give a public address in the temple complex. Now, he was at the high priest's house, hiding and lurking in the shadows before. This is a very different guy. It says, “For these are not drunk, as you suppose, since it's only the third hour of the day. But this is what was spoken of by the prophet Joel.” And he goes through. You can read all the way through to verse 38. This is a very different guy. He is not only just zealous for whatever he thinks is right, which he had been before, and you can see that in his actions and how he was doing. He thought he knew the answers. And here now, he gets that stare. He gets the look and he realizes that he messed up.

And then another wonderful thing, Jesus Christ stayed with him after his resurrection for 40 days, 40 of the 50 days. You think about that, it's 40 out of the 50 days counting towards Pentecost that Jesus Christ was there with His disciples, caring for them, taking care of them, teaching them. Because, I don't know, maybe humanly, I don't know if I would have lasted for 40, 50 days had he not done that. You see, they were going to go back and go fishing. He calls them back and He says, "Come on over here. Now we're going to start teaching and really getting into what you need to know and what you need to understand." But He prepped them, and this is a very different guy. This is a very different guy.

Again, seven weeks earlier, he had gone… this is all in a very truncated timeline. Seven weeks earlier, he denied Christ three times, realized what he had done and was ready to just kind of go off and go back fishing, until Christ pulls them back together, teaches them, says, "Peter, you are the rock upon which we're going to build this. Take care of My sheep, feed My lambs." And He worked with him and He cultivated him to where Peter was usable. Peter was a tool there in his arsenal, in his toolbox that could be used.

Let's go to 2 Timothy 1. The Holy Spirit made an immense difference in the boldness and in the lives of the apostles, as it should be doing in ours. 2 Timothy 1:6, it says, “Therefore…" This is Paul speaking to Timothy, and he goes through the introduction and he's remembering Timothy's history, how things have gone. He says, “Therefore…" He's just kind of reminding Timothy, “I knew you when you were growing up. I saw you, your mother, your grandmother. I have taught you. Remember those things, remember the miracles, remember the amazing things that God has done in your life and how He's brought you to where you are. Remember that.” “Therefore I remind you to stir up the gift of God which is in you through the laying on of my hands. For God has not given a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind.”

Think about Peter before being given the Holy Spirit and think about Peter after. There were some decisions that he did beforehand, you know, not so sound. There were some things that he did beforehand, not very much of confidence. They had fear. He's hiding. He's lurking. He's not really able to do what he said, what he promised he was going to be able to do, and yet after that, what did they do? They got beaten and they're like, "Woo. We were beaten for the name of Christ, to bring this gospel out. What a blessing! What an honor to be able to do that!” That's a very different mindset, right? That's a very different perspective.

But God's Spirit, if we allow it to grow and to work and to stir up, as Paul told Timothy “if we do that, well, then we can have those same effects. We can have that same outcome in our life. We need to have the Spirit to be able to do that.” And it's not just about, okay, if you're not baptized, go ahead and get baptized because you need this. We need to stir it up as we go on because there are a few things that are a greater casualty for the church than time. I mean, when you're doing this for ages and decades and you watch your friends no longer come and then you watch your family not come. Why are we doing this? Time goes on, and it hurts. And who wants to keep doing something that hurts?

We need to stir up the Spirit. If we don't have it, we ask God and we go through the process of baptism to request that. If we do have it, we need to be asking for it because there's no possible way that we are going to win without that component. We went through Ephesians a little bit when we were talking about the armor of God and the things that He gives us. We need to have those because, without it, we're sitting out there in the field. Yeah, we know the lion's there, but you can only stay up so long. You can only keep turning guard, you know, for so long before the lion's going to get you. And so God gives us the tools and He gives us everything, all the equipment that we need, but we need to, again, fess up. We need to own it, repent, have that Spirit. And if we have the Spirit, to stir it up and ask for that.

A third thing that we must do to actually fight what God has commissioned us to fight, which is, again, we're talking about our hearts and talking about how we need to grow, is we need to look up. So we fess up that we're actually the problem. We own up to what we should be doing. All the “therefores” in Scripture, if you go ahead and if you do a word study of therefore and read everything after that, that is Christianity, that is following God.

Everything else is kind of the justification. “So you should know all of these things. These are all in place, therefore do this.” Go to the “therefores," and that's what we're supposed to be doing. So we need to be owning up to what we should be doing. And then we need to look up. We need to request God's guidance. Because we can think we've got a great plan. You can give all the armor you want to somebody. And like David said, he's like, "This armor doesn't quite fit. I don't think it's what I need." You can have a lot of armor and you can be out there in a field with a lion, and you might still get tired and you might say, "What am I supposed to do with this now?" And so that's actually the question. David was like, I don't know that I could do anything with this. And so he went out with God to take on Goliath.

Another thing is like, how many people here like to do projects? Any kind of project, whether it's a craft, working on something at home. What is one of the best things about doing a project?

Man: Finishing it.

Nathan Ekama: That's a new one. I have to try that. Finishing it. Getting a tool. I mean, because you have to have the tool to do the project, right? I mean, you got to have the specific snips if you're going to do jewelry, or if you get a new wrench if you're working on a car. I mean, maybe it's just me. I like tools. I like having the right tool for the job. How many of you ever had a tool you bought, you're like, "I'm going to do this project"? And a few years later, you see it on the desk with the rest of the supplies still in the package. Anybody ever? Anybody else ever do that? Maybe. Maybe you've done it. If you have a tool to do a job, you kind of need to use the tool, right?

So if we're saying, "God, I recognize that I am the problem and I would like to have your help." So we ask God for His help, and He says, "Here's the help, here's the tool." And you go, "Okay, I got it," and you hang it up on the shelf. It's not very useful, is it? We need to do something with that. We need to do something with that. Let's go to Psalms 51, Psalms 51. This is probably one of the more popular psalms to go to as we look at overcoming and we look at the recognition that we battle our human nature and the very core of who we are more than anything else. This is a psalm of David and his repentance after his sin with Bathsheba.

But in verse 10, we'll start there. He asks such a… it's a big request because not that it's just of and by itself an amazing thing, but can you think of that from the human standpoint? He says here, he says, "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me." That means he has actually admitted that he's at fault. You think about how he responded to Nathan, you read about that in the book of Samuel. Read about how Nathan came to him. He says, "You're that man." And he had to admit that that was actually the case. That's a tough pill to swallow. You wonder how long it was going on that everybody knew and maybe he thought he was hiding it. But to get to the point, where he's saying, you know, "Create in me a clean heart, O God."

Is this, again, reminiscent of what Paul was saying? He's like, “I want to do this, but I'm not doing that. I'm doing this over here. I don't have the strength to do it. I recognize that the spirit wants to, but it is so… I just find myself falling back, doing the wrong things.” And David here says, in order to get around that, he's like… what do you need? “I'd like a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from Your presence and do not take Your Holy Spirit from me.” Verse 12, “Restore to me the joy of Your salvation.” This is a real prayer and a real request that we should be making because sometimes, trying to follow God and live the life that we are striving to live, it becomes more of a grind than a joy. And that's just the reality of it. It gets hard. It gets difficult as we were talking about earlier. But “Restore that joy of salvation and uphold me by Your generous Spirit… uphold me by Your generous Spirit.”

We have to ask God for help. We have to ask Him. “I don't know how to use these tools,” so today we go to Google or YouTube and we watch somebody else do the job that we or the project that we're thinking about doing, right? We go and we search those things out, or you find a teacher who can teach you how to do it. It's the same thing with what God has given us. He says, "Here are the tools," and you're like, "I don't even know what that one's called." He says, "Well, here, I'll give you the instruction manual to read about it. This is what love is. This is how you utilize this helmet of salvation I've given you to protect your mind and what it really means for you. It's all right here, and I'll show you. I'll tell you about it if you'll come and ask Me.” So that's why we should be praying before we get into His Scripture, to ask for the inspiration to show us. But we need to ask Him to do that.

2 Peter 2. God's Spirit is what upholds us. His Spirit is what gives us really the energy and the fire to continue to resist the devil so that he flees from us, to continue to say, "No, I've heard that argument before. That doesn't hold any water. Take a hike.” You know, “Go sell your wares somewhere else” because Satan will keep trying. You can also see as you go through Scripture, it's the same story over and over and over. He tries to just create a little bit of doubt at how amazing our Dad is. And we may have experiences with relationships in our lives where you have somebody try to put a wedge between individuals and you might start to question how amazing or how wonderful the person is who you thought was just magnificent only a moment before you were shared this little tidbit that cast doubt. And Satan wants to feed that doubt. And then where do we go with it? He's like, "Oh, just let your mind go. Figure out where that takes you." And where it takes you is division and it separates us from God, it separates us from one another. That's what Satan does. That's what Satan does.

We're here on 2 Peter 2:9. Let me actually get there. 2 Peter 2:9, it says, "the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations and to reserve the unjust under punishment for the day of judgment,” the first half of that verse, “the Lord knows how to deliver the godly out of temptations” if you don't know how to do something, it's probably a smart idea to ask somebody else who does, just saying, you know. My parents would tell me, you know, "You don't want to make that mistake. You would rather learn from somebody else's mistakes." They try to teach you. We try to teach individuals how to do something so they don't have the same pitfalls that we did. Right?

God says, "I know how to get you through that." But He also says, "Are you willing to ask?" He says, "If you don't receive, it's because you don't ask, or you ask and you don't receive because you ask amiss." He says, "Come and actually asked Me and I'll tell you how to do it. I'll help you through it. I've not only given you the tools, I'll also show you how to do the job. I'll also help you through it." He knows how to deliver us. And so we need, or we should go and actually ask Him, look up to Him, ask His guidance. As much as we did as kids asking our parents, there are times that I'm Oh, for the days of autonomy, right? When they're going to be fully self-sufficient from getting dressed, to food, to the restroom. Like, all the things you just want self-sufficiency for. But then you think about it and like, all these times that my kids come to me or my wife, and they're asking for something because they can't do it. And they recognize that we know how to do it, regardless of whether we have the actual time to help them, but they know that we know how to do it.

Kids go to their parents for stuff until they know more than their parents, know more than their parents, and then they don't need to go ask them. Are we the kid who knows more than our parent and be like, "No, I know how to do that because I have a friend who told me that one time they just looked it up on Pinterest and figured out exactly how to do it. And so, I just follow those" “No, I can figure it out just fine on my own. I'll Google it.” Or are we still willing to go to our Dad and actually ask Him? He says, "Come to He. I know how to do it. I'll tell you. I'll tell you the least painful way possible. I will help you."

We need to request His guidance. Let's go back to Matthew 17. Matthew 17, because we can think that we know how to do it. We can think that… you know, you open up that Ikea box and you're like, "I can totally figure this out. I don't need any of the directions." And then, after you can't find panel C and tell it apart from panel B and then go and find that other screw that’s… You know, they are so close in length so you can't figure it out anymore, then you're like, "Well, maybe… maybe I should go ask somebody." Matthew 17:14, “When they had come to the multitude,” and this is Christ and His disciples, “a man came to Jesus, kneeling down to Him and saying, ‘Lord, have mercy on my son, for he is an epileptic and suffers severely; for he often falls into the fire and often into the water. So I brought him to Your disciples, but they could not cure him.’ And Jesus answered and said, ‘O faithless and perverse generation, how long shall I be with you? How long shall I bear with you? Bring him here to Me.’ And Jesus rebuked the demon, and it came out of the child; and the child was cured from that very hour. So then the disciples came to Him privately and said, ‘Why couldn't we do that?’ Jesus said” in verse 20, “Because of your unbelief; for assuredly, I say to you, if you have faith as a mustard seed, you will say to the mountain, ‘Move from here to there,' and it will move; and nothing will be impossible for you. However, this kind does not go out except by prayer and fasting."

We can think we know how to do everything. We can think we're equipped. I mean, we're walking around and Peter knew, he's like, “You are the Son of God. You are the Messiah.” He knew who they were with. “We can go out and take care of this.” Done. Nope. Can't do that one. Don't quite have the faith to do that one. And Jesus Christ says, "This one doesn't come out except by prayer and fasting." There are things in our life that we will come in and, you know, I'm very good at continually pushing on the pull door or beating my head against a brick wall. I would just keep running into it. I'm very good at that. You know, but there are times that God will graciously say, "Hold on, hold on, hold on. The door, you have to pull on it," or "Wait, wait, the wall, you walk around this way." And maybe we can keep trying to do things on our own and we're not ready yet to ask Him. But He says, "Ask Me because I have the know-how. I have the guidance that you need in order to be able to get through this difficulty," and we just have to go to Him. We have to say, "You know what? I don't. I am not equipped to handle this. I need help. I need help."

God's entire plan is about calling us, getting us to the point where we recognize that we need to repent and have His Holy Spirit to be baptized. We have that given to us to guide us then and direct us on to expand His family. Again, same thing we talked about last week. God wants to, you know, have a family at the end. I think I said family over here. So He wants to have a family, right? But it has this process that goes along. He says, "Okay, recognize where you are. You're a slave to sin. Move along this process with Me. I will give you the tools. I will give you whatever resources you need, shy of your will and My will to actually do this. You have the willpower. Come to Me. I'll give you what you need. I will take care of you, I will help you. I will guide you. I will teach you. I want you to end up being one of My children. I want you to be there."

Let's go to Exodus 20:7. I love the opportunity to look at the 10 Commandments from a, I don't know, with a deeper lens, I guess. I think many of us have gone through and we memorized the 10 Commandments, but when you look at them a bit more with the underlying foundation of God's plan and what He wants to do with us and ultimately, hopefully, with all of mankind, those who are willing to repent, right? But Exodus 20:7, it says, "You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain." And so we say, don't curse. Don't say bad words. Don't say, "Oh my," fill in the blank. Right? But when we take on the name, you go and you can read in Revelation about Jesus Christ coming back with a new name and the saints are going to have a name. When you're adopted, what happens? You get a different name. We have the opportunity to have that name. Don't do that in vain. He says, "This is the opportunity that is set before you. I want you in My family. I want you to have this new name. Here's what you need to do. Therefore, because I want you in My family… therefore recognize that you have to overcome something. Not something out here, not something that you can't control, not even your past, but something that's right here that we can work on right now from where you are, and I will give you everything that you need to overcome the difficulties, the pains, the hurts that you've experienced in life. And I will take care of you." And that's what He tells us. And it's an amazing thing. It's an amazing opportunity.

Let's go to Matthew 5 here. Matthew 5:13. This is one of my favorite sections of Scripture, just because it encapsulates what we should be doing and what we should be striving for just in three verses. Matthew 5:13 says, "You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is then good for nothing… nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot by men. You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house." Consider all the things that we've been talking about, about, you know, what I will do that I don't do, and what I will… He’s saying, here are the things that I want you to be. Here's how I want you to live. This is what I would like you to become.

You know, not just fighting and waffling and going back and forth with that struggle, but you can overcome those things by asking me for the tools and for the equipment to overcome. And it culminates here in verse 16. It says, "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven." This is what we're called to do. As we go along that process for moving from a slave and having the calling and the understanding and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit and the continual changing and growing and maturing until we choose to be, say, “No, I would like to stay in Your house. I want to be a servant and a slave to You, and I want to be in Your family.” And He says, "Okay, well done, good and faithful servant. You can be a part of My family."

He wants us to do all of that process so that other people can see it. And when you think about the relationships and the individuals who you know in life, do you like to hang out with people who are constantly externalizing things and saying, "Well, it wasn't actually me. It was this thing over here that caused X, Y, Z to happen"? Or “I would have, but there was traffic.” Or “I would have, but my alarm didn't wake up” or whatever the excuse might be, something that's outside of ourselves. Or do we find that we're drawn to the people who will own up, fess up, and then look up to ask for the help? Those are people that we'd like to have on our teams at work, doing projects. Those are the people who we like to be around because you know what? They're actually moving forward and progressing. And that's the only way that we do that or that we can do that in this life, doing what we were supposed to be doing with God. We need to make sure that we're taking ownership. That's what we're called to fight. Because we look in the mirror every day, and when we do that, “we've seen the enemy, and it is us.”

[Mr. Gary Petty] So, predestination. It is incredibly complex of a concept. And yet it's very, very important because we have in the United Church of God—in most of the Churches of God—we have a rather unique viewpoint of this. Many of our doctrines—whether it's the Sabbath—you can find other churches that keep the Sabbath, or even some other churches that keep the Holy Days, or so many of the beliefs that we have; our viewpoint on predestination is very similar to the Methodists and some other Protestant groups. But then we have something we add to it that's different and it's unique. I have only found some Sabbath-keeping groups back in the 1800s that have the similarities to this. So, we have a unique sort of viewpoint of this that I want you to understand it because it is a complex problem.

Predestination. The most common belief about predestination in Catholicism, Lutheranism, all the Calvinistic churches, the reformed churches, the Puritans… There's a belief about predestination that is the majority actually of Christians that there's another view that evangelicals have and the old Methodists have. But the view that is the most common actually goes clear back to Augustine who lived in the 400s. It is surprising how many doctrines today that's the Catholic Church and in mainline Protestant churches, their doctrines go back to him. I was going to bring... I don't have all his writings at home, I was going to bring the 12 volumes I do have, and they're all the size of an encyclopedia. Okay? No, I have not read all of Augustine. I've read enough to call him Augustin, which is his name in Latin. So, I feel like I can personally call him Augustin. But outside of that, I have not read all 12 volumes. And neither should you, by the way. But if you want to understand certain teachings, Augustine, he developed the concept. He looked at the Bible and he said, "God had a relationship with Israel, now He has a relationship with the church." He went through the places in the scripture where the word “predestination” is used and he formulated some concepts.

One was when Adam and Eve got kicked out of Eden. From that point on, every human being at conception is evil and condemned to hell. Everybody's predestined to hell, except God comes along and He pulls a few people out of hell, you know, their predestination to hell, and He gives them eternal life to show God's grace. So, that viewpoint there, although it's been modified by the Catholic Church and modified by others, that's the basis. The basis of predestination is an idea that God has already predestined people to heaven or hell. That's where God is working from, and we're all on one path or the other. Evangelicals say, "Yes, we're all on one path or the other, but God can pull us off the one path and put on the other." So, they look at it, "No, we can still respond. People who are going to hell can still come back.” And, you know, that's why you got to get out and predestined land, this is why you got to get out with missionaries. You can bring people back into line and get them off that path, but there's these two paths. And everybody's making their decision in this lifetime. Everybody makes their decision in this lifetime, and everybody ends up in one place or another.

Do human beings really have free will then? And there's a... They struggle with that. Some true Augustinians say, "No. You really don't have free will." God wakens you up, and your free will says, "Oh, I like God.” From that moment on, you're saved.  And, you know, we're going to talk about free will because there is some elements about free will we have to understand. And we're going to understand salvation, which predestination has to do with salvation. Why did God allow human beings to be exposed to evil? And that was another thing that really just confused people and why it would help develop the common doctrine of predestination. And then one of the big issues in predestination is, can a person resist God's grace? And the answer for those from the Augustinian or Calvin—John Calvin believed the same thing, which he was a Protestant reformer—that no, you can't resist God's grace. This is where we get the concept you hear, "Once saved, always saved." Okay? This all goes back to this: everybody's on a road to either heaven or hell at birth. God… In the pure Augustinian “Eh, you're already determined. You're going one way or the other.” The more evangelical is “Nope, you can get people off the path to hell and bring them over, and it’ll change their destination here.” But the general agreement is once you come into this path, you can't get off of it. Once you're saved, you're saved. That's it. And, you know, you're going to be in heaven.

So, we're going to look at predestination. It's complex. So, I'm going to try and—and there's no way to cover this subject—but try to give you a concept of it by going through, first of all, some very simple things everybody knows. Okay? We're going to start with what we know. In fact, some of the things I'm going go through here at the beginning we've actually covered in the last six months in a number of sermons. So, it's even some things we've talked about. Okay? So, let's start in Isaiah 46 because there is predestination mentioned in the Bible. And we have to figure out, what does that mean? What is God telling us? Isaiah 46:8. God is talking here, and He inspires Isaiah to write:

Isaiah 46:8-10 "Remember this, and show yourselves men; Recall to mind, O you transgressors. Remember the former things of old, For I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like Me, Declaring the end from the beginning, And from ancient times things that are not yet done, Saying, ‘My counsel shall stand, And I will do all My pleasure,’"

 Now, some have taken this to the farthest extent that God determines everything. Well, God doesn't determine everything. I mean, does God...like in the sermon I gave a few weeks ago, you know, God even told Hosea at one point, "You tell the Israelites I'm not picking their kings, I'm not picking their princes. They pick their own kings. I wouldn't pick these people." There was a point where God just said, "I'm through picking your kings. You pick your own kings." And, of course, at that time in Israel, it was an absolute mess, and they were in rebellion against God.

So, we do know what God says is He has a plan and He works through history to carry out that plan. Now, if He determines everything, then we have no free will, because we have to define free will here in a minute too. If we really have choices to make, and that's what free will is (the ability to make choices) then God can't make all the decisions for us, or we really don't have choices. So, He makes the choices He needs to make to determine His plan to be carried out. Much of the rest of it is us and what we're doing. We're the source of so many of our problems.

But we also have to go back to Adam and Eve. And I talked about this in a sermon recently, but if we go back to Adam and Eve, and we know the story. Adam and Eve only knew good. Right? They only knew good. Satan came into the picture. The problem is God let him. I mean, you can only come to a couple of conclusions here. He either snuck in and God was like, "Oh, no. I didn't see him," or God let him come into Eden, which means that He was deliberately allowing, He wasn't causing, allowing Satan to present evil to Adam and Eve. He was allowing them to do that. And, of course, we know what happened. Satan came in, deceived Eve, Eve convinced her husband, and they both sinned. And their experience changed. What they were now was a mixture of good and evil. Excuse me. All they'd ever known was good. All they had was good. Now they were a mixture of good and evil.

One thing about predestination (the Augustinian concept of predestination) is all people are so evil, absolutely corrupted, that at conception, they are condemned to hell, and God doesn't care. That's what they deserve. It's only through the mercy of God that a few are saved. That happens right at conception. You're already condemned because He looked at your nature and said, "It's totally, completely corrupted." Now, we know it's corrupt, but we also know when we look at humanity, it's still capable of good. Now, being capable of choosing good sometimes doesn't equal salvation. We're going to have to go through that. But human beings become a mixture of good and evil. They're a mixture of good and evil. So, they're capable of good, but they're also capable of evil, and everybody does both. That's what happened. So, Adam and Eve now are kicked out of Eden, and they have to learn to start making choices. The only conclusion we can really come to is that God allowed Satan to come into the garden to influence Adam and Eve, to present them with a choice because it was His plan to do so. In other words, this is, “Okay, I'm stepping back. You get to now find out what evil is.” which means that it is God's plan for every human being to have to choose between good and evil. Now, you and I have a problem that Adam and Eve didn't have, but it didn't seem to help them. You and I were born into a world of good and evil. They were created in a world with good. So, we're already at a disadvantage.

But there's another problem. And once again, I mentioned this at a sermon recently. And that is when the apostle Paul says that Satan is the god of this age, he's the god of this age, he literally means that. When Adam and Eve got kicked out of Eden, Satan became the god of this age. He influences every human being, every human being, you and me, everybody has been influenced by Satan. He's the god of this age. So, what happened is—remember this—they get kicked out, they start having children. It doesn't take long, Cain kills Abel. It doesn't take long until murder takes place. You know, they start producing generations of people, and it becomes a mess. There's all kinds of rebellion against God and there's all kinds of sin. Why? Because every human being is capable of both. And who's the major force of influence in their lives? It's the god of this age. So, you look at that and you think, "We're doomed." Right? We're absolutely doomed because that's what every human being is, but remember God has a plan. And we're going to look at that plan, and we're going to look at how predestination fits into that. So here, a loving, caring God allows human beings to be exposed to evil in order to teach them how to choose. Now, that means you have to have a certain amount of free will. Free will is the ability to choose. Adam and Eve had free will. They could choose. They were shown these two things, and they chose the wrong one. So, human beings have the ability to choose, but human beings are, by nature now, influenced by Satan. We choose back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. One day we choose some good, the next day we choose some bad. Every day, we choose some good and some bad. That's what human beings do. And so, nothing really works.

Let's go to 1 Peter 1 because... No, I tell you what. Before we go there, let's go to someplace else because I want to talk about...I was talking about this idea that human beings are cut off from God. There's something even more profound happening here. Being cut off from God, and you'll see this all through the Bible, it say that human beings live in spiritual darkness. Spiritual darkness. How do you and I come out of darkness? This is what Jesus says in Matthew 13. This is the parable of the sower. We're not going to read the parable of the sower. He gives them an explanation of what it means. He gives them the parable. They're confused to what it means, and then He gives them an explanation. But I want you to really think about what Jesus says here.

Matthew 13:10 "And the disciples came and said to him, 'Why do you speak to men in parables?'" Now, what's interesting is you know by what He says, "These people don't understand anything you're saying." They didn't understand what He was saying either. "Why do you teach them in parables? We get it, they don't." "No, you don't," He said. So, He gives them an explanation. Why would you tell a parable? You know, sometimes I'll tell a parable in a sermon. Why? To help you understand the sermon better or tell a story to help you understand the sermon better. Right?

Well, that's why Jesus was talking parables, to help them understand. Well, let's look at what He says.

Matthew 13:11 "And He answered and said to them, 'Because it has been given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not yet been given.'" To them, it has not been given. I want you to think about that. Jesus said, "I am telling you the truth, and I am deliberately hiding the truth from them." And who was He talking to, by the way? He was talking to Jews who followed the Old Testament, who kept the Sabbath and the Holy Days and didn't eat pork and all kinds of things that we would agree with, who worshipped the true God. And He says, "Now I'm telling those people, I'm telling them parables because I don't want them to know what I'm teaching."

Matthew 13:12-13 "For whoever has, to him more will be given, and he will have abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand." And then He gives a prophecy from Isaiah that says the same thing, and then verse 16, here's what He says to His disciples.

Matthew 13:16-17 "But blessed are your eyes for they see, and your ears for they hear; for assuredly, I say to you that many prophets and righteous men desired to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it." The earth, the world, all human beings live in spiritual darkness. And Jesus Christ said to His disciples, "They live in spiritual darkness because we”—He and God—"had put them in spiritual darkness."

This is real important to understand. Humanity, since they got kicked out of Eden has been ruled over by the god of this age and has lived in spiritual darkness. And God has not shone the light much throughout history. He has, He's shone it, but not much. Why would He do that? Why would He leave us in darkness and then, not even talk to people to let them know they live in darkness? Why is He doing what He's doing? Well, He has a plan to get humanity out of darkness, but remember, we have a premise here. God, in order to have human beings learn what they have to learn to meet their ultimate purpose—which is to the children of God—they have to be exposed to good and evil, and they have to learn to choose between the two. They have to learn to choose between the two. So, the world for thousands of years has lived in darkness and the world for thousands of years has had human beings that keep trying and trying and trying their mixture of good and evil, and nothing really works. 1 Peter. Now, let's go to 1 Peter 1.

So, are you with me so far? Because we're in the part here that we've covered a lot. And you all know, you've been around most of you a long time.

1 Peter 1:17-19 Peter says, "And if you call on the Father, who without partiality judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves throughout the time of your stay here in fear;" Your stay here means on earth. "knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot." So, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ is how God reconciles man back to Him to start to bring him out of the darkness. Notice what he says next.

1 Peter 1:20 "He indeed was foreordained before the foundation of the world, but was manifest in these last times for you who through Him believe in God, who raised Him from the dead and gave Him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God."

So, he tells the Church, Peter does, that the reason you have hope and faith is because you know from the foundation of the world. In other words, the moment Satan whispered in Eve's ear and the thought entered her mind, the play was put in. It was just started.

From that moment forward, Christ was going to die. He was going to die in a certain time. There was going to have to be an Abraham, there was going to have to be an Israel so that the Messiah could be there. There was going to have to be a Judah. Now, all these things were going to have to happen and there was going to have to be certain things happen for a church to be about. There was going to have to be all kinds of things to happen throughout history so that you and I could be sitting right here on this Saturday afternoon. God put in play… We're going to have to do this here and this here and this here and this here so that we get what we want in this time of darkness. We're not accidents here. You know, either we have received something special, which sounds arrogant, or we truly are arrogant. Now, if we really receive something special, we shouldn't be arrogant, we should be absolutely humble and a little bit afraid. What does it mean to be a recipient of something special from God? This has to do with predestination. So, God put a plan in place. And still, the world has stayed in darkness, except for these little periods of light, little bits and pieces of light that appear all over the place. But basically, the earth is still in darkness. And God is holding back certain things, His intervention. He's actually holding back His intervention. You know, Paul writes in 1 Timothy that God desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. God desires every human being to be saved. And yet, we know from the Scripture they're not. That tells us something else too.

God could force everybody to be saved by grabbing hold of our mind and making us automotons. That wouldn't be that hard. I mean, God could do that. He doesn't do it. Instead, we are supposed to participate. We're supposed to have some say in whether we do this or not. I'm talking about free will again. But our free will's all messed up. Right? Every day, we just choose good and evil back and forth. Our free will's all messed up. And yet, that free will is supposed to set how we participate with God so that we can receive salvation. But God desires all people be saved, but all people aren't going to be saved. It's what He wants, but He's not going to force that to happen. So, God is going to carry out this plan without intervening with free will. He's not going to stop human free will. And yet, He's going to end up with His outcome. How does He do that? How does He end up with the outcome that He wants without interfering with our free will? Well, in some cases, some people will go to the lake of fire because they will not submit to what He's doing. But it appears that the great majority of human beings eventually will. How does He do that? This comes down to the concept of election. Okay? So, we know where we are, we see what God's doing. Throughout history, in order to carry out this plan, He elects people or groups of people. He chooses them.

Now, the word elect in Greek is not what we think of in English, you know, which is to actually vote on something. Although in Greek, I mean, if you belonged to Athenian democracy, you could elect somebody by voting for them. But it literally just means to choose. To choose. So, God chooses people, places, individuals, all through history to carry out what He's doing to accomplish what He wants to accomplish. So, this concept of election, which is mainly used as a term in the New Testament, you will see all through the Old Testament where God says, "I choose. I choose Abraham. I choose this person. I choose these people." He chose ancient Israel to fulfill part of history, what he wanted done to complete the plan. But there's something very, very important to understand about ancient Israel. We've made this point before. But if you're going to understand predestination, you have to understand this. Ancient Israel was elected by God to carry out His plan. But you think about this. Now, some of you are joining the Wednesday night Bible studies that we're doing on the minor prophets. And every minor prophet so far, except Jonah, every one we've done so far, there's a part in there where God tells ancient Israel, "I am going to punish you. And sometime in the future, I will bring the Messiah and I will save you." You find in Ezekiel, you find in Isaiah, you find in Jeremiah. "I will pour out My Spirit upon you. I will give you a new spirit." In other words, understand they are not promised salvation during the time of the Old Covenant.

Now, there were a handful. I mean, Abraham, Moses. You know, you find people who received salvation. We know it because they received the Holy Spirit. They received the Holy Spirit, so they received salvation. But the great majority of Israelites did not receive eternal salvation. He told them over and over and over again, "There will come a time when I will give this to you." This is the problem now that the Augustinians and Calvinists have a problem with, Augustinians and Calvinists. Wait a minute. What do you mean there'll come a time? They're dead. They're already in hell. So, here's what they did. Replacement theology. All of the promises made to ancient Israel have now been switched over and applied to the church, which makes God a liar because when He says to any of the prophets, "You go to these people and you tell this, I am going someday to bring salvation to you," Ezekiel said, "And there will be a resurrection. And all the bones will come together. The people will come up and breath will come into them, and God will give them His spirit." That's a lie. If that's been switched to the church, what Ezekiel said to them was a lie. I think replacement theology is one of the most terrible heresies there are because it makes God to be a liar.

But we have a problem. Wait a minute, wait a minute, remember, the whole premise of predestination is every person in their lifetime chooses whether to go to heaven or hell, every person. And predestination is where you go one path or the other, and God's already set you down the path anyways. God's already chosen your path, and you're headed down it. How can you have people in the future being saved? So, they changed all that to mean something totally different.

So, what we have is God electing people to do things for Him to carry out His plan. And then we have, in the New Testament, election for salvation. There are people in the Old Testament elected for salvation, but it's not the general thing that's happening. We do have it in the New Testament. 1 Thessalonians. I'm sorry, 2 Thessalonians 2. You see why this is important. We're attacking one of the core doctrines of the majority of Christians, well, that know their doctrines. You know, today, we have two types of Christianity. We have cultural Christianity, and we have some semblance, an attempt at Biblical Christianity. The cultural Christianity is the overwhelming number of people in the country. It has nothing to do with the Bible. In fact, for the first time in history, according to Barner Research, a majority of people in the United States don't believe in the Biblical God, a majority. It's over 50%. They believe in something, you know, some spiritual thing out there. Maybe it's the universe. “We worship the universe” or whatever. There may be some god, but they don't believe in the Biblical God. That's unbelievable. That number is unbelievable. And out of the people who do believe in God, an overwhelming number of them believe that Jesus really wasn't divine and He sinned.

So, you know, I listen to the radio and I hear these, you know, old-time preachers talking about repenting and accepting Jesus as the Son of God and all of this, and you realize they're talking to a very small amount of people in the United States. The majority don't accept that anymore.

2 Thessalonians 2:13-14 Paul says, "But we are bound to give thanks to God always for you brethren, beloved by the Lord, because God from the beginning,"—notice this—"chose you." Okay, election. You're chosen. This is written to the church. From the beginning, God knew you before you knew yourself. Okay? God knew you before you knew God. “For salvation through sanctification by the spirit and belief in the truth to which He called you by our gospel for the obtaining of the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ."

So, your election isn't the same election of ancient Israel. The promises made to ancient Israel were, "You follow me," God says, "and you will have rain in due season. And I'll drive out your enemies. You'll have good crops and lots of strong children. And you won't have any diseases." God hasn't promised any of that to us. What He's promised us is eternal salvation in the family of God. That's what He's promised us.

Remember, ancient Israel was told, "And someday, you'll get salvation." Okay? "You'll get all this physical stuff and then someday you'll get salvation." I'm not saying God doesn't give us physical things because He does. But that's not the core of the gospel of the church. The gospel of the church is, "Repent, be baptized, and become part of the family of God. Receive salvation." And that's why the gospel message of the church broke away from Judaism because it went to the world. It went to everybody. Everybody gets this message. Election today is everybody that God calls and He chooses to come into the understanding of what they're called to do today. And it's not to receive a physical blessing. It is to receive salvation. We're getting closer and closer to understanding predestination.

Now, remember though, God's Spirit has not been made, and it says here by the way, through sanctification. You can only be sanctified in this sense by having the Holy Spirit given to you. So, the overwhelming number of people in the history of humanity have never received God's Spirit, never. It wasn't even offered to them. In fact, they were blinded and God left them in darkness. Jesus said, in fact, the people I'm talking to—Who were the people of God. The elect of God in the sense that they were physically supposed to do something for God on earth—He said, "Yeah. They're not going to get this either, guys. That's why I'm not telling it to them plain." He left the world in darkness. I mean, He had 12 guys, and that was it, and some women. I mean, there were other people that were coming along with Him. But, you know, He didn't have that many people. And He said, "No. I'm showing you the real light." These people are in half-darkness, even the Jews of Jesus' time. All of Israel throughout all their history was at best in half-darkness. And a lot of the time, they were in total darkness. At best, they were in half-darkness. The church is called to come fully and completely into the light, and salvation is being offered to us. So, the question comes up then, okay, God has to get along and give us the light. Yes. You and I don't turn on the light, you and I don't determine the light. We don't know what light is.

Before God comes into our lives, we are at best in a little bit of light. I mean, at seven years old, I began to understand God's way a little bit. But I was just in a little bit of light. I didn't have God's Spirit in me yet. It took a long time to get little bits and pieces of light until one day the light comes on. I said, "Oh, my, there's a lot of darkness out there." In our case, there's a lot of darkness in here because the light sheds inside of us too. So, we are called to come out of the darkness. Israel never came totally out of the darkness because they were only offered future salvation. Oh, man, that just drives predestination people nuts. How do you have a future salvation when everybody's being judged right now? But you and I are not called to a future salvation, our day of salvation is right now. God turned on the light. He called you, He elected you because He chose you. And now, you must participate. Can we resist that? Let's go to Romans 8. We're starting to get an understanding here now of your calling and why your calling is different than... It's similar to Abraham's because Abraham was offered salvation. It's different than the average Israelite throughout history because they weren't called. Well, they were called for future salvation. But the whole world, the whole world has a chance at future salvation.

Romans 8:28-30 "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose."—We're back to you can't come out of the darkness on your own. Someone's got to turn on the light, someone's got to call you out, someone's got to choose you—"For whom He foreknew." Okay. Remember, you didn't discover God. "Yeah. I was looking for God. I was really searching and searching for God, and I'm so glad I found Him." No, you didn't. He found you. Why do you think you were searching for Him? Why do you think you were searching for Him? He found you. He knew you before you ever knew Him. "For whom He foreknew, He also predestined." Okay. So, what is the destiny of those who God calls and chooses and sanctifies? Remember, to be called and chosen, you have to respond with faith. You have to respond with obedience. So, God calls out of the darkness. You say, "I'm here," and He shows you some light, and you respond to it. So, He chooses you. So remember, He initiates everything. You and I don't bring anything to this table except our response. And we respond and we respond, and He works and He works, and He brings us out into the light. He says, "He also predestines to be"—To be what?—"To be conformed to the image of His son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover, who He predestined, these He also called, whom He called, these He also justified, and whom He justified, these He also glorified." You have received a predestination. You were called by God because He knew you before you knew Him. And He called you, and you responded. And because you responded, He says to you, "You now have a destiny."

Now, let's just step back a minute though and realize every human being God wants to give this destiny to. Now, we're going to get into our predestination this is really all about. It's about when God decides to give you your destiny. It's not, "Oh, you're predestined to hell, you're predestined to heaven," it's, "I have a destiny for you, and I will determine when you are called," God says. "And I will determine how you are called and I will determine if you receive it by your response." And when we do respond, He says, "Whom He called, He justified, and whom He justified, He glorified."

When Jesus went to heaven, He said to His disciples, "I go to prepare a place for you, and I will come back." You understand what he was telling them. "You have no idea what I got in mind for you. I'll go wait for a while, but when I come back..." Those people there with Him at that point when He said that, it was personal. "I'm going to go prepare a place for you, John, Peter, James. James, I got something for you. You won't even imagine." He had a destiny. When God called you, He had already predetermined, "Here's what I'm going to give you." You know, when Jesus Christ comes back, every one of us has a role to play in His Kingdom and I don't know what it is, I don't know what your role is. I don't even know what my role is. But you're being prepared for that. Every single one of us is being prepared for specific reasons by God so you have a destiny. You are predestined. It's not that you wake up every day and say, "God, do you have any idea what you want to do with me?" And God says, "I don't know. I've been wondering why I called you anyways." That's not what goes on here.

The Almighty God looks at you and says, "I called you, you responded. I chose you. Christ died for you. I sanctified you by giving you My Spirit. And My Spirit is going to work in you and create you until you become My child. And when you become My child, I got things for you to do." That's your destiny. Oh, not me, right? No. That's your destiny. You're predestined. Now, your neighbor has a predestination with God too. It may not be until the Great White Throne Judgment. God doesn't call everybody now, and He sure doesn't choose everybody now. Many are called, few are chosen. Lots of people get the call, few people respond. You know, well, if you don't pick up the phone, okay, I'll call you later, I'll choose this person. God's choosing people and then giving them a destiny. And this destiny, by the way… You know, it's interesting, every place you see the word predestined or predestination in the Bible, it never has to do with going to the lake of fire. It always has to do with becoming a child of God, every place. In other words, “I've got something for you. I'm working it out.” So, here's the problem then. Does that mean you and I can't resist that? And that's where even a Calvinist, much more than the Augustinians, the Calvinists say, "Nope. You can't resist it. You're going to be there, and you're going to be up there laughing while you watch the people in hell suffer because God chose you and not them." What kind of God would do that?

The bottom line is you're predestined because you're already called. Other people haven't reached that stage where they're predestined yet because, you know, predestination has to do when God calls you. It starts you into the plan and gives you your destiny. It has to do when God calls you, puts you into the plan, and gives you your destiny. Can we resist that? Hebrews 10:26. See why I said this gets a little complicated? Now,I’ll tell you what, after services, I'll be up here in case anybody has questions. You know, I've done that. Sometimes, people will come up. Sometimes, as I told some people this morning, I said, "Oh, no. I probably created more questions than I answered." That's the great thing about the Bible. You now have more questions. Right?

Hebrews 10:26-29 "For if we sit willfully after we have received the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins." Now, this is more than just the knowledge of truth. We're going to see that we are sanctified in part of the covenant. Not the Old Covenant, the New Covenant. The New Covenant is for salvation. Our salvation isn't the future, our salvation is now. He says, "But a certain fearful expectation of judgment, and fiery indignation which will devour adversaries. Anyone who has rejected Moses' law dies without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. Of how much worse punishment, do you suppose, will be found worthy who has trampled the Son of God underfoot.”—See, you have accepted Jesus Christ as that sacrifice—"counted the blood of the covenant by which you were sanctified a common thing and insulted the Spirit of grace?"

Remember, everyone is called by an act of grace because you and I can't get out of the darkness. The world is in darkness. And Jesus even said, “And right now we're not even trying to get everybody out of the darkness. It's time for some people, it's not time for others." Now, we are supposed to preach the gospel, by the way, but that doesn't mean we're supposed to shout it from the treetops, and woe one unto us if we don't. But that doesn't mean God's going to call millions and millions and millions of people right now. He's going to call those who He is choosing to this is their predestination time to give them their destiny.

But here we see that you can give up on that destiny. You can give up on that destiny. And this is what the Arminiuns… It was Arminius in the 1600s came out and said, "You know, predestination as taught by all the Catholics and all the Protestants is wrong." And he figured it out, and he was right. He put together a really good explanation on why it was wrong, but he still missed something and that's what I'm going to go through too here today, what he missed. But he understood "No, no, no. You can't look and say God's got everybody on two paths." No. People can change. People can repent. And just because you're on the one path doesn't mean you can leave it. You can leave it and go to the other path. He figured that out. He still was locked into though predestination has to do with your decision today, which puts you in heaven or hell. He couldn't get out of that one.

So, the spiritual blindness is caused by Satan. Only God can open our minds. So, that's an act of grace. A person can lose their destiny by returning to the darkness. So, even though you're predestined, God acts as if it's there because it is there. So, He talks about being erased from the Book of Life. That's a frightening thing. No, no, your name's already there. God says, "Yep, you're there. I've given you everything." Everything you need to be there, God has given to you. Understand that. Everything you need, He's either given to you or He's going to give it to you. He doesn't give us everything all at once. But everything you need to fulfill the destiny He has for you. I mean, you know what excited people about "Star Wars?" "Luke, you have a destiny." Okay. That's what excited everybody. Well, all Christians have a destiny. All Christians have a destiny. And we're predestined for that because we haven't achieved it yet, but we can lose it. We can go back out into the darkness.

Now, here's what's unique about our understanding of this. And it goes back to what I'd already mentioned, the issues of the promises made to Israel about a future salvation. We understand that when Jesus Christ comes back, all those who were predestined to be called during this age and stayed with it, they didn't give it up, they stayed in the light, they will be resurrected to be with Christ, right? Then starts a whole new day of salvation. A whole new day of salvation starts because all the people that are on earth that have gone through the tribulation are now going to have to be taught God's way because their lights come on. Satan's removed. The prince of darkness is gone. Satan's removed, and God turns on the light for the whole world. And so, physical Israel has to be gathered together for wherever they're scattered all over the creation. They have to be gathered together in a... You know, physical Israel goes back to the land. They’re in Isreal, around Jerusalem. Why are they there? Because Christ is there and He says, "Okay. You did nothing but fail. You're now going to go teach people about Me." They have a physical job to do. They're still elected to do that. We're going to talk about that in a minute. But what do we do, the saints that are changed? We've got a world to convert. Understand there's a world to convert because that's their day of predestination. It's their day to choose. And God's not going to say, "You know, you're going to show up in outer Mongolia." And someone's going to say, 'Well, we've decided to remain Buddhist." It doesn't work. The light's on folks. The light's on. You can't do that.

The light will shine in the whole world. And what happens at the end of that? Someone asked me. This is my conjecture, okay? So far, I've stayed pretty much with what the Bible says, but this is my idea. Why does God release Satan at the end of a thousand years? My personal belief is human nature is so sinful it will take that long to get it out of the human race. Every generation will still have a piece of it. I think at the end of the thousand years, they really won't have a choice anymore. Here's what you have to understand about God's judgment. Human beings choose good and evil all the time now, don't they? Every human being out there chooses, and some people become almost totally evil, and yet, some people are really good. But they can't choose salvation. You know why they can't choose salvation? Because at best, they're partially blind, and at worst, they're totally blind. How can you choose something you cannot see? You can't choose something you cannot see. The bottom line is nobody really has total free will until God turns the light on. You can't choose what you don't know.

So, we like to think we have lots of free will, and we do, but in the concept of salvation, you can only have, only have free will when God turns a light on because now you have something to choose. So, we can't get too haughty about ourselves. "Well, you know, I chose God." You didn't even know what to choose, I didn't even know what to choose, except God came along and turned the light on and the darkness went away. He said, "Oh, this is the way I have to choose." Understand that. That is why there's the Great White Throne Judgment. Those people lived in various stages of darkness, most of them in total darkness, their entire lives. So, their free will was remarkably limited. They may choose to be a nice person, but they don't choose salvation because they don't even know what it really means. So, the purpose of the Great White Throne Judgment… This, okay? This is what's missing in all other explanations of predestination. And it's why they have to change all the promises made to ancient Israel because those promises then extend out to everybody.

The purpose of the Great White Throne Judgment is to resurrect all the people who had ever lived and God turned the light on. So, think about it. Satan's released for a little bit there at the end of the millennium. Why? Because those people have to make a choice. Life is getting so easy and good. They're living under Jesus Christ, they don't even have anything to choose anymore. Everybody has to choose. But then Satan's removed. Why? All the people at the Great White Throne Judgment, they know what Satan's like. They all lived under his rule in darkness. For the first time, the light's on, and now they actually, they get to choose.

For the first time, they actually have the awakening of their total free will that says, "I can choose salvation or not salvation," because they never had it. It's a little scary though for you and me though because this is our day of salvation. Our choice now is for eternity. Your neighbor, the guy who's an agnostic and just parties all the time, doesn't care about anything, probably the lights never come on. He's never really had anything to choose. And that I think brings...This opens this up enormously to understand that predestination is the destiny God wants to give for every human being. And predestination has to do when God elects you, when God chooses you to give you that destiny. Let's look at two last scriptures here, Ephesians 1.

Ephesians 1:3. "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation..."—in Him. Remember what He chose to do at the foundation of the earth, or before the foundation of the earth? Sent Jesus Christ. So, from that point on, He was going to choose throughout history. So, we've been chosen. What? To be on a path that we can't come off of? No. We were chosen to have the light come on, we were chosen to be sanctified, we were chosen to be given the opportunity that this is our day of salvation.

Ephesians 1:4-6 He says, “that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He made us accepted in the Beloved.”

Just think about this. What is the destiny God's given you? What is it that He says every day, "This is why you get out of bed in the morning," it’s to be His child forever in His family. That's what you're predestined to. Now, we already read you can leave it. I have to keep saying that because I don't want people to think, "Well, I'm predestined. I can't lose it." No. But we don't have to fear all the time that I'm going to lose it because God will make it work as long as we hold onto God. God won't fail. God won't fail us. We have to become bitter, and we have to go back into the darkness, but God won't fail us.

Ephesians 1:7-10 "In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of His grace which He made to abound toward us in all wisdom and prudence, having made known to us the mystery of His will, according to His good pleasure which He purposed in Himself, that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth—in Him."

Even here, He says, "The salvation is completed when all things are gathered to Christ." Our salvation is completed when? At the resurrection. Our salvation is completed at the resurrection, but that destiny awaits us. It's what God's preparing us for.

Ephesians 1:11-12 He says, "In Him also we have obtained an inheritance, being predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, that we who first trusted in Christ should be to the praise of His glory." And that inheritance is not the land of Israel or rain in due season, or good crops or a quiver of children. That inheritance is the Kingdom of God. That is your destiny. That's what God has called you for.

So, now let's go to Romans, our last scripture we'll look at. Predestination's pretty interesting and it's pretty deep. Yeah. You have been predestined, not in the way Augustine said, not in the way Calvin writes, not in the way the Anglicans believe or the Presbyterians believe or others believe. I can't say, I don't know what the Presbyterians believe on this. Most of what they call the high churches believe in this. In Romans 9, we won't read it, but Paul is saddened because he says, "I'm an Israelite." And he said, "My people aren't the main focus of God's work right now." He said, "The church is the main focus of God's work, and I wish all my people to come into the church, but they're not." So, you know, he's writing to Rome. Most of the people there were Italians, although they were probably people from all over the world lived in Rome. So, I suppose the church would be the same way. And there are some Jews there too. We know that from certain things that are said. And he's saying, "You know what? I wish this place was just full of Jews. Everybody else too." But he says, "I really wish all my people were here, but they're not here." And it bothered him. But he said, "This is part of God's plan. God is doing something. And right now, the focus of what He's doing is not Israel and the physical promises, but the focus is God in the church and Jesus Christ leading the church and salvation. That's the main focus." And so, let's go to Romans 10, and then I want to finish up with just a few verses in Romans 11.

Romans 10:11-13 He says, "For the Scripture says, ‘Whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame.’ For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich to all who call upon Him. For ‘whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved.'"

He does it once again, "Shall receive salvation." Now, what he's saying here is the promises made to the church are greater. The promises made to the church are greater. And he says, "And there's Jews in the church." You know, there are Israelites in the church. There were all kinds of people from all over the world in the Roman Empire in the church. And he says, "I still feel bad because, you know, I wish more of my people were here."

Romans 11:25 Paul says, "For I do not desire, brethren, that you should be ignorant of this mystery, lest you should be wise in your own opinion, that blindness in part has happened to Israel until the fullness of the Gentiles has come in.”

He looked at his people and said, “They're not completely blind but they really live in darkness." His people didn't accept Jesus Christ, for the most part. Some did. He said, "They live in darkness." And why? Because the purpose of the church is not just to be the representatives of God on earth but to receive salvation now, to receive our destiny when Christ returns.

Romans 11:26-27 He says, "And so all Israel will be saved as it is written." Now, this is very interesting. He goes back to the Old Testament and says, "The Deliverer will come out of Zion, And He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob; For this is My covenant with them, When I take away their sins." You know what? He goes in the Old Testament and says, "Yeah. Here's the promise made to Israel. Their salvation comes in the future. This is a future prophecy." He says, "I look at my people, I wish more would come into the church till I realize their time of salvation is in the future." But see, all peoples anywhere who are called into the church can say the same thing. I mean, if you're Polish, you could say, "Ah, the time of salvation for my people is in the future." Right? If you're from India, you could say, "The time for salvation for my people is in the future. The time of salvation for the church is now. Yet, Paul agonized over this because, you know, he wanted his people, but he realized that wasn't going to happen. It says, "So, all Israel will be saved." I'll make a mention about that. Some people say, "Well, does that mean that by an act of birth, all Israelites are saved?" Well, that's predestination in the extreme. This is why Augustine said, "See, Israel has to be the church. All the church will be saved because God's not going to save all Israel." He just said they're blinded. No. The point made here, and some commentators will tie this into a rabbinical saying of the 1st century. And Paul, of course, had rabbinical teaching. I'm not sure he was doing this. But “all of Israel” was a term they used that just meant, you know, “all the Israelites are going to do this.” It’d be like saying, "Everybody in Tennessee agrees with this." No, they don't. Right?

The point about “all Israel” is... Remember too, if you were an Israelite and you rebelled against God and you became a pagan, you were no longer an Israelite. So, all the Israelites who turned to God, which seems to be the overwhelming majority just like it seems to the overwhelming majority of humanity, the majority are saved. If they're not saved, it's because, well, you're not an Israelite anymore. I mean, it's like saying all Christians will be saved. If you leave Christianity and you go out and become an atheist and hate God, you're not going to be saved. Because why? Well, you're not part of the church anymore. So, all the church will be saved doesn't mean everybody who says they're in the church will be saved. The same way with Israel. But the point he's making here is “Your time is still in the future.” This is a new concept of predestination in terms of how it's taught today. It was obviously Paul because he reads the Old Testament. Yeah. They'll be resurrected, and they'll have an opportunity to receive their destiny. So, their time, they're predestined to be called at that time, They're not predestined to be called or chosen at this time.

Romans 11:28 He goes on, "Concerning the gospel, they are enemies for your sake." He's telling the Gentiles there, the Romans there, you know, they've actually been enemies of God because why? It says because they're blinded. They've got bits and pieces of it. I mean, they have part of it. You know, he's writing at a time when the temple still exists. They're still doing sacrifices. They keep the Sabbath. They keep the Holy Days. And he says, "You know, they got part of this, but they're still partially blind." They may not be totally blind like an absolute pagan out here or the worst barbarians. The Scots and Irish, those are the worst barbarians. They painted themselves blue and fought naked. That's just weird. I mean, for Romans, that was unbelievable. You wore armor, and you marched in, and you were highly trained. And these guys come screaming out of the brush naked and painted blue. Okay. Now, how did I get off on that? Okay. I get a little, you know… The Scot-Irish in me, and I guess I, you know... Every time I hear bagpipes it's like, "Oh, we're going to go to war, eh?" Anyways, let's get back to Paul.

Romans 11:28 He says, "Concerning the gospel, they're enemies for your sake. But concerning the election, they are beloved for the sake of the Father." He says, "You know, they're still elected by God." Why? Because God loved Abraham, and God promised Abraham some things. See, He's still going to work through those people in the future. Why? Because He promised to Abraham. That's why. That's what He said. So, they were elected still. But their election isn't the same as the church because they haven't received salvation yet.

Romans 11:29 He says, "For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable." He says, "But when God told Abraham, 'I'm going to do this with your descendants,' He meant it." When God tells you, "I have prepared a destiny for you," and you're predestined for that. If you want it, He means it. He's not calling that back. He's not going to change it. He's not going to change His mind. He's not going to decide, "You're not worth it." Only you and I can remove ourselves from that. He will not. That's the God we worship.

Romans 11:30-32 He says, "For as you were once disobedient to God, yet now having attained mercy through their disobedience," the disobedience of the Jews, "Even so, these also now have been disobedient that through the mercy shown you, they may also obtain mercy. For God has committed them all to disobedience that He might have mercy on all." God chooses when and how and where to bring about salvation. He's not done with the world yet. He's not done with humanity yet, but understand what has been offered to you. God has a predetermined plan of salvation that involves when He's going to do things and what He's going to do. It involves firstfruits, and it involves people after the tribulation during the millennium, it involves the people in the Great White Throne Judgment.

You and I have been called, and He's not going to interfere with our free will. He's finally actually given us a choice. But you know why? I have come to the conclusion the only way we can love the way God loves is we have to have free will. We have to choose to love. If He takes away our free will, we'll never love, not the way He does. I'm not sure we will ever love the way He does. But you know what I mean? We'll never learn what we have to learn without free will. So, we had it in this limited way making our decisions every day, and then He turned the light on. And now, we're making a choice that's going to determine our destiny. What a privilege. And that's just by the grace of God. That's all that is. That's just by the grace of God. As Christians, you've been called and elected for salvation. You have been predestined to be an eternal child of God. Do you want the destiny? Then that leads us to the question when we understand what's actually happening, there's only one question that matters. Will you follow the destiny God has for you?