Amen. So we've finished discussing
at length the debate and defense of the apostle Paul and Barnabas
going up to Jerusalem and dealing with the brothers up there and
how that Peter and James defended Paul and Barnabas and having
told the Gentiles that they really only are required to do two things. That's verse 29. I'll start at
verse 28 and 29. For it seemed good to the Holy
Ghost and to us. This is what the apostles wrote
to the Jews that was sent to them by the apostles Paul and
Barnabas. It seems good to us and to the
Holy Ghost, which meant that they prayed about this decision
to set some boundaries around the conduct of the Gentiles.
It seemed good to us and to the Holy Ghost to lay upon you no
greater burden than these necessary things. And mark what he says.
These are necessary things. that you abstain from meats offered
to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, and from
fornication, from which if you keep yourselves, you shall do
well, fare ye well. So there were some boundaries that was placed upon
the Gentiles in this grace into which they had come. And those
boundaries were basically social markers granting a distinction
between what they were and what they are now. Social markers,
meaning that prior to their conversion, they ate blood, they ate things
strangled, they were idolaters, they engaged in idol worship
and eating the meats that were offered to those idols in the
pagan temples, especially in Corinth and in Ephesus. And the
essential truth that we derived last week and the week before
is that when you become born again, there's a radical change
in your life. It is not a perfect change, but
it is a radical change. And there are some practical
things and some moral things that must immediately give way
when you are truly born again. One of them is you're done with
idolatry. You are no longer engulfed in a practice of idolatry like
you were in your unsafe state. It's different for everyone,
but it's the same in this sense. When you really have a true encounter
with the living God through Jesus Christ, you are now going to
make a 180 degree turn from certain lifestyle practices that are
alien to the character of God and alien to your call to the
gospel. And we saw it before in 1 Thessalonians
chapter 1, Verse 10, if you can pull it up, this is where Paul's
speaking to the Thessalonians who were largely Gentile believers. He told them, we see how that
the word of God made an impact in your life in that, watch this,
I actually got to start at verse nine, in that, for they themselves
show us of what manner of entering in we had to you. How that you
turn to God from what? Right to serve the living and
true God and not only is the verb turned critical That's what
we call a conversion when you turn 180 degrees and go in another
direction But the next verb is important too and it's the verb
to serve So when you and I are turned by the grace of God from
that path of darkness and idolatry We are now on a course where
we are not only knowing God we are serving God Actually, this
is an advised term too, because the word served there is a common
assumption in all religious circles that the God that you pay homage
to is the God that you serve. It's a common assumption that
whatever God you pay homage to is the God that you serve. Now
I'm making that point before we go on to close down our study
because I really do believe that one of the areas in which Christianity
today is woefully deficient is in the area of the believer's
understanding of his relationship to God in Christ. When you are
bought by the blood of Christ And it's revealed to you through
the gospel. You are no longer your own. You may think that, and culture
may tell you you can do whatever you want to, but there are radical
consequences for being ignorant to this reality, that he bought
you with a price, the precious blood of Jesus Christ, and he
owns you lock, stock, and barrel. What that means is when you really
understand what it means to be redeemed. That's what the word
redeem means You're on the slave block of sin. He purchased you
he owned you And redemption means that he has the right to tell
you what to do You then become his servant his do-loss his slave
Our king james bible does not use the word slave because obviously
in the 16th century When the King James Bible was written,
slavery was prominent in Europe as well as in America. So the
idea of using the term slave was too pejorative. It was too
painful of a term to so blatantly use for those who would be slaves
of Christ. And so they use the word what?
Servant. Servant is a much more docile
term, less offensive. And in our day, it actually evades
the reality that when you become born again, you are a slave of
Christ. So you turn from being a slave
of sin and now you are a slave of righteousness. That's Romans
chapter six. And as a slave of righteousness,
your whole duty is to pursue your Lord in the context of faithful
obedience. Does that make some sense? Right.
And so your whole life is discovering what it means to know the good
and perfect will of God. That's our whole life. Our whole
life is circumscribed around learning what it means to do
the will of God from the heart. As Romans six again, verse 14
and following the assumption is you understand that you're
a slave of Christ. And that's the way the apostles
talk, particularly Paul, Peter, and James in their epistles. When they opened their epistles,
how did they open them? Paul, a slave of Jesus, Peter,
a slave of Jesus, James, a slave, even though James was the Lord's
brother, he called himself a slave. And so that the implications
of that statement are designed for you and me to know this,
that he didn't set you free from the slavery and bondage of sin
for you to just do whatever you want to do. And so the Christian
that's actually born again, if he or she is really truly born
again and finds themselves ignorant of the mandate to follow Christ
as Lord, is going to have a real difficult time in their life
because the Spirit of God is going to be rubbing up against
everything that you do when you think you're free to do whatever
you want to do. You're going to have a hard life. You're gonna
have a difficult life. There's no happier life for the
believer than the life of the obedience of faith Right, there's
no other way to be happy in Jesus except to what trust and what
that's that's exactly the whole concept And so here what the
Gentiles were told in verse 29 was hey you guys You serve the
true and the Living God now, so you can't sit at the table
of Christ and and eat the bread and drink the cup and then go
down the street and sit at the table of demons and drink their
blood and eat their bread. The two are mutually exclusive
and the text for that, as you know, is first Corinthians chapter
six, as well as first Corinthians chapter eight. So go to first
Corinthians chapter eight. I'll just show you one treatment
of this by the apostle Paul, and then we'll move on. 1st Corinthians
8 now the principle that we're drawing up because we don't largely
engage in overt practices of idolatry today ours are more
subtle aren't they much more Aligned with our simp are our
sinful and fleshly Peculiarities we're not bowing down before
Buddha dolls or images of different Hindu gods or some of our own
man-made gods, but we are bowing down when we don't have a clear
understanding of our assignment to secularism. We are bowing
down to worldliness. We are bowing down to the cultural
gods of our society where we are not clear on the moral parameters
and ethical breaks that are necessary to determine whether or not this
is a redeemable experience I'm engaging in. You may not have
understood what I meant by that, but it fundamentally means this.
When the Spirit of God is working in your life, John 16, 8, he
convinces you of sin, righteousness, and judgment. That work is a
continual development in our character, where if we are walking
in fellowship with him, He shows us what sin is in general that
is the breaking of god's law, but then he also shows us what
sin is Specifically and that is certain bits that we have
towards things that god knows are wrong The goal of the spirit
of god is to tutor you into obedience to christ And when he's working
with you, he will let you know. Hey That's not right And he will
patiently deal with you until he has to deal firmly with you
Until you are persuaded that the thing that you are engaging
in is sin Because what we do as human beings is we rationalize
the things we like So here we read in first corinthians chapter
8 verses 1 through 5 verse 6 rather verses 1 through 6 The way paul
addresses the concept of idolatry and especially eating meats and
things of that nature Here's what he says now. It's touching
things offered to idols. That's what they prohibited in
Acts 15, correct? We know that we all have what? Now watch this, this is what
I meant by when I said that we like to trick ourselves, we love
to bait ourselves, we have this uncanny desire as human beings
to engage in logical or rather illogical battles in our own
mind against things that we should know are right. So what Paul
said is, we all have knowledge. And that is a fundamental truth.
And in this context, he's saying we have knowledge about false
gods. He says, we have knowledge about
false gods. The same thing would be the word
for idol, just in case you didn't know. We all have knowledge about
that. Paul lived in a culture where Jews worship monotheistically
one God and the pagans worship many gods. And Paul says, we
all have knowledge. Knowledge, however, when not properly utilized,
only does what? Puff up. Do you guys see that?
All right, so I'll show you something here. This is going to be practical.
It'll work really well for us. And the word puff up is again,
a term that Paul is using to simply means to inflate with
what? Pride. To inflate with pride. To inflate with pride. And where there is pride, the
inflation of pride, pride loves to argue. It loves to argue. And all pride needs is fuel. to argue in a debate where pride
wants to win a battle, win an argument, hold a position. Just
give me the fuel and I'll fight you. Even if the fuel is not
even good arguments or even, you know, valid evidence, he
takes any kind of fuel he can to go no but and oppose what
is right. So he says knowledge puffs up
when knowledge is not rooted in charity. Do you see it? Knowledge puffs up when knowledge
is not rooted in charity. The puffing up of knowledge comes
where charity is either absent or where charity
is restrained. Where a person does not opt to
be charitable in their understanding and assessment of a thing. Implications
then to be drawn from this is that believers are to always
walk in what love and Where you walk in love another rule comes
into play and that is Love worketh no ill towards its neighbor.
That's Romans 13 Love does not work any ill towards his neighbor.
So what love becomes is a grid or a prism or a framework by
which we determine how we are going to act on that knowledge
that we have. Love becomes a grid or a framework
or a prism by which we determine, how am I going to act on this
knowledge? Will this knowledge that I have
be used by me to hurt someone or help someone? Will it be used
by me to get my own way or bring glory to God? That's where we
are with the concept of knowledge Versus or knowledge and love
now, here's what Paul says in verse 2 and if any man think
that he knoweth anything He does not know Anything as he ought
to know now what he says by this is almost seems redundant, but
it's not he's saying you can know about a lot of things But
there's always the possibility that you can learn more about
that very thing you think you know. You guys follow that? Right. And so where there is an understanding
that there may be more to the story than what I know, humility
is the best sort of frame or attitude to have. Because as
we learned in our women's theology class last night, When we are
assessing a thing and drawing conclusions or inferences or
assumptions, if we draw conclusions about a thing using insufficient
knowledge, especially when it comes to a person, we are inclined
to be slandering them. If we draw conclusions about
a person's actions or about a person's words without fully knowing that
individual's true motive and the background to why they said
what they said or did what they did, if we jump to conclusions,
we are in danger of slandering and slander is misrepresenting
the facts about a person. You got that? Misrepresentation
of a fact about a person is slander and a fundamentally in the law
of God in the Decalogue that is called what bearing what false
witness? It's called bearing false witness
Thou shalt not bear false witness against your neighbor and what
that would require is that we would suspend our judgments until
we've gotten all the data in and And once we've gotten all
the data in, we've then got to categorize the data in a way
that actually reflects the facts. Because you can have all the
data and shape it the wrong way, like a lawyer, with the objective
of having an outcome that you have already preconceived. And
at that point, it's subversion. It's not any kind of solid revelatory
analysis, objectively speaking, concerning the facts. And so
the Apostle Paul says here, that if any man thinks he knows anything,
he does not know yet as he, he knoweth nothing yet as he ought
to know. Then he moves back into the love issue. After reprimanding
us under the obvious fact that we are not omniscient, verse
three. But if any man love God, if any man love God, what? The
same is known of him. So now mark this, charity or
love, Either way it goes, I want you to mark this. Charity or
love is always, I want you to get this, demonstrable. It's always demonstrated. It's
always evidenced. It's always seen by what it does. If any man loves God, it's gonna
be evident. Like, you know, and this is one
of the reasons why I say to people, don't tell people you love God. Why are you doing that? What's
the point? Are you trying to persuade yourself
that you love God? And people said, I love God.
So what? What good is saying you love
God? When in fact, the only evidence that you love God is how you
live and how you act. Are you guys following the logic?
So there are some concepts that are diminished in their significance
by our words and love is one of them Love is diminished in
its significance by our words because love really is an action
word Right, but you'll notice that lots of people love to banter
about the term love don't they? I love you. I love you. I love
you. I love you. You don't have to say that that
many times I'm gonna know in a few minutes whether you love
me or not By how you act towards me? right and so Paul is saying
but if any man loves God the same is known of him and and
if we continue to develop his argument of Love versus knowledge
or love utilizing knowledge appropriately we are doing this in relationship
to the context in the context is of as true believers if you
love God and you have knowledge you are not going to overtly
and Intentionally do something like sit at the idols table and
eat pagan meats Offered to idols and drink blood when you know
that's going to give a horrible testimony to the exclusivity
of Christ in your life You guys follow that so let me go on and
develop that just a bit Notice what it says, as concerning therefore
the eating of those things that are offered in sacrifice unto
idols, we know, here's the knowledge thing, that an idol is what?
It is nothing in itself, but it is the concept. And what you
and I are always dealing with is ideas. Idol, an idol is nothing
in itself and that there is no other God but one. For though
there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth,
as there be gods, many and Lords, many. So you have that in parentheses.
So this is what we basically are doing is making an exception
to the statement. He just negated the fact that there are any gods,
but one true God. And yet there are multiple gods
in the sense that men call them God, right? But to us, there
is, but what one God, right? The father of whom are all things. And we in him and one Lord, Jesus
Christ, by whom are all things. and we buy him. How be it, here's
what he says, there is not in every man that knowledge. And
what he's saying is, not every man, even not every believer
has been able to thoroughly work through his experience in life
to conclude that there is just one God. So I want you to follow
this, because this becomes a principle of dealing with immature saints
versus mature saints around convictions and struggles that people might
have from their past practices that they may be liberated from,
but liberated from on a theological sense, but in an experiential
sense, still struggle with. Okay, so what happens is an individual
may be delivered from the practice of drinking, right? And that's a big deal. That's
a big deal in our culture today Alcohol smoking drinking all
that's big in the sense that people are free to do it. So
it's pervasive everywhere But there are people who have been
brought into bondage to alcohol And it has devastated their life
So they become a Christian they become a believer and you may
feel as if you're free to drink You may be able to demonstrate
that that's true in the scriptures and that very well may be true. This is what we call knowledge.
But now here comes a situation where you invite people over
and you've got a large group of people over and some are weak
and some are strong or some are in between, some are ambivalent
and some don't even know their own temptation capacities. And
you start just allowing, you know, the spirits to run free.
That's a good way to put it. And the brother who is trusting
in Christ, who has struggled with that, is actually having
a real battle around him observing you and your freedom to do that. Okay, he's having a real battle.
Ma'am, you got to tone it down. He's having a real struggle with
you because he does not know how to walk in the exclusivity
of one God or in the liberty which is in Christ without it
leading him back to the bondage that he was in prior to Christ. You guys hear what I'm saying?
Now, at this point, we are struggling with how am I to exercise a liberty
that I may have, I may or may not have it, because some people
say they have that liberty, when in fact what it is for them is
a bondage. They call it their liberty, but
it's a bondage. Now it may be a liberty in the
sense that there is no explicit testimony or commandment that
is prohibiting you from that practice. But it's not a liberty
for you because you haven't been able to demonstrate authority
over that thing. So you are actually subtly engaging
in it at a level of addiction as well. In fact, it's at a high
enough level of addiction that you don't care about other people
stumbling when you engage in your liberty. Are you guys hearing
what I'm saying? So now, if you feel as if you
can justify what you're doing through the scripture, but you
don't really care to examine or analyze whether or not it
has actually brought you into bondage, nor are you willing
to admit that it has the capacity to bring other weaker Christians
into bondage, well, you fit the script of verse one and verse
two, right? Knowledge, what? Puffs up. Love edifies. So the choice to
be loving and edifying in a context where my liberty could be abused
or be a stumbling block I am going to not exercise that liberty
so that my brother or my sister does not have to stumble around
me because I'm too selfish to understand that the highest priority
of my conduct is love. Am I making some sense? Right?
That's very critical. Very critical. You never want
to say I'm free to the detriment of another person. And I hear
the battle all the time around. Well, you know, I can't help
if they don't have any control. Yes, you can Yes, you can you
can help that they don't have any control by not aiding and
abetting They're stumbling if they're gonna stumble let somebody
else be the cause of their stumbling. Not you Am I making some sense
again? That's first Corinthians chapter
6 as well as 2nd Corinthians 6 where Paul plainly said if
my brother is Is offended by my meats romans 14 as well and
we'll get there when we get back to our roman series I will never
eat meat ever again in my life That's not even the point So
did you get that? No now notice what he said Notice
what he said He says if my brother stumble at my meat I am resolved
to never eat it This was not for health purposes This was
for the purpose of demonstrating such a level of love Around his
knowledge that he'd rather be a means of edification Even if
it means losing his liberty Does that follow? Right and if we
were operating out of that ethic in the church We would be able
to overcome a whole lot of things that are going on and be a means
of the edification of our brothers and sisters and and what this
is really talking about What Paul is really working through
in our context is the witness of the glory of God in the life
of the people of God, the witness of God's glory among ourselves.
Listen to what he goes on to say verses seven and following. And I'm going to go through verse
13 because this is, this is probably the direction we need to go for
tonight. How be it there's not in every man that knowledge for
some with conscious of the idol unto this hour eats it as a thing
offered unto an idol. You guys see that? And their
conscience being weak is what? Right. So they want you to eat
meat that just came from the market where they offered it
to idols. And for you, it's not a problem
because your conscience is fixed on the true and the living God.
But for them, they're struggling. Got that? They're struggling
because they don't know how to disassociate the meat, which,
according to the word of God, is clean and pure and through
prayer can be eaten. Right. That's what the word of
God says. But he doesn't know how to disassociate
that from the elaborate sacrificial Prostration that he engaged in
all his life around meat. So he's struggling Watching you
eat that meat when he knows how many prayers he prayed to that
false God His conscious is weak verse 8 But meat does not commend
us to God. Do you see it? For neither if
we eat, are we the better? Neither if we eat not, are we
the what? So see, one of the things I try
to do is help our brothers and sisters because we'll get on
these extremes. This is why I talked about the
ball last Sunday, how that we're like on this spherical circle,
spherical circle, where you're sitting on the top and you're
trying to stay in the center. You're not on a flat line, you're on
a half circle. And you're on that circle and
that circle is always moving. And you are always struggling
to stay in the center of God's will and not shift from one side
to the other. You're struggling not to shift
to licentiousness, which means, you know, let us sin that grace
may abound. And you're struggling not to
shift to legalism, which is touch not, taste not, handle not. That's
a real tension, isn't it? And that's the battle we're all
fighting. And it takes grace to stay in the center. takes
grace to stay in the center. And here's what Paul is saying.
He's saying to us, don't go around being scared of meat. Don't tell
people that, oh, you can't touch that. You can't taste that. You
can't eat that. That becomes a whole nother false gospel.
You know, some of our brothers and sisters will discover that
they have been excessive in their eating of meat. And now they're
developing high blood pressure and other maladies as a consequence
of excess, right? But it's not because they're
eating meat. It's because they're eating too much. The issue is
not meat. The issue is excess. Gluttony. We forgot that word. Gluttony
is the word in the Decalogue. Thou shalt not be a glutton. You know, you should not covet
in excess. You should not go over the top
And uh, and and be such a person that doesn't have the temperance
necessary to live a productive life if you and I are gluttons
As proverbs chapter 23 puts it we're actually being self-destructive,
aren't we? When we don't take care of our bodies, we're being
self-destructive and at that point, um, you know God has to
deal with us then too because our bodies are his We don't get
to just do what we want with our bodies And so it would be
the same way with those who are about us. Now, here's what he
says. We are not the better if we eat, and we are not the worse
if we don't. But take heed, lest by any means
this liberty of yours become a what? Stumbling block to them
that are what? That's right. For if any man
see you, which have knowledge, sit at meat in the idol's temple,
shall not the conscience of him that is weak be emboldened to
eat those things which are offered to idols? You see what he just
said? He sees you eating. He's gonna eat, but he's gonna
eat it differently than you eat it. You're gonna eat it free,
recognizing one true and living God. He's gonna eat it bound,
inclined to now pay homage to idols as he eats it. And that's
going to defile his relationship with Christ. Did you guys hear
what I just stated? He cannot, he cannot because
he's not, he hasn't grown enough. He hasn't matured enough. He
hasn't walked away from that sin or what was a sinful practice
for a long enough period of time to disassociate the freedom to
eat the meat without finding himself inclined to prostrate
himself and say words of prayers over that meat to certain pagan
idols. And here's what Paul says. He
says in verse 10 for if any man see thee which have knowledge
to that meet in the idols temple and shall Shall not the conscience
of him that is weak be emboldened to eat those things which are
offered to idols and through Your what and through your what? not love not love not love See
love work is no ill to its neighbor You know what the text says?
He didn't say through your love He said through your knowledge
Notice and through your knowledge shall the weak brother what?
Right and that's a again. That's a I love the way God puts
these roadblocks in the scriptures And these roadblocks are designed
to cause you and me to slow down Around the area of miss applying
grace To perish means to stumble in this context. And I'll develop
it a little bit for you so you can understand what we mean.
So what Paul is doing by the spirit of God is laying down
roadblocks, those speed bumps in the road to slow you down. And these are high speed bumps. So the faster you go, the rougher
the ride is. And it's rough enough for you
to know that you really shouldn't be going this fast. Y'all know
those speed bumps that I'm talking about? That really jack your
car up. And they're there in order to
get you to slow down in your mind. So here's the point. Biblical roadblocks, biblical
speed bumps are designed to stop you from abusing your conscience. You guys hear me? Biblical roadblocks
are designed to keep you from abusing your conscience because
this is what I said earlier Christians get knowledge and they start
jacking their conscience up trying to use knowledge as a justification
for them doing some selfish deed and Then they discover that they
can actually manipulate their conscience by stacking a bunch
of verses in their favor But you can't stack the Holy Ghost
You can't stack the Spirit of God and you really can't stack
the totality of Scripture So here's the evidence that you
and I have built a forge of lies to justify what we want to do.
Here's the evidence. We don't continue in God's word
as John 8, 31 and 32. Cause when you continue in God's
word, you're going to run into those speed bumps and those speed
bumps going to cause you to go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There it goes again. Whoa. And
it's actually challenging your position. is showing you that
you held to an idea that does not square with the totality
of the Bible. Now you have to go back to square
one and assess your conclusions and determine whether or not
your conclusions are biblical. And if they are not, you got
to do what? Reject them. You got to repent. And that's
what the word of God is designed to do. And this is why we have
to continue in the word. The reason you continue in the
word is so that you keep a healthy conscience. Your conscious cannot
remain healthy without you being in the Word. Can I get a witness?
Your conscious, see, your conscious is just as vulnerable to manipulation
by your own wicked heart and volitions as anything. Apart
from the Word of God being the regulatory principle that's informing
your conscious continually, your conscious will just do whatever
you want it to do. Now, it'll say, hey, no, you know what,
Jess? I don't know about you, but I remember a verse that said
something about and then I go shut up To my conscience, right
shut up Okay, man, I'll shut up but I do remember that verse
I don't know where it is it's so shut up Okay, man, okay, okay,
you know what you do I'm with you and your conscience will
quickly recede to the backdrop and allow your volition and your
lust to overrule your conscience. Your conscience is only as strong
as the word of God abiding with your conscience as its regulatory
principle. Am I making some sense? This
is why Christians can sin so grievously against God, because
the word of God is not abiding in them. This is what John said
in first John chapter two, and you have overcome the wicked
one because the word of God is abiding in you. You are strong
in the Lord and you have overcome the wicked one because the word
is in you. The word is only in us to the
degree that we continue in that word so that that word continues
in us. Am I making some sense? And believers
who want to mature and want to grow and want to develop make
it a habit to stay in the word. Cause we know to get away from
the word is to get away from the light. To get away from the
light is to get away from the strength. To get away from the
strength is to set me up to sin. That's absolutely right. That's
exactly what's going to happen to us. Cause you and I don't
live in a vacuum. We're tilting on that ball of license and legalism
all the time. And temptations are thrusting
themselves at us all the time. Are they not? So here's what
Paul says. And through your knowledge shall
the weak brother perish for whom Christ what? It's a radical device
that Paul is using here to warn the church not to abuse biblical
texts in the name of liberty by giving them a vivid picture
of what could happen, what could happen to a professing believer
if you fail to understand that your job is to be a means of
edification to them. And when I use the word professing
believer, that's exactly what I mean. Now, you and I don't
know the difference between a professing believer and an authentic believer
until the last day. Will you get that? You and I
don't know the difference between a professing believer and an
authentic believer until the last day. So what if in fact
you You know, you gratuitously embrace a person as a believer. They heard the word, they made
a confession of faith, they've been baptized, they come to church,
they understand the gospel, and you're fellowshipping with them,
and they stumble back into a pattern of sin as a consequence of your
actions. And they leave the church, and
they go deeper into that sin, and they die in that sin. Are
you guys hearing me? This is what Paul meant. when
you cause your brother to perish for whom Christ died. Now, two
conclusions are to be drawn here. It's possible that that individual
was never truly saved and all he needed was an opportunity,
an excuse to go back into the world. You follow that? That's
always possible. But it's possible that he was
saved and because he had a major weakness of sin, You became the
culprit by which that sin got a hold of him again. And it was
a sin that would lead to his physical death and ruin his chance
to be a vital fruitful believer in this world. He will go to
heaven, but he perished in this life because his life was ruined
by a bondage that you aided and abetted to bring him in. Did
you guys get what I just stated? You guys get that? What did I
parse between? I parsed between his eternal
life in his soul and the physical welfare of his body in this world
as something that he ended up bifurcating because of sin. That's
1st John chapter 5. And here's the point. You and
I are not indestructible Christians in terms of our physical bodies.
We're not indestructible. Meaning, Christians can be in
bondage to alcohol, they can be in bondage to pornography,
they can be in bondage to all sorts of sinful tendencies, and
it will destroy their physical life. Are you guys hearing what
I'm saying? And so, if I aid and abet that
by a lack of love regulating my knowledge, I am causing you
to perish. because our physical life is
just as important as a witness to God as our soul is. So I help
cut off, curtail, shorten your lifetime here. You guys understand
what I mean by that? Now, the reason why this is a
burdensome truth is because I may not know, and it really doesn't
matter, whether that individual is truly and authentically a
believer. What I know is I ruined his chance to live out the rest
of his life as a professing believer in a healthy, productive way
that could bring glory to God because I helped cause him to
stumble back into a set of bondages that just ruined his testimony.
And can you see the potential reverberations that come out
of that? I help him ruin his testimony. His testimony ruins
other people's testimonies. It causes other people to not
want to hear the gospel because his life now is so raggedy. And
this is actually a description of many of our churches. Are
you guys hearing me? Many of our churches actually
fit the description that I'm talking about, where Christians
are so raggedy in their bondages to sin because of bad modeling
on the part of those believers who should have been more careful
in their conduct and especially leaders in the church. Especially
leaders in the church. And so we look up and when Barnard
and other institutes start doing polls and start doing assessments,
about the condition of the church, the state of the church. They'll
talk about, you know, Christians in the church have the same bad
reputation that people do in the world about not paying their
debt, about getting divorces, about sexual fornication, about
idolatries, about worldliness, about carnality, about all this.
Once they start showing the statistics, we know that the curse is in
the church, isn't it? Right. And it's largely due to
us not being able to walk in love with our knowledge. Because at the heart of idolatry
is narcissism. That is a selfishness on our
part. And this is what Paul is warning
about. And he goes on to close out this way. But when you sin
against the brother and wound their weak conscience, you sin
against Christ. Got that? Powerful, powerful,
powerful, powerful. I'm gonna stay here and make
another application. So what I love about this text is this
is a corollary text to our Acts 15 text, right? This is a correlation.
You can't not use this text if you wanna defend first Acts chapter
15, you gotta use this. Because this is a direct development
of the prohibition in Acts 15, is it not? And you can see how
that, where Paul is developing the implications of disobedience
to that set of boundaries that are given in Acts 15, you create
a society that's going to be a mess. So what the apostles
said to the Gentiles is, you guys are on a track towards glory
because you've been turned from idols. To serve the true and
the living god now walk in love with the knowledge of grace and
liberty and freedom that you have in christ So that your knowledge
doesn't destroy you all over again Do you guys hear what I
just stated? Because we are willing to admit
now 2 000 years after christ That is very possible to be a
true believer and be so jacked up in my life that it doesn't
look like it And it doesn't feel like it And I know that's hard
for some of us to conclude. And it's also dangerous. Cause
we love to say everybody's saved and they're not. When he made
a decision when he was 12, that doesn't make you saved. And it's a good possibility you
are not saved. If you're living like hell. Now
watch this. We can parse between this and get this. Who is going
to be that person that is actually saved, but their lives are so
tore up because they are in these gins and traps of secularism
and carnality and fleshliness. How might I be able to identify
that person as a true believer? Is that a good question? You
really want to treat this because you don't ever want to lie and
say to someone that they're saved when they're not. As Ezekiel
14 for you, Okay, where God says you make the hearts of the righteous
sad by saying to the wicked you're free to go When the wicked are
not free to go and saying to the righteous they're in bondage
when the righteous are free So god says don't tell the ungodly
that it's all right when in fact it's not all right You guys get
that and that's what we do in this generation. Did you pray
the sinner's prayer? Yeah, good. Welcome to the family
of God. Oh It's salvation not easy And then you see nothing in the
life that demonstrates an ongoing desire and love for God and growing
and in grace and in the knowledge of Christ and those things that
make for what we call salvation, right and And then we're struggling
because we set up a golden cab. We set up a ox cart religion
to get people into the church, right? An ox cart religion that
didn't correspond with biblical truth. And we got to call them
saying, because we set that up. We would have to alter with and
we laid hands on. We told them, repeat after me.
That was our salvation plan we set up. So now we got to make
that make good on that or else we got to admit we lied to them
and lied about God in terms of what salvation really is. And
we got to sweep the whole thing up. I told you this before. They
finally came to Billy Graham and Billy Graham in his old age,
plainly said, my conscious bothers me. My conscious bothers me because
so much of my evangelistic ministry was manipulating people into
making a decision for Jesus and knowing that it wasn't authentic
in many cases. That's exactly what he said.
Just in case you want to Challenge that Because he was such a powerful
man And he had a ministry and it worked. It's called pragmatism
But he knew he was setting people up in the pews to come up to
draw other people because we're like sheeple we follow he knew
that and he knew after these mass and Evangelistic outreaches
that when they went back to check up on these people, these people
never ended up in churches. They never ended up rooted and
grounded in the word of God. They went back to life as normal.
In fact, this is the dirty little secret of revivals all around
the world. This is where you have to be
very careful about where you put your money in terms of support. You ought to give you want to
make sure that you don't die Having been stingy about the
cause of christ, but you do have to do diligence about where you
Give your money in support of a ministry to make sure that
you are helping advance the cause of christ with your finances
Because otherwise you're idolatrizing your money, too That's a whole
nother subject. We deal with that in our rewards
class. We'll deal with that but What
you can know is there are multiple ministries out there that are
called missionary works who built people of millions of dollars
in the name of going out to witness and save people and do good works
and build wells and feed the poor, et cetera. And the vast
majority of that money goes towards administration costs and people
living lavish lifestyle. And they print up faulty reports
The outcome I have a I have a lengthy article where One of the watchdogs
in the Christian Church had did that with the ministry to India.
I Had meant to actually bring this subject up in one of my
Monday programs and I will in the future but it was around
them knowing how gullible Americans are and Westerners and what they
would do is they would have the missionary come to India. But
before the missionary gets to India, they would have all these
groups of people telling them to come out to the tent meeting
because we're going to feed you. Pull people coming where you're
going to get fed. You understand that? But they
never told them that this is about you guys hearing about
God through Christ so you can be saved. They would come out
because the evangelist is not speaking in that language. He
has an interpreter The interpreter would translate what he says,
but the evangelist the missionary does not know what the interpreter
is saying The interpreter is having them pay homage to a pagan
god and the missionary doesn't know it They caught him That's
that's that's what you have to do because the heart of man is
what deceitful. I They caught him and they would have them
raise their hand and take pictures as if we are having massive revival
services going on. Because after all, if we see
it in a picture, it's got to be true, right? If we see it
in a picture, it's got to be true, right? See, look, see all
those hands up? They have to be saved, right? Wrong. Right? Wrong. They do not have to be
saved. That could be a completely Ford
scenario to make you think that that was a real authentic meeting.
And what would happen is after these big crusades that they
would do in India, because our Indian brothers come out by the
Buku. I mean, they come out by the tens of thousands out of
the woods and out of the huts wanting to get away from King
Cobras and tigers for a minute. They come on out, but you'll
go back and you'll discover that there's not even a missionary,
um, um, society there at all. The missionaries are not going
out evangelizing or doing nothing. They're just collecting checks.
Are you guys hearing me? And the reason why is because
Americans are gullible and we'll send the money, but we won't
go and labor ourselves. Are you hearing what I'm saying?
So you want to be very careful about being moved by the testimonies
you get. I could spend hours talking to
you about you'll hear this stuff on on the news on the radio,
Christian radio. Tens of thousands, hundreds of
thousands are coming to Christ in China. Oh, really? How do you know? They told me. Oh, OK. Oh, that makes it true. So first Thessalonians chapter
5, 21 says, prove all things. Hold fast to that which is what? Good. Prove all things. You know what prove all things
mean? Get off your lazy butt and take a team with you and
go to India. And stay there and do the research,
the hard necessary research to develop the empirical evidence
as to whether or not the facts are so. After all, if you're
going to be giving tens of thousands of dollars to missionary work
in India, can't you spend a couple thousand dollars sending your
boys there for two weeks or a month? to actually investigate whether
or not there's a missionary society, whether or not the money is actually
reaching that missionary society, whether or not those ministers
are actually doing their job, whether or not you're actually
seeing conversions take place where people are abandoning Hinduism
and embracing biblical truth and growing in Christ. Well,
pastor, that's a lot of work. Right. Right. Now, in our text, Acts chapter
15, guess what Paul and them are doing? They're going on their
second missionary journey back through where they came the first
time. How come they need to prove all
things and hold fast to that which is good. They're not assuming
anything. They got to go right back through
and see how many of those decisions for Jesus were valid. Did people fall away? Did people
go back to their paganism? Did the Judaizers come in and
lead them to legalism? Are you guys hearing what I'm
saying? So they had to go back to make sure that those churches
were being strengthened in the faith. Now that's how missionary
works supposed to be done. You send missionaries out, then
you send others out to check out those missionaries. That's
how you do that. Otherwise, what you're going
to have is holes in your system and the enemy is going to be
able to get in through those holes in your system and thwart
the whole thing. Does that make good sense? I'll
close out with this word here and I'm going to open the floor
for some Q&A and we'll exercise our senses around that, see what's
on your heart. Wherefore, here's verse 13. Wherefore, if meat
make my brother... Louis, can you put the AC on?
Cause it's on heat right now. Put it on, put the AC on, put
it on 69. If meat make my brother to offend, that's the word scandalize. Oh, that means to stumble. That's
my word up here to stumble. Cause the idea of stumbling is
that you are in process of falling, right? You are in process of
falling. And the idea of falling means
to fall away. So Paul is saying, if my meat
makes my brother to offend, I will eat no flesh while the world
stands. See it? It's amazing, isn't it? No wonder God could use Paul
the way he did. Watch this, ladies and gentlemen.
Paul loved God. And he loved the church. He loved the saints Now watch
this anyone who loves God and loves God's church will be used
by God Those are the people whom God uses see again You know,
you'll think about all the other people that are used in the scriptures
Peter James John and God used them, but here's Paul writing
80% of the New Testament Being the Apostle to the Gentiles,
right? He's the most famous person besides Christ. We know in the
New Testament that drew now Peter is a close second I I'm cool
with Peter but Peter didn't write a whole lot and you'll notice
besides him James and Jude and John the rest of them didn't
write hardly anything that got into inspired text now they did
their jobs and But God really worked through Paul, didn't he? But you can see why. He had built
into Paul a kind of ethic that was so clearly patterned after
Christ that he could use Paul in enormous ways because he knew
that Paul would not abuse the church. You got that? an interesting final thought
that I'll share with you around the importance of the summation
of the law Because what we're really dealing with is the summation
of the law You guys know what the summation of the law is raise
your hand if you do Okay, so I help you if you don't understand
what the summation of the law is The summation of the law is
wrapped up in two Commandments two imperatives. The first is
to love God with all your heart soul mind and strength That is never abrogated. The
second one is to love your neighbor as your what? That's exactly
the heart of the law. And what God says through Paul
in Romans 13 is when that's the ethic, the Christian is not going
to be defrauding the church. He's not going to be abusing
the church. He's not going to be neglecting
the church. He's not going to be harming
the church because he will understand the necessary horizontal connection
in terms of his relationship to God. God expects you to love
him by loving them. But in our generation, is this
not true? You got Christians who swear
they can love them some God and kick you Christians to the side.
Can I get a witness? Right. And see, that is what
we call in logic, again, a massive cognitive dissonance. It's a
massive breakdown in logic. That's why John, who is the beloved,
said it in 1 John chapter 3 and 4. How are you going to say you
love God? Whom you don't see. When you
don't love your brother, whom you see. Now, this is at the heart of
every abuse in the church. What I'm talking about is at
the heart of every abuse. Whether it's slander and gossip. Whether it's manipulation and
control. Whether it's defrauding your
brother or sister in Christ. are neglecting them and leaving
them to perish on the side of the road like Lazarus with all
of those wombs of whom the rich man stepped over every day until
he died. Are you guys hearing me? So see, when you and I are really
Coram Dale, we're not going to be sleeping with our brother
and sister in Christ as unmarried persons. Did you hear what I
just said? You're not going to do it. Because
you're actually going to be sleeping, committing fornication against
Jesus. See, this is why I know people miss it. I know they miss
it. They totally miss it. Completely consumed by their
own horizontal agenda. Completely consumed by it. But
the ethic that's laid out in the Word of God is so fundamentally
clear. You have to actually see every believer in Christ as a
member of Christ's body. And now you get to assess them
in light of your assessment of Him. What do you stand with Jesus? Well, if you can sleep with the
members of Christ's body if you can abuse them defraud them You
don't think much of Jesus at all You don't think much of Jesus
at all. This is why our churches are
filled with crooks and manipulators and cons and frauds Because what
we have reduced love to is simply a word. Oh I love you You see
what I'm getting at? And this is why the church is
jacked up the way that it is. The way the church is jacked
up the way that it is. I'm getting ready to open the
floor for a Q and A. If you guys got any questions that you want
to poise for the next 10 minutes, we can do that and we can shut
it down. Anybody got any questions? Father, we are coming to you
now because you are the only true and living God. And we know
that you possess all power, all authority, all dominion. and you dwell all the fullness,
all the fullness of authority and power and dominion. And God,
we know that you hear the prayers of your people. And so we come
to you not under the presumption that we are righteous in ourselves,
but only in Jesus. And we acknowledge him to be
the mediator between God and man. And his name is Jesus Christ. And there is no other name under
heaven given among men by which we must be saved. And so father,
we come to you as the body of Christ, the church of Christ,
the bride of Christ, sons and daughters through Jesus Christ. And we stand in the gap now as
we pray, as we do all the time for our brothers and sisters
all around the world, for our husbands and our wives and for
our sons and for our daughters and for our grandchildren and
our great grandchildren and for our nieces and for our nephews.
and for our friends and for our loved ones and for our bosses
and for our government, for our nation, Lord, and for our churches. We come to you even now and we
ask your mercy, oh God, to come down upon us first. Us first,
we need you. as individuals. Father, we need
you. Our sister said she has no power.
We have no power. There's no strength in us, oh
God. There's no power in us. We have
no ability in ourselves. All power belongs unto God. So
we come to you because you are the God of all the earth. And
we're asking that you would pour out of your spirit upon us. Not just her, but us. Not just
her, but us. And our families, and our children,
and our churches, and our nation. We need you, oh God. Humble us,
oh God. Humble us to call upon your name. to seek your face, to cry out
to you, O God, to ask for mercy because we need it in this dark
hour in which we live. You know, the bondage in our
world, you know, the traps, you know, the addictions that are
not only in this young lady's life, but in the life of many
who call upon your name in your church, in this church, you know,
the bondage. And we're asking that you would
move by your spirit, oh God, and set the captives free. Liberate,
open our eyes, open our hearts, open our understanding, open
our minds. Bring about repentance, oh God. Bring about repentance. Turn
us from our sins. Turn us, oh God. Start with us,
oh God. We need you. We need you every
hour. We need you right now. We need
you, O God. We are burdened. We are troubled. We are weak. We are flimsy, O
God. We need you, not just this young
lady, us. Have mercy upon us, O God. Have
mercy upon us. Spirit of God, work in her life
to deliver her. Work in our lives to deliver
us. Work in the lives of our loved
ones to deliver us. Not for our sake, but for your
glory's sake. For your honor's sake. For your
glory's sake, O God. For your glory, not ours. and
teach us, Lord, how to pray. Teach us how to call upon your
name. Teach us how to lift our voice on high and seek your face. Let this not be a strange thing
to the members of Grace Bible Church. Help us to fall on our
knees and to seek you in the closet of our own privacy. We
know that you answer prayer. You promises that you do, oh
God. You promise that you do. Help
us to never be a stranger to prayer. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Hallelujah to the
true and the living God. We worship you. We praise you. We adore you. We magnify you
even right now. Have your way in our life, O
God. Have your way in our life. Move
by your spirit even now, O God. Have your way. Open our hearts. Open our hearts. We are nothing
without you. and you told us that you would
have a house of prayer may we be praying people seeking your
face calling on your name laying hold of the altar that is in
heaven who is our lord jesus christ lord jesus have mercy
on this girl have mercy on your daughter deliver her In your
own time, in your own way, all power belongs unto you. All power
belongs unto you. And every secret sin, every presumptuous
sin, every private sin, that is hindering your people even
here now from serving you like you ought to be served. You saved
us. You redeemed us. You liberated
us. You bought us with your precious
blood. We are yours. You are not ours. We are yours. We are your children. You called us to liberty. And
we're asking, O God, to work it in our life. Deliver us from
religion And we might be the righteousness of God in Christ.
Deliver us from falsehood. Deliver us from hypocrisy. Deliver
us from self-righteousness. We need you, O God. Our hearts
go out to you even now. Our hearts go out to you. And they go out to her. And they
go out to her. We're asking you to be gracious.