We need to know what's required
of us, church. We need to know what it is that we've been called
to do, who we actually are and how God has created us and to
what has he called us to be obedient. As we journey through Ephesians
in the last months, it may come to surprise most of us that some
of the things that we've learned in this letter are new to us.
And even if it's not new, and then being the first time we've
heard it, it's definitely new and the first time we've meditated
on it or dealt with it. It's new to our minds, and because
it's new to our minds, it's new to our hearts. And so it produces
something. It produces a feeling. It produces emotion. It produces
frustration. It can produce anger. It can
produce joy. It can produce worship. It can
make you want to wash your hands faith and religion altogether
that can cause you to become like a witch hunter. You walk
around looking heretic, heretic, heretic, heretic, and you realize
there are no true saints. Everybody's a heretic. I must
be the only one alive in the world. And I'm not supposing I know
what you're thinking. I'm just sharing my thoughts through the
years and through the months and through the last few days. And as we journey through Ephesians,
though I've studied it numerous times, as well as many of you,
and you've been hearing me say the same thing for now 31 weeks,
we are still learning. We're still understanding, we're
still trying to grasp. But we are unable to sincerely
say, even if we know something, we cannot sincerely say, OK,
I got it. You can never say that, Church.
When we say, I've got that, we have proven we don't have any
of it. It's going to sound so cliché,
but we ought to be saying, does this have me? Rather than, do
I have it? Does the truth of the gospel
have me? Is the word of God capturing me? Is Christ capturing me? Am I in Christ, or is he in me? And if he's in me, then whereabouts
is he? Just in my mind? my heart, my
stomach, my feet, hands, eyes. I'd much rather be baptized into
the body of Christ than drag Jesus along in a chain. Even if we did understand truths
to a deep level, each time we see them in Scripture, we find
a fresh and boldly powerful grace that's forever with us. And this
fresh grace, this fresh power emits a new dimension in our
life, a new dimension in our worship, a new dimension in our
relationship with God and with His Word and with His Son, Jesus
Christ, and with each other as the body. Our goal today in this
text is to see how Paul is placing a very practical application
at the foot of sound doctrine and at the foot of a deep mystery
that he says now has been revealed to the saints of the Holy Spirit.
We ought not leave here today confused, but enlightened and
thinking. And thinking really hurts our
minds. It hurts to take time out to
really try to process that, because we want to look and see and leave. We want to drive up to the window
or to the microphone and order. And by the time we put our foot
on the gas to the window, it should be out the window to our
face so we can eat it and drive out to somewhere else and we
can sit down and see something else. We want it now. We want
to get it all now. It's not going to happen. Even
when Christ returns and we are made like him and our sin natures
are forever dead, praise God. We will still not know at all.
How do we know an eternal God that he will forever teach us,
he will forever bring us and encourage us and grow us? Our goal here today is to see
this application. It's one thing to know in our
minds that we are to display the wisdom of God. It's another
thing to know how. And so in this sermon today,
my prayer is that you would see how. Sadly, there are many people
who profess to be Christians who are going to disagree with
what I say today and in the next few weeks. Probably a lot. And as you grow and you share
this with other people, they're going to disagree with what you
say. And here's an encouragement for you. You cannot bring people
to understand what you have grown to know in a short time. They must grow to know it as
well. And part of that is dealing with how we share the gospel
with each other and teach the Word to one another. We ought
not throw people away just because they're having a hard time being
hard-headed. We pray for them and we endure patiently and lovingly. and we give ourselves at much
cost to the teaching of the truth in their lives. But not only
will there be people who disagree with me, they will also disagree
with Paul, and they will disagree with Jesus the Christ, and they
will disagree with what the scripture says when it comes to understand
the purpose of the church and the power within the church.
There are some who would say that the church is not to learn
and not to grow in knowledge, and to that I ask that they read
the word of God in its entirety. In fact, just read one letter
and ask themselves once they're done if they have contradicted
their beliefs or if what they've just read has actually affirmed
their belief that the church should not grow. Friends, we've
learned in the last few months up to this point that if a church
is not growing in the knowledge of grace and the knowledge of
Jesus Christ, it is not growing in a unified faith, it is not
growing in worship, it is not growing at all, but rather it
is dead and the likelihood of it truly being the body may be
in question. What happens? Well, we've seen
here in Ephesians that if we are to overcome all of the negative
teaching, the false teaching, the deceitful schemes of men,
then we must what? Speak the truth in love. We must
grow up in every way into Him who is the Head, who is Christ.
And we do that by learning the Scripture and teaching the Scripture. That's really the ultimate flow
of the life of the church. We learn, we grow. We grow, we
give. As we are going, we make disciples,
teaching them to obey all that Christ has commanded us. Because
if we are misplacing our purpose, and if we're not growing, then
something happens. What happens? We are carried
away by every wind of doctrine. This is the argument of Paul.
And the main purpose of not being carried away with every wind
of doctrine is that, number one, we may have eternal life in Christ.
Number two, that we might be able to rightly evangelize and
worship and share Christ. When we come to the place where
we are not growing and learning, then this takes place in our
lives. Error, apostasy, heresy. We've all had heresy in our thoughts
and our belief systems. What is a heresy? It's a flat
false truth. That's an easy way to put it.
false doctrine. It's not that we think and we're
going, yeah, I'm tricking people. There are many of those. But
we can believe false doctrine and not know it. We can eat a
cookie that's laid out on the counter and not know that it's
a dog biscuit. And we might think it's good. And then people come
in and say, well, where did the dog food go? Oh, I thought it
was cookies. And then we feel a little gross,
but we enjoyed them immensely while we were eating them until
we found out they were dog food. Such is the false doctrine that
we learn. And that's awesome. And then
when we realize it was dog food, oh, my appetite is gone. I'd like to take it out. We can't
take it out. How about we just build nutrients in our body by
eating the right food from now on? By avoiding the things that
are not for human consumption. When we are wrought with error,
things take place. This is a review. When we're
wrought with error, we worship a God that is not from Scripture.
Then we become idolaters. We worship idols. You may say,
well, I worship Jesus the Christ, the one in the Bible. But everything
you know about him is not what the Bible teaches about him,
thus you are not worshipping Jesus of the Bible, you're worshipping
Jesus that you've built. An idol doesn't have to be a
graven image, it can be a mental image. An idol doesn't have to
be something that you can carry around in your purse, or your
pocket, or your pen, or hang from your mirror, or sit on a
shelf. An idol can be something you sit on the shelf of your
heart. And you can call it Jesus, and it very well could be something
other than Jesus, the Antichrist. When we are wrought with error,
we misunderstand who God is. We misunderstand who Christ is,
and thus we do not have eternal life. Understand that Jesus,
in John 17, says this is eternal life, that they know you, the
one true God, and the Son whom you have sent. Nicodemus knew
who Jesus was. He knew he was sent from God
divinely, from the Father. And he confessed that, and he
says in John 3, you are of God and have been sent to God to
teach us. And Jesus says, brother, you're lost. You have no sight,
for you can't see me, except you be born again from above
by the Holy Spirit of God. How am I born again, Nicodemus
asks. You cannot be born again except
the Spirit of God that blows where it wishes and how it wishes,
births you. Then you will look at me and
you will see me for who I am. So as we sit here today and we
listen, ask ourselves, have I been born again? And if you find that
you have not, that you doubt, your only hope is in Jesus Christ.
Your only hope is in God's gracious mercy. Put your faith there. When we are wrought with error,
we void any power of ministry in our lives that will ever bear
fruit, as it says in 1 Corinthians 3. We build on things that will
be destroyed. We've understood that these are
people. These aren't things, these aren't acts of service,
but these are people that we're building up that will be destroyed.
Let us take heed that we do not void the power of ministry in
our lives. by being wrought with error. When we're wrought with
error, we mistake application with doing something before knowing
something. And we understand through Paul's
teaching here to the Ephesians is that doing something always
comes from sound learning. that all that we do comes out
of the knowledge of the truth of Jesus Christ, the knowledge
of his power, the knowledge of his grace, the knowledge of his
working in us, and the power that is, according to Paul, already
at work within the saints. So, knowledge comes before movement. Learning, wisdom, all of that
comes before service and ministry. And we've learned that true ministry
is the Word. True ministry is the Word. What
happens when we're wrought with error is we actually hate God. How do we hate God? We hate God
when we hate to learn about God. We hate God when we hate His
Church. We hate God when we are apathetic toward growing in our
faith. Well, I certainly do not hate
God. Yes, you do. The Scripture teaches that if
you love God, you will love your neighbor as yourself. The Scripture
teaches that if you love Christ, you'll obey Him. The Scripture
teaches that if you are a child of God and you love God, that
you will love your brother. The Scripture teaches that you
will practice righteousness. How are you to know these things?
You have to learn them. And when you learn them, you
have to continue to bring them into your life through God's
grace, which is sufficient for you to actually grow and walk
in righteousness. Not perfectly, but striving in
righteousness. And ultimately, what we'll see
here is when we are wrought with error, we become useless. We
are futile. We are futile. We're futile and
we're useless, and then we're not growing in maturity, we're
not ministering the Word, we're not worshiping in unity, and
in my opinion, we're not even the Church. We're just a group
of people gathered together for some other reason. As we've seen,
the mindful believer in Scripture is set on eternal things. It's
set on glory, weighty and mighty truths, things that bring us
to awe, that are revealed in Jesus Christ perfectly. For we
have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son of the Father,
full of grace and truth. Paul is about to embark on an
explanation and then give a command, giving a clear picture of what
the sinful state of the human mind looks like. And that's what
I want us to see today. In contemporary news, the Southern
Baptist Convention has several churches within its midst, less
than one percent, thankfully, that have adopted a traditional
Southern Baptist view or doctrine on salvation. There are very
disturbing things in this document. You will hear more about it as
we move along, especially as we move toward the end of the
fall. But in this document, one of the statements refers to the
fact that a person is not a sinner unless he has personally sinned
and willfully sinned. Well, this is the denial of what
we call from the scripture original or federal sin. The headship
of Adam, and through Adam all became sinners. Through Jesus,
some will become righteous. When we do this, when we come
to this conclusion that people are good, the whole tenet of
the gospel of Jesus Christ goes down the toilet. Now these are
bold claims. I suggest you listen to them,
write them down, and then decide whether or not I'm true or not
according to what? The Word. The Word of God. It
is a violation of scripture to say that man is not sinful at
conception. It is a violation of what is
taught in scripture, and it renders, in my opinion, the gospel as
a lie from hell. So if man is good, then Jesus
is a liar, and we are, by most standards, should be pitied.
This happens because of decades and decades and decades of church
life and administrative policies and pastors who are moving out
of doctrinal teaching and out of doctrinal learning into what? CEO status. Into this mindset
that they need to grow a people so the best thing for them to
do is to learn how to manage rather than learn. These failed views of God are
the result of that, and a failed view of learning results in a
failed view of God, which results in false doctrine, which results
in uselessness, wastedness, pathetic, absolute deadness. The human
heart and our brains, apart from Christ,
are in this state. Our entire bodies, every essence
of our being, every fiber of our soul is dead without Christ,
without His power, without His life. His Word and His grace
are useless to us except we are born again. So now let's look
at the text. Ephesians chapter 4, verse 17
through 21. He says, now this I say and testify
in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do
in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding,
alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that
is in them, due to the hardness of heart. They have become callous
and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice
every kind of impurity, but that is not the way you learned Christ,
assuming that you heard about him and were taught in him as
the truth is in Jesus. We'll stop there. That's the
first part of next week, by God's grace. What I want you to see
now is Paul's description of the mind of those who are not
in Christ. We already learned over in chapter
2 and three, that every human being is dead in their sins and
that those who are saved by Christ, by grace, are now what? Made
alive in Christ and are no longer dead in their sin. Their mind
has been renewed. Here we see this contrast with
learning and growing and ministering in the word of God versus those
who do not do that. I'm of the opinion Based on the
problems that were going on in Paul's day, that when Paul deals
with a theological problem, and when he does a contrast, I believe
most of the time he is contrasting not the pagans of the world,
but the professing Christians who are actually lost. Why? Because those are the ones who
are living among the church going, I'm a Christian too. And Paul
wants them to clearly see who are and who are not the children
of God. Like a billboard with your name on it. So let's look
at this. Now this, I say and testify in
the Lord. Paul is really putting emphasis
here on the nature that this is God speaking here. In the
Lord, I testify and I say. And then he gives a command,
an all-around practical command. Do not walk as the Gentiles do. Now keep in mind, he's speaking
to people who are Greek. And so when Paul is dealing with
Gentiles there, he's not talking about ethnicity. He's talking
about spiritual ethnicity. He's talking about spiritual
family. You've got what? Two families
in the world. Who are they? The family of God
and everybody else. You've got what we call in Romans,
Israel, the children of God, the elect, the chosen, which
includes the church of Jesus Christ. And you have everybody
else. So here, he's saying, don't walk
as those who are not in the faith do. Don't walk as they do. How do they walk? He gives us
an example. In the uselessness of their mind. You see where that goes? You
notice he didn't say, he didn't start out by saying, you know,
you need to treat your brothers nice and, you know, they're doing
that. Because even Christians will fail in the application
of righteousness. We will commit sins from time
to time. especially when we fail to learn
the Word of God and stay disciplined in it. But Paul doesn't go there. He basically starts out with
the very base and foundation of all wickedness, which is how
we think and live and breathe, which is our mind, the uselessness
of their minds. Some of the greatest brains in
the world are at absolute waste because they do not receive the
truth from God's Word as truth. You must no longer walk in the
futility of their minds. Let's look here at this. What
brings the futility of the mind? Look at this. They're darkened
in their understanding, alienated from the life of God. Why? Because
of the ignorance that is in them. What caused that? The hardness
of their hearts. So I want to take that and start
with the very last thing, for it is the root of all things.
What is it? The hardness of the heart. The
hardness of the hearts, the futility of the mind starts with the hardness
of the heart. It's the core of the essence of man. Why is man
sinful? Because he's rebelled against
God. And Adam rebelled, and Eve rebelled, and everyone who has
been born of man and woman is guilty of the sin of humanity. of being a rebellious being,
even before we commit sin, we are due the judgment. The wrath
of God remains on us if we are not His and called out of darkness. So this started because of hardness. Hardness is rebellion. You think
of the word hard. Hard in most things. You don't
want a hard chair and you don't want too hard of candy. You don't
want your grits to be hard. You don't want the road to be
too bumpy or too hard. You don't want life to be hard.
You don't want, what, school to be hard. You don't want work
to be hard. You don't want the heat to be hard. You want it
easy. You want it to be light. You want it to be a little more
pleasant. You want it to be just a little
lighter. Lesser on the hardness. So, hardness is rebellion. What hardness is, is a continual
rebellious slap in the face of God. It's the knowledge of the
truth, Romans 1, for no one is without excuse. No one has an
excuse. No one can say, I don't know
that God is. But they refuse to worship God
and give Him thanks, and they have traded the greatest change. They've exchanged the glory of
God for the glory of man and the glory of the world. And so
that is hardness. Hardness. Hardness is deserving
of judgment. The reason Paul says this is
because nobody is innocent in this world. There's nobody living
in this world that's innocent. No child, no baby, no old sweet
lady, none of them. Nobody is innocent in this world.
Adam and Eve were not innocent, they were righteous. There's
a difference. And so you're either righteous or you're wicked. Well,
I'll tell you, if you're not in Christ, you're wicked and
you deserve to be judged. We who are in Christ have been
passed over. because Christ became the Passover
lamb. The judgment of God has been
passed over us. You think all this stuff that
happened in the Old Testament was just something to write about and fill up paper?
No, it pointed to Christ. The very irony of the fact that
that Passover, the day before he was arrested, he goes and
declares himself the Passover. The Jews were angry that he would
dare come to the Passover. when the very thing that they
were looking for was there with them. Their hearts were hard. Well, a hard heart then produces
something. Look at the text. What does it
produce? Ignorance. A hard heart produces ignorance,
and ignorance is a continual lack of knowledge or a superficial
knowledge. You may not be completely ignorant,
but you've got just enough and you're fine with that. I like
to say ignorance is a calm, resting state of depravity, thinking
that it's something. You think you've got something,
but what does Jesus say? Even what you think you have
will be taken away from you. You see that in the parable of the talents?
You see that in the parable of the seed and the sower? So be
careful what you think you... That's why I can say very confidently,
we should not say, I got that. I know that. Oh yeah, let's move
on. No, please, don't say that, church. Be very careful not to
put yourself in that place. That is ignorance. Hard heart
produces ignorance. Ignorance rests in ignorance.
It's like a stackable thing that never gets smaller. It just fits
in there so perfectly and it rests. And you just put more
ignorance in on top of more ignorance. And when we don't clarify the
teaching of the Word of God, ignorance just begets ignorance
just begets ignorance. The old game they teach us in
grade school, the trickle down the lane where you start at Johnny
and you end up with death in the back, and what you said to
Johnny was the frog is green, and in the back it says Mama's
got a washing machine. I mean, you know? and no telling what
happens all the way in between. Such is bad doctrine. The sad
thing is, bad doctrine seems to always stick, doesn't it?
It never gets right somewhere in the middle. Ignorance. What is the result
of ignorance? Being alienated from the life
of God. Look at that. Christian, if you are truly the
church, if you are truly a child of God and you remain in ignorance,
what does it mean? Are you just rebelling? Are you
stomping your foot at God? Are you putting your finger in
His face every day and going, I know? Are you overwhelmed? Are you
depressed? Do you need encouragement? Or do you not see the need? Growing
in your faith doesn't please God. It displays Him. Growing in your faith and growing
in the Word and growing as the church doesn't please God, it
doesn't go, oh, finally, they're getting it. No. He's able to
look down and see Himself. God is pleased with Himself.
He needs to be able to see his work. And if his work isn't evident,
then it wasn't his work to begin with. It's very important to
understand. So this alienation from the life
of God, these are not children. These are apostate. These are
the Hebrew six people who came and experienced all these cool
things and enjoyed the fellowship of the saints and saw the power
of the Holy Spirit and in some sense had a cognitive agreement.
And then all of a sudden they walk away. They walk away from
the faith. People that walk away from the faith were never in
the faith. I'm not talking about a David that Sheba, oh woe is
me, I'm hiding in the wilderness because I'm so ashamed and I
want to repent. I'm talking about people that are fine with it.
Are you fine with it? Are you fine with remaining in
ignorance? Do we occupy a seat among the church or are we in
the church? In Psalm 1, are we like a man
that's planted by the river with roots that are deep, that grow
and produce much fruit in season? Are we near to being cut down
and cast into the fire? Are we near to being destroyed
because we make a mockery of the manifold wisdom of God? What's
the absolute result in all this? What does it say there? Darkness.
The darkness. They are darkened in their understanding.
So even what they do try to see, they can't see. They're stumbling
around. You see this imagery? It's used everywhere. Paul uses
it all the time. John uses it constantly. The
darkness. The darkness is the place you
don't want to be. The darkness is apart from Christ. The darkness
is what the world loves and the pagans love and the Gentiles
love. We who are the church, we who are the elect of God,
we love light. And we come to the light so that
we clearly see, John 3.36, That God's work, that our works have
been carried out in God. That's what we desire. But those
who love the world love the darkness. They don't want to be in the
light. For God who said let light shine
out of darkness, what? Has shown in our hearts to give
us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face
of Jesus Christ, 2 Corinthians 4 says. So if we've seen and
God's shown in our hearts, then darkness doesn't come from us.
In 1 John chapter 1, right after the introduction, it says, And
this is the message that we have heard from him, that God is light,
and in him there is no darkness at all. So if you say you have
fellowship with the light, but you walk in darkness, you're
a liar and you do not practice the truth. It's a very difficult
thing for us to see if we're in darkness, because we stumble
around, we fall, and we fail, and we think we have what we
think is something worthwhile, Try to get into a shadow somewhere
where there's a little bit of a light and we realize it's not
what we had at all. But there's not even enough light
to see that we don't have what we think we have. Am I making
sense? In Matthew 13, we hear these
words. You will indeed hear, but never understand, and you
will indeed see, but never perceive, for this people's heart has grown
dull, and with their ears they can barely hear, and with their
eyes they have closed, lest they should see with their eyes, and
hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn, and
I would heal them." That's Isaiah chapter 6. We see it in John
chapter 12, where Jesus says the same thing about the Jews.
And there comes a time where these people remain in darkness.
And Jesus says in Matthew 13, excuse me, yeah, Matthew 13,
16, But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears,
for they hear. Church, do you see and hear?
Are you growing in grace? Because darkness is utter destruction.
So what's the outcome of darkness? What is the outcome of this darkness?
Look here at this verse 19. They have become callous. They
have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind
of impurity. What are you? What do you see
in your life? You might say, well, I'm not
like that. See, here's the mistake we make. I'm not sensual. I'm not callous. I'm not like
that. I'm not doing all these things.
You think of the people who go out deep in the mornings on Fridays
and find themselves laying in a ditch somewhere the next day
and don't know how they got there. That's not what we're talking
about here. Now, they would certainly be included with that. But quit
looking at it in such a deep depravity way. Look at it in
the essence of your true affection. What is it John says in chapter
2 of his first epistle, verse 15 through 17? It's a command. Do not love the world or anything
in the world. And he lists them, three of them.
What are they? The lust of the eyes, the stuff we see, the things
we like, the things that we want, the pride of life, power, popularity,
happiness, relationships, or what? The pride of possessions,
the stuff we possess, the things we've accumulated, the things
that we hold dearest. So let's look at it from that
perspective. What's the outcome of those who are in darkness?
They're callous. They have no tenderness toward
the things of God. They have no holy affection. They have
no affection toward God or His people. They just tolerate spiritual
things because it's the cultural thing to do. It's the thing that's
supposed to be done because it's best for the community at large.
It's best for the kids. It's best for the wife. It's
best for the husband. Friends, this is not the way
Christians live. It's not the heart of those who
are in Christ. then they have been given up
to sensuality. They give up to sensuality. Sensuality
is anything that satisfies the flesh. What is the flesh? Anything
connected to your body, whether it be your mind or your eyes
or your stomach, your skin, your nerves, your soul. The sins of
pleasure, the sins of the body, the sins of the stomach, the
sins of the soul, the sins of the mind. This is sensuality.
Things that make us feel good about who we are. When we don't
find pleasure in Christ, we try to find pleasure in other things.
Whether it's what we look at, whether it's what we wear, whether
it's what we enjoy as a vocation or enjoy as a vacation. Maybe
it'd be our church. It might be our ministry. It
may be the things that make us feel good about who we are. Then
we might feel justified as we go to bed at night. I'm not that
bad of a person. I know I'm a Christian. Look at all that I do for good.
But the only example of that in the New Testament, Jesus says,
brings a man to condemnation. The sins of power and prestige,
sensuality. I want to be known. I want to
be big. I want to be good. I want to be successful. I want
to be these things. I want to be that thing. We find one's
worth in the world. When we find our worth in the
world, we have no worth in Christ, for we're worthless, and our
minds are futile and useless. We think and do and operate all
that we want to do. Now, is there anything wrong
with ambition? No. As the Lord wills. I'm not throwing
it all. I'm not saying we don't need
to buy clothes. We don't need to have entertainment. What I am saying
is, do you find That that is what you do. Is that the practice
of your life? Those who are not in Christ,
that is the practice of their lives. They work so that, what? They can have. They live so that
they can live it up. They work hard so that they can
move up. Because in their core of their
heart, that's what they really want. not to glorify God, not
to be the lesser, not to be the lowest of these, not to be the
last, but to be atop, to be the greatest. And these are sins
that please the mind, the body, and the soul. Given up to greed,
we understand what that means, desiring things, the lust of
the eyes, the stuff that we see. But given up to the greed of
practicing all impurities, what is that? Anything that you can
think of that is not honoring to God is practice. Do you know
the world that I'm speaking of? And friends, sometimes it's so
vague for those around us. They are so moral and speak so
godly that we don't know, and neither do they, that they are
in utter darkness. We can become numb and hard of hearing. But
what does Paul say here in verse 21? Verse 20. But that is not the way you learned
Christ. You see the hope? Because I know,
for me, as I look at this list and I think, wow, I think some
of those things are still there. I think some of those things
tap on my shoulder and are racking up my nerves right now. I think
maybe I'm apostate. So what's the remedy? Learning
Christ. Learning Christ. Not seminary, not systematic,
though that's not horrible. Learn the Word. Read the Word
of God. Grow in your knowledge of who
He is. Begin to experience the power of God's Word in your life. Read it. Know it. Understand
it. And watch it have power over
these things that still have remnant in our lives. These things
that still trip us up. We must tear away through the
power of God's Spirit. We must tear away through the
Word, and through study, and through sound discipline, and
through life together as a church. One of the greatest sins of Christians
is that they go alone in their battle against their sin, in
their battle against their flesh. And I'm not the guy that likes
to hear all the dirty secrets. We don't need that. But we do
need to confide in someone who is a brother or sister in the
Lord that can walk with us as we struggle. You can't do it
by yourself. You're not supposed to. God didn't
save billions of individual churches, he saved one body. And part of
how we minister to each other is that we give the right word
in the right circumstance, though everything around us tells us
it's the wrong thing to say. The saint lives by faith in the
Son of God who gave himself up for them. We do not live in our
own, but it is Christ who lives in us. It is not our life, but
him who lives in us. The saint does not live the way
of the Gentiles. We walk the way of faith. The
child of God has a mind that is ours in Christ. We have learned
Christ by hearing his voice foundationally. In chapter 10, I think it's verse
6 of John, Jesus says that the sheep, my sheep, Hear my voice. They know my voice and they follow
me. Are you hearing the voice of
Christ? Are you hearing the words of Christ? And are you following
him? If you're not, you're not his. Repent, believe the gospel. Hold
fast to the confession of hope that is in Christ Jesus. Understand
that it is only in Christ that you have hope. The children of
God are His children indeed, not in name, but in nature. And they love the law, and they
love holiness, and they hear the voice of their Shepherd,
and they follow Him together. Let's pray. Thank you, Father.