SPEAKER_04 0:00

So we are in week three of a of a pretty new series that we started a few weeks back. That's why we're in week three. Uh it's called the Gospel. It's called the Gospel. The word gospel means good news. And it really means the story of Jesus, the message that Jesus has for this world. And in reality, the entirety of the Bible, the whole scripture, is the good news. It's the story that God has been crafting. This amazing story of redemption and love. This incredible story of God doing everything in his power to reunite us with him so that we can live a life that matches the original purpose that he created us to live. It's a beautiful story, but it's a big one. And it's definitely a complex story, and at times it is a confusing story. Most great stories are. And to make it even more important, it's a story that we're part of. Every single one of us has been invited to play a very significant part in the story that God has been crafting throughout all of human history, but it's really hard for us to play our part in the story if we don't understand the story we're in. Sometimes we we come to a relationship with Jesus and we get excited and we're super excited about our faith and we want to grow, but we're a little bit confused because every time we open up the Bible, we we don't really know what's going on, or we read things, or even hear about things, or know about things that make us go, wait a minute, that doesn't seem like it matches with the message I was given. That doesn't seem like it lines up with Jesus. I don't know why this happened, I don't know why God did this, I'm confused. It is hard to be aggressive when you're confused. It's hard to grow and move forward if you feel like you're constantly playing catch up. But that's the situation we often find ourselves in because we're not coming into the story at the beginning, right? We're not on season one, episode one. We're pretty deep in the story. And so we have a lot of catching up to do. We want to eliminate that confusion. We want to understand the story that we're in so that we can play the part that God has asked us to play. That's why we're doing this series. That's why we are exploring the entirety of the story. We're going through the entire story of the Bible in about eight weeks, which is pretty ambitious. But we want to make sure that we walk away from this, having had the Bible come to life for us. So that we can at the very least say, I get it. I understand what God has done, I understand what God did, why he did it, what it led up to. I get what he's doing now, so I can be part of what he's doing now. Here's the way we're breaking this up, just to make it hopefully digestible in some way. We started with creation a few weeks back, and from creation we went to crash, the moment everything fell apart. From crash, we moved to covenant. We'll talk a little bit about that today, what that means. Covenant takes us to Christ, Christ leads to the cross, cross leads to a conquering that happened. Uh, this is gonna be Easter Sunday. I talked last week about how I couldn't think of a word that began with C that went with Easter, and this fourth grade girl named Kaelin walked up to me and said, conquer, duh, there it is. So we just went ahead and put that in. Caitlin's awesome. We're gonna try to hire her as soon as possible. So from conquer, we get to creation again, but it's a new creation, and then from creation we get to covenant again, but it's a new covenant. Today, where we're at in the story is the the covenant that defined what it meant to follow God for about a thousand years. Covenant's not a word that we use that often in our day-to-day vocabulary, but a covenant essentially is a sacred relational agreement. It's an agreement between two people, between two parties, and it is viewed as sacred and it should be viewed as unbreakable. It's different than a contract. You know, a contract is an agreement, but a contract always has, you know, ways out of the contract. It's not a sacred thing. Marriage is an example in our world of a covenant, at least it should be. It's a sacred agreement between two people. Both people make vows, both people make promises, both people have an obligation to one another, and there are things that each says that they will do for the other. It's a sacred agreement that should be viewed as as unbreakable as possible. All throughout the Bible, God is making covenant promises with people. God's initiating a relationship with us, and he almost always initiates those relationships with promises, promises of blessing. And so, for example, Noah received a covenant promise from God when God said, After the flood, I won't do this again, I won't flood the earth again. That way, every time it rained, we didn't have to freak out. You know, because can you imagine after the flood what it would have been like for Noah the next time it rained? Should I get back on the boat? What should I do? And God's like, you need to understand that this isn't gonna happen again. It was a covenant promise. Abraham was this man that God called. And he called this man who didn't have a family, he called him to leave everything he knew and to go to a place he didn't know, a place he didn't even know where he was going. Because God said, I will give you a family, that family will grow into a mighty nation, and I will bless all of the earth through your family. That was a covenant promise that God made with Abraham. God gave Moses a covenant promise. He said, I will bless the nation of Israel, I will bless these people that you just let out of slavery in Egypt, I will bless them. And in response, I need you to follow this law that I'm going to give you. And it's that covenant that we're exploring today, because it's that covenant that really defined what it meant to follow God for a large chunk of human history. The covenant of Moses. This is often called the old covenant, it's often called the law. That's what we're gonna explore today. If you've read the Bible or maybe you're reading the Bible right now, this would be like Leviticus and Numbers, everyone's favorite books of the Bible, everyone's favorite scriptures. Anyone here would say Leviticus is my jam. I wake up, I love, I just wake up, I want to read Leviticus. Leviticus chapter 4 blows me away, right? No, this is that part of the Bible that you get to when you know, and maybe it's the beginning of a year, and you say, you know what, this year I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna read the whole Bible cover to cover. You start strong, you get to Leviticus, and you go, nope. Let's just skip ahead a little bit. This is actually one of the most confusing parts of the story. This is a part of the story that a lot of people get hung up on, get tripped up on. A lot of people lose a lot of enthusiasm and excitement, have a lot of questions when they get to this part of the story because often we look at this moment, this chapter, and we go, This doesn't seem like Jesus. Jesus seems so laid back, he seems so just loving and open, and then we read the law, and it just seems so harsh and difficult. It seems like there's this massive disconnect between Jesus and the law and the old covenant, but there's not. In fact, the two are very, very harmonious. The Bible says that Jesus fulfilled the law, he fulfilled that covenant. So this is a confusing part of our story, but it's a very, very important part of the story, and if we're gonna understand the story we're in, we need to understand this chapter. We really, really do. So before we dive into the details, let's just back up for a second. Last week we talked about the cra the crash. This moment when we basically said to God, nah, we're gonna do things our way. This is a really big moment because basically what happened when God made the world is he defined good and evil for us. He said, Look, here's what's good, here's what's not. It's very simple. Very, very simple guardrails. But we got tempted and we had a choice and we decided to choose our way, not God's way. What we basically said to God was, hey, we're gonna decide what's good and evil for ourselves. We are rejecting your definition of good and evil, and we are going to adopt our own definition of good and evil, and that's what we did. We walked away from God, we decided we're gonna do things on our own, and everything crashed. And all the problems we see in the world today, all the hurt, all the tragedy, all the heartbreak, it's all symptomatic of the crash. Because when you do that with God, when you walk away from him and do things on your own, it just creates this massive mess. Number one, I don't know if you've noticed this or not, but we're not that good at defining good and evil for ourselves. I mean, you just look around at the world and see if you can find people that agree on the definition of what is good and what's not. When we're the ones making the definitions for good and evil, we tend to choose very convenient definitions. Definitions that allow us to do the wrong thing for the right reason, or so we think. So we're not very good at deciding what's right, what's wrong for ourselves. And to make it even more complicated, we walked away from God to do that. God is good. Like he is good. Once a man came up to Jesus and called him good teacher, and Jesus said, Why do you call me good? Only God is good. Only God is fully good. Jesus was making a statement there about who he really was, who he is. But he reminds us that God is fully good. And so if you walk away from God, who is good, so that you can figure out what's good, you see the problem there. It was a mess. It was a crash, and it created a disconnect between us and God. The disconnect was not between God's love for us and us, nothing can stand in the way of God's love. Nothing. I mean, history shows that, scripture shows that in every single chapter. It's God's love being unrelenting in his desire to know us. So it didn't create some disconnect between the way God feels about us, but it did create a disconnect between our ability to live in relationship with God. Because now we have a problem. We have a holiness problem because God is holy, he's different, he's set apart, he's something very unique, very, very powerful. He's holy. And he created us to be holy. When he made us, he made us for a holy purpose. That purpose was to look like God, to be his image in this world. So he's holy, he made us to be holy, but when we walked away from a relationship with him, when we walked away from doing things the way he intended, we also walked away from our holiness. We sort of dropped our holiness on the floor as we walked away from him. And now there's this there's this problem, there's this gap. A holy God and people who have sacrificed their holiness. And it's it's a problem that has to be solved. If the holiness problem isn't solved, we can't live in a right relationship with God. And so that begins this amazing, amazing story of God putting things in place to bring us back, putting things in place to fix the holiness problem. And rather than me go into great detail and go through it all because it's a big story, I want to show you guys a video done by this group called the Bible Project. I don't know if you've heard about the Bible Project or not. It's an amazing, amazing group. It's a nonprofit. If you actually want to support them, I highly encourage it. It's a group of very talented and passionate Jesus followers who create content to help make the Bible something that's more easily understood. So that people, everyday people like us, can open up the Bible and get some things that maybe we we couldn't get because we don't have doctorates and we don't have years and years of study. They do an amazing job. In fact, on our mobile app, we have links to their their app. If you use apps to read, they have an amazing app. You can read the Bible every day through it. It gives you all sorts of extra details. It's so cool. We also have links on our mobile app to all of their stuff online. If you don't use a mobile app, go to the Bibleproject.com and that's where it is, or you can drive to California where they physically are and just talk to them. Those are your options, okay? So it's either the internet or a long drive. But but they create amazing stuff, and I want to show you this video that really encapsulates the holiness problem and how God went about solving it. So take a look at that, and then we'll come back.

SPEAKER_01 11:03

You've probably heard the word holy before, or at least sang it in a church song once or twice. And for most people, this idea is really just connected to being a morally good person. So God is holy because he's morally perfect.

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Yeah, that is part of it. But in the Bible, the idea of holiness is even bigger and more rich. What it's really describing is how God is the creative force behind the whole universe. He's the one and only being with the power to make a world full of such beauty and life. And so all these abilities they make God utterly unique, which is the meaning of the word holy. So a helpful way to think about God's holiness is by using the sun as a metaphor. The sun is unique, at least within our solar system, and it's really powerfulness, the source of all this beautiful life on our planet. And so you could say that the sun is holy. And you can actually take this metaphor even further, in that the whole area around the sun is also holy.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

Yeah, because the closer you get to the sun, the more intense it gets.

SPEAKER_00 12:03

Yeah, exactly. So that very power and goodness that generates all this life is also dangerous. I mean, the sun, if you get too close, will annihilate you. And in the same way, there's this paradox at the heart of God's own holiness, because if you're impure, his presence is dangerous to you. And not because it's bad, but because it's so good. And so the first time we see this paradox of God's holiness, it's in the story of Moses and the burning bush.

SPEAKER_01 12:31

So God tells Moses to take off his sandals because he's standing on holy ground. And Moses covers his face in fear, and God says, Hey, don't come any closer. It's intense.

SPEAKER_00 12:41

It's actually that intensity of God's holiness that's explored even more in the stories about Israel's temple, which was the main place where God's holy presence was located. And at the center of the temple was this room called the most holy place, the hot spot of God's presence. And whether you're an Israelite living in the land around the temple, or a priest working right in the temple, you're in proximity to God's holy presence, which is dangerous.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Yeah, this is a problem. So, how's it supposed to work?

SPEAKER_00 13:11

Well, in the Bible, the solution is that you need to become pure.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

So, like being morally pure.

SPEAKER_00 13:16

Yeah, and that's easy enough to understand. But the Bible spends a lot of time talking about another kind of purity, being ritually pure, which is a state where you separate yourself from anything related to death, like touching things like diseased skin or dead bodies or even certain bodily fluids. All these make you impure. And becoming ritually impure isn't necessarily sinful. What's wrong is waltzing into God's presence when you're in an impure state. And so that's why God gave the Israelites very clear instructions for knowing when they were impure, steps to become pure, so that they could go into the temple again.

SPEAKER_01 13:53

So that's what the book of Leviticus is about.

SPEAKER_00 13:55

Right. But it doesn't stop there. This idea keeps developing. So later in the scriptures, we find this really interesting story by a prophet named Isaiah. And he has this crazy vision where he's in the temple and he's right in God's presence. He's totally terrified. Yeah, he knows the rules. He shouldn't even be in there, and he's worried about being destroyed. And then this crazy creature called Cetophine.

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Yeah, that is a crazy creature.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Totally. So it flies over with a hot coal, and then it sears Isaiah's lips with the coal and says something really weird. Your guilt is taken away, and your sin is atoned for. So this burning coal somehow makes Isaiah pure. Yeah, it's remarkable. Because normally, if you touch something impure, it transfers its impurity to you. But now here's this new idea where you have this coal, this very holy and pure object, and it touches Isaiah, and it transfers its purity to him. Isaiah is not destroyed by God's holiness, he's transformed by it. I mean, the implications of this are just huge. But there's one more development, this time from another prophet, Ezekiel. And he has this vision where he's standing at the temple and he sees water trickling out from it. And then that water turns into a stream, and then it grows into a deep river that starts flowing through the desert, leaving this trail of green trees behind it, and then it flows into the dead sea, making everything fresh and alive.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

So instead of becoming pure first and then going into the temple, here God's holiness comes out from the temple, making things pure and bringing them to life. What does it all mean?

SPEAKER_00 15:32

We don't know. Until we meet this man, Jesus. And he claims that he's fulfilling all of these ancient visions, but in surprising new ways. So Jesus, he went around touching people who are impure, people with skin diseases, a woman with chronic bleeding, or dead people. And when he touches them, their impurity should transfer over to Jesus. But instead, Jesus's purity transfers to them and actually heals their bodies.

SPEAKER_01 16:01

Jesus is like that holy coal in Isaiah's vision.

SPEAKER_00 16:04

Right. And Jesus claimed that he was the human embodiment of God's own holiness, and that he and his followers were now God's temple. So that through them God's holy presence would go out into the world and bring life and healing and hope. And so this is why Jesus described his followers as having streams of living water flowing out of them.

SPEAKER_01 16:26

So this is our part of the story where we find ourselves now. But where's this all headed?

SPEAKER_00 16:32

So the last pages of the Bible end with a final vision about God's holiness. This time it's by a guy named John. And in his vision, we see the whole world made completely new. The entire earth has become God's temple. And Ezekiel's river is there, flowing out of God's presence, immersing all of creation, removing all impurity, and bringing everything back to life.

SPEAKER_04 16:58

Isn't that cool? I always uh I'm always thankful when there's people that have a gift for for making what is complicated understandable. Jesus was like that. That's what Jesus did. And so, like I said, the Bible project, they have videos that go along with every book of the Bible. It's really, really exciting and helpful if you want to dive into that. I highly, highly recommend it. So we we saw in that video that God has solved the holiness problem and he solved it through Jesus. God literally sent his son, came on our behalf, and he made us holy. The Bible says that when we give our lives to Jesus, when we commit our lives to him, then not only is our sin taken away, not only has it been dealt with on the cross that Jesus paid that price, but the Bible says that the holiness of Jesus, the righteousness of Jesus, transfers to us. So he takes our sin and he gives us his righteousness, and that means that when God looks at you, he sees the perfection of Jesus. It's awesome. It's amazing. Jesus solved the holiness problem. And we we're fortunate enough to live with hindsight. We're living on the other side of Jesus, so we can look back and we can say, wow, look what Jesus did. I mean, it makes sense to me. I I can look at the world and say, this isn't how it should be. I think pretty much all of humanity can look at the world and say, something seems off. We're not the way we should be, we're not as we ought to be. And I can I can think about how I could try to solve the problem, but it's a problem that's a little bit too big for me to solve. And if you know me well, you know that I'm not the guy who's gonna fix my own car. I'm not the guy that's gonna fix my own toilet, okay? I'm I'm just I'm the guy that's gonna break the toilet trying to fix the toilet. That's what I do. And so anytime something in my home is broken, I call an expert. I'm like, I need someone who knows what they're doing to fix this because I can't do it myself. And clearly we can look at the story and we can look at the world and say it is so broken that maybe we're not the ones with the expertise to fix it. And so it makes sense to me that the one who made it would come to fix what he made. But but if that's the case, sometimes I wonder why God didn't just send Jesus right away. I'm a big fan of efficiency. I want to be efficient, I want to get stuff done. I want to get stuff done fast. Sometimes I want to get stuff done too fast, and I forget that doing things fast isn't always the best way to go about it, but I just want to get stuff done. I want it to be efficient, I don't want it to take forever. That's the problem with God. He has forever. We don't feel like we do. And so sometimes God's pace is a little bit frustrating, right? We need him to move faster, do things faster because we feel like time is of the essence, and God seems to be pretty relaxed in his approach time-wise. And in my my evaluation of efficiency, I just don't look at the way God goes about solving the holiness problem as very efficient because, yeah, Jesus is awesome, and he came and he solved it, but what about all those years leading up to Jesus? When that holiness problem still existed, when Jesus had not solved it yet, why didn't he just send Jesus right away? Because what he does first is he creates a covenant with Moses and the people of Israel, and he says, hey, here's a laundry list of rules and rituals and obligations, follow these. This is how we're gonna deal with the holiness problem right now. And it's those laws that are in existence for over a thousand years. The time from Moses to Jesus, it's approximately a thousand years. So for a thousand years, people are striving, they are they are breaking their backs, trying to meet all the demands of the law, trying to fulfill their end of this covenant that God created, because in their minds, that's what it's gonna take to solve the holiness problem. But then we learn that that doesn't even do it. That the old covenant, the law, it was it was never intended to be permanent. It was it was temporary. In fact, we read that in Galatians chapter 3, verse 23. Before the way of faith in Christ was available to us, we were placed under guard by the law. We were kept in protective custody, so to speak, until the way of faith was revealed. So from the beginning, Paul is saying that the law, the old covenant, was meant to be temporary. A thousand years doesn't feel too temporary to me. A thousand years and hundreds and hundreds of rules and obligations and rituals, that seems a little bit intense for a placeholder. But then we learn that the law was not only temporary, it was ineffective. It didn't even work. Galatians 2 16 says, Yet we know that a person is made right with God by faith in Jesus Christ, not by obeying the law. So if the law was meant to be temporary and if it wasn't even gonna solve the holiness problem to begin with, why on earth would God give people a thousand years of rules and obligations and rituals? Why would he do that? Is this God playing a really non-funny practical joke on people? Like maybe we just don't get his sense of humor, and he's like, ha ha, gotcha. Hysterical, right? We're like, not at all. Not funny. Is this God being cruel, or is it God showing us what real inefficiency actually looks like? I mean, if Jesus is the answer, if he's the only one that can fix it, why on earth would God give us a Thousand plus years of law. And what I want to suggest is that the law actually had this incredible purpose. The law was much more than a placeholder. It was much more than a rough draft. The law had this purpose intended by God and it served its purpose beautifully. Sometimes we look at the law from our perspective and we go, man, that just, oh, I why would God have people do that? What in the world? I mean, it's it's a lot. If you've ever read, if you've ever read Leviticus, it's a lot. You remember when Apple first made the iPhone and their marketing was there's an app for that? Leviticus is basically like, there's a law for that. You can think of any situation in the world, and there's a law, or at least a principle in a law, that will tell you how to address that situation. It is a lot. There are laws about relationships, there are laws about food, what you can't eat, what you can't eat, there are laws about how to prepare food. Some of those laws were only for Israel for a specific period of time. They were meant for a time and place, because sometimes in different seasons of life you have to have different rules. That's just reality. Like in school, you have to raise your hand every time you talk. In a marriage, that'd be weird. Some of you might opt for that if you're married to someone who talks a lot. Hey, just raise your hand and I will call on you when I'm ready to call on you, right? But but sometimes rules are meant for a time and for a place. A lot of the rules that God gave Israel were like that. Some of the rules in the law, some of these laws, they're things that God apparently values, but we have no idea why. Like we would look at God and go, why do you care about that? If I were you, I wouldn't care about that at all. And all I can say on those laws is that we have relationships with people all the time that care about things that we don't care about. And that shouldn't be a deal breaker. Like my wife cares very, very greatly about our sheets on our bed. Like she has a very specific thing. We have to have a sheet tucked in at the bottom, and then two layers of blankets every single night. And before I was married, I did not, I didn't use a sheet. That's just extra laundry. You know? I didn't do that. I had I had the the fitted sheet on my my bed that I never washed. It just didn't occur to me. I'm just gonna be honest. It's not that I was looking at it going, Oh, I don't want to wash this. We literally got married, and Megan helped me move out of the place that I was living in, and we pulled that sheet off, and she said, This looks kind of gross. When's the last time you washed it? And I went, I never have. I just, this is the first time I've ever thought to. So there. So I just I just had a fitted sheet, and then I had a blanket, and I would just sort of wrap up in that blanket like a burrito, but then like kick my foot out. That's that's how I prefer to sleep. And then I got married, and Megan's like, sheet, blanket, blanket. Do not do not even attempt to alter this. And sometimes I'll get in bed and I'll sort of scoot the sheet over because I don't want to be under the sheet. I don't like it. It's I don't like the way it feels. I don't, ah, I just don't like the sheet. And then Megan will reach her foot over and go, You're not under the sheet. Get under the sheet. And I'm like, and in the summertime when it gets hot, we don't shave a blanket off. We still go two blankets and a sheet. I'm sweating and I'm hot, and I have no idea in my mind why Megan cares so much about our sheet and our two blankets, but she does. And I I want to have a great relationship with her, and I want things to happen near those blankets, and so I'm willing, okay? I am willing. If that's what it takes, so be it. So be it. That's all I'm saying. My point is I made a joke about that in the first service, and I felt really awkward, and I was like, probably won't do that in the second. Went ahead and did, semi-regret it. But whatever. Um but but the thing is, I have a relationship with all kinds of people who don't value what I value, and there's things that they care about, and I don't understand why. There's things that I care about and they don't understand why, but that's relationships. And a lot of, to be honest, human rebellion against God comes from us telling God what he should value based on our opinion. A lot of human rebellion simply boils down to people saying, God, you shouldn't care about that. You should care about what I think you should care about, and then we forget the fact that we don't get to dictate to God what he cares about. That's not how it works. Some of the laws are things like that. Some of the law, in fact, the majority of the law, it's just basic good human behavior. It's just the way people should treat one another. If you actually look at the law when it arrived in history and compare it to the laws of other nations and cultures at that time, I mean it was revolutionary. Trust me, if you had been living in those days, if you could choose one set of laws to live under, you would have chosen the laws of Israel. Because those laws would have protected you from oppression, those laws would have protected you from even the oppression of a ruler in your life. There were there was no other no other concept like that in the world. The law was revolutionary in terms of the way it taught people to treat one another, but it's a lot. No matter how you dissect it or categorize it, it is a lot. And it was basically God saying, Hey, you said you want to know good and evil. You said you want to know the rules, here you go. And we were like, this book is bigger than the rules we would have written down. It was a burden. It was a burden, but it served a great purpose. And the purpose was not to make us holy. That's what we thought it was. But here was the actual purpose of the law. The purpose of the law, the purpose of the old covenant was not to solve the holiness problem, it was to expose the holiness problem. The purpose of the law was not to fix us, it was to prove to us that we actually need fixing. Because there's this thing that God understands about human nature that takes us a long time to admit, and it's simply this, and we're gonna put this on the screens. If we cannot accept our situation, we will not accept the solution to our situation, right? If we cannot accept our situation, we won't accept the solution to our situation. That's how we are as people. That's why we hate asking for help. Does anyone here love to ask for help? Like, like maybe you even ask for preemptive help. You're like, hey, I'm not sure if this is gonna be a problem or not, but it might be. So will you clear your day and just be available in case I have a problem and need you? We don't do that. We wait until someone has proven to us in every which way possible that we even have a problem before we attempt to deal with it. That's why you might have a pain in your body for weeks and weeks and weeks and months and months and months, and everyone who loves you says, Go to the doctor. You should probably go to the doctor. Why don't you go to the doctor? There's people called doctors, they know what that means. You should do that, you should go there. You have medical insurance, and we're like, I'm gonna give it a week, I'm gonna wait. I know it hurts, and I'm super uncomfortable, and I'm telling you all the time about how I can't sleep and how I'm just achy, but you know, I just give me another week and then maybe I'll go to a doctor. And then we go to the doctor, and the doctor's like, You should have come much sooner. Right? It doesn't matter if we're talking about finances, it doesn't matter if we're talking about relationship problems, we live in denial. We have this tendency as people to deny our situation, to excuse it away. And in doing that, we also delay the solution to that problem. If we cannot accept our situation, we will not accept the solution to our situation. See, the the solution to the holiness problem was Jesus. It was always Jesus from the very beginning, Jesus. In fact, we read Ephesians 1, 4, and 5 a few weeks ago, and it says that even before he made the world, God made us, he chose us, and he chose to bring us to himself through Jesus. Jesus was the plan from the very beginning, but God in his wisdom, knowing human nature, knew that we would not accept Jesus. We would just say, I got it, I got it. I mean, if you've had kids, you've probably seen a situation where your children are trying to do something they physically cannot do. I have watched my children try to lift things bigger than themselves. They don't get physics yet. I'm like, hey, you weigh 30 pounds, that weighs 100, you're not gonna lift it. Can I help you? And my kids will be like, no, I do it. Right? I'll do it, I can do it. And they try and they try, and I'm just watching them like, I mean, I'm here, I will help you. But them accepting my help requires surrender. We have a hard time surrendering as people, and God knew that. And so He gave us the law and said, Here, do this. Not because it was gonna fix our problem, but because it was going to expose the fact that we actually have a problem and we need someone to do what we cannot do for ourselves. That was the purpose of the law. Not to fix the problem, but to expose it. And it did that in two ways, really brilliantly. Number one, it defined sin, it defined for us what was what was evil. And we were sort of surprised with the definitions. There were things in there that we were like, oh, I didn't realize this wasn't a good thing to do. And God gave us those. It began with the Ten Commandments, pretty basic stuff, right? And it evolved from there. But God says, this is good, this is evil, live this. And now we actually have sin defined for us. And that that's both a good thing. Now we now we know. But it's a bad thing because once you know, you're accountable to that knowledge. It very much changes your relationship with God. Just like as a parent, when my kids know right from wrong, it changes my relationship with them. To be honest, I'd rather that not happen. Just like God preferred that we didn't eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that way he would never have to hold us accountable to the things that we knew. Our relationship with him would have been like innocent. But once we know, we're we're accountable. I see this in my own kids all the time. Once they know right from wrong, I have to hold them accountable because sin has been defined, and now I've got to make sure they they live based on that knowledge. So I've got three kids, Liam's our oldest, and we've got Lily and we've got Judah, and Lily and Judah, they they get up three or four times in the middle of the night every night. We get very little sleep. Very little sleep. Megan gets gets way less than me, I'll just be honest. I'm kind of like a bear. She will wake me up, say the kids, and I'm like, uh, and then, you know, which is just an act. I'm just totally acting. Um it's actually not. It's not. I get up early in the mornings to get Liam ready for school as a way of saying thank you for her getting up throughout the night. We we found a situation that doesn't really work, but it's the best we've come up with. But but they just wake up all the time. Now, Judah's one year old, Lily's three, so we handle their waking up a little bit differently. All right, this is Judah. Show you Judah. You may have never seen Judah before. Um you guys can go ahead and throw up Judah. There's him. This is Judah. Terrible table manners for a one-year-old. That's Judah. We left a plate of uh something chocolate on the couch, and Judah's just having at it. That's our one-year-old boy. He will wake up three times in the middle of the night crying, and when that happens, we just go in and we comfort him and we say, Shh, it's okay, and we rock him, we lay him back down gently, and he's so, so cute. That's Judah. This is Lily. Um, Lily, uh, this video I think kind of encapsulates her personality. She is like the Tasmanian devil. Um I'm telling you, this girl is special. She's gonna run something really big, something really important one day. She is confident. I will say that. Very, very confident in her ability. I had a person tell me once that uh I was I was very aggressive. This person said, Justin, you're like a speedboat. You get a lot done, but you should probably look behind you every once in a while to see all the people drowning in your wake. And I've spent the better part of 10 years trying to figure out how to minimize the wake. Lily leaves a big wake, okay? And if you saw in that video her shirt said wild hair, don't care, that kind of sums up Lily. And when Lily wakes up in the middle of the night and comes in our room and screams at the top of her lungs, we don't pick her up and go, Oh, shh, shh, oh, poor baby. Here, let me put you back in. Because she knows better. She knows she's not supposed to do that. She knows unless something on her is broken or there is a fire or something, she is not supposed to come into our room and scream because it wakes up the baby. She knows that, and because she knows that, we deal with her differently. And it's tough. It's tough. I'm just gonna be honest, we've tried everything. We've bribed her, we have we have spanked her. We have we have yelled, we have, we have just we've lost it. We we have had moments as parents that we're not super proud of because we just can't figure out how to get this girl to stay in her bed. For more than an hour. Last week, Megan read about a technique that she wanted to try, and it was awesome. But I gotta tell you guys, it was one of the craziest two hours I've ever witnessed in my life. It's this way to keep your kids in bed that what you do is you just you sit outside their door, and when they open the door, you don't say a word to them, you don't make eye contact with them, because for them it's all about control. You just pick them up and put them back in their bed and shut the door. And if they get back up again and they're like, Mom, you don't look at them, don't talk to them, just put them back in bed. And we're desperate. We'll try anything, okay? And so Megan's like, let's give this a try. And the results were hilarious and insane. Okay? But I will say, after that night, she stayed in bed so much better. So if you need something, if that's where you're at in life, take it. So the first time Lily opens up the door, she's surprised that we're standing there. She's like, oh. And she starts to talk to Megan, she's like, Mommy, and Megan just picks her up, puts her in bed, and as Megan walks out of the room, she's like, Mommy, mommy, mommy! Megan shuts the door, and then Lily gets right back up, opens the door again, and goes, Mommy, I want you, just picks her up, puts her back in. Lily starts getting really frustrated, she starts getting angry. This happens 17 more times, okay? Over the course of like 10 minutes. And then then Lily starts to figure out, okay, this is gonna keep happening, so she starts to strategize. Her first strategy was to come to the door and peek under the bottom to see if we were there. And when she saw us, she just yelled, No! Go away!

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Go away! Right? And she starts yelling, you're mean, she's yelling at Megan, you're a mean mommy!

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Go away. And that didn't work. And so, and so then a few minutes later, she has this idea, and you know, when you have kids, and then those of you who don't have kids, you'll have these experiences. Uh, you realize in certain moments, oh, they think they're smarter than us. So she comes to the door again and she goes, I'm in bed, I'm in my bed, I'm sleeping, I'm sleeping, thinking that we'll hear that and go, okay, we'll like walk away so she can get out. And then five seconds later, she opens the door and just screams, No! Shuts the door again. I mean, at this point she's starting to lose her mind. She's kicking the door, she's throwing things at the door. My son Liam is a few doors away laughing hysterically, okay? Just laughing hysterically. And then, I told you she was confident, right? I want you to know, I'm not embellishing, I'm not embellishing tone, I'm not, I'm not inserting words. This this came out of her mouth exactly like this. She's screaming, she's yelling, and then she goes, I'm gonna huff, and I'm gonna puff, and I will blow this door down.

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Like, that happened! My daughter, my three-year-old daughter, did that.

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And actually blew, expecting, I believe, fully expecting the door to come down. Because, like I said, she is confident. And then it ended, it ended, the final thing, the final struggle, was she just banged on the door and yelled, again, word for word, what the heck is going on? And finally, she went to sleep. Finally, she just came and gave up. Finally. It was awesome. It was awesome. Sometimes, sometimes we look at God and we wonder why he does things as a father, and then we have to look at ourselves and realize that sometimes as a parent, you do what you have to do. Right? You do what you have to do for what's best for your kids. Because, yes, it's nice for us to get a good night's sleep, but kids need sleep. Like, it's important that she gets rest. Sometimes you do what you have to do. See, the law, the old covenant, it it exposed our sin. It showed us what sin was, and now that we know we're accountable to it, Paul actually talks about this very dynamic in Romans 7. Just like my daughter is accountable to staying in bed because she knows she's supposed to, Paul wrote, Well then, am I suggesting that the law of God is sinful? Of course not. In fact, it was the law that showed me my sin. I would never have known that coveting is wrong if the law had not said you must not covet, but sin used this command to arouse all kinds of covetous desires within me. If there were no law, sin would not have all that power. At one time I lived without understanding of the law, but when I learned the command not to covet, for instance, the power of sin came to life and I died. So I discovered that the law's commands, which were supposed to bring life, brought spiritual death instead. Sin took advantage of those commands and deceived me. It used the commands to kill me. But still the law itself is holy, and its commands are holy and right and good. The law was good, but it exposed the sin in our lives. Because we've got to know it's there to accept that it's there. We had to get out of denial and see it for what it was so that we could accept our situation. That was the first way that the law accomplished that purpose. It defined sin for us. The second way is pretty simple. It showed us that we can't do it. I mean, we had a thousand years to try. A thousand years to see if one person could keep the law, and not one could, not even the first Ten Commandments. Not even the first ten. And I heard a pastor say this once, and I use this a lot because I just loved it. I never thought of it this way, but the Ten Commandments are not like the pinnacle of human achievement, right? It does not say give all you have away and go move overseas and help the poor and just be this generous person. It's it's it's like the low the low bar for human behavior. Don't kill people, don't take their stuff, don't lie about it. It's like basic things. And after a thousand years, not one person can say, I did it. I did them all. Not one person. And trust me, like God was He was itching to be dumb with the law and to bring Jesus to us. In fact, he told the prophet Jeremiah in Jeremiah 31, the day is coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the people of Israel and Judah. This covenant will not be like the one I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand and brought them out of the land of Egypt. That's the covenant we're talking about today. They broke that covenant, though I love them as a husband loves his wife, says the Lord. But this is the new covenant I will make with the people of Israel after those days. I will put my instructions deep within them, and I will write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. And they will not need to teach their neighbors, nor will they need to teach their relatives, saying, You should know the Lord, for everyone from least to greatest will know me already, says the Lord. And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins. And here's what's what's amazing about that. God is telling Jeremiah this, six hundred years before Jesus. So in the thousand-year lifespan of the law, the old covenant, we're not even at the halfway point yet. And yet you can see God's heart. You can see his desire to be done with the old covenant and to give us Jesus, but he knows if he sent Jesus then, we wouldn't be ready. We'd still be like kids going, don't need you. I can do this. I can do this. But after a thousand years, I mean when Jesus could stand up and say, Hey, has anyone done it? Anyone in a thousand years? Has the most devoted, the most conviction-filled person have they even done it? And we can say, not one of us in a thousand years. Once you get to that point, you go, Do you need some help? Are you ready to maybe surrender a little bit and say, help me? I need you to do what I cannot do. That's that's where the law brought us as people. It brings us to the point where we go, oh, I I need you. I need you. Jesus, I need you to do for me what I cannot do. And Jesus did that, and he came to this earth and he lived the law to the letter. He did not, he did not break it, he fulfilled it. He lived that that perfect life. He did what no person could ever do. The Ten Commandments, check, check, check, check, check. Every single one of them, he nailed it, then he died on the cross, paying a penalty that he didn't need to pay because he had done nothing wrong, but he paid our penalty. And then he gave us his righteousness, and he fulfilled the law, he fulfilled that old covenant, and he ushered in the new covenant. Jesus did that, but it took a thousand years of us trying to be ready to accept his help. That is why the old covenant is there. That's why those chapters in the Bible exist. And so when you read those, don't get confused and caught up by all this uh obligation and religion and say, oh, that's not Jesus. No, no, no, that was paving the way for Jesus because his people we would not have accepted him if we hadn't been made aware of our actual situation. That's why that exists. The law existed to expose our need for Jesus, and it did a wonderful job at that. And so here we are in the story today, and obviously that covenant has been replaced. And we don't live under that covenant. We need to understand that, by the way, in Romans chapter 6, verse 14, the Bible says, sin is no longer your master. For you no longer live under the requirements of the law, instead, you live under the freedom of God's grace. So so please do not do not try to live this life that's about striving and perfection. Don't try to do that. When God has said you've been freed from that, when Jesus came and and he did away with the old law, he didn't replace it with a new law. It wasn't like, oh, here's a new list of rules you have to learn. It's a law of love and grace and mercy and forgiveness. It's freedom. So don't break your back trying to earn what you've been given. We're not under that law, but I'll say this as we as we wrap up. We are wrapping up. We can still learn an increase. Incredibly valuable lesson from that law, from that covenant. We can still learn the lesson that it was meant to teach. Because, see, we we have to accept our situation. We have to. That's the lesson that we can learn, that we can take out of here so that today is not just, oh, cool, the Bible makes more sense to me now. That's important, that's good, but I want us to walk out of here with something we can do, something that makes our lives better now. And it's important for us to accept our situation. Just like humanity had to accept its situation to be ready for Jesus, we've got to do the same personally. Paul, one of the greatest followers of Jesus to ever live, wrote this in 1 Timothy 1.15. This is a trustworthy saying, and everyone should accept it. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and I am the worst of them all. That's such an interesting phrase because I wouldn't look at Paul and say, You're the worst. I mean, the man wrote the majority of the New Testament. There's not one person that could claim to be personally responsible for more people following Jesus than Paul. None. And yet he wrote, I'm the worst of all sinners. I'm the chief of sinners. That's what some translations say. I read a person talking about this verse, a man named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who had an incredible story. You may have heard of him. He lived during World War II in Germany. He was executed by the Nazis right before the end of the war. One of the most brilliant followers of God in the last hundred years wrote some great stuff. And I wrote something that he, I read something rather that he wrote about this, and he said, every follower of Jesus should get to the point where they say that same thing. Just like Paul said, everyone should accept this. This is a trustworthy saying. And I remember reading that, going, why like that seems kind of self-defeating. I'm not the worst of them all. I'm better than some people, in my experience. Right? And he said the reason we should all get to that point is because if there's any part of us that doesn't feel that way, that doesn't accept our situation so fully, that that means that we think, to some degree, we think that we can earn it. That if we can't look at ourselves and say, I am chief of sinners, that means there's some part of us that believes I'm good enough. I'm good enough to earn this. I don't really need God's grace entirely. I need some of God's grace for sure to cover the stuff I've done wrong, but I've got a lot of good too. And so I just need, I need, you know, a portion of God's grace. No, we need the fullness of God's grace. Every single one of us, we need the fullness of it. And I'll tell you this: if you if you diminish your situation, you diminish the victory that Jesus has won for you. I spent years of my life diminishing my situation. I was an addict, but I wouldn't call myself an addict. I would say things like, you know, pray for me, I'm really struggling with this. Pray for me, I'm battling this, I'm wrestling with this, I'm having a hard time with this. I I would use words like that. I would I would stop short of the actual truth, which was, I am an addict. And I remember that when I finally said that for the first time, the power that I experienced in just accepting my situation, when I said, I am an addict, because it wasn't until that moment that I was ready for the solution. It wasn't until that moment that I was ready to receive what I really needed. When we get to the point where we look at the law and we go, nope, can't do it. And we realize the impossibility for us even to do it if we gave it all of our effort. And we can say these words that seem really self-defeating, but they're actually not. We can say, I'm a sinner. And we can then understand the fact that God looks at us and he says, Yes, but I love you. I accept you. And I have I have taken the identity of sinner and I have replaced it with the identity of son or daughter. So, yes, it is true that you are a sinner, but not in my eyes anymore. You are my son, you are my daughter. I've taken care of that, and I love you. If you diminish the situation, you just diminish the joy and the love that you experience from God. I've learned that I've got to own my sin so I can own his grace. I want to own it, I want all of it. So you just gotta own your situation. Learn that lesson. And finally, I swear. Accept your situation, accept God's solution. And that solution is Jesus. It's him. Paul wrote this in Galatians. He said, Ask for me, may I never boast about anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Because of that cross, my interest in this world has been crucified, and the world's interest in me has also died. It doesn't matter whether we've been circumcised or not, thank God. What counts is whether we have been transformed into a new creation. May God's peace and mercy be upon all who live by this principle. They are the new people of God. What matters, what counts, is we've been transformed by God through Jesus. That's what matters. That's what counts. So if you walked in here today with the weight of your struggles, if you're sitting here right now going, I'm really glad we're talking about sin in church, because that's what I needed to be reminded of, all the ways I failed, and then I can't do it. Maybe you're like, I am all too aware of my situation. Thank you very much. Got that part down. Do not leave today without accepting the solution. And that solution is not you working harder and striving and doing better. Religion will tell you that. There's a lot of churches that will tell you that. Do better, do more. Let God do it. Just accept Jesus. Just accept Jesus. And maybe you've never done that before. Today needs to be the day where you say, I accept you. I need you to do for me what I cannot do for myself. So, Jesus, I invite you into my life. I believe in you, I put my faith in you. The moment that happens in your heart, you belong to Him. And God's grace and His mercy and His forgiveness, it just covers everything you struggle with. It's covered, it's dealt with, it's done. And you might still struggle, you might still need to grow and mature, and that's fine. But as you're doing that, you need to know that you're covered. Always. And if you're here and you have accepted God's solution, you're like, okay, I've accepted Jesus. Be reminded of that. Because I have this amazing tendency to say thank you, Jesus, and then tiptoe back to striving, to trying to earn my way when I don't have to. I heard a pastor say once that when we sin, the first words out of our mouth should not be forgive me, but thank you. And I really didn't know what to do with that at first. I'm like, that seems kind of, I don't know, a little haughty. But his point was that we can say forgive me all we want to. He's already forgiven us. He wasn't saying that praying for forgiveness is bad. If we need that for ourselves, fine. But when we mess up, the first words out of our mouth should be thank you, because we need to realize that when we mess up, that does not define our relationship with God anymore. Because Jesus came and he fulfilled the law and he replaced the old covenant with a new one and he saved us and he rescued us. So when we mess up, we can say, Thank you, God, that he did what I could not do. Thank you, God, that this moment is not what defines me in your eyes. Thank you, God, for Jesus. So accept your situation. You're messed up. Just a minute. If you're looking for a church full of people who have it together, this is not your church. Just gonna tell you. Okay? Accept it. And but don't stop there. Because if we stop there, there actually becomes this weird pride where we're like, look, I've got I've got sin, I've got stuff, and no, no. Accept the solution. Embrace it every day of your life. Wake up in the morning and say, Thank you, Jesus. Walk out these doors and say, thank you, Jesus. And live. Live in that comfort. That's been dealt with. It's been handled. He loves you. He gave us the law to show us that we need a savior. But then he gave us a savior. So let's enjoy that relationship we have. Let's just live in it. Pray with me as we continue worshiping and we wrap up. Jesus, thank you so much for this incredible church, these incredible people. God, we we can't on our own. But Jesus, you said that with God all things are possible. So by ourselves, without you, away from you, we can't do it. We can't live the life that we're meant to live. But with you, Lord, there is nothing we cannot do. With you, Lord, with your spirit in our hearts, there is nothing that we cannot do. There's no situation in life that we cannot conquer. Lord, we're grateful that you gave us the law. I'm honest, we're grateful that you gave us something that could show us our actual situation, something that could bring us to the point we need to get to, which is surrender. Something that could get us out of denial and get us to the point where we asked for help. And God, I'm grateful for that, but I'm so much more grateful that you sent the help, that you are the help. That you didn't look down on us in shame and disgust because we couldn't do what we couldn't do, but instead you looked down on us with compassion, and you sent your son and you gave everything, Jesus. You gave it all. Because you knew we couldn't. And we love you, Lord. We're grateful for that. Fill our hearts with love and passion and joy. Because of the grace and the love that you've given us, Lord. We pray this in your name, Jesus. We love you, we worship you. Amen.