March 30, 2025, Message by P. Kevin Clancey
Transcribed by Beluga AI.
Alright, we are in Romans 6:15.
15 What then? Should we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? Absolutely not! 16 Don’t you know that if you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of that one you obey —either of sin leading to death or of obedience leading to righteousness? 17 But thank God that, although you used to be slaves of sin, you obeyed from the heart that pattern of teaching to which you were handed over, 18 and having been set free from sin, you became enslaved to righteousness. 19 I am using a human analogy because of the weakness of your flesh. For just as you offered the parts of yourselves as slaves to impurity, and to greater and greater lawlessness, so now offer them as slaves to righteousness, which results in sanctification. 20 For when you were slaves of sin, you were free with regard to righteousness. 21 So what fruit was produced then from the things you are now ashamed of? The outcome of those things is death. 22 But now, since you have been set free from sin and have become enslaved to God, you have your fruit, which results in sanctification —and the outcome is eternal life! 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (Romans 6:15-23, CSB)
May the words of my mouth, meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock, our Strength, and our Redeemer. Amen.
So all my illustrations are old. Bob Dylan. Come on, Kathleen.
Like a Rolling Stone man, I want to watch that movie. They made a movie about Bob Dylan and the big Hollywood production. I want to see it.
But what a lot of people don’t know about Bob Dylan is during the Jesus movement in the 70s, he made a confession of Christ and he wrote an album. He produced an album called Slow Train Coming. And one of the songs, my favorite song on that album, was you got to serve Somebody. That’s right. And who might you serve?
It might be the devil, and it might be the Lord, but you’re going to have to serve somebody. I mean, Bob Dylan is one impression I just can’t do. I don’t know if anybody can do it. But anyway, you’re going to have to serve somebody.
And where did Bob Dylan get that? Romans 6, and lots of other places in the Bible, you’re going to have to serve somebody.
And the great delusion of our time, the great delusion of secular humanism, the great delusion of secularism is, and this stems from the enlightenment all the way into the modern day, is that you don’t have to serve Anybody.
You are small g God. You are completely autonomous. You are the master of your own destiny. You are the ruler of your life.
And Paul says that’s not true. Paul says that’s not true. He says that whoever you submit yourself to, you end up belonging to whatever you submit yourself to.
He starts by saying what he says at the beginning twice. In Romans 6, he repeats this just in a little different language. But in Romans 6:1, he says, should we continue to sin so that grace may abound? Greek word meganoito, absolutely not. It’s the most emphatic. I mean, they could put seven exclamation marks after absolutely not and, you know, several frowning emojis, however emphatic you can make that.
And then in verse 15, what then? Should we sin because we are not under law, but under grace? Absolutely not.
15 What then? Should we sin because we are not under the law but under grace? Absolutely not! (Romans 6:15, CSB)
The word for this, thinking that since we’re no longer under the law and Christ forgives us of our sins and we’re under the grace and mercy of God, and therefore it doesn’t matter what we do because God will forgive us anyway, and we can just live in accordance with the flesh and we can just eat, drink, and be merry and do whatever we want because it doesn’t matter, God will forgive that.
The word for that is antinomism. It means antinomism, gnomism, law, anti against law, or another word used in this passage, lawlessness.
And so the argument is, because Jesus is going to forgive me, I can live any way I want. And sometimes that kind of happens in the modern church when we tell people that the gospel is essentially boiled down to come up front, say a prayer.
When you say the prayer, you have eternal assurance that you go to the good place, and you know, and you said the magic words, you said the magic prayer. As if saying that magic prayer equals biblical faith. You are justified by faith, but I don’t think that equals biblical faith.
And Paul says, you’ve got it all wrong if that’s your thinking. He says, listen, whatever you surrender yourself to leads to slavery. Whatever you surrender yourself to leads to slavery.
Right next door we got a 12 step meeting going on, Alcoholics Anonymous, all right. And Alcoholics Anonymous is simply a 12 step group, by the way, the most effective still today with all our mental health treatments, with all our drug treatments, with all our recovery homes, with all the things where we can, you know, help people try to get sober from their addictions.
Still, the most effective means of long-lasting sobriety is spiritual. It’s centered in God, which all the 12-step groups are centered in. God, some of them, some of the Christian ones, will take those 12 steps and take them from the Bible where those 12 steps originally came from. Others stay away from the Jesus stuff. But the key to sobriety is still God.
And here’s the deal. Addiction is slavery. Addiction is slavery. And you know what? We might not be alcoholics, or you might be, but you’re going to have to serve somebody.
Whatever you surrender yourself to. Listen, you don’t have to be an alcoholic. You can surrender yourself to the Seattle Seahawks. You can surrender yourself. Listen, it’s not. There’s. I’m on the. That’s the precipice that I live close to, surrendering myself to sports and being a sports fan and living and dying with my team.
There was a game on yesterday in the NCAA college basketball playoffs, which I just love. I think March Madness, it’s so good.
And there were two teams that I didn’t care about, but I decided to care more for Texas Tech than Florida because they were the underdog. Texas Tech had them beat until the last three minutes.
And then all of a sudden, they couldn’t hit a shot. Like they couldn’t hit the water if they were at the beach. I mean, they were missing everything.
And Florida got smoking hot. They zoomed past them as the favorite and won, and the underdog lost.
And I was mad, and I thought to myself, why are you mad?
You know, nothing about the University of Florida or nothing about those guys on Texas Tech might all be thugs and crooks, and those guys on Florida might all be lovely Christian people. You just pit, decide to go for. And now you’re going to let it ruin your day. That’s what it’ll do to you.
And if you recognize it, you’re okay. You recognize, oh, this is just a game. Who cares? You know, and those poor kids care, but who really cares? But you can be, you know, C.S. Lewis and the Screwtape Letters.
Screwtape is giving devilish advice to another demon who’s trying to tempt a soul to walk into hell. And he says, you know, the gentle road is much easier. Why make a man a murderer when bowling will do, right?
So anything romantic love. Oh my goodness, do we idolize romantic love? Money. Anything that you give yourself to, you end up being enslaved to it. And anything outside of God that you give yourself to leads to death. It’s a dead-end street.
And you become a slave to sin, and you surrender to sin, and it leads to death. But the alternate is when you surrender yourself to obedience of faith. When you put your faith in Christ and you begin to follow Jesus, that leads to righteousness. That leads to a right standing before God and a right living before God, and you get the righteousness of Christ, and that begins then to take hold of you.
And so the question that Paul’s asking is, it’s not can I sin because I’m no longer under the law.
It’s like, who are you going to submit yourself to? Who are you going to present your body to? Who are you going to follow? What voice are you going to listen to? Right?
You ever seen little cartoons with a little angel on one shoulder and the little devil on the other shoulder? Why do those cartoons exist? Because that’s kind of what exists in our head. Right? That’s kind of what I’ll go ahead. It’s not that bad.
Little devil and the angels, like our Holy Spirit’s like, you know what, you don’t need to do that anymore. That’s not of me or the one that’s more common.
Those are like, you know, we avoid the bad things. The one that’s more common is, oh, you don’t need to do that. And the Holy Spirit says, no, do that. Do that scary, faith-filled, risky thing. Go ahead, go ahead.
Well, Lord, I don’t want to invest my time there. I don’t want to invest my money there. I don’t have enough time and money.
Oh, talk about an addiction that leads to death. Golf, big investment of time and money. It’s killer. Golf’s bad. Yeah. Yeah, it is.
All right, we’ll let Tom Golf surrender to obedience, which leads to righteousness. When we’re converted, it involves an exchange of slaveries. Now, the word slavery is so overwhelmingly politically tainted in our culture. And don’t let this come across like I’m a fan of human slavery. I’m not. But throughout most of the history of the world, slavery has been practiced. In most instances, it’s been very cruel and very oppressive.
But not in every instance. In many parts of the ancient world where slavery was practiced, and in many parts, even of the more modern versions of slavery, maybe it’s not the majority of cases, but there are actually masters who love their slaves and slaves who love their masters.
And they didn’t think it was a cruel or oppressive system. They thought it was just a kind of an employer-employee relationship, except the employee didn’t have any rights to quit and leave. But in a loving relationship, the employee didn’t want it.
In fact, there were slaves who wanted, and here’s the word Paul uses often for slaves, is doulos, which is a bond servant or a bond slave.
There were slaves who would actually, they were slaves for a period of time, and then they would work off their slavery and be able to be set free. And they would so love the family or the master that they were working for. They’d say, I don’t want to go out and find another job, I don’t want to go out.
I want to continue to serve you and serve in the household because I love this household. I love you.
And they would call bond servants or bond slaves. They would bond themselves to their masters, and the master would take them over to a wall and put a big hole in their ear and put a big ring in their ear. And they were bond servants; they were love servants.
All right, so the difference here is you can be a slave to the devil. That’s the oppressive kind of master.
That’s the kind of master who doesn’t care about you, will use you up to death, is only interested in what you can do for them. Or you can be in a love relationship with a good and gracious master that you voluntarily bind yourself to.
But as Bob Dylan said, you’re going to have to serve somebody. Which do you want? And conversion involves an exchange. It’s like, I ain’t working for him anymore, I’m working for him. I’m not working for the devil anymore.
We’re all born into that. We’re all born into sin and slavery and death.
We’re all born into that system. But when we come to Christ through the obedience of faith, we exchange masters. We call Jesus Lord. What does the word Lord mean? Guy that I occasionally do what he asks of me? No, it means master. It means master.
Where you go, I go. What you say, I say. What you do, I do. Jesus is my Lord. I surrender myself in obedience of faith to him. We used to be slaves to sin.
But the obedience of faith has liberated us from the slavery to sin and made us slaves to righteousness. We’ve been liberated.
Now here’s the 50 million dollar question. If we’ve been liberated from sin, why do we keep doing it? Because slavery develops in our heads. Both slaveries develop.
And God created our brains pre-fall, pre-sin, in a very helpful way. And what our brains do is, our brains actually, when things we do become repetitive, our brains kind of draw tracks in our head so that we do those things by autopilot.
Imagine if your brain didn’t do that. And every morning when you woke up, you had to learn to walk again like a toddler, right?
We were talking about this for blind people. When babies first see sight, they don’t see something and go, oh, that’s a person. That’s my mother. All they see is light reflected off objects. But eventually they realize, hey, the light reflected off that thing, which is a face, is always loving. And I always get fed when that thing, which is a face, sings songs to me and loves me.
And then that light that reflects upon that thing, that’s father. He always, you know, he always gives me these little things in my belly where he blows on them, and it makes me giggle. And. And. You ever get slobber daubers as a kid? Right? I always gave my kids slobber daubers. They’re in their 30s. They won’t let me give them slobber daubers anymore.
What’s up? What’s up? Well, then they made kids for me so I can get my grandkids slobber daubers. Are you also raspberries? Zerbers? I don’t know, whatever you call them in your family.
But, you know, they recognize. And it’s actually incredible what our brains do when faces look at us as children. It actually works as adults, too, when faces look on us with delight. Our brains draw tracks, so you don’t have to learn how to walk every day. You don’t have to learn how to recognize faces every day.
You know, how is it that people zip down the road at 65 miles an hour in these combustible vehicles? And, yeah, there are accidents and crashes, but how come there’s so few?
Because we don’t, you know, and how many of you taking your kids out for their first time in the car, right?
And those of you who went out with your parents for the first time in the car, you began to recognize this sound coming from your mother. It wasn’t an exhale, it was an extreme inhale.
And you’d watch your dad as he would slam down his foot on the right side of the car as if it was a brake, you know, thinking, I could die here. What’s going on?
But fortunately, your kids grow up.
And by that process that goes on in their brain, they learn to turn signal. They learn to turn, they learn to judge the distance between cars, all pretty much without thinking.
Now I drive, you know, I’ll drive home from Poulsbo tonight, and I’ll start thinking about this service and start thinking about the day and thinking about the Sermon. And, you know, I’ll go, whoa, where did Silverdale go? I just kind of. I’m all the way past Silverdale. I didn’t. You know, I wouldn’t. I didn’t recognize the Newberry Hill exit or the mall exit.
You know, I’m all the way to Chico Way, and I was just in Poulsbo. Well, why? Because I was thinking about other things, but I was still driving safely.
Why now? The problem is with sin, we train our brains the same way. I feel bad. I do this thing to make me feel better, but it’s not the thing prescribed by God. And it enslaves and it makes me. It works, right? Getting drunk works. If you’re in pain and you’re in misery and you’re sad and you get drunk, you forget about it.
And, you know, if you’re shy and inhibited and you get drunk, all of a sudden, wow, I’m confident and fun, and it works. And the pleasure’s up here and the need’s down here. But as we train our brains, this is what happens, right? The pleasure goes down, and the need goes up. And then we’re over there or in here.
Every serial killer. Nobody started out as a serial killer. Almost all serial killers, there’s a pattern. And their brains are broke. I get it. They’re sinful. But.
But one of the things that happens is they start out by being cruel to animals. They start out by, and somehow in their brokenness, they derive some relief or some pleasure from that.
But as the pleasure of being cruel, you know, of burning an ant with your magnifying glass diminishes, you have to find a stronger. And then it’s cruel to birds, and then cats, and then dogs, and then finally people.
Nobody started out with fentanyl or heroin. Now there’s all sorts of people who can drink beer and stop there.
I’m not, you know, saying, oh, beer is a gateway drug. Never drink beer. But everybody who’s done fentanyl and heroin started with beer and pot. The thing grows, and the slavery grows. Our brains develop, whatever we invest ourselves in.
Moral impurity grows one step at a time, but so does righteousness. And righteousness grows into full-blown sanctification, which is holiness, which is happiness and the ability to relate to God on his terms. And so, just as our mind draws bad habits in our brain, so our mind draws good habits in the brain.
And I’ve told you time and time again, you don’t have to read your Bible. You don’t have to say your prayers. You don’t have to go to church. You don’t have to worship. You don’t have to serve the poor. You don’t have to give your money away, but you get to.
Well, what happens when we apply ourselves to the means of grace, to communion and saying prayers, and we do these rhythms and practices of the Christian life?
Well, if we do them in a legalistic attitude, that draws tracks in our brain that aren’t necessarily good. But if we do them in a thankful, joyful attitude, what we’re doing is what Paul says later in Romans: we’re renewing our minds. We’re drawing new tracks in our mind.
That when I’m tempted, that when I’m feeling bad, that when I’m hurting, I don’t have to go to that drug anymore. I can go to God, or I can go to God with skin on. What’s God with skin on, y’all? The church.
I can call somebody and say, hey, every recovery group I know works because of sponsors. It’s like, well, just call on God. Yeah, I will call on God, but I need God with skin on.
Well, call your sponsor. Call your accountability brother or sister in Christ. The minute you talk about it, you’re drawing a new track in your brain, and you experience the liberation that comes by obedience in Christ.
And you are liberated from sin and Satan and death. But to walk in that liberation requires a renewing of your mind.
Follow. You don’t follow.
You’re mute. You have no voices. All right, thank you. Yeah, go ahead, Kathleen. Yes, yes. Right, right.
And what does the Bible say? What does the Bible say? Defeat defeats fear. Perfect love. Perfect love casts out fear. That can be found in the New Testament. And the direct address can be found in a concordance in your Bible. Anybody know the exact? The exact? I think it’s in 1 John. There you go. 1 John. Yeah.
All right. All right, people. I’m sorry I let you down. I did get 1 John, right?
All right, now you’re thinking, what, he. He hasn’t memorized the whole Bible. I’ll tell you what I tell my kids when they’re growing up. I don’t know everything. I just know almost everything. I’m not always right. I’m just almost always right. Just like your parents, Sophia. Yeah.
All right. Righteousness grows into full-blown sanctification, holiness. The things develop in us. So slavery is freedom and freedom is slavery. What does that mean? Freedom from righteousness led to slavery, which resulted in shame and ultimately death.
This idea that I’m free, that I have no master, that I can do what I want, and that’s not going to create any bondage or destructive patterns in my life is an outright lie. It is the doctrine of Satanism.
And another old example, Frank Sinatra. Yep, that is the anthem of hell. I’m not saying Frank Sinatra is a devil. I’m just saying that song, I Did It My Way, they sing that on every Black Sabbath, probably in the land down under. I did it my way. Who cares? your way stuck your way.
Your way was death. This idea that I can just live my life with no boundaries and there are no consequences. Experience the Bible, everything tells us that is not true. That is not true.
Every step we take, C.S. Lewis tells us, is either a step toward destruction or a step toward life. And our job in life is to take those steps toward life and help one another take those steps toward life.
That kind of freedom, that kind of delusional freedom leads to slavery. It leads to things that we are ashamed of.
Everybody has done things that they were ashamed of, but those things that they were ashamed. Like every addict, you know, every addict does things that at one point in the early periods of their addiction, they say, I’ll never go that far.
Every sex addiction says, yeah, but I’ll never visit a prostitute. I’ll just look online. But unfortunately, many of them, not all of them, but many of them end up needing a bigger thrill, and they end up going and they go into prostitution. All right?
Every drug addict said, well, I’ll never steal for my drugs.
They end up stealing not only from other people. They steal from their mother, they steal from their father, they steal from the people they love the most. Where’s that vaunted freedom when you end up living your life doing things you’re ashamed of, that you said you would never do? Those things lead to death. And it all starts with, I don’t want anybody telling me what to do. You can’t tell me what to do. I’m free. I’m free.
As we’re locking the shackles on our own hands and feet, liberation from sin and a life set apart to God produces eternal fruit, leads to sanctification, and ultimately eternal life. And it actually leads to great freedom. There’s great freedom in service. Like, for one thing, I’m free from the opinions of others. Isn’t that great? I’m free from what? your opinion of me is none of my business. Unless it’s good, and then you should tell me often. your opinion of me is none of my business. I’m free from that. I only have to Please, one person.
I had a youth pastor for years, and he always came to me and said, well, you know, Kevin, I’m doing the best I can, but I’m worried about the parents. His name was Steve Newbaum. I called him Newbie.
I said, Newbie, you don’t have to worry about the parents. My theology was bad here, but I was his boss, and I just said, Newbie, all you got to do is please me and God, and I’m happy. Check with God. I think he’s happy, too. He’d go on.
You know, he’d take kids on a mission trip. I got 20 kids. I said, Newby, just bring 19 of them back alive. That’s good. If we lose one, it’s all right. In fact, I’m sure the church could vote on which kid we want you to lose. The parents might even. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I tell them that. I said, you just got to please me and you got to go. What about my wife? So that’s between her and you. But as far as I’m concerned, just make me happy. And that’s not even true, right?
That’s not even true. you’re free. you’re free from the slavery of the things that used to make you ashamed and led to death. you’re free from the condemnation of the devil. you’re free from sin. you’re free from the power and the threat of the grave when you submit yourself to Christ.
Involuntary bondservant doulos, slavery. Those things lead to sanctification and ultimately to eternal life. And it leads to freedom. How many of you think, in the new heavens and the new earth, 24/7?
Jesus could be looking over your shoulders saying, well, now do this, and now do that, and now do that. No, we’ll be dancing with joy, and anything we’re supposed to do will be a delight.
You know, Jesus may say, hey, Kevin, go talk to Kathleen Kelly. Oh, bummer. She’s always such a Debbie Downer. I’m being facetious. Kathleen, you have a gift of encouragement.
Go talk to Isaiah Miller. Used to talk to him a lot on earth. Enjoyed every minute of it. How many times did you talk to Isaiah? You know what I’m going to say?
A zillion. A zillion. I don’t know this inside joke, right? But I’ll let you know. First time I met Isaiah, I used some reference. I forgot what it was. It’s like, oh, I’ve done that a zillion times. And he just as coolly and as logically and as rationally as could be said, a zillion is not a number.
So since then, of course, you know my personality, right? Every odd chance I get with Isaiah, it’s like that’s. That’s. That happened a zillion times. It’s a love language. Zillion has become our code.
So in eternity, we’ll talk a zillion times. Isaiah, we’ll talk a zillion times, and we’ll have our theological discussions, and it’ll be great. What’s that? Might. It might. You know, we might have our zillionth eternal birthday someday. When you have your zillionth eternal birthday, I want to be there for the party. All right. Thank you.
So it’s glorious, and it leads to life and freedom. So there it is. Romans 6:23, one of the most famous passages in the Bible. Every evangelist uses it. The wages of sin. Here’s what you earn by your rebellion.
Here’s what you earn by saying, I did it my way. Here’s what you earned by saying, I don’t want your shackles, God. You earned shackles, slavery, and death. That’s your wage. That’s your paycheck. That’s what you earned. Death. You worked for it, right? That’s what we say, right? I just want what I deserve.
C.S. Lewis says, in the end, there are only two kinds of people. Those who say to God, my will be done, and those who say to God, thy will be done. They both get what they ask for.
I didn’t want life, love, forgiveness, abundance, glory. I didn’t want the beauty of your face and the glory of eternity. I wanted my way. And God says, you can have your way, but if it’s without me, nothing, it’s death.
CS Lewis again says, don’t ask for peace and happiness. Apart from God, there is no such thing.
Dear ones, I want to give you one of the greatest keys to happiness in this world and eternal life. And if people knew this in our culture, counseling offices would be closed around the nation.
Two things would close counseling offices. The ability to forgive people who’ve hurt us. The other one is the ability to realize it’s not about me. There’s such freedom in that.
I’m not the center of the universe, and neither are you. Now it’s hard because we have this thing called self-consciousness. I don’t know what it’s like to be Stevin. All right? I don’t know. I don’t have the consciousness of Stevin. I don’t know what it’s like to deal with the things he’s dealing with.
And you know, I don’t know what it’s like to be Brian. I know what it’s like to be Kevin. That leads me to the delusion that Kevin is the center, because Kevin is the center of my consciousness.
But then, as two and three year olds, right, we try to assert that. Our parents say, no. You know, I’m four years old, sitting on my mother’s lap. She tells me, I told her this. I said, mommy, you’re the boss of me, huh?
And she said, that’s right, honey, I’m the boss of you.
Now, ladies, you can disagree with this back in the 60s, so this is how it basically functioned. And dad’s. Dad’s the boss of you, right? Yeah, he’s the boss of the whole family. Yeah, Dad’s the boss of the whole family. And God’s the boss of dad and the boss of everything, right? And she said, that’s right. And she’s probably thinking, wow, for a four year old, this is pretty good.
And then I dropped the bomb.
I said, you know, before I was born and was in heaven, God told me I get to be the boss. You should have thought of that one, Sophia. Should have told that to Sean.
It’s not about me. One of the great things we do when we come here on Sunday nights is we step out of that. That’s what worship does. Worship steps us out of that. It’s about me and I’m the center of the universe. And again, that’s so liberating. It doesn’t all rely on me. I don’t have to.
We have the phrase carry the weight of conscientious people. They carry the weight of the world.
And mothers can say, you know what, God, I love my kids. I said my prayers for them. I did the best I could, and it probably wasn’t perfect. And don’t listen to the devil too much, mothers, because she’ll beat you up. But just say, just look at your kids now and say, God, especially if they’re grown. Just look at your kids now and say, God, your problem, not mine. your problem, not mine.
All right, not quite, Sophia, but pretty soon you’re just going to be all God’s problem.
My kids still call us with problems. I can’t fix them. I couldn’t fix them back then. All I can do is say, help them, Jesus, help them. I did the best I could. Best thing I ever did for them was bring them before you and marry Jill. I gave him two great gifts. Two JCs. I gave him Jesus Christ and Jill Clancy. There you go. It’s the best I could do for them. Now they’re your problem, not mine.
My grandkids, they’re your problem, not mine. Why? I ain’t the center of the universe. I don’t have the power. I can’t fix them.
God, firehouse, church isn’t going the way I want it to. Kevin, whose church is it? Oh, I mean, I say that all the time, right? People say, pastor, you got your own church. I always say, don’t tell Jesus. He thinks it’s his, but I act like it’s mine. I act like it’s mine.
Why aren’t those people getting sanctified quicker? Why aren’t there more people coming? your problem, God, not mine.
Your problem, God, not mine. It’s not about you, and dear ones, when we realize that, we step into life.
Here’s the final thing I want to say: there is no middle ground. Ultimately, there is no middle ground. There is no kind of life or kind of death. There’s life and death.
We had my mom’s second cousin when he was a young man. He was several years younger than my mom, so he’s kind of in between, right? My parents’ age and our age. He was in that generation, kind of in between.
He came to live with us as a young man. He worked where my dad worked. My dad got him a job. He was a good guy, really liked him. He was a nice man, and he was good to us, but he lived with us.
You know how a young person would, you know. He moved from his home, lived with us, getting a job, getting set up financially. And he got a. He had a girlfriend, real sweet lady. I wish I could remember her name. If I saw it on Facebook, I’d remember.
But she was really nice. She was very nice. And they got engaged, and she moved up, and she got an apartment. He was still living with us.
I remember one time we were driving, and let’s say her name was Paula. It’s not, but we’re driving, and we drive past, and my mom goes, oh, that’s where Paula’s apartment is. And my little sister, my youngest. You know how kids are kind of pharisaical. And I don’t even know how she thought about this or knew this. She’s probably only six or seven or something like that.
She goes, I bet she’s halfway pregnant. Yeah, there’s no halfway pregnant. There’s no halfway pregnant. There’s no purgatory. There’s no limbo. There’s no this is it. This is the place between heaven and hell. This is the place between life and death.
But ultimately there is life and death. And doing it your way earns death. And submitting by an obedience of faith to God leads to life. you’re going to have to serve somebody. I love what Joshua says, choose this day whom you will serve.
He doesn’t say, choose this day whether you’ll serve Yahweh or be free. He says, choose this day who you will serve. The gods, the pagan gods, the foreign gods, the demonic principalities that you served in Egypt, or the God who brought you into this land and delivered you out of Egypt and established you in this land.
As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. We choose this day. Listen, God does it. It’s God’s power. It’s God’s grace. But we have a part to play in it, and that’s the part we play.
Do we believe? Do we align ourselves with King Jesus? Do we come to Jesus and say, as for me and my house, we’re going to serve the Lord? My kids did not have a choice. They had a choice whether or not to believe in Jesus. That was their choice. But I didn’t raise them neutral. We went to church. Now, fortunately, they liked going to church. I mean, they had so much fun in youth group. We’d be on vacation and they’d say, are we going to get back in time for youth group? That was awesome.
They loved going to church, which was great. But if they didn’t love, I didn’t love going to church. My parents took me to church. I always tell people I had a drug problem as a kid. I got drugged to church. I told one Baptist preacher,
I said, my mom was a Baptist growing up. He said, didn’t hurt her none either. You know what? Didn’t. Didn’t hurt her none. The wages of sin is death. But the gift, that’s what you earn. But the gift, the generous, overflowing, abundant, loving, kind, forgiving, empowering, eternal is life.
Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, with the heart of men and women what the Lord has prepared for the heart for his sons and daughters.
We’re reading the book Imagine Heaven. You know, Imagine Heaven. If those stories are true, and I think they pretty much are, you know what those stories show us? The first two feet past the front door, they show us the first steps into eternal Narnia.
And I love how C.S. Lewis describes it: higher up and deeper in, dear ones. Eternal life, you don’t have to climb a mountain for it.
You don’t have to fast 40 days for it. You don’t have to give $10,000 to the church. You can’t buy it with $10,000 to the church.
Today there’s a special. If you want to give five, we’ll see what we can do about it. But you can’t buy it for 10. No.
It’s simply saying, Lord, I know I don’t deserve this, and I know I have patterned my life in a way that I’ve become a slave to sin, but I want to transfer allegiances. I want to follow you, and I want my mind to be renewed.
And I ought to be retrained so that one day not only will people say I belong to you, but they’ll be able to say in complete honesty that I’m like you. Isn’t that the greatest gift of salvation?
We think the greatest gift of salvation is avoiding the bad place, going to the good place, which is great. I definitely want to avoid the bad place, go to the good place. But the greatest gift is what will make it the good place. He’ll be there, you’ll be there, and we’ll all be like him.
And what we’re experiencing now is a little bit of a foretaste of that. And this is a foretaste of that. It’s amazing how communion looks backward, forward, and in the present.
It looks backward because Jesus says, what? Remember what I’ve done for you. It looks forward because Jesus says, this meal is an appetizer. And one day you will feast with me at the wedding feast of the lamb, and you’ll feast forever in my kingdom.
And it looks very much in the present. And it says, take this and eat. In doing it, you’ll be fed.
It is another means of grace. It’s another way of meeting me. And it’s another way of renewing your mind. Anybody know you can renew your mind with food? It’s one of the most primary ways we renew our mind, right? Food is the most bonding thing apart from sex. Food is the most bonding thing we do with another human being. That’s why, as a prelude to sex, as a prelude to mating and dating, what do we do? What’s the first thing we do? We go to eat. We go to eat.
I tell you what, you have a meal with somebody. By the end of that meal, you have decided whether you want to spend another meal with that somebody or you don’t want to see them again.
Jesus says, Come have a meal with me. Have a meal with one another and I will knit you together with me and with one another in love. And it’s a love that never ends.
And this story is too good to be true, but it is. So, dear ones, I’m done. There’s something better for you than anything I’ve said.
And it won’t even take a half an hour. It’ll take 20 seconds. Come and eat.
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