Series: The Sermon on the Mount
May 9, 2021 - David Stockton

We’re going to be in Matthew chapter 5 if you want to grab a Bible and turn there. We’re also going to be in Galatians chapter 3 if you want to make a mark there as well.

It’s Mother’s Day. My mom is not around anymore these days. She was awesome, though, in a lot of ways. She had an interesting experience of becoming a mother. She was 17 when she got married and 18 when my brother showed up, and then had another one of my brothers at 19-1/2 and had me by the time she was 23. So three boys by the time she was 23.

And my dad was actually 27 when I was born, but he was probably going on about 20 as far as his maturity level. So my mom really had her hands full with a bunch of boys in the house. And yet, my mom, she was strong. She was small but she was strong. And she did set us in line and taught us a lot of things.

I was thinking, you know, we’ve been talking about the law as far as when Jesus was saying in Matthew 5:17 that he didn’t come to abolish the law, but to fulfill the law. So we’ve actually spent a couple of weeks talking about the law of God as brought to us through the Mosaic covenant. And we’re going to be talking about the law again today.

I was thinking about my first interaction with any concept of law was my mom. She was the one who laid down the law in our house. And like that little film was joking, I mean, all those are rules, right? Those are laws that moms come up with that kids violate continually, that’s why they never say those things.

One of the things that came to mind real strong was my mom got a couch one day. I don’t know if it was a nice couch and she had always wanted a nice couch and finally got a couch. I have no idea what the couch was, I just remember the law was we weren’t allowed to sit in it. So I thought, okay, there’s a nice couch coming. We destroy everything. She doesn’t want us to sit in the couch. But the couch was right in the middle of our house in our living room. So it wasn’t like a couch in her bedroom, it was a couch in a room where people sit a lot. And we weren’t allowed to sit on that couch.

I can still picture that couch and how pristine it was, in my mind, just wondering what it would have been like to sit on it and to feel that couch underneath me. But that wasn’t enough. I don’t know exactly what took place, but that rule of not sitting on the couch quickly became we weren’t allowed to go into the room that couch was in. So the entire living room, we were not allowed in, me and my three boys. There weren’t a lot of other people living in the house besides my mom and dad. But we weren’t allowed in it. We were allowed in this tv room, but I actually can picture the difference of those two rooms. This room the carpet was clean and still was sticking up, you know. Then the tv room where we were allowed to go was rough. It was a rough space in the house.

Those are some rules. We used to get a nickel for every pair of socks we could put together. Anybody else have something like that? And you’d think, “Wow, that seems like a lot of money.” We’d get like four pairs is all we could ever find each. It sounded like this really big deal but it never worked out that great for us. We had some interesting things.

Then I remember my mom came up with this real clever, like legal system for us as far as chores goes. Every time we’d do a chore we’d get a thumbtack on this little tack board she put up there. So clever and trying to get us responsible and all those things. We’d get a certain amount of money for every thumb tack that we got when we completed a chore. Sounds very normal. I just remember, because I was the youngest, it didn’t matter how hard I worked or how many chores I did, I couldn’t get more thumbtacks on the board. It would always stay the same few numbers. But my brothers, who never seemed to do any chores, just kept growing thumbtacks all the time. It took me a while. I was a little dense as a kid. They’d just walk up and it would be like bam, bam. They were just stealing them.

It didn’t matter what rules my mom made, we violated them and made a mess of them. But somehow we got through.

Talking about the law. Matthew 5:17. Let’s read Matthew 5:17-20. This is super, super important passage of scripture, passage of the Sermon on the Mount, as Jesus is trying to help the people he gathered understand what it’s going to be like if they follow him. Understand what’s it’s going to be like to walk in his ways. Understand what he was on earth to do was to bring in something new, something different. So this is what he says:

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets;

Which is a past thing. He’s speaking to Jews primarily. He’s speaking about this covenant that God made with Moses. That the people had basically been participating in for thousands of years.

I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished.

So again, he’s just saying this is so important. All of those commands, all of the stuff you learned in the Law and the Prophets. The Torah, the Prophets, all of those things. So important they are from God. They are good. And they will not pass away.

Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and the teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven.

So the law is good. It’s not going to be abolished. It’s super important and yet, you need to have a righteousness that’s better than the Pharisees or you’re not even going to make it. So this is what we’ve been talking about.

It’s funny. I’v been finding a lot of help for this sermon series from a guy named Jonathan Pennington, super-cleverly on the Sermon on the Mount and it’s called The Sermon on the Mount. You can check it if you want. But he wrote in there about this passage of scripture, which just kind of confirms so much of why I just felt we needed to camp out here. He said this:

The compactness of Matthew 5:17-20 is at once its power and its difficulty. By virtue of its pithy, contrastive statements we get a large-scale snapshot of the issue; but its brevity and super-concentrated collection of weighty terms and ideas mean that every sentence is a spark that sets off a fire in a different direction. Like good poetry, this short passage is thick with meaning and in need of deep reflection.

So we’ve camped out here and you might be sick of these verses. You might be saying, “Why are we talking so much about the Law? I thought we were Christians living under grace.” And all of that is true. But I’m really trying to make sure that we hear from Jesus in this time as best we can before we go forward.

So we have been doing a lot of affirming of the Law, because that’s in here. Jesus is doing that. Affirming of the commands that God had given us. Now again, that’s a tricky, complicated thing. Because what is Jesus really referring to when he says the Law and the Prophets. There’s a lot of debate. There was a lot of debate at that time.

There were four main sects at that time: Pharisees, Sadducees, Zealots and Essenes. They all had different worldviews, different philosophies on how to do that. Kind of like what we have today with Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, progressives, whatever you want to talk about. They even had these Zealots. And the Zealots were basically like, “We just want to fight. We just want to find the Romans and get rid of them because they are oppressors.” It’s kind of like the social justice warriors of this time.

They were all trying to unpack this in a different way. And then you had schools of thought. You had the school of Hillel and the school of Shammai. One of these was taking a little looser understanding of the scriptures and kind of giving a little more room to wiggle. And others were tightening it up and making it really, really strict.

So there was this constant challenge of, well, what is the Law? In the Mitzvot was the 613 confirmed commandments that came through the Torah. Torah is the first five books of the Bible, which another name for it is Pentateuch. But then it gets even a little deeper because those 613 Mitzvot commandments that came from the written Law of the Torah needed interpretation and commentary to figure out how they really applied to life.

So they came up with something called the Oral Law. The Oral Law eventually gave way and became something called the Talmud. The Talmud was basically the most general adopted orthodox traditions and teachings and commentaries on the Mitzvot which came out of the Pentateuch and the Torah. Then the Talmud was broken up into two main kind of documents. One was a little bit prior and one was a bit little after that. That was the Mishnah. Then the Gemara.

You see the complexities? This is the stuff we’re trying to do. We’re trying to gain a vision of the righteousness of God for our time. God, what do you want us to do with the issues that we are facing today? And last year, 2020, a lot of these issues came to the surface because a lot of us were feeling real insecure. And what happened was a lot of people started shouting and preaching about what righteousness and justice really were. And they were coming up with their own backing of those type of things, their own reasoning for those things. But not a lot of them were coming from a scriptural point of view, a Judeo-Christian ethic. In fact, I would even call them anti-Biblical.

So we really did have to kind of all of a sudden say, “Okay, God. I’m being pulled in so many different directions. These are some powerful ideologies being passed out. Some of them sound so good. I don’t know what to do.” So we dove into the scriptures, the safety that’s there. And we affirmed the goodness of the Law of God. And we unpacked it and tried to understand. We went back to 1 Kings and really looked at what was the idolatry of that day. Where did they go astray so that we won’t fall into the same traps. And we really affirmed the Law.

We’ve been doing that the last two weeks. Two weeks ago, remember Kenny? He was here preaching about those who relax on the Law of God are the least in the kingdom. We don’t want that. We don’t want to be the least in the kingdom so we’ve got to be careful we don’t relax on the Law of God or teach others that they can relax on the Law of God. We talked last week about how we don’t want to mess with the truth because the truth is what sets us free. Then if we mess with the truth we’re really messing with our freedom. And if we diminish or water down the truth, we’re really diminishing or watering down our ability to be free as the Lord as prescribes it.

All of that is good and right and wonderful. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have done that. But I’m saying that is partial. And you’ve got to track with me here. And I don’t even know if I’m going to do a good job of explaining this, but I’m trying. I’m trying and I will keep trying until we can understand it. Because the New Testament is full of this relationship. What is the role of the Law in the life of the believer? Where does it stop being a good thing and become a bad thing? Because that happens.

And that’s where Jesus brings in the example of the Pharisees. Because the Pharisees knew the Law. They loved the Law. They searched the Scriptures constantly. They put them in little boxes on their head and wore them around. They put them on their doorposts. They were trying to really unpack and understand how to live righteously according to God’s standards. They committed themselves to it.

But Jesus said their righteousness wouldn’t even get them into heaven. So something was missing. In some ways the picture in mind as I’ve been trying to understand this for myself, is picture a bunch of logs on a fireplace. There’s no fire, but the logs are in there. For me, I love bonfires in a little bit of a too much way. At least that’s what my mother-in-law says to me all the time. But the kids that I have and the cousins that are around a lot, they don’t think so at all. They think it’s awesome.

But I love to build these bonfires, build them, and you can build a box one. You can lean things together and make little teepee. It’s really fun to build these things. Basically, that’s what it seems like these Pharisees were doing. They were building all these things and in some ways it seems like they were building their own Tower of Babel trying to reach to the righteousness of God.

And was Jesus was saying was, “I haven’t come to get rid of all that but I’ve come to set fire to it. I’ve come to bring the fire that will actually make this thing come alive, make this thing good, make this thing bring warmth to the people who need warmth; and healing to the people who need healing.” But the Pharisees had no fire. They had none of the Spirit of God or the Spirit of the Law. They just had the substance and their righteousness was completely empty, according to Jesus.

So we’ve talked about that. Now we’re trying to shift into this understanding of what Jesus was moving into. “I’ve not come to abolish the Law, but I’ve come to fulfill it.” That word fulfill means complete or satisfy. And that’s what I like. It’s like, “I haven’t come to get rid of this bonfire, but I’ve come to actually bring fire that will now ignite this thing in such a beautiful, world-healing, individual healing way.” That’s the righteousness that he’s really after. Not these empty towers of righteousness that often religiosity brings about; but a true relationship with Jesus that causes justice to flow into the world out of each one of us. So that’s what we’re trying to move into.

So let’s go to Galatians chapter 3, because here is where Paul — who is just such a perfect example of what was happening here — Paul was writing to the Galatians about the Law of God and what its purpose is and what it was supposed to be about. He’s trying to help them shift from this understanding of walking in the Law to now walking in the Spirit. This kind of thing that Jesus ushered in, moving us from an old covenant to a new covenant reality.

Paul is coming, not just from a person who’s understanding this from revelation from God, but he’s coming because he’s actually experienced all of this in his own personal life. We first meet Paul as someone who is so filled with anger and murderous threats in his pursuit of righteousness. He was someone who was zealous for the Law. He was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, he says of himself. He said, “According to the Law, I was blameless.” Yet what he had inside his heart was anger and frustration and murderous threats. Literally, he was trying to go kill people who were following the way of Jesus. That’s what all of that religiosity, that’s what the Law brought him until Jesus came and said, “Hey, what are you doing? What you’re doing is not righteousness.” And Jesus began to interact with him and teach him the way of Jesus.

It’s kind of interesting. We did mention last week, remember, how Jesus was trying to help people understand that murder, according to the Pharisees and according to the law is if you don’t kill somebody. But Jesus is saying that’s not the righteousness that God’s after so you won’t kill somebody. God’s actually wanting to see that the anger in your heart, you call people Raca, you call people fool, something in your heart turns from anger to love. He’s wanting to get at these divisions and bring unity and peace.

And Paul experienced that firsthand in his own heart. When he met Jesus, Jesus stole his anger. And the very people that he was trying to kill, literally, he now became a champion for, someone who served them and cared for them and built the Church of God. Which is so fascinating that that shift happened because the Spirit came. He went from old covenant to new covenant in a beautiful way.

Let’s read what he says in Chapter 3 about the Law. Now verse 2 is where we’re going to start:

I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh? Have you experienced so much in vain—if it really was in vain? So again I ask, does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you by the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard?

So, first of all, we’ve got to understand that the Law is actually a covenant. So when these people were hearing Jesus talk about the Law, I mean, when we talk about the law, we think cops and robbers, right? We think of courtrooms and all of those things. We think of governments trying to pass laws, which they’re doing right now. That’s where our mind goes.

But when these people were hearing about Law, they were hearing a lot more the word covenant. Because that’s what the Law was. The Law was where God, who had set the Israelite’s free from slavery in Egypt, had sustained them in the wilderness, had led them to the Promised Land, had been so kind and good to them, had been so close and faithful to them, was now saying, “As you go into this new place, here’s the relationship I want to have with you. I will be your God and I will give you blessing and I will watch over you and I will prosper you. And here’s what I want you to do in return. I want you to love me, have no other gods before me. Don’t take my name in vain. And I don’t want you to kill each other. I don’t want you to commit adultery.”

He gives them the Ten Commandments. This is basically the relationship. It’s almost as if you’re at a wedding. What happens at a wedding? You have a guy standing up there. You have a girl standing up there. They look at each other before the authority, the priest or whatever, and they give vows. “I promise that this is what I’m going to do. I promise that this is how I’m going to be. I promise that I’ll never leave you, til death do us part.” We make all these promises. That’s a lot more, when they hear the Law, they think more of vows, of covenant, of relationship.

That’s ultimately what God was trying to do with the laws he was giving to Israel. He was trying to draw them in close to say, “Hey, this is how we’re going to have the best relationship.” But what happened in Israel was they began to make the laws all about the laws. They began to just focus so much on the laws, they forgot to even focus on the Lord. They started focusing on doing all the things God was asking them to do, and really gave no attention or care to God at all.

We have to remember that all of the laws that we’ve been given, all the commandments are ultimately to cultivate a relationship with Jesus, which produces righteousness. Not a righteousness that, someday if we get it all right, God will bless us. It’s such a challenging thing for us to not fall back into those things.

The Galatians, when Paul came there, the Galatians didn’t know the Law. They didn’t know what God was up to. And Paul preached to them and he shared with them about who Jesus is. and he basically told them that the world has all been set up and your life is just going to be empty until the Spirit comes. The Spirit’s going to bring fire to all of this and then your life can be shining bright.

And they were like, “Yeah, we believe. We know we need forgiveness. We’re stuck in our sins. We can’t stop doing that. We have hatred. We have all these things you’re talking about. We need forgiveness. We need the Spirit.” They received it. They received what Jesus did on the cross. They received his Spirit in their lives. And signs and wonders broke out in Galatia. People were being healed. People were being set free. Beautiful things were happening. And it was wonderful.

Then, shortly after that, the people started to just kind of be all about rules. And they started to create just religion. And they really forgot to just kind of be walking in the Spirit in relationship with Jesus. And Paul was saying that you’ve got to remember that the Law is a covenant with a person, the person of Jesus Christ. That’s what it’s all about. It’s not to make you righteous. It’s to make you closer to Jesus, because Jesus is the one who makes you righteous.

The second thing he says here is the Law is a measure for us. 3:10 through 11:

For all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: “Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law.” Clearly no one who relies on the law is justified before God, because “the righteous will live by faith.”

So here, what he’s saying is basically the Law given to us, the Ten Commandments — all of these things — one of their purposes in our lives is to help us know what righteousness is and, therefore, to know that we’re not righteous. That’s literally one of the reasons God gave the Law to the people, so that they would know what righteousness is, but then in the very next breath they would remember that they are not righteous, because they’re not fulfilling those things. They have the hatred in their heart. They can’t get free from the lust. When somebody does something to them they lash back. They don’t love their enemies. They don’t stay faithful to their contracts and vows, including marriage.

These are the things that Jesus was describing and unpacking. When we measure ourselves against all that God desires, all that God asks of us, if we’re honest, we fall short. And he’s saying here, if you even do one, you could nine out of ten and your righteousness is still not enough to get into heaven. That’s the way he finishes up this little part of it. He says, “Be perfect, even as my Father in heaven is perfect.” That’s the kind of righteousness that he’s requiring.

So when we’re face to face with the Law, it’s totally appropriate for us to affirm the goodness that is described there, but then we also have to acknowledge that we are sinners. That’s bad news for just a second, right? Everybody’s feeling a little heavy right now. Everybody’s like, “Why is he saying this? Is he trying to be mean?”

It’s important. This is one of the reasons the Law is there, to help us know we can’t make it, which then makes us then go, “God, I need you.” And he’s like, “Cool. I just sent my Son. Bam. All your sins are forgiven. Righteousness just like me. Bam. We won.” It’s all there. But we have to understand our insufficiency if we’re ever really going to be able to receive the sufficiency that Christ is.

If we keep falling back to just saying, “Well, maybe I’ll get it right this time,” and not rely on his strength, not fall into his grace, not live out of grace, we’re going to be brutal to ourselves and we’re going to be brutal to those the Lord has around us. We need to be full of his grace in the face of his Law.

So the Law is covenant. The Law is a measure for us. Then this one is interesting. The Law is a tutor. I’m going to read from The Message translation (MSG), but it’s the same chapter 3 verse 23 through 27. This is what Paul says about the Law:

Until the time when we were mature enough to respond freely in faith to the living God, we were carefully surrounded and protected by the Mosaic law. The law was like those Greek tutors, with which you are familiar, who escort children to school and protect them from danger or distraction, making sure the children will really get to the place they set out for.
But now you have arrived at your destination: By faith in Christ you are in direct relationship with God. Your baptism in Christ was not just washing you up for a fresh start. It also involved dressing you in an adult faith wardrobe—Christ’s life, the fulfillment of God’s original promise.

Basically, what he says is the Law is kind of like a tutor. The Law was given to us to hold us there, to keep us safe until the day something else kicked in. When I think about my mom’s laws, that’s exactly what they were. My mom was basically trying to provide a little structure, a little shelter to these three boys that were insane, until the day — and she prayed a lot — that maybe a little maturity would show up, maybe a little common sense would kick in, the tiniest bit of self-control might be there. She had to war with us. She had to fight with us. She had to try to get my dad on the page, because she would make the laws and he would enforce the laws, but he would also break a lot of the laws. It was like the enforcer/breaker. We were just the breaker/receivers of the enforcement. Anyway.

All those laws were put there to try to protect, until the day she was just hoping and praying, one day we would be able to make a good decision all by ourselves. That’s what that was. Basically, that’s what Paul was saying the Law was. God gave the Law to his people to kind of hold them together, to teach them the way, to keep them from falling off the cliff until the day that something much better showed up. That “something much better” is the Spirit of Go, who wants to not just teach us about what God’s ways are, but he wants to write them as desires on our heart. He wants to come inside of us and navigate us. Not only that, but the best part of it is to empower us to walk in those things.

Jesus was, they said of him, that John came to baptize with water, but Jesus came to baptize with the Spirit and with fire. He was saying, “I’ve not come to abolish that whole Law, but I’ve come to fulfill it. I’ve come to put the fire in it. I’ve come to release my Spirit into you so that you can now walk in this righteousness.”

It’s a major, major thing. I know it’s so hard for us to grasp totally what he’s saying. I’m not saying you. I’m saying me, too. The intensity of what he’s saying. But the rest of the epistles in the New Testament are all unpacking this new covenant, this new thing that God created in Christ Jesus, where we can be made just as righteous as God the Father. Justified. Just as if we never sinned — by the life of Jesus, by the death of Jesus, and by the resurrection of Jesus. All the work that he did applied to us gets us into the fulness of righteousness.

Now the Law of God, for the life of a believer, is now we’re going from righteousness to the Law to be guided. Not trying to use the Law to gain some sort of righteousness. So now we have to figure out what it means to walk in the Spirit, that there is a much more important Law, a greater Law over our lives than the Law of Moses or the Law of the old covenant.

So we’re now living into what does it mean to live in this new covenant life? This new relationship with God. Walking by the Spirit. This is what we’re trying to unpack. I’m saying this because I know it’s hard to understand what that’s like, to walk in the Spirit. Paul is continually trying to help people understand what it means to walk in the Spirit. So I’m going to give you a couple of examples to finish up here. But more importantly than anything, I want you to start figuring it out on your own, what it means to walk by the Spirit.

Like I said, for Paul, what it meant when the Spirit came in was he no longer living according to the works of the Law, but now he was trying to follow what God was asking him to do. He just started doing what God asked him to do in this relational way. He wouldn’t go to the Law, necessarily, to figure out what God would want. He would go to prayer. He would go to his relationship with the Spirit to figure out what God wanted. And yes, more often than not, what God wanted him to do was totally in line with the scriptures. Absolutely. This is God’s favorite tool. But don’t ever make this God. Don’t seek this God where you think you have eternal life by doing this or you’ll fall way, way short like the Pharisees. This is just trying to help us know about Jesus and the relationship we’re supposed to have with him by the Spirit.

But going back to my mom, my mom had to really figure out what it meant to walk in the Spirit. She had to figure out how to live by the Spirit because her dad took off on her when she was really young and left her to try to figure out some things on her own. Then her mom kind of went super cold because she was trying to figure out how to raise some kids and pay the bills. So my mom was really kind of left alone to figure out a lot of things on her own.

Then, when she was seventeen, she met my dad. Through my grandmother, my dad’s mom, she ended up meeting Jesus. And she invited Jesus into her life and she began to learn of his ways. She began to navigate this exact thing that we’re talking about, not falling back into the antinomism of no law, but not falling into the legalism of too much law. Trying to learn how to walk in the Spirit. She loved the scriptures. She loved to teach them.

I remember the day when my dad took his life and her having to navigate that situation. Yes, the scriptures were helpful, but what she really needed was something a lot more powerful than just the scriptures. She needed God to show up. She needed the Spirit of God to be enough for her at that time. I watched her lean into Jesus and cry out to Jesus. And I watched Jesus be enough and give her peace and comfort and strength to keep going.

Then, shortly after that, she ended up getting cancer. That cancer was going to be something that was easily taken care of, but then it metastisized to her brain. And real quickly, her life was leaving her. I remember staying with her on her death bed and I knew she had a relationship with Jesus. I knew what the scriptures taught and I knew God could work all things out to good, but that wasn’t doing anything for me. So I asked her a question. I said, “Mom, what’s Jesus saying to you?” And she just smiled and looked at me and said, “Jesus told me that his power is over me to heal me.” And she had so much peace as she said it. That’s not a bible verse, by the way. I mean there are Bible verses that affirm that, for sure. That’s why the Bible is so important. But she was just having a conversation with Jesus in this place. And the Spirit of God made it clear to her that God’s intention was to have his power all over her to heal her.

I was like, “Does that mean he’s going to heal you?” And she said, “No. He just wanted me to know how close he was. That he could do it if he felt it was the right thing, but he has a better plan.”

That message to her right there gave her so much peace in the face of death, in the face of leaving this world, in the face of leaving us, her sons, who still needed a lot more common sense and self-control and maturity. But the Spirit of God was enough. It was more than enough. If all she had was just a tower of wood and structure and religiosity, it would have been dead and insufficient. But what she had was, she had a living, real relationship with the living, real Spirit of Jesus Christ, who rose from the dead.

So Jesus didn’t come to abolish the old covenant, the old Law. He came to fulfill it, giving way to something new. And you and I, today, we have a decision to make. Are we going to completely forsake all that God teaches and says and come up with our own way? Because the world around us is dong that like crazy. Or, are we going to really dig into this and try to earn some sort of righteousness by following the works of this law? Because there have been Christians like you and I who have wasted so much time and energy and left themselves raw and exhausted trying to do that. Or are we going to receive the Spirit of God that is a gift of this new covenant that Jesus purchased by his blood and begin to learn to walk in the Spirit, day in and day out? Begin to hear what he has to say each day, and trust that and go.

Yes, look to the scriptures and community to confirm that we’re not just hearing whatever weird pizza put in us last night. This is still an important thing. It’s still a tutor for us. But this is not what you really, really need. What you need is a relationship with Jesus. You need the Spirit of God to come in with his fire and consume your disordered desires, and speak to you and teach you and sustain you and empower you to walk in righteousness, so that those around you can really know what it means to be in Christ Jesus, so that the fruits of the Spirit, the love, the joy, the peace, the patience, the kindness, the meekness, the gentleness, the self-control can show up in our lives, not because of our effort, but because of our connection with Jesus.

Lets pray:

Jesus, I’m sorry that I so often just fall back into religiosity and rule following and I leave you. But, Lord, I really do pray that you would help me to learn to walk in your Spirit every single day, not only so that I will have the guidance and power that I need for my life, but so that I could actually help the people around me with true guidance and power that comes from you.
And I pray for the people who are facing really tough decisions or really struggling with some disordered desires or addictions, or maybe they had someone that they really love come to them and say something that was really hard and they don’t know how to handle it. Lord, I pray you would visit them by your Spirit. I pray that they would be still and they would seek you and your Spirit would speak to them. That they wouldn’t just live off past scriptures or past experiences, but, Lord, they would seek you new and fresh every day.
Let this be a church that, yes, is full of your word, but Lord, more so, way more so, let us be filled with your Spirit. I pray that your Spirit would really break out in this place, that you’d come with your baptism of fire and of Spirit and baptize us anew, Lord.

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