Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:05 Many of you. You may not know John Thomas, who is one of our worship leaders, but a couple of weeks ago, he came up to me and he caught me after a service. And he, he can be really intense if you ever talked to John, he's got these really intense eyes and he's like, we have to do this song. And he pulls out his phone and he's like the miracle making Shane breaking powerful name of Jesus and people who don't know him or me think he's like yelling at me or something and he's out there. And I'm like, John, I don't know if that melody is even singable the doggone. I love how much you love it. And we're going to be singing that song. So the next time you're up, that that is, that is happening. And if you know John's story, that is John's story.
Speaker 0 00:00:44 It is my story. It is your story. If you're in Christ and particularly John's story is really beautiful watching Jesus break the chains of sin and watching my friend to lead worship and lead me in worship many weeks, seeing the power of Christ in him is really special for me. So there's like another layer of meaningfulness to that song for me, which is not just watching him delight in it, but delighting in what God has done in his life, watching it, knowing many of you and knowing my own story. So man, John, thank you for leading us in that. Love you. And thank you for bringing that to us. My name is Michael fueling of the lead pastor here at the village church. And we're in week two in a study called the golden calf. We're making our way inevitably over the years to the book of Exodus. And so this morning we're going to watch as both Moses and Israel, they learned some basic facts about sin. So I want to start off and we're going to take a three question true or false quiz this morning. I want to ask a favor. Don't answer the questions out loud. I said this in the first service and some smart guy was like, answered them all out loud and got them all wrong. And I was like,
Speaker 1 00:01:56 Oh, so
Speaker 0 00:01:58 Don't answer these out loud if you would be so, so kind of in your head, that's what that means. You answered them in your head. Okay? Sure. False three statements. All sins are the same true or false. Don't say, hello, number two, true or false. Some thins are worse than others. True or false.
Speaker 2 00:02:23 Number three.
Speaker 0 00:02:25 Some sins make God more angry than other sins, right? There's all a lot of confusion about how God feels about sin. And so the only way we can really know how God actually feels about sin is if we go to the word of God and we let the word of God form and shape our views of God's view of sin. Here's what I do know in this room. Probably if I were to pull, this is just a guess half of you would've said the right answer to these questions. And half of you would have said the wrong answer because not because you're terrible or we're evil people because we are formed by our culture more than we realize. And so one of my hopes is actually to kind of get us all on the same page with some of these things. So now turn with me, Exodus chapter 32, verse 30 and here's what's happened so far in Exodus 32, Moses went to the mountain.
Speaker 0 00:03:19 He was gone for how many days? 40? Correct? That was not rhetorical. That was one. You can't answer a loud he's up there for a long time. They didn't know what happened. He's in the presence of God, maybe he's dead. We don't know. So in his absence, they created an idol of gold in defiance of the first three of the 10 commandments. They gave this idol, credit and glory for what Yahweh alone accomplished through freeing them out of Egypt. Then they proceed to engage in gross sexual immorality all together, publicly in defiance of the commandment on adultery. And we learned last week that God was not pleased with the people. Can you understand why so far? So Moses and the Israelites, they're sort of like baby Christians, if you will, who don't maybe know what is right, what is wrong? And if it is wrong, how bad is it?
Speaker 0 00:04:24 Actually, what has got really think about these things. And so Moses and the Israelites, and now us, we're going to learn three really important truths about sin. And here is the first truth. Not all. Sin is the same. Look at Exodus, chapter 32 verse 30. The next day after Moses came down, the mountain gives them a kind of a data cool off. Moses said to the people, you have sinned a great sin. Now Israel has sinned quite a bit, have they not to date, but there's something categorically different about this sin. And this sin is going to provoke. God who provoke your way in a way that so far, no other sin has quite provoked him. So intuitively though we know that not all sin is the same. Let me give you an illustration. Let's say your children or your best friend, they have the option to either one murder you or to steal from you, which would you rather, they do steal because not all sin is the same.
Speaker 0 00:05:36 Now, if your children come up to you and maybe one of your, one of your children says, I am going to send today and you get to choose which sin I'm going to commit. I will either murder somebody or I will tell a white lie, which one would you rather they do tell the white lie because not all sin is the same, but there has been a cultural mantra over the last in the evangelical church that has sort of started to kind of become normal thinking. And so I figured this was a good time to begin to dismantle this mantra. The mantra goes like this. Sin is sin. All sin is the same. Now the intentions of somebody saying this usually are good. Often it's to make somebody not feel unnecessarily terrible about something they've done. Sometimes people use this to sort of, kind of numb their soul because they know they have participated in something that God is not happy with. And so rather than face the true weight of their sin, this is sort of like Nova came to the soul. So we don't actually have to face the real depth and weight of what we have just done. All sin is the same to me. That's sorta like saying all dogs are the same. Now I want you to imagine you have a bunch of little kids at home. Would you rather take home a Wolf or a mini golden doodle?
Speaker 0 00:07:01 I want you to imagine you go to you, go to the dog adoption store. I forget what you call it. And you go there and you say, what's the difference between that Wolf and that little mini golden doodle. And they say, all dogs are dogs. They're all the same. There's no real difference. No big deal. So you decide I'm going to take home the Wolf. Are you happy about that decision when you get home? Definitely not. When it grows up, some of you are like, oh yes, please. Until you have little itty-bitty children that it sees as breakfast and they're different, they're bred different. They have different temperaments. They do different things. They have different repercussions. Everything is different about them. And so we have to understand intuitively we know this, okay? Yes, humans are humans. Sin is sin, but really that's not a fair statement because they're all humans the same.
Speaker 0 00:07:48 No, not at all. And is all sin the same? Definitely not. Let's let's break this down. All sin does have a few things in common. So here's one every single sin, whether it is a little white lie or whether it is mass genocide will have the same net effect on your relationship with God. Sin separates us from God, relationally, period. In fact, if the hypothetically only sin you ever committed and your entire life, now, this is impossible, but I mean, you and I, wretched sinners, we sent every single day, but let's say you had one sin and all you did is deceived your parents one time. Would you still need the blood of Christ to cover you for that sin? The answer is absolutely because sin all sin, every sin separates us from God. That is true. Another reality is that all sin can only ever be paid for by the blood of Jesus Christ.
Speaker 0 00:08:41 That is a fact that is a reality. But do all sins have the same consequences in terms of relationship with God or relations with other people or our relationship with our own bodies? No. In fact, some sins are exponentially more devastating. So let me say it again. Not all sin is the same. Let's have a little comparison game, which sin is worse, stealing or murder murder, John murder, murder, which sin is worse, lust or adultery adultery. Correct? Right. So I want you to catch this intuitively, you know, there's a difference, you know, that not all sin is the same. So in the old Testament, there are different words that we translate into English for sin. The first one is actually going to be translated your heat and your old Testament as just the word sin. And this word sin is simply a moral wrong. It's something that is, you know, is wrong.
Speaker 0 00:09:48 And then you do that thing that, you know, to be wrong. It's just a basic word for sin. There's another word in the old Testament for sin, as the word transgression, this means defiance rebellion or betrayal. There's the third word, which is iniquity. And this is where you take a good thing and you pervert or twist it. And so all of these are equal. They are not necessarily worse than, or better than the other. So let's do a little math equation here. Okay. I want you to imagine you have an axis and on the horizontal axis you have sin, iniquity and transgression. You can have a really bad iniquity, a really bad transgression, a really bad sin. Now the Hebrew old Testament has actually different words that describe the severity of the sin. One of those words is the word great. So you can have iniquity or you can have great inequity.
Speaker 0 00:10:38 You can have transgressions, or you can have great transgressions. Now there's another word that the English, the Hebrew Bible translates into English as abomination and abomination is something that is so bad. It is so evil that literally under old covenant law, you are required to be killed. If you commit these abominations, there's so bad that they are repulsive and that we shouldn't even look on these kinds of things. And aren't you really glad in this moment that we do not live under old covenant law, but we live under new covenant law. Now you can have a whole bunch of sins and transgressions and iniquities, but some of these actually make their way up to being great sin or great iniquity or great transgression or an abomination. And every time you find one of these in the old Testament, the punishment, the repercussion of this is the death penalty.
Speaker 0 00:11:30 Now, if I were you, I would be asking, okay, pastor Michael, what makes a sin and abomination? Like, how do you go from just a really bad iniquity to an abomination inequity? We don't even want to know that, like, what's the line. So I'm going to give you three questions that are pretty simple and we'll help you understand what can take one sin and elevate it under old covenant law to abomination or great sentence. Here's the first question does it, does the sin mess was something God created to reveal himself. Okay. So there are a few things in creation that God uniquely made to reveal himself. They're distinct from all other areas of creation and what you're going to find, whether you're in the old Testament or you're in the new Testament, that if you mess with these, God gets angrier quicker. And the discipline is more severe.
Speaker 0 00:12:31 Here are the four categories. Number one is the sanctity of life. So you go way all the way back to Genesis chapter nine and before even old covenant law is instituted. You have the death penalty. You have the death penalty that is applied to anybody who takes the life of another person that this has now elevated itself to abomination because we are made in the image of God. And when you mess with something that God made to reveal himself, God's anger is provoked more quickly. The second category is the sanctity of family or marriage that when you mess with this category, it provokes God to anger quickly, whether you're in the old Testament or you're in the new Testament, you go to the book of Hebrews and the author of Hebrew says that the marriage bed is to be undefiled. And there's something about adultery that when marriage is messed with God has provoked more quickly than had you just told a small white, why here's the third category, the sanctity of sexuality, that there is something powerful about sexuality that God has imbued it with more power than almost any other human experience.
Speaker 0 00:13:46 And that God created sexuality as a gift to show us a picture of the union between Jesus and his bride, the church, so that whatever joy we experienced in heaven, we're going to be able to make some kind of connection. And so you find in the book of first Thessalonians, chapter four, it's a powerful chapter talking to two Christians, and it talks about one violating another sexually. And the vengeance of God is the response. You find this throughout the old Testament and the new Testament. There are some things that when you do them, God has moved anger more quickly than others. Here's the fourth category. This is the sanctity of the covenant that God made with them. And so this is broken through idolatry, which is spiritual adultery. And you can see that God deeply values his covenant relationship with the people. And also the marital covenant, the marital covenant is there to reflect and show you the power of God's covenant with his people.
Speaker 0 00:14:41 You mess with these, and God has provoked more quickly. Now here's the second question is the sin a compound sin. So it's one thing to just steal quietly. It's another thing to steal and then lie. It's another thing to steal lie, and then to kill somebody who knows the truth so that you don't get caught and you can start to see how compound sins become more and more exponentially evil. Now here's the last question is the sin compounding one of these four things above let's process, the golden calf. Okay. Sanctity of family and marriage. Is that being violated? You better believe it. Adultery is being committed, left and right publicly out loud in groups. Okay. Does it violate the sanctity of sexuality again? The answer is yes. Does it violate the sanctity of the covenant relationship that God has with the people? Absolutely because they are building fashioning and worshiping a false idol so far we're three out of four.
Speaker 0 00:15:47 What about the fourth one? Thankfully they, the fourth one was not violated yet, but here's what would happen. Had God not intervened sooner. When they go into the promised land, into the land of Canaan, these gods are vile and evil and they will require the sacrifice of your first born child to be put on a bronze altar, to be burned alive as a blood sacrifice atonement for sins to these false gods, they were on their, on their way to four out of four. So now when God responds in anger, are we beginning to make sense of why this infuriates him so much is all sin sin? No, it's not. I mean, yes, all humans are humans. All dogs are dogs, right? But it's all sin the same. And that it is the same consequence or the same effect or the same collateral damage. Now it's actually, I think intuitively we know these are very different.
Speaker 0 00:16:40 We go to old Testament law and we see that even different sins have different punishments. So if you were going to murder somebody, the punishment would be death. If you're going to traffic, human trafficking, the punishment would be death. But if you were to steal the punishment, isn't death, the punishment would be repay plus four or five times the amount, depending on the thing that was stolen. So it's different. Even old covenant law tells us that there are some sins that have greater potential for damage and harm than others and old Testament. Law reveals all of this. Let's go back to verse 30. He says the next day Moses said to the people you have sinned. This is a great sin. Now the second truth that they're going to learn about sin is this all sin requires blood atonement. Look at verse 13. He says in now Moses is talking to the people.
Speaker 0 00:17:34 He's like, okay, this is really bad. I have to go back up the mountain and talk to the Lord. Perhaps I can make atonement for your sins. Atonement is a concept. That means that blood is shed for the forgiveness of another person's sin. And so you would often find that they would sacrifice the blood of animals in order to have their sins forgiven. So Moses is going to go back up the mountain and his agenda is to see, can atonement be made for your sins. Now there's a rule and it is a universal law that applies to everyone all over the world. No matter what generation you lived in, no matter what millennium you've lived in, no matter what country you live in. And it's a law that applies to everyone, always all the time, it's sort of like the law of thermodynamics. It's true.
Speaker 0 00:18:26 Everywhere. Always. This is a spiritual law and the spiritual law comes from the book of Hebrews chapter nine, verse 22. And it says this without the shedding of blood, there is no forgiveness of sentence. Now, if you go to most Americans, do they understand the concept of blood atonement? It's totally foreign, but does that, does that make it less true? Definitely not. Like here's kind of the big rule. When you get to heaven, this rule will be in play. And there is only one way to be forgiven of sins in God's economy, which is the only ultimate real economy that matters. And that is for the shedding of blood. Now, Moses understands this principle. He understands that sin needs to be paid for by blood. And he also knows something that you need to understand before we move on. He knows that God accepts substitute sacrifices.
Speaker 0 00:19:26 Watch what happens for 31. So Moses returned to the Lord and he said, alas, this people has sinned a great sin and they have made for themselves gods of gold verse 32. But now if you will forgive their sin, like could we just sweep this under the rug? Now is God allowed to ever sweep any sin ever anywhere under the rug? The answer is no. In fact, if a judge on earth did this at Richard gonna overlook that murder, that stealing that line, that law breaking, we would say unjust, judge, God has no unrighteousness in him whatsoever. And so God does not let anything go. He has to deal with all of it one way or another inevitably. And so here's what we have. God, can you just kind of, maybe I don't forget about this one, but then he says, but if not, please block me out of your book that you have written.
Speaker 0 00:20:27 Moses offers himself as the possible atonement blood sacrifice for their sins. God, take my life, take my life. If you can't let this go. If this needs to be dealt with via blood, I'll be it. Now you would expect of all the people in the entire world, Moses, the one who has direct face-to-face access to God, the most significant, greatest prophet, other than Jesus in all of biblical history. Would you not think that Moses blood would be enough to cover the sins of his people and God's basic responses? Nope, not good enough. Adorable request. I appreciate it. Like I really do. That's like a very meaningful, like I see that you love the people, your blood isn't right? Because Moses, you can't take the blood of a sinner to pay for the blood of another center. In fact, in God's economy, there is no forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood.
Speaker 0 00:21:34 Well, what kind of blood? It's not the blood of bulls and goats. It's the, not the blood of your spouse. And it's not the blood of a young child offered to a demon. God. It is only the pure blood of Jesus Christ that has the power and capacity to atone for sins. When we die and stand before God, there is only one way to have your sins forgiven. And it is through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. And that is it. There just are no other options. If there were other options, God would have said, well, you can try this religion, or you can try this tactic or you can try this, but there is no other it's, it's exclusive and it's narrow, but it's open to every single person who would trust in Jesus Christ.
Speaker 0 00:22:20 So Yahuah, here's what he says in verse 33, whoever has sinned against me. I will blot out of my book and anyone else confused? Anyone else? I'm wondering like, what's the book. There are books. Wait, you have books that are not the Bible. Apparently God has books. Now are they literal books that if we had them, we could just look at them. I don't know. I hope so. That would be very awesome and wonderful. But this is sort of a confusing subject because there are a couple of books listed in scripture and I'm going to keep it kind of give you like a brief fly over of the books. There seems to be two books. And there is first of all, a book called the book of life or the book of the living. And this seems to be the book that Moses is referencing and God is referencing.
Speaker 0 00:23:04 And David also references this in the Psalms a couple of times, and it's a book of everyone who is alive and in this book are written also all of their deeds. And so to have your name blotted out of the book is not to lose your salvation or to go to hell, but it is to actually be killed or to lose your life. If your name is blotted out of the book of the living, it means I'm going to kill you. Now there's another book. And we see this in the new Testament. We see this in Daniel and the book of revelation, it's called the Lamb's book of life or just the book of life. And this is a book and in it are written the names of every single person who is truly a follower of God. Now here's the crazy about the Lamb's book of life.
Speaker 0 00:23:46 It was written before the foundations of the world mind blown. And if your name is written in that book, it can never be blotted out now with the book of the living. And what Moses is saying is take my life, blot my name out of this book. And God says everyone who sins, I will blot out of my book. Here's the third essential truth we learned about sin. Forgiveness does not negate consequences. Don't you just, and you just love if the moment you came to Jesus, all the consequences for your sins were gone, right? All the times you lied to your spouse or to your parents or to your friends are cheated or stole or cheated on your taxes. That all of a sudden God was like, it's all made right. There will be no grudges. It is as if it never happened, but as is that real life, it's not look what happens in verse 34, God says to Moses, now go lead the people to the place which I have spoken to you behold.
Speaker 0 00:24:52 My angels should go before you, nevertheless, in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them in verse 35, then the Lord sent a plague on the people because they made the calf. And probably my favorite little like line in this whole section is the one that Erin made. It's a reminder of his great sin for all of history. Some people got the sword. Those seem to be the ones who were in unrepentant sin. After Moses came down from the mountain, the Levis killed 3000 of them. The rest of the people got a plague. We don't know what kind of plague. It seems that the plague did not immediately kill everybody. But I'm pretty much guessing that if a plague came over village church, it would not be a great thing. So, um, I have a hunch. They were not happy about it, but everybody got disciplined one way or another.
Speaker 0 00:25:49 I'm not that old, but I've learned a couple things about sin. And one of them is that the greater the sin, the greater their collateral damage internally to people in my life. There's this American notion that it's my life. I do what I want. Doesn't matter what you do. It only, I only, I only do things that affect my life, but here's the deal. That is not how God has created the world. Let me give you an illustration. I want you to imagine you're a dad. You're married. You have three kids. You're broken in a moment of desperation. You decide that you're going to go break into some stores in the process. You end up killing somebody, you get caught and you go to jail and God's discipline to you is through the legal system that he allowed to exist. Who's the collateral damage, your wife, your children, the people who logged up to you, damage is a very real thing.
Speaker 0 00:26:38 One of the hardest things for me to watch is people willfully throw their lives into sin, disregarding the very real effects it is going to have on the people who love them the most. And we believe the lives my life. I mean to a degree, yes, it's your life. But do you really believe that what you do only impacts, you know, in fact, we're all in this room, picking up the pieces of someone else in our life who has sinned big aren't we, and there are people in this room have picked up the pieces of our lives when we have sinned, big, heavy, not, and sin is a corporate reality. Here's another ugly thing that I've just learned about sin is when we're in the middle of it, we are numb to how gross it really is. Uh, years ago there was a husband and wife and they were fighting a lot.
Speaker 0 00:27:34 And one day the wife, uh, recorded, um, the husband. He did not know about it. So when the fight was over, she told him that she had recorded it. She was going to send it to their counselor. He said, fine, send it. I'm something I'm ashamed of. Okay. So she did the counselor called me and said, I need you to come in. And I want you to mediate this with me. And what I want to do is with his permission, I want to play him the audio, um, with you and him in the room. And I want him to hear what actually happened now, for some of you, this is your worst nightmare. So we sit down and we had a whiteboard. It was a big whiteboard. And the point of the white has every single inappropriate word that was said, we would write it down.
Speaker 0 00:28:20 And every time it was said, we check, check, check, check, cross, check, check, check, check, cross. And we count how many bad words were said. And every time there was a mean cutting or derogatory statement, we would pause the recording and then we would write it out verbatim. And so we could just accrue. And one of the hardest things about sin is to face sin in its full weight, like sin as a vested interest in us, not thinking it's that big of a deal and to make it smaller than it is, right? One of the most powerful things you can actually do is face your sin, collateral damage at all, for what it is. Very few people will actually ever do this. And so we began the recording. This was roughly a three hour meeting. We actually never finished the full 30 minutes because we had to stop so many times, um, about three quarters of the way through the recording.
Speaker 0 00:29:06 We had over 100 F bombs dropped. We had so many words and checkmarks and statements. We had to take a picture, erase the entire board and start over again. We lost count. We got to a point where we just said has the point been made? And the man was incredibly humble. The man shows to go through this. The man shows to allow us to do this. He approved my presence in the room and approved it, being sent to the counselor. Here's what he said when we got it's like listening to my dad, but it's my voice.
Speaker 0 00:29:50 His overall feedback was I had no idea. If you would have asked me beforehand, I would have said, yeah, I definitely dropped the F bomb a couple times, but I never in my life would have imagined. We would have to erase the whiteboard and start all over again. Mindblowing because in the middle of sin, we are not aware of how gross it really is. And this is one of the hardest parts about being a sinner is that we struggle, but we're blind. How big of a deal it is. But whether it is a hundred, F-bombs in a 30 minute conversation, or it is a little white lie, every single sin requires the shed blood of Jesus Christ. All of them. Now you might go home and say, somebody might say, what was church about it? It was about sin and how terrible. I hope. I hope that you walk away.
Speaker 0 00:30:49 And here's what you leave with. We are all sinners who fallen short of the glory of God, but our God is amazing and loves us and provided for us. The only way in the universe that we can be forgiven and redeemed through the shed blood of Jesus Christ. I pray that when you leave here, you leave here with this overwhelming sense of gratitude, not how bad you are, but in light of how bad we are, God loves us and has bestowed grace upon grace upon grace. Like the moment you and I trust in Jesus. This is just a mind blowing thought for me, that he promises to forgive all of our sins, knowing every dumb thing we're going to do for the rest of our life. In light of that knowledge, he still says forgiven past, present future. And I'll share with you three, three. So what's number one. It's specked. Every single sin ever committed to be addressed either now or later, do you ever just look around at the world? And you're like, okay, Lord, there's a lot of abomination, gross inequity, gross transgression, gross sin, great sin everywhere. Are you going to end this thing? Like, why is it this person can do this great sin over and over and over and over again. And you just don't seem to care.
Speaker 0 00:32:12 Every sin. Some, some sins get dealt with immediately. God disciplines, God intervenes,
Speaker 2 00:32:20 But inevitably
Speaker 0 00:32:20 For the ones that he kind of is patient. Sometimes the Lord just gives people over it and let sin do its own thing in their heart, mind and bodies. But on the day of judgment, every single sin from Christian and non-Christian the ones that are secret and the ones that are public and everything in between will be publicized, dealt with and judged. Rightly I want you to just hear this. Romans two 16, Paul talks about the day of judgment. And he says on that day, according to my gospel, God judges, the secrets of men by Jesus Christ, Hebrews four 12 says this Jesus discerns, the thoughts and the intentions of the heart. No creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him, to whom we must give account. And I want you to rest assured God will graciously justly and appropriately deal with every sin ever committed period.
Speaker 0 00:33:22 And your sin will be called what it is. And so will mine. And there will be one of two kinds of people. Those who sins have been paid for by the shed blood of Jesus Christ and those who have rejected the shed blood of Jesus Christ and my strong encouragement to you would be trust in Jesus Christ and what he's done for you on the cross. Here's the second. So what, it's a little blunt, but I think it makes the point. Well, terrible parents don't discipline and let sin run rampant. Amen. God is not like that. God has a good father, good moms and dads, discipline and discipline is really hard at first. Isn't it? When God or your parents have to intervene in your life to discipline you, you're like, oh, you're tempted to get mad, but what is their goal? Their goal is to love you into help you.
Speaker 0 00:34:22 And so for many of us in this room, we have personally experienced the discipline of God because of our disobedience. And I want to read you a passage in the book of Hebrews chapter 12. It starts in verse seven. And I just wanna encourage you to save her every single word of this passage, because it's beautiful for what son is there, whom his father does not discipline. If you are left without discipline, in which all have participated, then you are illegitimate children and not sons. Besides this, we have had earthly fathers who disciplined us and we respected them. Shall we not much more be subject to the father of spirits and lived for, they disciplined us, our earthly fathers for a short time, and it seemed best to them. I love that line, but he, God disciplines us for our good, why
Speaker 3 00:35:12 That we may share in his holiness for
Speaker 0 00:35:17 The moment. All discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, MN bill later, it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Third. So what repent and trust the blood of Jesus for all of your sins, both great and small communion of those shirts is an opportunity for us to remember how amazing and gracious and generous our God has been. Uh, we don't celebrate communion every week here because we're good people. We don't celebrate communion this week because I was especially hid. We celebrate communion because we need to be reminded that the blood of Christ atones for every single one of our sins past, present, and future, for those who have personally trusted in Jesus. And so we celebrate communion weekly to draw our hearts and our minds away from the lies of Satan, that God isn't heaven wanting to condemn you for your past and present sin and believing the truth that there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Speaker 0 00:36:27 And if there is what feels like condemnation, here's what we know. It is disciplined because he loves us and he is training us for holiness, just like a good mom or dad would do with their kids. And so we remember, and we celebrate the fact that us rebellious, sinners, transgressors, committers of inequity. We have total complete forgiveness to the shed blood of Jesus Christ. So here's how we do communion at village church. And I think this is a fitting way to end this sermon. We're going to have a time of silence. It's an opportunity for you to pray, to confess and to thank God for really how amazing he's been to you. I'm going to pray out loud and then we're going to worship together. As we're seeing, there are elements in the coroner over here by the beam and the back doors. And in this beam over here by the hope sign and want to invite you.
Speaker 0 00:37:16 If you did not get communion elements, when you came in the room to stand up and you can walk over to those beams and you can grab the commune elements and come back to your seat and to the song is over. We're going to read some scripture together, and then we're going to partake of communion together as a symbol of our unity in Jesus Christ. Some of you are here and you're visiting from another church and you don't know if you should. Partake of communion. Communion is open for any person who has personally trusted in Jesus, moms and dads. It is completely up to you, whether or not your kids partake in communion. All we ask is that you have confidence that they have personally trusted in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of their sins. And maybe you're here and you are ready to trust in Christ.
Speaker 0 00:37:57 I want to invite you if this is your first time trusting in Christ, take these elements, partake, partake of them as your first declaration that you believe Jesus Christ is God that you are a sinner and that he died on the cross for your sins and was raised from the dead. If you're here today and you believe that, and you want to ask God for forgiveness of your sins, this is a great way to start. I want to invite you to partake of communion with us. Let's have a time of silence where we confess and talk to the Lord.
