Please make a great effort to personally attend and support every lesson of our gospel meeting. Attendance helps the speaker, our singing, and our attitudes for serving the Lord. Brother Phil has invested some time in preparing these lessons for us. We need these lessons to help us grow and be faithful in the Lord.
What is your cross? The cross is not something pleasant. The cross is something difficult. Our society does not like to think about things that are not pleasant and difficult, but the truth is that life can be unpleasant and difficult at times. How are we going to confront those situations? Will we bravely take up our cross? Will we run away from the cross?
God calls lawlessness and unrighteousness sin (1 John 3:4; 5:17). He doesn’t distinguish right from wrong and righteousness from sin arbitrarily. Because God sees and knows all, He sees how sin ruins and hurts us. He calls wickedness and lawlessness sin, because He loves us and doesn’t want sin to deceive, enslave, and cause us to die spiritually.
The book of Hebrews tells of Christians who are slowing growing dull and falling away from the faith. Some were drifting (Hebrews 2:1-3), some were dull of hearing (5:11), and some had fallen away (6:4-6). They had fallen into the habit of forsaking the assembling. It was not that they missed an “assembly” or part of an assembly; they had abandoned meeting with the saints altogether! They quit going to worship and bible classes.
In our confused, broken, and chaotic world, there are some fundamental things every person needs! Yes, they need each of these things. These things are not to be taken lightly or dismissed as trivial. They are basics of life.
Paul faced many challenges in preaching the gospel to the Gentiles. Paul wrote that when he came to Macedonia, “our flesh had no rest, but we were afflicted on every side: conflicts without, fears within” (2 Corinthians 7:5). “I have been in labor and hardship, through many sleepless nights, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. Apart from such external things, there is the daily pressure on me of concern for all the churches” (2 Corinthians 11:27-29).
The gospel provides salvation from a lawless world. How? First, by providing forgiveness of man's lawless deeds through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus. And second, by providing a law of love (Romans 13:10, Galatians 5:14) by which we can live lawful lives in service to God. The gospel is, therefore, God's perfect law of liberty (James 1:25), the law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus that frees us from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2).
In 1 John 3:4, the ASV reads, "Every one that doeth sin doeth also lawlessness; and sin is lawlessness." That one verse tells us why we live in a lawless world today, because we live in a sinful world today. The world doesn't have to have cattle rustlers, corrupt sheriffs, or saloon bosses to be lawless (though it often does). Sin, in and of itself, does the job. Truth be told, we probably don't think of people's sins as being lawlessness, but they are.
The scriptures give us a somewhat different picture than the Old West. In Matthew 7:23, Jesus says, "And then will I declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from me, you workers of lawlessness'" (ESV). Both the King James Version and the American Standard Version of 1901 translate this word "iniquity." But it is best translated "lawlessness" as the ESV does.
Helpful confrontation is as natural as the confrontation between darkness and light. Do you find it uncomfortable to turn on the light switch? We do it every day so that we can see and not be hindered by darkness. Light confronts darkness (John 1:5). So, also, we should be comfortable in presenting the light of the gospel to others. Are we?
Paul writes in Romans 12:2,3 “And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” Many Christians want to transform the gospel to satisfy the culture, but that is not what Paul teaches. Radical transformation in action focuses upon moving Christians away from non-Christian culture and the sin within it.
America's first schools taught Christian values. Our children will learn values somewhere, and the Ten Commandments encapsulate them. Let's pray for our students.
Sometimes we talk about behavior being “rude.” This means the opposite of being gracious. First Corinthians 13:5 says that love “does not behave rudely.” This Greek word means “to act unbecomingly.” It is the opposite of behaving graciously toward someone. It has the notion within it of causing offense. Christians do not intentionally seek to offend other people, nor do they intentionally seek to be offended by other people.
There is a proper place for safety, but we must not use it as an excuse not to exercise our God given responsibilities. Remember the excuses given for “safety” in the book of Proverbs. “The slothful man saith, There is a lion without, I shall be slain in the streets” (Proverbs 22:13), and “The slothful man saith, There is a lion in the way; a lion is in the streets” (Proverbs 26:13). God condemns this kind of thinking as slothful or lazy. “Safety” is not a good reason for not interacting with other people.
We need to interact with other people. Isolation is a spiritually dangerous place to be. Consider Proverbs 18:1, “A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire; He rages against all wise judgment.” Here is the heart of why people isolate themselves. They are seeking their own desires. That is, they are being self-centered and not trying to engage with other people, which God wants us to do to fulfill His purposes.
What can we do to avoid judging people based on appearances? First, when we see a new person, go up and greet them—introduce yourself. Speak to them as you would any other person with whom you have a good relationship. Presume the best of others because love “hopes all things” (1 Corinthians 13:7). If we love our neighbor, our initial attitude toward the potential relationship should be hopeful and optimistic.
A friend is someone that a person can talk to without having to worry about where the information shared is going. A friend will do things that you like to do because he enjoys your enjoying it. A friend will stick with you even when times are hard. Proverbs 17:17 says, “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for adversity.”
When we do not listen to people and get to know them as they are, this creates barriers in relationships. Barriers happen when inauthentic and selfish behavior dominates the relationship. This creates a situation where one cannot get to know another because he cannot get past the protective shell of the ego. That shell may be many things, but it prevents authentic relationships.
The only way for someone to reveal their true self to us, though, is to talk to them. God reveals Himself to us by talking to us. Paul wrote, “For what man knows the things of a man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so no one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God” (1 Corinthians 2:11-12). We cannot know the mind of another unless that mind is revealed to us through communication.
The single greatest obstacle that we face in our relationships is the image that we construct of other people. Most of the time we interact with that image instead of with the actual person. Why do we do this? It is easier. That image is a product of our own creation. It is what we see of ourselves in someone else. We know it very well. After all, we made it. But this is a selfish move because we are just interacting with an image of our own creation, not the other person.