Understanding the Fulfillment of the Law

Occasionally I hear people talk about the Bible and they'll say something like, I like to read the New Testament, I enjoy that, but I'm really not an Old Testament person. I don't like to read the Old Testament, I don't understand it, so I guess you could say I'm a New Testament Christian. They see the Old Testament as God being different than what they see in the New Testament. You are starting a study in the small groups about the Ten Commandments where he talks about being a culture of love and creating a climate of love among the people of God. If that's true in the Old Testament, it's exactly the same as what's said in the New Testament. That the foundation stone of what God is doing is his nature and character, his love. Jesus made it really clear when he came that he didn't come to do something different than what had happened in the Old Testament, for he was building all of his work on that. Matthew chapter 5, Jesus has just given the Beatitudes, he hasn't yet given the Sermon on the Mount, he hasn't even really called all of his disciples, he's just getting started with this. In the very beginning of his ministry, he says something very powerful and worth attention for us. Jesus said, Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. I tell you the truth, 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. Everyone who breaks one of these least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same 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 law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. Jesus' words are powerful, direct, and pointed. They were to accuse Jesus of all of his ministry of being a person who had abandoned the Old Testament and its teachings. So Jesus begins his ministry by marking out clearly what he intends to do. Notice what he says, Do not think I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have not come to tell you that the things in the Old Testament, the commandments, all those things in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, and Deuteronomy are not to be listened to anymore. I have not come to do that. I have not come to tell you that the prophets were wrong. Everything that's said in the law and the prophets I want to build on, I've come not to abolish them or destroy them. I'll tell you the truth, he said in verse 18, 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. If he could give any more specific, concrete, presentation of what he wants, he's talking about the things that you read in the Old Testament that may seem insignificant to you. Things that you read in the Old Testament law that may seem like they're so out of bounds. He says not even the dot over the I, as we would say it in our language, or the cross of a T will be removed from the Old Testament law. When you look at that, it is not expendable. It's going to be there, he said, until everything in the world is here. When the world is over, the law is over. When the world ends, then it ends. But until that time, everything remains exactly as it is. When Jesus asked his disciples to follow him, he was saying to them, I want you to do what I do. And you know what he did? He kept the law. He went to the temple when it was required. He went to the festivals when it was required. He offered the sacrifices when it was required. He did everything that was spelled out exactly as the Old Testament presented it to be. Jesus made it clear that when you look at his life and ministry and you see only that, you read Jesus' life in the New Testament, you have missed something significant. None of these things will be abolished until everything is accomplished, he said. Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven. We look at Jesus and we call him greatest in the kingdom of heaven. If he had told us that these things should be abolished or set aside, we would have to say, according to his own words, he's least in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus said, whoever practices and teaches these commandments will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus makes it clear that believing and living according to the Old Testament principles is critical for a person's relationship with God. For I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. Now when we read the passage such as this, what goes through our mind is the fact that we don't have here at our church an altar on which we would kill a calf. We might barbecue one after it was killed, but we're not going to kill one right here. You might look at the Old Testament law and say, well, we don't do those things now, and we don't. So Jesus knew that too. What is it that he's talking about here when he takes such powerful emphasis on the significance of the Old Testament and the law for us? Two words in what Jesus had to say here give us a clue as to what he's talking about. It is the word fulfilled. He said, do not think I've come to abolish the law of the prophets. I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. Then another word, not the least stroke of a pen by any means will disappear from the law until everything is accomplished. So Jesus gives us two words that is the clue to understanding the Old Testament and its relationship to the new. One of them is the word fulfilled. Now whenever you talk about fulfilling something, you mean it's sort of started, but it's not really completed or finished. You don't mean that the first part of it is insignificant or you can abandon it if you're baking a cake and you've done everything but put it in the oven and you do that to fulfill the recipe. It doesn't mean that all the other stuff you did is insignificant or you can forget it. You can't go the next time and just put it in the oven without anything in the pan and expect a cake. Something has to happen both before and after. When something is accomplished, it means that preparation has been made. Something has been done, but not everything to finish it has been done. What Jesus was talking about was not removing the Old Testament, but understanding it in terms of the light of God's intention and purpose for it. The law is the same way. When he's talking about the laws of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, he's talking about the very foundation stone on which his ministry and the work of God is built. On Wednesday nights, I think I've done most of this, but I've talked through the book of Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy and Joshua and over and over again to say to the group that comes, here is how these principles in the Old Testament are shown and exemplified in the New. There is not one God of the Old Testament and one of the New, even though some people try to make it as if that's the case. There is a consistency throughout. God is the same in the Old Testament as he is in the New. So what Jesus is talking about in his ministry is what he's going to do is fulfill what happened in the Old Testament. He's going to accomplish what God intended to take place in his people's lives in the New Testament era, but he's building on those things that are in the Old Testament. Now I want to use one example to discuss with you what it means, what Jesus is trying to get at, and it's the issue of the Sabbath day. If you read in the Old Testament, there are two places where the Ten Commandments are given. One of them is in Exodus and the other one is in Deuteronomy. In the book in Exodus, it says that it talks about the Sabbath day a little differently than it does in Deuteronomy. In the giving of the law in Exodus, when Moses brings it down from the mountain, he simply tells what's on the stone. When he recalls this in the book of Deuteronomy, which is a long sermon of Moses, if you can imagine a sermon that long, you ought to try to read that in one day, and then every Sunday you'd be thankful that I don't preach that long a sermon. It's a long, long book. In Deuteronomy, Moses is telling them not only the commandments, but he's giving some insight as to their purpose. The people of Israel knew what their purpose was because they had this material. Let me read to you what he says the purpose of the Sabbath day commandment was. Observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. That means setting it apart so that it only belongs to God, and you do the things there that God wants you to do. God, this is your day. We use that word if you want to honor somebody. You might say to your husband or wife, now, today's a special day. It's your day. Whatever you want to do, whatever you want to have happen, this is your time. This day, you're to say to God, this is your day. We're going to set this day aside for you. Now, this is what it means to be holy. As the Lord your God has commanded you, six days you shall labor, do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord. The word Sabbath means simply a time of rest. It's a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it, you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your manservant or your maidservant, nor your ox, your donkey, or any of your animals, nor the alien within your gate, so that your manservant and maidservant may rest as you do. Now, that is what's found in the book in Exodus. This part is different. Remember that you were slaves in Egypt and that the Lord your God brought you out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Therefore, because that's true, the Lord your God has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day. In that small sentence, he gives us some idea of what the Sabbath day is about. Why are they not to work? Because they are to concentrate their attention on God. When they concentrate their attention on God, what are they to concentrate about? It is the Exodus, how God delivered them out of the hand of Egypt. They're to sit down and remember what it was like to be slaves for 400 years, how their ancestors worked hard and were in captivity and were overwhelmed with the work that they had there. They were not free to do anything they wanted to do or to go where they want or to be the kind of people they wanted. And there was no hope for them. And then God came and brought Moses. He caused Pharaoh to say, I want you to leave. He gave away all of his manual labor people. You can imagine how devastating the economy was as a result of this. The most powerful nation in the world. God convinced that man to say, you're free to leave our country. Now, you're to remember also what happened on that journey. You came to an ocean you couldn't cross and God parted the water and you walked across on dry ground. When you had no water, he made it squirt out of a rock. When you had no food, he made bread rain on you. When you had no meat, he made quail came till they were knee deep as far as you could see. Remember the great delivering power of God. How he came to you when you were helpless and rescued you. How he came to you when you had no one to go to and he extended his hand to you. When you ran into problems that would kill human beings, he stepped up and he did things beyond any kind of explanation. We can't even imagine scientifically how water could squirt from a rock enough to feed thousands of people and all their animals. We can't imagine quail so deep as far as you could see up to your knees. We can't imagine that. All of these things happened beyond any human explanation for them. That's what they were to do on the Sabbath day. Why were they not to work? Well, if you have to go out and plow during the day, you think about plowing. If your son says, well, I can go out and plow, then you have to think about what he's doing and whether he's doing it right and you have to answer questions he has. So on that day, your wife doesn't have to cook. No one has to cook. You don't have to work. You don't worry about anything. I want you to spend the day reflecting on how God has saved you. That's what the Sabbath was about. It's true that he said, here are the things you can't do, don't work. No one's to work in your household. Everyone's to have the time off. Well, when you start thinking about that, the Pharisees and the Jewish people seemed to concentrate on what they were not supposed to do. So over the years, they built more and more things to try to tell you what you couldn't do. So when Jesus came, the Sabbath day was sort of surrounded by all the don'ts and the no's. And that's what it really stood for. It wasn't the focus on what God had done, nor how what God had done affected them or affected the world. So when Jesus came, he found himself in a difficult situation. Here were people who didn't even know what the Sabbath was really about. And so he set about to show them what it was that the Old Testament story was really about. Jesus had several run-ins with the people who were religious leaders of his time who were experts about the law. They knew everything you weren't supposed to do, everything you were supposed to do. But they had missed the principle of the Old Testament commandment. You see, in every commandment, there's a principle that is the idea that you're supposed to get. And then the second thing is how you put it in practice. And sometimes the way you put it in practice varies by the culture that you're in. It varies by the age of the person. All kind of variables can come about the practice, but the principle is always the same. God wanted his people to remember who he was and celebrate him as the great Redeemer and Savior of his people. So Jesus was out one day with his disciples going on a mission. We don't know what it was. Doing the work he'd been sent in the world to do with his disciples. He was training them. One Sabbath, Jesus was going through a grain field and his disciples walked along. They began to pick up some heads of grain. Now when you, the Sabbath day, you could eat grain if somebody gave you the grain in their hand, but you weren't to harvest it or you weren't to do something to get the grain out of the head. And they picked it up in their hand and began to rub it like that, which was technically harvesting and technically combining, I guess we'd say, to get the grain out in their hand. When they got it, they let the chaff fall away and they popped the wheat in their mind or in their mouth and their barley. Pharisees saw this and they knew the rule. Don't harvest on the Sabbath. Now Jesus understood that his disciples were on a mission from God and that God would take care of them. So that's what he, that's the purpose of what he had to say about it. He answered, have you never read that David, what David did when he and his companions were hungry and in need? In the day of Abiathar, the high priest, he entered the house of God and ate the consecrated bread, which is only lawful for priests to eat. And he gave some to his companions. He's talking about David, the great king they would all look at and say was a great man. He violated the law because he was on the run for his life and they had no food. And so he took the bread that the law said only the priests could eat and he ate it. And God said nothing bad about him and nothing bad happened to him. Jesus says, then Jesus said to them, the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. So the son of man is Lord even of the Sabbath. In this short sentence, Jesus tells us what he means by fulfilling and accomplishing the law. He helped them to see the real purpose of what the law was. It was not to tie people into a boundary that was so tight they couldn't do anything for God, but it was given to them as an assist to understand and to help them in the work that God was doing. The disciples were doing the work of God and they needed food. On the Sabbath day, the food that they would harvest would actually benefit their work for God. What was the problem? They fulfilled the principle of the Old Testament, remember and participate in the salvation that God is delivering. They were out there doing witnessing for the Lord. They were doing the work that God had sent them to do. And the food was provided by God and the rules to do nothing that keeps you from thinking of God didn't stand in the way. They were focused on what God wanted so much so that they were traveling and didn't have time to fix food for themselves. So the principle of producing the picture of God as the great Savior was fulfilled in this. Another time he went into the synagogue and a man with a shriveled hand was there. Some of them were looking for a reason to accuse Jesus so they watched him closely to see if he would heal him on the Sabbath. Jesus said to the man with the shriveled hand, stand up in front of everyone. Jesus knew what was taking place. He knew what the law was. You couldn't heal anybody who was not going to die from the disease that they had on the Sabbath. Now, if you came on someone who was laying there beaten up and his blood gushing from him, you could stop and heal him. You could do something to help him. But for people who had non-deadly diseases, it was against the law to be able to help them on the Sabbath day. And Jesus asked them, which is lawful on the Sabbath, to do good or to do evil? He puts them in an awkward spot. Are the rules of the Sabbath given so that you will not help people? Or are they given so that you would help people? If you're remembering the redemptive work of God and what he's done to save Israel, there you're celebrating the power of God to save people. So would it be better if you, on the Sabbath day, did something to save a life or to kill a person, to do good or to do evil? They didn't want to answer that question. What would you say? It'd be better to kill somebody? It'd be better not to help somebody? So they were silent. He looked around at them in anger. He was mad. He was mad because they were using the very law of God to stand in the way of the work of God. You see, they were not catching the principle to celebrate the redemptive work of God. They were simply focused on the practice. What can we do that might get in our way from doing the good work of God? And they were focused on what might get in their way, but they never focused on doing the good or the healing or the redemptive. So he was angry because they were using the law contrary to its real purpose. And he was deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts. He said to the man, stretch out your hand. He stretched it out and his hand was completely restored and everyone was happy. No. Then the Pharisees went out and began to plot with the Herodians how they might kill Jesus. They were so attached to the practice that they missed the principle. What does it celebrate to remember how God in his great love for his people came and delivered them from the nation of Egypt? How in his great love he protected them? How in his great love he provided for them? How in his great love he guided them? How in his great love he made them a great nation? That's what he wanted them to remember on the Sabbath, the good that God had done. Now to be able to remember the good that God had done, they needed to set aside some time when nothing would interfere with that. And that's what the Sabbath was. God from the very beginning had an intention to allow his people to have time to be able to celebrate and remember the great and mighty, powerful work that God had done. In the New Testament, we don't have a day set aside like that because things have changed. The practice of that principle has changed. You know why? Because inside of every follower of Christ, the Holy Spirit resides. You're never separated from God as a follower of Christ. You get up in the morning and the Holy Spirit of God is right inside of you. He's talking to you. He's telling you how you should treat your husband or your wife or your children. He's reminding you of the important things that you do. And as you start to the day, maybe you get up a little bit crabby, you walk in the kitchen, everything's not quite right, you fly off the handle, immediately his Spirit says, calm down, remember, love your family as I have loved you. All of a sudden, it calms you down. You start trying to plan your day and thinking of all the things you're going to do and you get overwhelmed with all that and he says, be careful, remember, I can part the waters of an ocean, I can take care of your problems, there's no problem here. He's with you all the time. Reminding you about the salvation he's delivered in the past and bringing it right to you. That's your Sabbath. That's why the Bible says Christ is our Sabbath. He's the rest of us that allows us to be able to celebrate moment by moment throughout our lives his presence with us. Nothing interferes because you can be in the middle of all the things that you're trying to do and if you do something that's out of line or you neglect something that you should have done, the Holy Spirit just puts a thought in your mind saying, hey, you missed this or you did that wrong. You don't have to stop because he's not outside of us, he's inside of us. And so he has a living presence with us. And when you sit down today, tomorrow, the next day to read the Bible and you focus your attention on the Scriptures and who God is, you're celebrating the Sabbath. The principle, do not forget the redemptive power of God and how he has always saved his people from Israel to you. From that day to this one. That principle is never, ever violated anywhere. That's why he said we should never take even a small part of that. It's a critical thing for us. And so God lives in these basic principles. But in that generation, they had to do it one way because of the absence of the Spirit and ours, we do it another because of Christ's life, which we can celebrate his great delivering work, death on the cross, and the presence of the Spirit who lives within us. But the principle is exactly the same. Remember me all of your life and what I've done for you and what I've called you to be and to do. And so Jesus is here. The man with the withered hand is here. The father says, son, this is why you've come. Well, father, you know, if I heal that guy's hand on this day, they're going to be so mad at me. They'll want to kill me. I know. I know. But you've come here to teach them what the commandments really are all about. So I want you to heal that man in front of everyone, to let them know it doesn't make me happy what they don't do. It makes me happy what they do. The principle and the practice. The principle is eternal and the practice fits the circumstance and age. If you read your quarterly or the manual you have for your lesson, I want to take exception to something that he said in that, I could be wrong about it, but this is what I think is right, indicated that we shouldn't look at the Old Testament law and see the laws that were given. He said we don't have a theocracy anymore. That means a group of people who have as their leader God. Instead we live in a country where we have a president or prime minister or all kinds of political leaders instead of a king anointed by God. So that those practices in the Old Testament that relate to a nation or the laws of that kingdom or world, we can sort of bypass those. He also indicates that we live in a time when the cultic practices, that means the sacrifices and the things that they did then, we can sort of bypass those too. What Jesus said I think contradicts that. Not one single thing of those principles in the law can we overlook. How do we look at that? In the same way we look at the practice like Jesus talked about with the Sabbath. What was the purpose of the cultic sacrifices? If you look back at the Old Testament, what you found was whenever you sinned, a person sinned and they were aware of their sin, they realized they needed to do something to get forgiveness. So there was a pattern for them. You recognize your sin, you take one of your most valuable animals that you didn't want to get rid of at all, and you say, okay, God, I've sinned against you and I'm so sorry for it. I wish I could change it, but I can't. I ask for your forgiveness. I'm going to take the most valuable animal I have and I'm going to give it to you. So you take it down to the temple, you go to the priest, and then you get him aside and you say, I've got to tell you what I did. I did something that I know God didn't want me to do and I'm so ashamed of it and I need forgiveness because my guilt is overwhelming to me. So I brought my best animal, examine it here and see, make sure it has no defects on it. I want to give nothing but the very best to God as a payment for my sin. Priest examines it, takes it down on the altar, cuts its throat, takes the blood, sprinkles it on the altar and may even throw it on the guy. He cuts it up and burns it completely. The man, before all that happens, lays his hand on the head of the animal. It's a way of saying, God, I can't burn myself on this altar. You said that's not the right thing to do. But I'm laying my hand on this animal to let you know that I wish it was me. I would do anything for your forgiveness. So this animal represents me to you. Now he stands there while the animal is cut up and put on the altar until it's completely burned up. As he sees the smoke going to God, God receives the smoke. He accepts this man's life given back to him. And the man walks out knowing that God no longer holds his sin against him. In the New Testament, you get up one morning, you go in and everything's not going like it ought to, you lose your temper, you say things you ought not to say, you say words you shouldn't say, you know they're hurtful and harmful. All day long you keep thinking about that. Here's what God tells you to do. When you realize you've done something wrong, you admit it. You say, Lord, I was really not acting like you today, this morning. I hurt people's feelings, I said things to people I love, they don't feel love from me. I just want to be forgiven. He says, okay, you confess your sin to me, you go to the people you've confessed and you make it right with them, you apologize, and you ask for their forgiveness. And you remember that the blood of Jesus Christ on the cross has paid for this sin. And then you forget it. You're forgiven. You see, it's the same process, except it's not the blood of a lamb, it's the blood of Christ that's given for us. The principles, the same in the Old Testament as in the New, the practice is just somewhat different. It's also true about the country, you know, you may be a citizen of the United States or some other country in the world, but once you accept Jesus Christ, you're a citizen of the kingdom of God. It has a king. And he wants you to live according to his rules. Jesus' disciples, when they started working, they were telling about Jesus, and they brought him to court and said, we don't want you to talk about Jesus anymore. We killed him, he's gone, forget about it. And they said to them, we know we're citizens of this kingdom, of this world, but we have to decide whether we're going to listen to human government or to God. You decide what you want to do, but as for us, we must do what God tells us. He is our Lord. And when you stand in the baptistry, and you look out across this crowd, and you say, Jesus Christ is my Lord, you're saying he's your governor, he's your president, he's the ruler of your life, and you're going to live by his rules and by his laws. And everywhere in the world you come to, you will find yourself in places, sometime, someplace, someway, in which you will be at odds with the government of the land in which you live. You may not think that's true here, but let's say, for example, you were called to be on the jury, and it was a murder case. And you look at the case, and you see that they don't have any eyewitnesses to this murder. Then you look up in the scripture and say, what are the conditions under which a follower of God can condemn someone to death? And it says, only on the presence of two eyewitnesses. You're in a bind. The law of this country allows you to do that without two eyewitnesses. But God requires two. You have to make a choice as to what you're going to do, which law you're going to live by. All over the world there are followers of Christ that are living in places and circumstances where they have to make choices. Fortunately for us in this country, there are not so many of them. But there are times and places in which our loyalty to the human government has to take second place to our loyalty to God. We know circumstances in this country are changing. We know patterns of right and wrong are changing. And they're changing based on what people think and what they like and what they choose. But for us in the kingdom of God, they're not changing. They're the same. Everybody else may believe it's okay to do something, but when we read the Bible and it says, thou shalt not, for us, it trumps our laws. That's why all over the world governments are afraid of Christians. This is the only country I know about in the world where they don't have a government office of religion to try to control these people who are not loyal to their country. Now I want to say as loyal as you might be to the United States, the day Jesus comes back the United States is kaput. No more. All over. It's only the kingdom of God. The rules and laws of this country are second in the mind and heart of the followers of Jesus, just like they were in the Old Testament when they had a king and when they had a country. The principle is the same, but the practice, that is, you have a land and a place where you all live, is different. Now we live all over the world, but in every place where people say, Jesus Christ is my Lord, the rules of this book and the law of this book take precedence over the law of their country. And you see it. People who are killed because they gather in a building like this and say, Jesus Christ is my Lord. And as you saw, a church building 1,500 years old was bombed and destroyed. People who are members of that church flee the country to save their lives. We're fortunate we don't face that, but let us not become complacent to think that it's enough for us to simply obey the laws and the customs of our land. We have principles to live by. It means there's some shows we can't watch. It means some things we can't do. There are limits, you see, in the country in which we live. Peter, in writing to the believers, he said to them, we live in a country where you're aliens, and we don't like to think of ourselves as aliens in the United States, but you know what an alien is? Somebody that has a citizenship in another country. We have citizenship in another country. And we live in this land as aliens. Our primary loyalty is to someone else and to another set of laws. He said you're aliens in this country because your real ultimate destiny is the kingdom of God. Don't get too attached to the place you are. Now, I don't think you can ignore the principles in the Old Testament about the kingdom of God. I don't think you can ignore the Old Testament customs about how to find peace with God. They're the same because our God is the same. The principles are there. The practice, Jesus said, I'm going to fulfill those so you'll find a better way of doing it. I'm going to accomplish that so you'll find a complete way of doing it. But am I going to remove those things? No. Am I going to change them? No. The principles are the same. So when you start reading the Old Testament and you find that there are radically different ways of doing things, you stop and quit looking at the practice and you start looking at the principle behind it, and there you will find the eternal message of God. Now what Jesus says to us is very clear and plain in his own story. When he starts his work in this world, he said, I want you to understand what's important about all of this. I tell you that unless your righteousness surpasses the righteousness of the Pharisees and teachers and the law, you will certainly not enter the kingdom of heaven. Don't look at the laws and what people say about them, but you look instead at what I've told you. Jesus said not one little thing that God has said we should do can we ignore. Every one of them are binding on us. The reason is, when you come into a country to be a citizen, you say, well, okay, I'll take an oath to be a citizen, but let me give you a list of the laws I'm not going to keep. I'll promise you, you won't get your citizenship there. And when you come into the kingdom of God and you say, okay, I'll give my life to you, Lord, but I've got a list of things here that are said in the Bible that I'm not going to do, he won't accept you. You won't have a citizenship. What he wants you to say is, I give my life to you, nothing held back, no resistance. You are my Lord. Why does he do that? Because he loves us so much that he wants to keep us from doing the things that would destroy our lives. That's what laws are for, to protect us. And he can't protect us unless we're committed to do all that he asks us to do. You bow your heads, please, for a moment. Most important thing in your life you'll ever do is to become a part of the kingdom of God. To say to God, I give you my life. I pledge to live in submission and obedience to you all of my days. I will learn what you want me to do and try my best to do it. I will live according to the instructions you've given me. Now, he's made a way that when you fail, you can make it right. That's what all the story of Christ's death is about. You don't have to be perfect. You have to be passionately committed. If you've never made that promise to God, you're outside the kingdom of God. The doors of it are open. All he wants you to do, you can do it right here, sitting where you are, is say, Lord, I want to be a part of your kingdom. I want to promise you right now that I'm going to give myself to you, to live as you directed. I'll learn as much as I can about it, and everything I learn I'll try to put in practice. I want to live in your kingdom. You tell him that now. What will happen to you is you'll feel the peace of God come to you. You'll experience the presence of God changing your thinking, the way you see things. Your life will become different. Maybe you've made that promise to God, and you get hung up on the rules instead of the principles. God wants to shake you loose from that, and make sure the principles are first in your life, not the do's and the don'ts. Maybe you've been hearing God say to you there's some things you shouldn't do, but you keep doing them, so your life gets messed up. Maybe there's some things that you've been hearing that God says you should be doing this, but you're so busy you just push it aside. You never say no, but okay, sometime in the future. When God says it's time to do it, it's time to do it. I know when I used to tell my boys here's what I want you to do, and they said I'll do it some other time, that's the same as saying no. The rules and laws of the kingdom are real, and there's not one little bit of them that we can say no to. Unless your righteousness exceeds the rule keepers, you'll never enter the kingdom of God. I'm going to be at the front here for a few minutes, and someone's going to be here with me. I think Josie's coming, Denise, I mean Debbie, the instrument's going to play this morning. A way of giving you an opportunity to talk to God about what He's put in your mind. If you want someone to pray for you, you just come and we'll pray for you. If you're ready to give your life to Christ publicly and openly, you can come and do that. If you know you've backed up on some of the things God's told you and you're ready to get started again, this is your opportunity. The ruler of the world is talking to you. What do you do about it? What do you do about it? Would you stand, please, for a moment? Sometimes there are things that we think are right, God, and we do them, only to look back and see that it was a big mistake. Sometimes we make the very best choices we know how and get advice from all of our friends and realize down the road what a disaster it was. What a wonderful and comforting thing it is to know that the laws that you wrote thousands of years ago still work. They'll still lead us to life. They still give us the future that you've planned for us, so that we don't have to wonder if they're going to be changed next year. I thank you for those who've made promises of faithfulness to you. Give them the strength to keep it. I pray for those that heard something that they knew they should do and are afraid to say yes to you. Pray them patience and be patient with them. For those who've made promises to you, we can't keep any promises we make to you without your wisdom and without your ability, so give us that. In the name of Christ, we pray, our Lord, King, and Ruler, amen.