The Story - Chapter 5

Maybe you've come home sometime with your family, and when you walk in the house you know that something is wrong. You can just tell. Something is not exactly right. You know what it means for a wall to be built between you and other people. Well, this is what happened to God. He came to the Garden of Eden where he had met with Adam and Eve many times, but when he came to their presence he realized that there was something different here. They had chosen to say to God, we're not going to do what you want us to do, we're going to do something else. And a barrier was built between people and God because of their rebellion against Him and their refusal to let Him guide their choices and their lives. God began at that moment to start fashioning a way by which he could bring all the world together in the same kind of relationship that he had with Adam and Eve before all this took place. God wanted to build his relationship with his people. It wasn't that this alienation between God and his people was physical, God didn't go back to heaven and say, I'm not going to be here anymore. He was right here all the time. You know what I mean. You can be in the same room with someone and feel a wall or a barrier even though you're in the same place. That's true with God. When you're with God, no matter where you are, he's with you. We talk about inviting God into our church service, but really you can't do that. He's always here. You can't invite him into your life as if he wasn't there because he's always in your life. You can't keep him out of any place. You can't keep him out of the court. You can't keep him out of the school, and you can't keep him out of your house. The Bible describes God as being everywhere in the world, and we have a word for that omnipotence, the omnipresence of God. He's everywhere, all the time. He's not always relating to us as he wants to. Because of the rebellion we have in our own hearts toward his authority, a part of what God did to break this barrier between us was he decided he would tell us the secret about how to be able to have this relationship with him that he wants to have with us, and how to be able to have relationships with each other that are proper as they ought to be, fulfilling and rewarding. We call this the law in the Old Testament, and the people of Israel loved the law. In Psalm 119, the psalmist in writing about the law, this is a book that talks about all that, the whole chapter talks about the scriptures. In Psalm 119, verse 163, he said, I hate and abhor falsehood, but I love your law. Seven times a day I praise you for your righteous laws. Great peace have they who love your law, and nothing can make them stumble. Love the law? How could you do that? Whenever you use the word law around our culture, you hear people who are rebellious against it. They don't want to do what the government tells them or anybody else wants them to do. They see the law as telling them what to do, and all of us have this part of our nature that if someone says, you've got to do this, we immediately say, I'm not going to do it. I don't want to do it. We just resist people telling us what to do, and the law sounds to us like someone is saying, this is what you have to do. How can you love that? Well, when they talk about the law in the Old Testament, it's quite different than what we think about in that word law. Sometimes we think about the law and we read in the New Testament where Jesus comes in conflict with people who are constantly telling him he's breaking the law. And you read harsh words in the New Testament about the law, but you have to remember something. There's two kinds of laws in the Bible. There's the law of Moses, which we find written in the Old Testament in the Ten Commandments, in Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy. And then there's the law of the scribes and the Pharisees. They would give the Old Testament law of Moses and then make enormous numbers of rules about how to keep that. The Sabbath, for example, got Jesus in trouble. He was out with his disciples and he found someone who was very, very sick. Now the law said you're to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Jesus met someone who was sick and the Pharisees said, now to keep this law of the Sabbath, you could only heal someone who was in danger of dying on the Sabbath day. If someone was very, very sick and they still weren't going to die, you can't help them. You can't give them medical treatment. Now you see, keep the Sabbath holy was the law of Moses. You can't help sick people was the law of the Pharisees. Jesus found the law of the Pharisees terribly burdening to him. So he met this person who was sick and he healed them. And they got on to him about it. They said, you've broken the law. He said, do you think God would prefer someone remain in misery and suffering on the Sabbath or to get well? What do you think God's interested in? So in the Old Testament, you have the law of Moses. In the New Testament, the law of the religious people. So when we read about the law, something terrible comes to us. We think of our own human nature. No one's going to tell me what to do. Then we think of Jesus, who was constantly badgered about the law. And we get in our own mind that there's something negative about the law. I want to ask you to think about the law in a new and different way. I have in my hand a book. This book is the Mustang's Owner Guide, 1994. I drive a 1994 Mustang car. This book comes with the car. If something happens, you look in this book and you can find out maybe how to fix it. For example, one time, some of the electrical components on the car went out and I thought, I wonder if it's the fuses in this car that are bad. Then I thought, I have no idea where to find the fuses in this car. And if I found the fuses in the car, I would have no idea which one of them went where. And then I thought of this book. This book tells you where to find the fuse panel. It tells you when to find the fuse panel, which one of those fuses go to the radio and the lights and all the other things in the car. Now I could look at this manual and it says, here's where the fuse panel is. And I could say, nobody's going to tell me where to go look for the fuse panel. I'm going to look wherever I want to. But you see, this book, even though it tells you what kind of gas to put in the car, tells you the size of the tires you're supposed to have, how much pressure you have in them, these are laws or rules or principles that allow me to be able to operate that car successfully. Now you could call this, in the Old Testament idea, a law book because it tells you what to do and what not to do. It tells you how to do things and how not to do things. And for me, when I found this book and I looked and found the panel, I was so thrilled for this book. I loved this book right then because it meant that I didn't have to take it to somebody and pay $50 an hour to go into the panel and find that and stick a little thing right in there. I went to the store after I pulled it out, bought some of those, had to buy five of them. But I bought five of them, came back and stuck it right in that hole and it worked fine. I love this book. The people of Israel said, I love this book because this book tells me how I can be friends with God. This book tells me how I'm going to be able to live in this world with the people around me the way God planned for me to live. That is what the Ten Commandments are really all about. What God intended with this story was to tell us how to build a relationship with Him that He wants us to have. In the Old Testament, the Ten Commandments, we call them that, the Hebrews call them the Ten Words. These Ten Commandments are sort of like the introduction to a book. Each one of those commandments has a lot of things that you could do or you need to learn or to put into practice. And if you read Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy, you will find that those Ten Laws are oftentimes used many different times and different circumstances to explain how you put it in practice. What that has is the beginning, it tells you how to say you should love God. And then all the way through those books, those five books, it tells you how to love God. What does God want from you? How can you worship Him? What does He want you to live like? How can you be a friend to God? And it's spelled out in great detail. When you look at the New Testament and Jesus starts His ministry in the book of Matthew, there is the Sermon on the Mount. In the beginning in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has what we call the Beatitudes, which are kind of like the Ten Commandments. They're Jesus' outline of all that He's going to teach in that book. And He then teaches the Sermon on the Mount and then He starts living that. So He not only tells us what we can do to have a relationship with God and with each other, but He puts it into practice. All of this is the law of God. It's intended for you to know exactly what you need to do so that you and God have no wall between you. If you ever feel like you've done something wrong, it's God telling you you violated one of these principles. You may be working somewhere, things don't go exactly as you wanted, and all of a sudden something really bad happens and in your frustration and your anger, you may snap at the people around you. You may even ask God to send your hammer to hell because it hit your thumb, and as soon as you've finished, inside of you, you say, that was wrong. You look around to see if anybody else heard. That is God. He's right there with you, telling you that you violated one of these instructions that He's given us about how to have a relationship with Him and with others. What God wants in this story is for us to understand how we can have the relationship with Him that He really wants us to have. So I want to read from chapter 21 of the book of Exodus, God's instructions as to how to build a relationship with Him and how to build a relationship with other people. Now if you want to see how these are worked out, you have to look at the rest of the book of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. I've preached through all of those books, and every one of them relate back to one of these commandments. Every verse in there is related to one of these commands that He gives us, because He's trying to help us to know how to live so that God and ourselves will have a relationship together. He's trying to show us how to treat each other so that we will have the kind of relationship that is supportive and encouraging to us. And God spoke all these words, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt and out of the land of slavery. He's identifying Himself. I am the one that's in charge. This is my instruction for you. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or in the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God punishing the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to thousands who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses His name. Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all of your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do anything, any work, neither you nor your son or daughter nor your manservant or maidservant nor your animals nor the alien within your gates. For six days the Lord made the heaven and earth and the sea and all that is in them, but He rested on the seventh day. Therefore, the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Those first three instructions from God are saying to you and I, this is the way you can have a relationship with me. Tim talked about this in his own life. In the beginning of his life it was all about him and nothing about God. That built a wall between him and God because God knows that He made Tim. He knows that He made all the world and He rules the world and He is in control and He is in charge of all of this and He wants the acknowledgement and recognition of who He is. When you go to work anywhere in the world, the boss wants you to recognize he is the boss. So if he tells you that this is a job I want you to do, you say, I don't want to do that but this is the boss, they pay me, I am going to go ahead and do it because he is the boss. God demands that we recognize His position of authority. I am the Lord. I made everything that there is. There is to be nothing or no one in your life who causes you to make choices and decisions contrary to what I want. If you want to get along with me, you have to recognize that nothing controls your life except me. I control the way you think, the values that you hold and the choices that you make. And if you let me do that, then you and I will have a relationship that is close and personal and friendly. But if you rebel against my authority and say I am going to do what I want to do, when I want to do it, the way I want to do it, then there is this wall that is built between us. Because you no longer recognize who I really am. He said, now there is another thing that I want you to remember. I want you to take time out of your life to remember me. So he set aside one day, they are not to do any work that day, none of the people that work for them are to do work, and that day is to be dedicated wholly to the Lord. Wholly means set apart just for God. In the New Testament, Jesus didn't emphasize this so much. Instead what he said to us is, the Holy Spirit of God will enter your life and every day you are to take time to remember God is with you. That's what the Sabbath is for. The Sabbath is not just not to work and watch football all day long, it is to remember who God is, and the place that you play in his life, and the place that he plays in your life. So in the New Testament, what Jesus told us was, we were to walk with the Spirit of God. For when we say to God, I give my life to you, he gives us his Holy Spirit, and then he expects us to walk every single day aware that God is with us, he is in us, he is guiding us, he is directing us, he is telling us what we should do about the choices we make, and helping us make the right choices. So that's why day by day you get up and you read the Bible. Before you read you say, God, okay, I recognize you're the Lord in charge of my life, I'm going to read this, is there anything you want to tell me today? That's your Sabbath day. Every day for the follower of Jesus is a Sabbath day. It is set apart only for serving God. And then he said, now if you want me to be your friend, I want you not to recognize who I am and treat me with respect. That's what he talks about, about misusing his name. We say that's cussing, and what it really means when you say, God, would you damn something like your hammer that hit your thumb, you're like saying, I'm going to order you around God to do whatever I please. You do use God as a tool to accomplish the things that you are interested in instead of him. Don't ever treat me like I'm one of the rest of you. I'm not. I am the Lord. Those three things God sets apart and says, you and I will get along just fine if you will do those things. Our relationship will be close. So if you have something in your own life and you feel like, I'm not very close to God, God's not hearing my prayers, or God's not responding to what I want, you go back to those three things and say, this is the book that tells me how to get close to God. All I have to look at is to say, is God really in charge of my life? Am I listening to him every day and doing what he tells me to do? Am I treating him like another human being on this earth? Or am I saving great reverence for him in his name? You do those three things and all of a sudden you'll feel the presence of God come back into your life because you've removed the barrier that he has. The other seven of these have to do with how we treat each other. God says, if you want to figure out how to have a good life, this is it. It starts, he says, with recognizing who authorities are. If you want to have a happy home, you need to make sure as children that you obey your parents. That's what you're supposed to do. As long as you have parents living in this world, you obey your parents. You have respect and reverence for them. All the kind of problems of rebellion that come into the lives of children growing up stem from this one place. They don't have respect and reverence for the authority of parents in the home. But Jesus, when he was talking about this, and all the way through the books as Moses told him in the other instructions and the other five books that he wrote, he expands this. He says, it's not only about just respecting the authority of your parents, but expecting the authority of your boss and expecting, respecting the authority of your government. I have placed you in the world to live under authority, and you must respect it, he said. Someone asked Jesus about whether or not they should pay attention to the Roman government and pay taxes. They expected Jesus to say no. Many of them did. But he said, no, you give to Caesar what is rightly Caesar's, and you give to God what is rightly God's. You respect the authority of God in everything that he tells you, and you respect the government in everything it tells you. Now, in our time, you see, we have a little bit of trouble with that sometimes. We don't want anybody telling us what to do, and we don't like the government or the president or the congress or whatever. We think it's our right to say, shove off. The government in Jesus' day in Rome was a very wicked place. The senators oftentimes were immoral, visited prostitutes, their wives oftentimes were adulterous, and the Roman emperor at that time had boys all around him all the time swimming with him. He was a noted homosexual. And Jesus said, you give Caesar the money that is due him because he's Caesar even though he's immoral, wicked, and godless. Respect your authorities. Paul writing in the book of Romans says the same thing to the Roman church. They were punishing Christians in this time, and he said, honor the government. What God says is you're going to get along in the world if you learn to honor authority. I know we don't like that always because we don't always agree with it, but you respect it. This is how society is structured when there is someone in charge. You look in the countries where that's not true, Somalia, where the pirates are in control and the government has no control over what goes on, and it is chaos from beginning to end. You look at the places where Al-Qaeda is having free reign because there is no strong government in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and it is chaos. If you want to live in a world that's structured the way it should, pay attention to authority. Parents, school, government, wherever it is. For this is the method that I've made, and what God is doing is not giving us laws. He's telling us the secret to life. Not only is it a matter of authority, he said, but I'll tell you how you treat each other is important. Don't murder anybody around you, for all life belongs to me. And then in the New Testament, Jesus said, I'll go one better than that. What God is really getting at is, you should never be so angry with another person that you get angry enough to kill them, or to hurt them, or to damage them. If you want to get along in life, get rid of anger. That's his point. You know people who walk around with a whole lot of anger, and it doesn't take very much for it to get out. Jesus is telling us the secret to relationships. No one wants to be around a person who's angry, and gets angry at the least little thing that takes place. Do not commit adultery. He's protecting the home here. When you establish a home, make sure that the promises you make to each other are permanent, and you don't vary from those. The government, he's talking about, the relationships with other people, and the home. Where is the rule for your home? Always have faithfulness to each other. Then he talks about relationships with things. If you have something and people steals them, it hurts your feelings, but it also causes chaos. You go to countries where there's a lot of thievery taking place, and you see it's hard to run a business. It's hard to operate. Jesus said the secret to the world is you never take something that does not belong to you. Then he said, you can't ever do anything in the world if you can't trust the people around you. So never tell lies. Always tell the truth. How much easier it is if you can know that the people you're dealing with are always going to tell the truth. And then he ended it by saying, I'm going to give you everything you need to live, so I don't want you to look around and say, boy, I'm not satisfied with what I have. I want what that person has. Never get greedy or covetousness controlling your life. You see, the law in the Old Testament and the New Testament reveals to us the principles about how to have a relationship with God and how to have a relationship with each other. I think of it this way. If you were plopped down on an island somewhere, and you knew nothing about this, and you were looking for something to eat, you wouldn't know if one vine was poisonous or one plant was poisonous or not. So what God has done with the law is He's put on certain things a sign that says, this is poison to your life. This is poison to your country. This is poison to your home. This is poison to your relationships. This is poison to your financial life. This is poison to your heart. So we know without any question whatsoever exactly how to live so that we might find life in its fullness. Now can you understand why the psalmist would say, I love your law? Because it's laid out before me exactly how I can live and find life in all of its fullness. Now you don't have to do this. You can choose to live any way you want. But if you suddenly one day find your relationship with people around you are terrible, you might want to go back to these instructions that he gave you and say, am I really doing the things I should? Do I get angry all the time? Do I lie to people? Just go through the list. And when you find one of those things that you're doing that he says you shouldn't do, stop and say, okay, I'm going to change that. God, you're in charge. You're in authority. I'm going to believe you. I'm going to trust you. And you will find it begins to change your relationships and your life. You don't have to follow instructions if you don't want to. Adam and Eve found that out. But what you will find is if you don't accept the instructions of God, your life will never, I mean this, never work as it should. Your home will never be what it could. Your relationships with people will always be strained. For what God has given us in the law is the picture as to how life ought to be lived. And everything that happens to us that deviates from this life that God wants us to have is the result of ignoring the manual. You can put in a 94 Mustang car kerosene instead of gasoline, diesel fuel instead of gasoline, but it isn't going to work right. You can refuse to change your oil and say, I'm just going to run it and run it and run it. And you're going to tell people how much money you've saved over the years until one day the motor falls apart. You don't have to follow it. But the fact is, if you don't, it will destroy your car. You don't have to follow it. You can live like you want to. But if you don't, it will destroy your relationships with people, your home, and your life. And you will end up in hell forever. It's your choice. That's why the psalmist said, I love your law. I mean, it helps me know how to be able to live. Do you believe that? Would you bow your heads for just a moment? If you believe this, what God wants you to do is to say to him, Lord, I believe what you have heard today. I believe that you're in charge of this world and you've shown me how I should live, and I want to do that. So today, I want to say to you, you are my God. I accept your authority over my life. And from this day on, I'm not going to do what I want, but I'm going to try to do, as best I can, what I know you want me to do. That's what it means to have God, Jesus Christ, as your Lord, the ruler of your life. If you've never done that before, I beg you today, do that right now. If you think you should do that now, this is God himself saying to you, my friend, this is what I want from you. Don't ignore that thought, that feeling, that this is what you should do. You do it. You have to do nothing more than just say to God, I want you to rule my life from this moment on. The church is a group of people who promise God to live in obedience to him, and we're banded together to do the work that God has for his people. Today, the doors of our church are open for people who are not a member of this congregation to say, I want to band together with others who have dedicated themselves to live in obedience to God. Lord, I ask today that you would help each of us to know if there is something now that you want us to promise you. I ask today that if there's something you want us to do, each of us would know exactly what it is. In the name of Christ, I ask this. I want you to remain where you are. I'm going to be at the front, Ozzie will be here with me, Debbie will be here. If God has spoken to you this morning and said, come, join me in this great story that I'm writing right now in this world, you do that by doing what you know God has asked us to do. Would you stand, please, for a moment of prayer together? Do you need to make some report with him? Brad comes and asks for prayer. He has Jesus in his heart, he has Jesus and the Lord in his life. His mother, he does not believe, has that relationship and it's very hard for him. We just pray that the Lord would continue to give him the strength and that we will pray for his mother to develop and come to know the Lord as Brad has. Dear Father, we come today for Brad's mother. It's our understanding that she doesn't have a relationship with you and it's our understanding that Brad does. He knows that he needs to honor his mother and this has certainly caused friction between a mother and a son. Father, I know that you are not the maker of conflict, but you want love and understanding. So, Father, we lift up Brad's mother today that somewhere, somehow, she comes to know you and accepts you as her Lord and Savior and that her son can continue to live his life at his mother's side, worshiping you. We thank you for this. In Jesus' name, amen. Father, we give thanks to you today for speaking to us, for leading us and guiding us. You've heard each of our minds, the promises we've made to you. We ask you guide us this week that we might be obedient to you and find the life that you want for us. Dismiss us in your grace, your mercy, and your peace. In the name of Jesus, we ask it. Amen. Let's sing our closing song together, Amazing Grace. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.