Churches in Salem

“A lot of you have been operating and living on your own strength. Let's just right now ask the spirit of God to help us say no to that. Take a breath. Turn your attention back to Jesus, then start walking with the Holy Spirit step by step, moment by moment, day by day, not perfectly, not through resiliency and grit, but by grace alone that we don't deserve, gracious unmerited favor. God help me through the power and presence of the Holy Spirit. And as you walk by the spirit, you will become Romans eight twenty nine, conformed increasingly to the image and the person and the presence of Jesus in your life, in your friendships, in your marriage, in your parenting, and your neighboring, and your members. You will become a more joyful, faithful, gentle, kind, loving, patient, self controlled person because the spirit of Christ does those perfectly.”

“Every believer is positionally righteous, but we don't feel righteous, do we? Do you feel the tug of war in your heart? Anybody? Hand raised? Anybody? Three, six, twelve, fifteen, twenty four, nineteen, seven? Yeah. Yeah. I don't feel I don't I don't I don't feel righteous at times. There's this spiritual tug of war going on in my heart. You know the feeling you wanna respond with anger, but something in says something in you says, show patience. You wanna hide the truth, but something in you says, tell the truth. You wanna hold on to resentment, but something in you says, forgive the tug of war Israel. The presence of the struggle does not necessarily mean you're failing. It may mean that the spirit is working in your life. So the question is not will I struggle? Because the answer is yes. Will I struggle? Yes. The question is whose voice are you gonna listen to? You're gonna listen to the voice of sin or the voice and the power of Jesus.”

“Just walk, slow down, see life, pause, listen. If you will walk by the spirit, you will live a life of victory. It does not mean that you will have all the hurt and hang ups and hardships, but the spirit of God will remind you whose you are and the battle is already won. Some of you are raising your hands, you're singing, that is truth. We're singing truth and the spirit of God reminds us about those truths. Walk by the spirit. Let me give you some real quick specific application to to young people.”

“The spirit gives voice and power to believers to say no to sin. It's not just moral effort, It's supernatural enablement. Think of the spirit as both the impulse and the muscle. He convicts when sin tempts you. He strengthens you to resist, and he replaces the old impulses with new. But I say, walk by the spirit and you'll not carry out the deeds of the the flesh. The flesh in the New Testament stands for that which is in opposition to God. When you become a believer in Christ, you're positionally righteous, but we are not functionally made holy perfectly.”

“But so often, we sit in sin and we just buckle down in the sin and say, I'm not gonna confess that sin. I'm just gonna live in this decay, this hurt, this pain. Why do I need to confess? I don't wanna confess. I'm ashamed to confess to God all the sin that I have. I'm afraid to come to him. We get this idea of, well, I was saved once if you're a follower of Jesus' room. I got saved and confessed the first time. Why do I need to do it again? He's just gonna be ashamed of me. He's just gonna look down upon me. But here's the beauty that we see in the story of David, that we see in the Psalm, is that the gift of forgiveness is the opportunity to not just confess once, but to continually confess our sins. Nathan lays out, says, hey David, it was you. The whole story, I'm talking about you.”

“And over a couple weeks, it just kept dripping and dripping and dripping, and this little drip seeped through the cement, seeped through the concrete blocks the house was made out of, got to the walls, and caused this mold that was essentially deadly mold to go up the side of our walls. Church, when we talk about sin, we sometimes have a light view of sin. We think, well, it's just a little something. It's a little white lie. It's a little thing I do on the side. It's okay. God doesn't really care about sin. We have this light view of sin and its and its effects, but the truth is is that all sin is cosmic treason. And it causes death. It causes decay. It causes destruction. That if we even let a small drip of sin in our life, it will be all consuming, and it will take over.”

“This is a joyful life. When we continually confess our sins to God, he doesn't just forgive us, but he gives us abundantly more. He protects us. He teaches us. He instructs us. This is the life that I want. This is the life that David receives, and we can truly be glad and rejoice. At the end of every sermon, we always do believe and do based on the text that we looked at. We got a very simple one today. First one is this, God what I want you to believe here is God will forgive those who ask. Now you're like, yeah. That's we say that in church all the time. God's gonna forgive you. There are some people in this room, because I've seen and experienced it myself in my own life, where you feel as if God can't forgive me this time. Maybe you're not a follower of Jesus, and you're saying, God can't forgive me because I am so bad, that I have so much sin, that I have done such terrible things. Pastor Tony, you don't know what I've done. Church, I want you to believe one thing today. God will forgive those who ask, whether this is your first time asking or your millionth time asking.”

“Stop hiding in your sin and ask God to forgive you. You may be saying, well, I'm a Christian. I've already been forgiven. Yeah. You've been forgiven eternally. You are saved. You're going to heaven. But it's not just heaven that's our reward. It's living the in the freedom that God provides us a reward. And what we say when we live in sin and hide sin is that we'd rather live under the slavery of sin than the freedom of God. And so we not have to stop hiding in our sin and ask God to forgive us.”

“And the Holy Spirit saves us, seals us, and then changes us for the rest of our days. And so when we look at this sermon, when we look at what Jesus did let me ask you this question. Where do we see ourselves in the process of salvation? Nowhere. It's all God. It's all God that does it. And when you are saved, when you're empowered by the spirit, you are then able to do better. So is this a do better sermon? No. But followers of Jesus empowered by the Holy Spirit, guess what your answer is? Yes. Absolutely.”

“But there's so oftentimes, as we are followers of Jesus, if you're a follower of Jesus' room, that instead of putting on what's new, we stay in the old dirty clothes, our old dirty self, and we continue to live like the world. And we start asking questions like, why do I feel so far from God? Why aren't things doing working out? Is this Christian faith really all the that it's made up to be? And the answer is yes. But the key is that we need to live like you know Jesus, which is our big idea.”