Churches in Spearfish

“You see, God is after our hearts. He is not after empty ritual. He does not want your church attendance. He does not want you to be like, wow, I scored a 100% on my bible reading plan. If your heart is far from him, it doesn't matter how many times you appear at church. It doesn't matter how many times you go on your knees to pray to God. It doesn't matter any of those things if your heart is not his. Guys, we have we have to see that to be a Christian, a proof of you being a Christian is your heart's delight is in Jesus Christ, not anything else. And guess what? From the fruit of that, it will not be begrudging obedience, it will be loving obedience.”

“John wraps up this section with another doctrinal truth to believe as a Christian, as a proof. Am are you a Christian? And this proof is this. It's a necessity of believing Jesus is the Christ or Messiah and also the necessity of believing that Jesus is the son of God. He focuses in on Jesus' deity. Jesus is, in fact, God. He's not just mere man. He's also fully God. You wanna be a Christian? Believe the right things about God. But don't this doesn't just stop there. Those beliefs will lead to you wholeheartedly loving God and loving his people, delighting in his commands. And this is what it means to have victory in Christ. This is the truth. I pray these proofs ring true in your life that as you've tested yourself today and you look in your life and you're like, man, do I love God? Do I do I keep his commandments? Am I born again? Do I believe these things about Jesus? I pray as you look at these tests that you you do see I I am his. Because John wrote this letter so that we may know and we have certainty in eternal life. That's what he'll say later on in the same chapter, verse 13.”

“You see, God is after our hearts. He is not after empty ritual. He does not want your church attendance. He does not want you to be like, wow, I scored a 100% on my bible reading plan. If your heart is far from him, it doesn't matter how many times you appear at church. It doesn't matter how many times you go on your knees to pray to God. It doesn't matter any of those things if your heart is not his. Guys, we have we have to see that to be a Christian, a proof of you being a Christian is your heart's delight is in Jesus Christ, not anything else. And guess what? From the fruit of that, it will not be begrudging obedience, it will be loving obedience. It'll be like, God, I just wanna do it more. And and you'll end up like Paul at the end of his life saying, I'm the chief of sinners.”

“This faith and with the helper, we live we can now live the holy and blameless life that God has called us to live in this wicked and perverse generation to share the gospel with others. And like I said earlier, it doesn't mean we won't struggle with sins, that the flaming darts won't come by? No means. But now we have an advocate with the father who, if we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us. And that is how we overcome the world, through Jesus Christ. Being an overcomer of this world, it means we no longer live for its passions. We no longer live for the temporal. We live for the eternal. God is our desire. We desire his kingdom. We desire him.”

“So if you desire God with your whole heart, being a Christian is not a burden but a blessing, an absolute blessing, a gift from God that we don't deserve. That's what grace and mercy means. Mercy is not getting what we deserve and grace is getting what we don't deserve, guys. What we deserve is complete separation. But God in his grace and mercy on us, I said, no, I want you to delight in me. I wanna have a delightful relationship with you.”

“Back to the favorite sports analogy. We did nothing. All we did was watch. All we did was hear it and believe it. It's like, God, oh my goodness. Look at what you did. You won. That is what we cont you wanna know what we contribute to our salvation? It's our sin. Our sin is what we contribute to it, that he had to die for to pay the price for. We contributed to the very thing we needed to be saved from. And that's the beauty of this. Because when you see the victory in Jesus through our faith, you see it's work his works of righteousness, not our own. Our works are nothing but filthy rags before the king of kings and lord of lords.”

“It's to believe this. It's to believe that Jesus is, in fact, the Messiah, the Messiah that was promised to come, that he is the anointed one, sent by God the father, the great prophet, because he is the final and perfect revelation of God. It's to believe he is the great high priest because he has offered himself once as a great sacrifice, the anointed one of the father. He is now interceding on our behalf. That's what Hebrews tells us. He is also our great king because he reigns in his kingdom forever. God has made his son both Christ and Lord. And we know from scripture that one day every knee will bow, every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is the Lord.”

“``What is being made clear here is to be saved is not simply just to believe the fact that Jesus merely existed. It's not merely to believe in Jesus and and our own little image of Jesus. It's to believe in the Jesus of the bible, the Christ of the bible, the promises of the bible, that he is the fulfillment. He is the promised savior. Christ has conquered, atoned, and he has revealed the father to us. Christ is king. This is more than a doctrine to believe. This is a saving faith that rests on the person and work of Jesus Christ, and this is glorious news for us.”

“Sometimes love gets boiled down to, like, an emotional response type deal or a temporal feeling that fleets is fleeting and things of that nature, but that's not the kind of love that is being talked about. You're actually studying the Greek. This is a love that leads to action. You wanna tell me you love me, show me. And this love leads to actions, and that's keeping God's commandment. This right love that God creates is a motivator right living. Right love motivates right living.”

“Well, the mission still requires the proclamation of a message, That message is that Jesus died for our sins. He was buried and on the third day he rose from the grave. First Corinthians fifteen three and four. This is the gospel and we must proclaim this message. You're like, well, is obvious. Well, I don't know that it is. You see, there's a lot of work happening in the world today being done by Christians that we call mission work, but a lot of that work is happening absent of gospel proclamation. I mean, we even have a saying now that nobody actually knows where it's coming from, but it says, preach the gospel at all times when necessary, use words. That's just bad theology. That's bad teaching. My friends, building a house for a person, giving them food and clothing, giving them a well to drink from, these are all good things. And while they may be a bridge for you to give the gospel to them, if you do not share the gospel with them, Those people got a home, they got some clothes, they got a well, but they're still headed to hell.”