Authenticity in Faith: Aligning Heart and Actions

1) "Jesus warns us against doing good to be seen of others. We must be very careful why we do what we do. I had a man come to me one time and he said, Pastor, I think faith promised missions is a bad thing and we should not make commitments to ourselves. Our missionaries and, you know, blah, blah, blah. Because you got this guy that's poor. You go through a missions conference. He makes a commitment and then he can't keep his commitment. So how is he going to trust God? I would say if he trusted God, he would have kept his commitment. What I would have said. Because you can always quit drinking soda waters. You can buy cheaper food. You can quit doing drugs." [05:02] (41 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


2) "We have to be careful not to do things to be seen of men. Alms here would actually be kind of talking about righteousness. So it would be saying, Don't perform righteous acts so that you might be seen of men. Now, I'm not going to say, the Bible says, Be ye doers of the word, not hearers only. James says, Show me thy faith without thy works, I'll show thee my faith by my works. By the way, when I got into this understanding of a doer-based mentality versus a spirit-led mentality, verses that never made sense finally made sense." [07:34] (37 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


3) "Jesus addressed the danger of cultivating an image of righteousness. It's almost impossible to do spiritual things in front of others without thinking what their opinion is of us, and how they're thinking better or worse of us because of what we do. But if we lead that way, if we live wondering, if I do this, they'll think worse. If I do this, they'll think better. Who is our judge? They are. Meaning, we will do things that compromise our stance before God in order to please them. And it's a hard thing to swallow, but it's still true." [13:54] (40 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


4) "Doing the right thing with the wrong motive gives us no reward. There was a famous preacher that I believe did great damage to the cause of Christ in the Independent Baptist Movement, and he preached a message called duty. And the premise of this message was, you do it whether you feel like it or not, and eventually you'll feel like it. No. This verse puts that to shame. This passage of Scripture puts that to shame. If you're doing it for the wrong reasons, you have no reward. You're doing it so that people will see you doing it. You're doing it so you'll see yourself doing You'll do it to motivate yourself, but the motivation doesn't come from the doing. The motivation comes from the Spirit of God." [24:17] (49 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


5) "The idea is that when we do righteous deeds for the attention and applause of men, their attention and applause is our reward. It's much better to receive a reward of your Father in heaven because we know the rewards of your Father in heaven are eternal. Eternal and without turning. And the rewards of men are fickle. You remember when David had to flee? He had to flee from men that were his friends. He had to flee from men who were on his side." [20:18] (29 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)


6) "We must be real. We must be real in our lives. We have to be real. I hate to say I'm sick of it because that's very derogatory sounding. But I'm up to here with fake Christianity. I'm up to it. I'm done. I'm not going to play with it anymore. You say, hey, pastor, why aren't you happy with me? Because you're fake. Is that all right? No, I'm just kidding. That's rude. I apologize. I apologize. I'm going to do my best. I'm going to say, hey, we love you. We want to help you. I'm not kidding. I love you and I want to help you. And I'm not mad that you're fake. I know you're fake because you're hurt and you don't know the right way to go and you don't want people to be mad at you. We're not going to be mad at you. We're going to help you." [27:53] (47 seconds) (Download raw clip | Download cropped clip)