You know that song? We're just going to go back to verse one. Verse one, verse one, and just for a second, just the verse and the chorus. We can keep it down, but I want you just to think about this.
You're here today, and we come to church for a lot of reasons. Sometimes we come because we've had a bad week, and sometimes we come because there's somebody special there we want to see. Sometimes we come just because we know we want to do the right thing. There's nothing wrong with most of those reasons, but I think sometimes we forget that we should be here to worship God.
It is a worship service, and we, as simple human beings, mess up in all of our ways. We're coming in and approaching the throne of God with confidence, as His word said that we can, right? And He loves us so much that He's welcoming us right up to Him. If we're not careful, we can get our minds caught up with all those other things that are going on in our lives. I'm not saying they're not important. I'm not saying that they're not impactful. They are.
But what I'm saying is far more important than any of that is the time you can spend in the presence of the Lord, the time that you can spend worshiping Him. I love the position that this song puts us in. If you really think about the words, and by the way, don't just sing songs here. We don't have song services; we have worship opportunities, okay?
Make this your prayer, and recognize it says, "I am an instrument of exaltation. I am an instrument. I am an instrument of exaltation." You know, probably about three or four years ago, this thing started happening in the music world where vocalists started referring to their voice as their instrument. I have no problem with that. That's great, and I like it especially for this moment right now. You are an instrument.
You, this body that God gave me, the body that He gave you, the ability He gave you, I don't care how well you sing. One of the reasons we have the music loud is so that you'll feel confident. You'll feel comfortable to sing. Straight up. If it's too quiet, some of y'all won't worship, and I don't apologize for that. I want you to lift your voice to the Lord. That's what His word says.
So no matter how off-key you are, even if you don't know what the word pitch means, recognize that you are an instrument of exaltation, and you were born to lift His name, God's name above all names.
Listen, we have lots of heroes in life. We have people we look up to, people who helped us, people we have never met that we still just idealize, okay? But there's one name above all names, and that's Jesus.
For just a couple of minutes, can we please find a place in our heart first? Because it starts in here, and let it come out from there as we worship the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, because no one else is worthy. Amen? Amen.
Jesus, we're here in Your presence, and we pray that as we worship You, that You will just settle in this place. Let Your Holy Spirit just rest upon us as we go forward to hear from Your word this morning.
God, there's a lot of amazing things in this life that You have blessed us with and given us the opportunity to enjoy. But Lord, it's my prayer, it's my heart's desire that for myself personally, for this congregation, I pray that we will never forget that all the joys of this life pale in comparison to the joy of knowing You.
That all the accomplishments in this life mean nothing compared to having a relationship with You. That no matter how successful we may become, no matter who we may come to know, no matter what obstacles we have destroyed or what goals we have achieved, nothing will ever compare to Your greatness, God.
Did you come to the house of the Lord this morning? Find three or four people on your way down because I know some of you started down real fast. Find three or four people, give them a high five, say, "Man, I'm glad you're here. Let's get ready."
God good? Hey, I'm so excited that you're here today.
Listen, if this is your first time at Harvest Fellowship, thank you for spending the morning with us. I know it's early for some of you. Where was I? Oh, thank you for hanging out with us. Seriously, we are a very casual church on purpose.
We believe that the word of God is true. We live our life accordingly. Amen. We don't believe that you're made more holy by the way you dress or the way you act or the way you look or the way you talk or the people you hang out with. Some of those things can contribute, thank you, Josh, to those situations.
But we think that we grow holy and become more holy in the presence of God. We pray in the presence of the Lord, and as we seek Him, amen. So just be yourself. Just relax. Tell your neighbors, "Relax," because God's got some stuff this morning. I don't want you to miss it.
I'm gonna fly through a couple of announcements real quick. As I said last week, we're changing up the way we're doing announcements for January. We may bounce back in February to something different, but just to kind of give you a heads up for a few things, if you haven't gotten one of these yet, there's a one-page document that was on the seats last week and probably back at these tables now, probably a few more in here.
It's just got some dates for you to remember so you can put that somewhere and remember those things. One thing that's not on here, but it is on the Church Center app. And by the way, if you don't have the Church Center app, you want to get that because it tells you everything all the time.
But if you go to Church Center and go to sign up and you scroll down a little bit, there's an opportunity to sign up for water baptisms on Sunday, January 26th. If you've accepted Jesus Christ but you haven't been baptized, that's your opportunity. It's a day of celebration. We'll have a great time. And it's just amazing. It's a first act of obedience, I believe, as a child of God that we should make, amen?
So if you haven't done that, feel free to go online and register. If you don't know how to do that, come talk to one of us, and we'll help you, amen?
You know, I think I can say amen 15 times, and somebody will still not respond. Funny story. So I've started trying to keep a mint in my mouth when I preach because for some reason my mouth gets really dry in the mornings, and I think it's the devil.
But years ago, when I first started in ministry, I had a sore throat, and a lady who sat right on the front row right here where the Montoyas were, she said, "Hey, I got a cough drop for you." And she gave me a Fisherman's Friend.
You ever had a Fisherman's Friend? I'll tell you, as the saying goes, with friends like that, you don't need enemies. It was the strongest cough drop I ever had in my life. And so I asked Josh to find me a mint, and he came out with three different cough drops, and I'm a little scared right now. I'm having a little PTSD.
What do I want to do? We'll go blue. Thursday starts 21 days of fasting. What we do by that, we don't talk about it a lot in the sanctuary every year, but for our discipleship groups, our men and women of valor, every year we take 21 days of some kind of fasting. It may be a Daniel fast. It could be a total fast. It could be a progressive fast. We let them choose what that is, okay?
But some kind of fasting takes place starting this coming Thursday. So I want to encourage you, give you an opportunity. If you've never done fasting, do some study on it. Man, it'll change your life. Maybe there's a certain thing in your life that you're trying to break through on spiritually. Fast about it, okay? It's a great way to get there.
There are books out there, there are lessons on it, different things. But I want to encourage you. I'll be doing a fast with them and just encourage you about that. We'll talk more about it Wednesday night too in our group over here. But that starts Thursday, the 21 days of fast for men and women of valor and anybody else who wants to participate.
Coming up also, Marriage Matters, our marriage conference. It's a marriage intensive one-day event. It's going to be phenomenal, ending with a dinner and a dance, DJ'd by DJ P-Ron. Always fun.
So be sure to go online. Again, Church Center. You can register for that even now, and that'll help us out. By the way, that's free of charge.
And I've never pointed it out this way, but you can learn a lot in one day at a marriage conference. It's going to be a lot of fun. And if you've ever paid for counseling and therapy, you know there's a value and a cost to that.
And by the way, we support that 100%. But it'd be a good deal if you just show up. It might help you out. And it'll be a lot of fun. There will be a lot of prizes given away too. Fun stuff.
Rough Cup Men's Conference is coming up this year also. So be looking for that in March. And I just want to say thank you for your faithfulness in giving. We like to tell people we don't take up offers. We're all friends here. It's something that God just kind of laid on our heart years ago.
I just feel like there's a lot of people who think the church just wants their money. So we've kind of taken that out of our service. But if you want to give or feel led to give, there's black boxes in the back around here. You can drop something in there. Or the Plenty Center app has a link you can give. There's a QR code above those boxes you can scan. Just about any way you want to, you can give.
And I pray that you will. I thank everybody who does for their faithfulness. I believe that God is taking care of you because you are being faithful. Amen? Awesome.
These two of our series, "Have You Not Heard?" I'm excited about this. Just real quick, I'm going to hit the ground running because I've got some deep information today. But I think it will change our lives. It's going to set a lot of people free.
As I said last week, listen, everyone is going to be challenged by this series. I don't care how long you've served the Lord; you're going to be challenged by this series because none of us are perfect. None of us have ever achieved perfection. We're still striving.
And you know what? That's okay. It's the people who think they're perfect who worry me. Nobody else? Okay.
This series will challenge us. It will make us really process and stuff. And so to recap real quick from last week, the main take-home principle that I wanted you to get, and this is an overarching theme for every sermon in this series, and that is this: that the first, primary, and last resource for righteous living is God's word, read in context, and unadulterated by any rationality.
I'm not going to break it down completely like I did last week, but just real quick in case you weren't here and you haven't had a chance to go online and look at it yet, it's the first. That means before you do anything else, before you ask anyone else, before you consult any other source, you go to God's word for any problem you have.
Okay? I said last week I believe that there's an answer in God's word either directly or indirectly for every situation you're dealing with. All right? So go there first.
Secondly, I think God gave man wisdom. I think every bit of intelligence we have, He gave to us on purpose. And I love it. I admire it. I made all of it, how He has allowed us to do some of the things. I love doctors. I love scientists. I love all of it. I have no problem with consulting any other resource to add to what God did.
But then you have to come back, and the final, whatever you learn out in the world, you have to come back and make sure it still lines up with God's word. Because if it doesn't, it's wrong. I don't care how good it sounds, it's wrong. I don't care how much you love your grandma who told it to you. If it doesn't line up with God's word, it's wrong. Amen? Awesome.
So that was last week. And for the next three weeks, we're gonna be hitting some very familiar passages to some. Many of you probably just skimmed over these passages, but there's a phrase that we're gonna read over and over again. Jesus said it.
And the phrase is the title of the sermon series, that is, "Have you not read?" Have you not read? In these passages, we will see in every one of them that Jesus is challenging people.
Now I want you to catch this. He's challenging people who are challenging Him. Side note, it's never a good idea to challenge Jesus. Ask Him anything you want to. He'll help you. He's a great God. He doesn't knock you around for asking questions.
But these words, religious leaders would often challenge Jesus, trying to trip Him up and trying to find Him wrong so that they can get Him out of their system and stop His influence, right? So He is confronting them, and He confronts them with God's word.
Now, what we will see is that He will typically answer the question anyways, what they're trying to figure out. But in doing so, He will also demonstrate some other truth or lesson about the nature of God and about Jesus' son.
And that we need to do something about that. We need to know and apply it to our lives now. So we're going to look at it in context, but then we're also going to take and look at what He's teaching them and see how it applies to us now too. Is that cool? Are y'all ready? Can I just go?
The first text of these three is found in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter number 12. I'm reading from the New King James Version this morning, starting with verse one. It says this:
At that time, Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples were hungry and began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. And when the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, "Look, Your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath."
But He said to them, "Have you not read what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him, how he entered the house of God and ate the showbread, which was not lawful for him to eat, nor for those who were with him, but only for the priests?
Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath, the priests in the temple profaned the Sabbath and are blameless? Yet I say to you that in this place, there is one greater than the temple.
But if you had known what this means, 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless. For the Son of Man is Lord, even of the Sabbath."
So basically, to summarize, Jesus and His disciples are walking along. It is the Sabbath. They are hungry, and they're walking through a wheat field, and they pull off little grains of wheat and start to eat. That is considered work because they're harvesting, right?
I mean, talk about picking at things, and they're eating a little bit of really soft granola. That's all I can compare it to, okay? And they're getting in trouble for it. And these people are accusing them. Jesus goes on. He says, "Hey, they were guiltless. And if you understood that, you would not have even accused them."
But let's break a few things down as we unpack this. First, there are two different times in this passage where we can see Jesus challenging them. Okay, these are the Pharisees, by the way. They were religious leaders or at the least they were the leaders of one of the largest religious movements at the time in the Hebrew people, okay?
But He challenged them with the statement, "Have you not read?" It's interesting to me how other translations and paraphrases of the scripture for this same passage yield some different things. Some say, "Have you not read?" Some say, "Have you not even read?" Others say, "Have you read?" And then that's followed by, "Haven't you read?" And the last one says, "Didn't you ever read?"
I just say that because no matter how you interpret it and no matter how you slice it, Jesus is calling them out. He's basically challenging their effort of study because they're like, "Haven't you?" He's challenging their knowledge of the scripture, and in essence, because of religious leaders, by doing those things, He's challenging their qualification and their authority.
And that's a lot in one passage, one little sentence: "Have you not read?" But He's challenging them, and that's a pretty in-your-face kind of love, by the way. Side note: Jesus has never been mean, but He is almost always blunt, okay? He just gets right to the point.
And I say that this is not a part of my sermon, but I just felt like I need to throw it in. So maybe this is for you, and if it is, let me just encourage you. If you are easily offended, you're very possibly going to miss opportunities to grow and to succeed through His correction.
The Bible says that God corrects His children that He loves, right? And if we can't take bluntness and we can't take the accusation when we're doing wrong, we're probably gonna miss opportunities to grow.
So Jesus is giving these religious leaders some opportunity to grow right here because what He's saying to them is truth: "Haven't you read?"
So we see in verse 3 and verse 5 as Jesus is calling them out, He's challenging their effort of study. But He's challenging their... the Bible we saw in chapter 7. I'm going to use this scripture that they should have known, right?
And then in verse 7, just in case you miss it, He challenges them again with another scripture that they should have known, saying that, and I'm gonna read this again, this is verse 7: "But if you had known what this means, 'I desire mercy and not sacrifice,' you would not have condemned the guiltless."
If you had known what this means, and then He quoted a scripture. So this is something I've wondered about, and we got to teach a little bit here. I love preaching because I love having fun. I love telling jokes. I love pulling people in, but sometimes we got to be educated, okay?
And I was never educated on this as I was growing up, so I want to make sure everybody is educated. And if you already know that, praise God, we're awesome. We're so you're awesome. We're glad you're here.
But for those who don't know this, let me tell you, there was scripture around when Jesus was there, okay? Before Jesus was ever born, years before Jesus was ever born, the Hebrew people had scripture, and it was compiled into something they would call the Tanakh.
Tanakh, okay? And the Hebrews, in Jesus' time, had access to it. What they would do, and I have a visual, if you can put that up here, they could go to the synagogues, and both they could read it or it would be read to them.
And it was usually in the form of scrolls, but they had this whole system together. And what it was, in our Bible, we would look at it as most of the Old Testament, right? We've got the, what we call the Torah, which is the teaching or the law of Moses laid out: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
Then the Nevi'im, which is, that's my Oklahoma pronunciation, Nevi'im. Prove me wrong. And that's the writings of the prophets, the 12, the major up top, and then the minors at the bottom, all the prophets are there that we read in the Old Testament.
And then the Ketuvim, again, who knows? But that's my guess. And those are the other writings, the teachings, the poetry, the different things that we see in the Old Testament: Psalms, Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, Ruth, all of that is in there.
And that was available to them. And not only was it available to them, they would have studied it. And for these people to be Pharisees, for them to be religious leaders, that's something they should have known, right?
So that's where that all came from. And so when Jesus was talking about it, He was addressing them directly. There were typically teaching on that every day in the synagogue, so they should have known it, but they obviously had not learned the message or at least had not learned the lesson that they were meant to learn.
And so Jesus had to teach them. The writings here that Jesus was referring to are found in 1 Samuel and Hosea and Micah. And I'm going to read them to you, just the verses. I'm not giving you the background. Feel free to go and read them on your own, but just for the sake of the sermon, I'm giving you these verses that Jesus referred to.
1 Samuel chapter 15, verse 22 says, "So Samuel said, 'Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice and to heed than the fat of rams.'"
Second reference he made, going quickly, Hosea 6 and 6: "For I desire mercy and not sacrifice and the knowledge of God more than burnt offerings."
And then Micah 6:6-8, I'm going to read all these: "With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before the high God? Shall I come before Him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has shown you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?"
Okay, now I told you all that, gave you all that background because I want you to see what I'm talking about here. I want you to see, in essence, in this lesson that Jesus is teaching, Jesus is trying to teach His accusers the lesson that He still desires for us to learn today.
And this is take-home principle number one: Christianity is not about rule following; it's about righteous living. Okay? Christianity is not about rule following; it's about righteous living.
Going deeper, and I'll leave that up there for a second, I probably could have said Christianity is not about rule following; it's about righteous living. I'm going to go back and read that for a second. It is about belief in and relationship with and a desire to be like Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
But for simplicity, and because we teach salvation here at Harvest Fellowship, every Sunday we'll give you an opportunity to know the Lord if you don't know Him, okay? But for some simplicity, it's about righteous living. It's about seeking God and trying to be more like His Son, Jesus.
That's the simplicity of it. And I have to say that because many times we think of Christianity, and the world thinks of Christianity, as some kind of people who just follow rules. You got to do this all the time, you got to do this, you got to go here, then you got to do this, and it's all about the ritual, about the repetition.
And that's not what Christianity is about. It's about knowing Jesus. It's not about how many times you go to church a year. You are not more saved if you make it all 52 weeks. Is that 52? Good job. You're not more saved to make it all 52 weeks. If you want to make 40 weeks, you're kind of safe. No, it's not like that, okay?
We should tithe. Yeah, you absolutely should tithe. But it's not a matter of religiosity if you tithe this way. You know, you can do the right thing in the wrong heart, and it be for the wrong reason, and it's no longer right, right?
Going through these motions just because it's what you're supposed to do kind of negates the blessing of doing them. It's about relationship. It's about righteous living. It's about seeking Jesus.
Righteous living, in my opinion, is summed up well in the verse that we just read from Micah 6 and 8. And we're gonna refer to this a few times. He has shown you, O man, what is good, and what does the Lord require but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.
To do, or I like to say in some translations, let's just say to live justly, do or live justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly. That's what righteousness is.
Now, going back to this practical conversation Jesus is having in the passage in Matthew, Jesus uses the challenge to teach, or maybe better said, to reemphasize a truth that these spiritual leaders should have already known.
This is take-home principle number two or three. I don't know where I'm at. But God's word is intended to help man, not to hold man captive.
And I gotta explain this again because the devil wants to convince people that being a Christian, that loving the Lord, that trying to live your life according to God's word is somehow a negative thing. It's gonna keep you from having fun. It's gonna keep you from enjoying this life you get to live. It's constraining. No, it's not.
It's not. God's word is there for our benefit. God's word is there to help us. He gives us instructions. And even the law of Moses itself was left for us, or left for them at that time, to help, not to hold them captive, but to keep them from harm.
Where there are issues of sin that were addressed directly, absolutely there were. And there still are in our lives. But not everything in the law was about sin. Some of it was a matter of hygiene and health.
Some of the laws of Moses were there to keep them healthy, not just holy. It was there to keep them physically alive. That's a good thing. Some of them were there for a matter of protection from outside influence or physical harm.
There's lots of things that were in the law that were for the Hebrew people, the children of Israel, that weren't necessarily sin-related. They weren't there to hold them captive. Those laws were there to help them, and God's word is for us to help us.
The instructions of Jesus, the life we're supposed to live, it is laid out for us to help us, not to hinder us. I have shared time and time again, and most people will agree with this, that many times the problems we face in life are problems of our own creation, and we're dealing with them because we chose to do something that was contrary to God's word.
And I want to be clear, I'm not saying that if you live according to God's word, you'll never have a problem because, as I've said many times and as the Bible says, you will have problems. We are living in a messed-up, jacked-up world, full of sorrow, full of pain, full of sickness and disease.
It was not the intention; it happened as a result of sin that entered the world through the fall of man, right? So there are going to be issues we'll have to deal with. But if we have Jesus, He'll help us deal with them. And if we follow His teachings, our life is going to be so much better, and we'll avoid so many pitfalls and so many traps.
Why? Because God's word is there to help us. That's why He said that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. What we're saying is we need to rest. These physical bodies need rest. They need a time to unplug and to decompress and to breathe.
That's why you weren't supposed to work on the Sabbath. That's why you weren't supposed to travel more than what they called a Sabbath day's journey. They even had the number of steps you could take. They were religious about it. Why do they do it? It was for their betterment.
That makes sense? God is not out there with this rule book trying to slap you and keep you from having fun, and every time you mess up, hit you on the side of the face with it. That's not who He is.
Instead, He gave you an instruction manual for life, and if we follow it, we're going to have a better life. It's not rocket science; it's simplicity. God's word is intended to help man, not to hold them captive.
Obedience is better than sacrifice. Now, what do we mean by that? Let me explain it. Jumping back in a second, obedience is better than sacrifice. We don't sacrifice today like we used to, right? Back in the day, the time of Moses, let's talk about the law that Moses laid out.
If you broke one of the laws, if you messed up, you would have to make some kind of sacrifice. There were different sacrifices for different issues. There was a sin sacrifice; there was a sacrifice for all these different things. You would have to bring a certain sacrifice as an offering to the Lord for your harvest.
There's all this stuff laid out, usually involving the killing of some kind of animal, not always, but many times. And there's a long study we've talked about. It's caused the blood; there can be no remission of sins without shedding the blood. That's how that all flowed into there.
But today we don't do that, so what does sacrifice look like today? Well, many times we find ourselves living in a way that's not pleasing to the Lord, or we find ourselves doing something that we shouldn't do, whether it's to another individual or whether it's a lack of something we should have done with the Lord, and we start to feel guilty.
Okay? Now, I would say that's conviction. Anytime you feel this little tug that says, "Hey, stop doing that. Hey, you shouldn't be doing that," that is the Holy Spirit getting your attention, right? And convicting you, trying to get you back where you're supposed to be.
Any of you have one of those cars that has that little lane correction thing? And you're driving, and you start to lean over, and the steering wheel starts going? That's conviction. You ever think about that?
Now, I wasn't going to say this, but we have one of those cars that's got this thing called blue cruise on it, and blue cruise is awesome. In the big cities where all the stripes are very defined, it's really cool because you can stretch for a second. You can just trust the car and sit back, and you know, eventually say, "Hey, hold on to the steering wheel."
Okay, they'll say, "Hey, look at the road." Oh yeah, you know, you have to pay attention, and ours will make noises if you don't. But in the rural areas that we live in, when you got blue cruise on, you can be driving along, and all of a sudden there's a turn lane to go over here, and the white line disappears, or it's very prominently doing, and the vehicle just all of a sudden...
That's condemnation, right? Because it wasn't that friendly nudge getting you back in line; it's something pulling you to destruction, right? Trying to make you... it's for somebody.
So what does sacrifice look like? Now we find that we're doing something wrong, and we will come up with this idea, "I'm going to make it up to you." We offended our friends. I'll make it up to you. We offended our spouse. We treated them in a way we shouldn't have treated them.
"I'm going to make it up to you. I'm going to make it up to you." And sometimes we say that, whether we say it literally to God or not, we have that attitude: "I'm going to make it up to you, God. I messed up, but I'm going to make it up to you."
He doesn't need you to make it up to Him. He doesn't want you to make it up to Him. We'll get more on that, but that's what it could look like. What could sacrifice look like? It could be neglect followed up by aggressive commitment.
If I'm calling you out today, please know it's not on purpose. I had nobody in thought when I say this, but these are just things that the Holy Spirit gave me. There are some people who may find themselves for a season, could have started accidentally with no purpose whatsoever or with no evil intent, but something happened, life happened, and they found themselves stopped going to church.
And all of us have probably been there at one time or another, right? And then they start to feel a little conviction about it, but then, you know, they wrestle, and their result is instead of just saying, "Oh, you're right, God, I need to fix this," they can overly aggressively commit.
You know, we're here every Sunday, every small group, every Wednesday night lesson, every men of valor, every... you know, I love that as a pastor if it's from your heart, but if it's just an act of sacrifice trying to make up for what you missed, you're missing it.
That's not what He wants from you. I'm, please don't throw things at me. Tithing. Harvest Fellowship, we teach it like this: we give grace.
Somebody taught me years ago that it's funny in the Christian church, we give grace for everything but in giving. We give grace here in giving too, all right? And this is what we tell people: should you tithe? Absolutely. What is a tithe? It's 10% of your increase. That's what the word says, right?
But what I challenge people is trust God. Try Him. Let Him reveal Himself faithful to you. If you're not giving anything, just start giving something. And I can tell you this testimony in my own life, what I have seen happen.
When I gave nothing, and then I started giving $5 a week, I started seeing a blessing from that because it was the process of growth. If you give something, but you don't give consistently, maybe your next step is, it's like a step up a ladder. You start giving consistently.
Every week, you're giving something. And man, God will bless you for that. And then at some point, as you're continuing to grow, and you're going to see God's faithfulness, and by the way, you don't have to go through a step. You can start at the top.
But I'm just saying, if you struggle in this area, if you're giving consistently but you're not fully tithing, then try what happens when you fully tithe. Give a full 10% of the increase in your life.
And I can tell you, and everybody has said it, who knows this to be true, there are people in this room who can testify 100% that this is accurate, is that you can do a lot more with 90%. You can do a lot more with 90%. You can do a lot more with 90% that is blessed than with 100% that is cursed.
Okay? Promise you. I promise you. And then you don't have to stop there. By the way, there's not a cap. You can give more than 10% if you want to.
And I, you know, there's fewer amens on that than there was on the other stuff. But let me just say a couple of things. Firstly, Angela and I, for years, this is not a statement, but we practice what we preach.
Since we started the 12th Stone's journey and all that we've been doing with the building and God laid on our heart, we give, I started to say tithe, can't really tithe more than 10% because 10% is a tithe, right? But we faithfully give 13%.
It's just the number God laid on our heart. And there are times when we give above that. And there are many people in this room who I know, and I'm not going to call out, who give well above that.
And I can tell you a truth that I have seen time and time again. You can read anybody, any writer or author or expert in the world of finance, and they'll confirm this to be true, both from a secular perspective and from a Christian perspective, that generous people are usually wealthy people.
And looking the other way, some of the wealthiest people you know are also some of the most generous people you will ever meet. Now, that may not mean that they give money where you think they should give money. Wouldn't that be great? Yes, it would be great. But it's not.
You know, that's between them and God. They're going to pray about it. They're going to sow seeds where God tells them to, and He's going to bless them and honor them for their faithfulness. I've seen it happen time and time again.
So I say that to say, you know, some people may realize and feel convicted. And if you're feeling convicted right now because you haven't been tithing, don't do this, okay?
They may say, "Okay, I'm going to make up for it. I'm going to be sacrificial, and I'm going to give a huge offering this morning to compensate for all the times I haven't been giving." Praise God. If you want to give a huge offering, do it. We will put it to work in the kingdom, but it needs to come from your heart and not from some kind of sacrificial attitude that I have to make things up.
That's not how things work with the Lord. That's not how things work. I love the concept and the illustration about sin, how in our lives we can allow sin to come in and to creep into our lives, and before we know it, we seem like we're far away from God.
But the truth is, and the truth is, we may seem or feel like we are from God. We're just a whisper away, just a simple call out to the Lord, and He's right there with us. You don't have to earn your place back in His family. Amen?
Because He loves you. He wants you to give faithfully, but He wants you to be a cheerful giver. Today, even though we don't have all these sacrifices, these are ways that we give, okay?
But the thing is, we forget at times as we're trying to atone for our mistakes that, number one, only Jesus can pay for our sins. And He already paid for them. And He did it with His blood from a life, a sinless life that was lived, born of a virgin birth, facing all the temptations that we all face, yet not sinning.
He paid the cost for you and for me. He's an awesome Lord. And we forget that sometimes. And then the other thing we forget is that grand gestures don't make up for the disobedience.
If Angela and I, Angela tried to teach me something years ago. I learned part of the lesson. I don't think I learned the whole lesson. But she taught me that when I made a mistake in our relationship, she didn't want me to bring her flowers.
First of all, it was a waste of money because they're going to die. That may be me and not her. I'm not sure. But the reality was, it was just me trying to get myself out of trouble.
And it doesn't matter how many bouquets of roses I would bring; that wasn't going to make up for the indiscretion that I committed, right? And by the way, how shallow of a people would we be if someone could slap us in the face and give us a $5 bill, and we're okay?
I mean, unless, you know, it's like your livelihood and you're Mike Tyson, and you got beat up on national television for $20 million. Okay, it's a different conversation.
Doesn't work that way. And listen to this, and I don't know if I put this up there. I don't think I did. So listen closely. God would much rather have our obedience than our grand sacrificial gestures.
Okay? I said last week that there's a hidden subtitle of this sermon series. And because of the tone that Jesus takes with the people He's talking to, and because of how it should apply to our lives, because this isn't necessarily a spiritual battle. Everything's a spiritual battle. Absolutely.
And God will give you the strength that you need to make the right choices. But at some point, you have to choose to make the right choices. He will not live your life for you. He will not force you to be holy.
He'll give you every out you need to avoid temptation, and He will put people in your life who will help you to walk the righteous lifestyle. But you have to decide whether you're going to do it or not.
And so I said there's an underlying subtitle of the series, hashtag do better. Because we know what to do nine times out of ten; we just don't do it. Do better. It's not make this up to me, okay? Just go do better. I love you. I forgive you. Go do better.
That's the heart of our Lord. If there's some area in your life in which you feel convicted, some area in which you have fallen short, should you repent? Of course you should. And by the way, repentance isn't always a salvation issue.
Anytime we allow the world to get in our way in our relationship with Jesus Christ, we need to repent over that and ask God's forgiveness and restore that, right? But the forward motion, the next step in our journey isn't great sacrifice; it's simple obedience.
Live justly, love mercy, walk humbly. It's all you got to do. Live justly. Do justice. Just do what's right. Love mercy. Forgive people. Don't beat them up when they mess up.
First of all, remember, you're not doing what you just messed up to. But that's not what God would have us to do. Love mercy. Love forgiving people. Love helping people get back on the right track.
Love helping to restore people in their walk with the Lord. Love helping people overcome instead of beating them up and pushing them down when they make mistakes.
By the way, if you're here today, let me just tell you, if you've got some mistakes in your life and you've messed up, and maybe you messed up last night, I saw some posts that were going around. Ashley made a post and a few others, and I loved it about the fact that this is where you belong.
And we love you, and we're not going to beat you up. We're going to help you to grow and walk you through it because God loves you so much that He sent His Son to pay the price for those sins. Amen?
Live justly, love mercy, walk humbly. There's nothing more. And as I've said so many times before, God is less concerned about the mistakes of your past than He is about the choices of your future.
Pastor, does the Bible say that? Yeah, it kind of does. 2 Corinthians 5:17: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. Old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new."
Pretty simple. Jesus' forgiveness is encompassing. The old is gone. The new has come. And the devil's a punk, and he tries to hold us.
There are people who have been forgiven for stuff for years that Jesus forgave at the moment that they repented, but they still feel condemned about it in their life every day. They still feel like they're trying to get over it.
They're still trying to overcome it. It may be the acoustic guitar. Mute that if you haven't got it muted. They're still trying to overcome it. They're still trying to figure out how they can make up for what they did.
And they forget. Jesus already did it. He already made up for what they did. He already paid the price for it. And instead of going on and releasing that past and changing the world for Jesus, they're stuck in it.
We had a little joke this last week. I have no permission to tell this story. What did I do? I'll say it anyways. We had this little joke last week going around about some people who were being condemned for something in their past, right?
And thankfully, there were righteous people who loved the Lord, who lived justly, who loved mercy, and walked humbly. And they just made a joke about it. "Yeah, I just, going around with a scarlet letter on me." It's whatever.
Because they knew, they knew that they weren't tied to their past. They had been forgiven, and they were going forward with the Lord. New creation.
These are my thoughts. I think condemnation and refusal to accept the Lord, to accept forgiveness or to forgive ourselves keeps us focused on past sins.
And also, I feel like I need to say this concerning our testimony. Our past failures and pain, the story of those things don't minister to people. It's our overcoming life, our present peace, and our future hope.
That is the part of our testimony that will give God glory. And that is the part of our testimony that will encourage others.
And that is the part of our testimony. Additionally, and I don't know who this is for, but I had to say it. This came up three times this week in different conversations.
Some people worry, and they feel like that their testimony isn't that great because they've never been addicted to anything, you know, except for maybe soda, right? They never went to jail. They were never arrested. They never had an all-nighter. They never woke up in a bed. They didn't know how they got there.
They never had that story. And so they don't feel like they have a powerful testimony. And man, that's a lie of the devil.
Because the greatest testimony that we can ever tell is, "I've served the Lord since I was a young person. I've known Him my whole life. And y'all, I messed up, and I made mistakes because I'm human just like everybody else. But I can tell you that every time I made a mistake, I ran to Jesus, and I tried to live my life according to His word. And because of that, I've had a pretty amazing life."
Right? Don't mistake me. I love hearing the testimonies. There are people in this room, and they won't mind if I call them out, who did find the Lord in prison. Praise God. I'm glad they did. And it's an amazing testimony.
But can I tell you something? On the same level and possibly even more amazing is when I watch one of these young people who start at Harvest Fellowship when they're this big, and they learn about the Lord, and they go all the way through high school still loving the Lord, and they go to college still loving the Lord and serving the Lord.
And someday they're gonna become adults who are gonna teach others how to love the Lord and serve the Lord, right? And they're even doing that now, and they did that while they were in high school. They're putting God first in their life.
That's the testimony that gets me excited. And listen, it's not a negative. Yeah, we give the Lord praise for it. It's not a negative thing about those other things. I praise God that people have been delivered from addiction.
I praise God that people have been set free from all these different kinds of captivity that the devil would like to hold us in. I praise God for every person who has ever found Jesus in a prison cell or in some kind of prison chapel. I praise God for that.
But I also praise God that I can stand here as a product of a Christian family and tell you I've never been drunk. I don't have a reference point.
I might've been high one time because I took a pill for a headache that I probably shouldn't have taken. But I just, somebody said, but I don't even know if I was high. I just knew I had a headache still. I was just happy I had it.
I don't know what it's like. I've never been to jail. I've never been arrested. I don't know what it's like to have any kind of drug going through my vein. Now, be careful. I'm not saying I'm perfect. I've messed up a lot in my life. Made a lot of mistakes.
Went through a lot of hardship. And the new has come. Have you not read? Have you not read what Jesus did for you?
Have you, have you not read how much He loves you? And if you're sitting here and you feel unworthy to be a child of God, let me tell you something. It's something you never get qualified for.
You can never be good enough to deserve Jesus. You can never live a holy enough life to deserve Jesus. It's only because He loves you. It's only because He chose to give Himself for us that we can have salvation.
Have you not read that Jesus loved us so much that He chose to walk away from His deity with the Lord and His place with the Father to come and be born and live a human life, being fully God and fully man?
Have you not heard that He loved you so much that He lived a sinless life? And even though He lived a sinless life, He still willingly surrendered Himself to be abused, to be mocked, to be ridiculed, to be beaten, and to be nailed to a cross to pay for crimes He didn't commit?
Have you not heard that when He did that and He died and He surrendered, the Bible says, "gave up the ghost," when He surrendered His life to the pain and the natural body He was in, He surrendered that and He died, that He didn't stay dead?
But that God loved you so much that He rose Him from the dead? Have you not heard that all that happened for you? For you. And for me. For us, yes. But for a second, get your mind off the us and get it on the man.
He did it for me. He did it for you. So that you could know Him. So that you could be set free from your sin. So that you can have an optimistic life and a future to look forward to.
So that you wouldn't be held captive by disease or by addiction or by sin of any kind. So that you could be free to serve the Lord. So that you can walk in confidence knowing that when you take your last breath here on this earth that we dwell in, you can open up your eyes in eternity with the Lord.
That the end is not the end. Have you not read? And if you have, man, if you haven't made that decision, do it today. It's not about perfection. Yes, we should strive for it, but you'll never reach it. But that's okay.
Because Jesus paid the price. If you mess up, pray about it. Surrender to God. Repent. Go for it. If you messed up last week, don't do it this week. Go for it.
If this is the first time you've been in church in three years, praise God. Thanks for coming. Let's go forward. Amen.
Why don't you bow your heads with me? What does He require of us with this life? Just to love? To do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly.
If you're here, you say, "Pastor Ronnie, I need Jesus." I don't care if this is your first time to ever be in a church, or if you've been attending Harvest Fellowship for the past 18 years. I don't care.
If you're here, you say, "Pastor Ronnie, I need Jesus. I need Him to forgive me of my sins. I need Him to be my Savior. I want that assurance of eternal life that you're talking about."
I'm going to pray. I'm going to lead us all in a prayer in just a second, and I want you to say that prayer with me. Say it from your heart. Say it from your heart. And you can leave confident and whole, knowing that you've been saved.
If you're in this room, and you've been saved, and you've lived for the Lord, but you've just allowed some of the things, the shiny things, the flashy things, the loud things in our society to get in the way of you and Jesus, say this prayer with us.
Make it a prayer of rededication in your life, that you don't want anything to separate you from Him. And when we leave, we're going to leave this place. We're going to step out in a new direction to serve Him.
If you would, everyone say this prayer with me:
"Heavenly Father, thank You for loving me and for sending Your Son to pay the price for my sin and the sins of this world. I ask You now to forgive me of those sins.
Jesus, I know You are the Son of God. I know that God rose You from the dead. I know that You love me, and I'm so grateful that You died for me. I know You didn't have to, but I'm glad You did.
I ask You now, be my Lord, be my Savior, and help me, because I want to live for You the rest of my life. It's in Your name I pray. Amen."
Lord, a hand clap of praise. Thank You, Jesus. Thank You, Jesus, for salvation. Thank You for forgiveness. Thank You for Your love.
We're going to close out in worship. And listen, I'll dismiss this formally in just a few minutes. If you need to go, you can go now. Nobody's going to be mad at you. But we're just going to worship a little bit.
And I just want to encourage you, release the sins, release the shortcomings, release anything that may have been holding you back. And just worship God. Amen. Stand with us.
So this is what we're going to do. I'm going to pray a prayer of dismissal over everyone. Thank you for worshiping with us. Don't miss Wednesday nights. Wednesday nights are amazing. They'll change your life.
And I just pray that you walk out of here confident and closer to God than you came in. I pray you leave this place fired up and ready to help other people, ready to teach them what you know, and to show them the love of God everywhere you go. Amen.
I pray you make that same decision tomorrow and the day after. And if by chance something happens and you drop the ball, I pray you just pick the ball back up, repent, and go on again, okay?
He's worthy. He's worthy of our praise, and He's worthy of our righteous life. So let's live it for Him, amen?
Father God, go with us as we leave this place. God, direct us in all that we do. Help us to be Your hand and Your feet extended. God, be with those today that are going through difficulties, those today that are suffering from illness.
I pray Your healing virtue will flow through their bodies. God, those that need some kind of financial miracle, God, reveal Yourself. Show Yourself to be faithful in their lives.
God, for those that are suffering loss and going through some kind of loss, Lord, I pray You would help them. Give them the peace that only You can give, the comfort that only You can give, and help them to journey through this holding Your hand.
As we leave this place today, we leave here giving You glory because You're an awesome God. And all God's people say amen. Be blessed. We love you guys.
on Jan 12, 2025
