What does it mean to be free
What does it mean to be free?
Intro: Last week baptism-people making a public profession of their faith in Christ...saying that they are committed to a new life with Jesus…
Today…look into what it means to live out that new life in Christ.
Begin with continuing to follow the history of the Israelites as they followed God through the desert to the land He promised them.
Exodus 19-3 months after leaving Egpyt. The Israelites arrive at Mount Sinai. 19:4-5 “You yourselves have seen what I did in Egypt, and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant (agreement), then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession.
Here is what I means to be my people. If you will do these things, you be my treasured people…blessed beyond all others.
God descended upon the mountain top and Moses went up. Came back with what we now call the 10 commandments.
Exodus 20:1-17.-Read through them
This is God’s standard for how His people should live. Think about it…this is the way God intended people to live. This is how he designed us. Just as a machine operates best when it runs as it is designed, it is best for us to live as God intended us to live.
Most people will look at these commands and recognize them as good things. Built into us. That is a certain moral code we all understand as what we should do if we are good people. Those things line up with these 10 commandments.
Most people want to be “good”, so it’s important for us to do our best to follow these commands. This is where things get a little messed up, though.
Let me just take a moment to set up a demonstration of what I mean by that.
Call kids up. Show rubik’s cube. Ask if know what it is. Talk about history of it a bit. EVERYONE had one. They are tricky, though. You work play around with it, and sometimes feel like you are getting somewhere with it…maybe even complete one side, but then the rest of it is still messed up. When you try to get the next side, you mess up the first…just get trapped in a bigger mess! That’s kind of what our lives are like. Our lives are like a big puzzle, and we need to do our best to figure out the way to do the right things in order to solve it. It can be tricky, though.
Now when these things were so popular, there would be all kinds of contests to see how fast you could solve it. You’d watch these people pick up their cube, look at it and then twist and turn it as fast as they could and then….done! In fact, there were even contests to see who could do it fastest with a blindfold on! These people knew something the rest of us didn’t. There was a key to solving it. If you knew the keys, you could learn to solve it without even looking. People have written books about the keys to solving the puzzle, so to learn the keys you just need to read the book. That’s what we need to do to learn the keys to figuring out how to live our lives…read God’s book…has the keys to teach us how to live our lives. Want the best life possible, right? Important to understand the keys…so make sure you start learning now to spend time learning about God and the life he wants for you from your Bibles. (Hand out keychains) Go ahead and take these puzzles as a reminder about how we need to learn how to live our lives. See if you can figure it out.
So our lives are sort of like this puzzle...and to have the best life possible, we need to learn and obey the keys the Bible teaches us. Anyone who wants to know how to solve this cube quickly knows that they need to do just as the instructions tell them…whether they understand it or not. They can’t just make up their own solution and call it good enough. Same thing with us. One of the keys the Bible teaches us is that these laws/commands are important. John 14:21-“Whoever has my commands and obeys them, He is the one who loves me.” Not just our actions either. It’s our thoughts and attitudes that matter. Jesus made this clear in Matt 6-“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment, but I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgement.
There’s a problem we run into, though. If we understand these command are good and set out to live our lives in obedience to them, we end up failing every time. At some point, we turn to our own way and disobey God. Have you had times when you just wanted to do things your way…even though you knew it wasn’t right? Had times when you’ve wanted something someone else had…their possessions…their talents…their popularity…greed/jealousy…coveting. WAnting more money…even overeating…gluttony….form of idolatry…putting other things before God and what he wants from us…We can’t seem to escape it.
Just like the Rubik’s cube, you sometimes feel like you are making progress…seem as though you could solve it if you just did what you needed to do….but you end up in a more tangled up mess than before. There’s a reason this happens in our lives. When it comes to our lives and our ability to follow the rules, it’s as though someone has taken the color off one of the cubes and switched it with another one. What would happen if you did that? It would be a lot MORE difficult wouldn’t it? In fact you could NEVER solve it. This is the result of what’s called our “Sin nature”. Adam and Eve…the first man and women introduced sin into the world by their disobedience to God. That introduce a problem into all of God’s creation. It’s not that God created us in a way that causes us to fail….it’s that Satan…through Adam & Eve and the choice they made switched the stickers around. Since the very beginning, no one has ever been able to remain completely obedient to God’s laws…except Jesus.
The apostle Paul explains all these things in detail in the book of Romans ch 6-8..encourage you to read them sometime.
Ch 7:18-20: I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.
If the focus of our lives is to try to do good…we trap ourselves. We keep on doing the things we don’t want to do!
This is really the whole point of the 10 commandments that God gave us. Romans 7:10 “I found that the very commandment that was intended to bring life, actually brought death.” 13b “But in order that sin might be recognized as sin, it (the commandments) produced death in me through what was good, so that through the commandment sin might become utterly sinful”.
If God had never given us commandments, we’d go on doing whatever we wanted with our lives...even if we somehow felt we should be doing something else. But when you have those commands to look at you are suddenly very aware about how often you are failing to live up to them! That’s exactly what God wants us to see. The commandments help us to recognize just how messed up we are! There are probably several colors out of place in the Rubik’s cubes of our lives!
So what are we supposed to do about that? Do we live in guilt for the rest of our lives because we keep disappointing God? Do we make it a comparison contest with everyone around us so we can tell God “At least I was better than him!” Do we just give up and say it’s not worth it. I’m not going to even try.
The result is the same for all of those paths….we remain trapped in our sin, and the penalty for that is death…not just physical death…we all experience that, but eternal death…eternal separation from God!
As I explained to the kids earlier, we need to understand the key to solving this puzzle, and the key for us is made clear in the Word of God. This is the key to this new life in Christ that I started this message talking about.
The key to getting free from this puzzle in our lives is first to acknowledge that we can’t do it alone. We need God to come in and fix us…put all the colors back where they belong. God offers us the solution through Jesus
Jesus first offers us forgiveness for everything we’ve done wrong and will do wrong….When God gave the law he established a system of sacrifices for people to be forgiven when they failed Him…knew it was going to happen. Jesus, however, being God and living a sin-free life as a man, became the perfect sacrifice…he is an ongoing sacrifice to cover all our sins past, present and future…if we will sincerely desire forgiveness and acknowledge his sacrifice for us.
Jesus also provides us the means of learning to live as God wants us to live…to fix and solve the puzzle. It requires us to continually ask Him for help…to allow the Holy Spirit to work in our lives…and change us…putting those colors back where they belong.
(Romans 8-life of the spirit)
Ongoing process throughout our lives of giving spirit more and more control….living according to God’s will.
How do you do it..
…ongoing turning back to back when we find ourselves trying to do things our way again…
…ongoing learning about God and allowing His spirit to change you
…ongoing teaching ourselves to just do what God tells us to do regardless of whether we completely understand it or even want to do it sometimes….
…other examples
-intro song-
Special song
Closing