Zeal for God's House

Awesome. Hey, thank you all so much for being here today. If you are a guest with us or if Sauldam is still new to you, you’re still new to us, I want to say it is great to see you. Really would love to get to know you over the next couple weeks. If you take our invitation to fill out that Connect card, then we would love to take you out to coffee or fajitas, maybe even some ice cream at you old-fashioned. I don’t know, something like that.

So if you are new to us, then what we’re about to do next might be a little odd to you, but we set aside a portion of every Sunday morning service just to pray. We believe and we know that if we try things in our strength and our wisdom, then we can get what man can provide. That could be cool. That could be a fun flash in the pan, but what we need is for God to provide. We need God to work. So we spend a portion of every Sunday morning where we just pray and we ask for God to step into our needs and the needs that we see around us.

All month we are going to pray for the Janie Chapman State Missions Offering and for what that represents. Just say a few words about that. We are a Southern Baptist church and one of the best parts about being Southern Baptist is that we choose to work alongside other Southern Baptist churches for the sake of the gospel so that more churches can be started or restarted, more disciples may be made, more of the darkness of the world may be pushed back as we shine the life of Christ. So we get to work alongside other SBC churches and one of the ways that we do that is through these occasional offerings, such as the Janie Chapman State Missions Offering.

All the receipts that are brought in for the Janie Chapman State Missions Offering go purely to help strengthen and accomplish missions in the state of South Carolina, which if you have driven the roads of Charleston at any time in the past couple years, you recognized we are one of the fastest states in the country. And with that, that means more people are coming in who likely have never heard the name Jesus, at least not in the way that you have. So we want to take this really seriously. That’s right.

One of the things that we’re also praying for in the midst of all this is that as Wes said a second ago, Sauldam has the unique opportunity, not just to support churches generally through the Janie Chapman Fund, but even to support a specific church called Storyline Church. You remember a few months ago, our church Sauldam voted to sponsor a new church that’s starting in Greenville, another SBC church in another pocket of our state. That’s also growing extremely rapidly. And like Wes said, they’re holding interest meetings, getting people together to say, Hey, this is what we are striving to do. These are the types of works and the ministries we are striving to accomplish here. If you want to be part of this church, man, why don’t you join up with us?

If you want to contribute specifically to their cost of doing those things, as you recognize it costs money to do church, then feel free to write that on one of the giving envelopes, or you could check out their information online as well. So without any further ado, let’s just pray. Pray for the sake of missions in the state of South Carolina. Pray for Jake and Rachel Borum and Storyline Church. I’ll put a bow on it here in a second. Y’all take it away. Thank you.

Holy Spirit. Good morning. Book of Revelation says that the prayers of the saints are like incense at the altar of God. God, you are sitting on high right now, smelling the incense of your people praying to you. How cool is that? That the heart and the sound of our prayers be pleasing to you. Like when we come into the home after a long day and we smell the aroma of dinner in the crockpot. Weather turns cool and we step outside and we smell the fire pit running. Go to the beach and you can smell that salt water. All of these are just little whispers, just, just little appetizers of what you’re enjoying right now as we pray to you.

God, thank you for, thank you for finding delight and pleasure in our prayer. We pray to you, God, begging for your provision and for your power. Father, there are so many people In our state that do not have a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ. Please change that. God, please use these Janie Chapman offering dollars to take the gospel into more homes, more schools, more offices, more ball fields, more hunt clubs, more restaurants, more neighborhoods, God.

God, I pray specifically for Jake and Rachel, for them as they are looking to start Storyline Church up in Greenville. God, as they’re having these interest meetings, would you please bring the right types of people to join them? God, not so that they can build this really cool, perfect church, but so that the kingdom of God would find more of a foothold in Greenville. Please, God, Jake and Rachel, they don’t think that they are saviors of any sort. They don’t think that they’re anything special. They just believe that you’ve asked them to start a new church and they’re trying to follow you. Please help them.

Please help us this morning. I need your help to preach. I can’t do this in my own ability and strength. I need you to speak. And God, for this congregation, we can’t listen to a sermon well enough in our own ability either. We need your help to open us up, to illuminate this for us, to pry open our hearts so that your word may be planted in it, please.

God, for anybody that’s in the room this morning who doesn’t yet have a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ, for anybody that has come in and, man, they’re feeling the darkness of sin on them. For anybody that’s come in and they are trusting in their good works to make them good before a holy God, for anybody that’s come in and they hear those dark voices in their mind and their souls and they can’t tune them out, would you just give them a few minutes of peace and respite? And would you rescue somebody today, please? Would you save somebody today, please? Speak, Lord. We are listening. Amen.

Well, if you have your copy of the Bible, go ahead and open up to John chapter 2. John chapter 2. We’re going to continue our series called “Savior of the Broken” as we are simply just walking through the Gospel of John verse by verse, letting the text kind of speak for itself. So John chapter 2. If you are still learning how your Bible works, you just split it right in half. You’ll probably land in Psalms. I want you to turn right. You’re going to end up at the end of the Old Testament. You’ll know you’re there because the names sound funny. And then you’re going to get to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and the fourth John. That’s the fourth book of the New Testament if you want to get to it that way. John chapter 2. I’ll be reading from verses 13 through 25.

Oftentimes we like to think about Jesus in purely warm, sweet ways. We think about Jesus and the “Let the little children come to me, Jesus.” We like to think about Him as feeding the 5,000 with the lunchable Jesus. We like to think about Him as the “Judge not Jesus.”

I remember when I was in high school, this is my early Christian days when I did not yet to have any sort of discernment about the types of movies I would watch. And I’m even a little nervous mentioning this to you guys. I watched this movie called Talladega Nights. So others have watched this. Okay. All right. At least I’m not the only one in the room. Okay. It’s this parody about NASCAR is what really what it is. And they’re having Thanksgiving dinner. There’s KFC, there’s I think Pizza Hut, there’s Taco Bell. And one of them, okay, I’m getting some smirks, starts to open up and they want to pray a blessing over the meal. I will not read the blessing for you. It’s been satirized and all that. But in that blessing, the guy that’s praying says, sweet, dear baby Jesus. That’s how he keeps addressing him. And one of the other characters says, you know, he grew up, right? Like he wasn’t always just sweet, dear baby Jesus.

Man, oftentimes we come to church or we live our Christian lives. And that’s how we think about him. Sweet, dear baby Jesus. The passage this morning, we’re going to get the sassier side of our savior. We’re going to get the feistier part of who Christ was. You see, Christ, not just this sweet, dear baby Jesus born in a manger, also a warrior, a fighter, and even someone who would drive people out of the temple of God’s house. We’ll see that in action. This is John Chapter two, starting in verse 13. I’ll just take it a chunk at a time. The Jewish Passover was near, and so Jesus went up to Jerusalem. In the temple, He found people selling oxen, sheep, and doves. He also found the money changers sitting there. After making a whip out of cords, He drove everyone out of the temple with their sheep and their oxen. He poured out the money changers’ coins. He overturned the tables. He told those who were selling doves, “Get these things out of here.” Let me actually say it with a little more force, like our risen Savior: “Get out! Stop doing this! Stop turning My Father’s house into a marketplace!” Sweet, dear baby Jesus. Yelling at Him.

So this moment, this dramatic purging of the temple, happened during the Passover festival. If you’re not familiar, Passover was one of the big three annual festivals in the life of Judaism. This is one of the big three celebrations where it was expected, if not required, for all able-bodied men amongst the Jews to all converge on the city of Jerusalem. A city that had an expected population of about 50,000 would swell to 250,000 or 300,000 people during the course of this week, where all day, every day, they were supposed to be celebrating what God had done when God freed the people of Israel out of Egypt.

You remember that with Moses? The whole “let my people go” situation? The 10 plagues? The tenth plague that God did on the Pharaoh and on the people of Egypt was this Passover moment where God struck down the firstborn of every Egyptian household—firstborn son, firstborn animal. And the only people that escaped from that unscathed were those who slaughtered an unblemished lamb, took the blood, painted it over the doorposts, so that when the angel of death comes at their house, checking each individual house, the angel would see the blood painted over the doorposts and would pass over that house. That’s where we got Passover from.

So every year, the people of Israel would celebrate that moment where God did not take the life of their firstborn, and God uses that to exit the people of Israel out of Egypt, to exodus them out. Every year that the people of Israel would celebrate this, the men were required to bring a sacrifice to the temple—a way of remembering what God had done for them in that sacrifice, a way of repenting of their sin, a way of kind of charting a new path for them forward. Therefore, it was actually very helpful for there to be some sort of animal merchants and money changers at least nearby.

You see, imagine you are walking from, let’s say, 200 miles away, and you’ve got to make this mountainous trek from your hometown up the elevation to Jerusalem. It would be a lot easier if instead of bringing your ox or your sheep along and having to find it some food and find it water, instead of doing that, you would just buy one when you get to Jerusalem. That makes a lot of sense. When you get to Jerusalem, though, you’ve been using money that’s been minted by the Roman government, or you’ve been using money that’s been made from impure precious metal. And once you get to the temple, you can’t use the Roman stuff, you can’t use the impure stuff, you’ve only got to use bona fide, pre-certified coinage. So therefore, you’ve got a predicament. You need an animal, and you need the proper money to buy that animal and to pay your temple taxes.

So the Jewish leaders set up a system where they had animals on site and they had money changers on site, so that any devoted worshiper would be able to change their currency. Obviously, you pay a little bit of an upcharge exchanging all that currency, and then you use that new currency to go buy your animal, to pay for the animal, and then you bring that to the temple and you make good with the Lord. All that is fine and dandy. The issue is where that’s happening. At some point, the animals and the money changers had been brought in from offsite into the temple complex.

You see, the temple complex had multiple zones—how do I say this?—reserved for different types of people. The outermost zone was the Gentile court. Those are non-ethnic Jewish people who want to worship Yahweh, the God of the Jews and the God, as we know, of the whole earth. You had them in the outermost. You had the women’s court next because it was a patriarchal society. Then you had the men’s court, and then you Go into the Holy of Holies. What the Jewish leaders had done to make things as easy as possible for themselves is that they brought in all those animals and the money changers into that gentile court. Most likely. Most likely that’s where they are. Jesus walks on the scene. What are y’all doing? All this commotion? All these goats bleeding? All these oxen? Whatever the noise is that ox make? I’m not sure what noise they make. All these doves cooing or whatever doves do? All these money changers? You could just maybe just kind of hear them just like counting out the money, you know? How worshipful of an atmosphere do you think this would create?

I need some help. I need like two really brave volunteers. Do I have to? Cody, you’re my man. Okay, Cody, come up here please. Who’s going to join Cody? Say, Nolan, you’re also my man. Come up, Nolan. Let’s go ahead and give a round of applause. Now, I need two more less brave volunteers because they volunteered first. Can I have two more other volunteers? I need two volunteers or else it’s not going to work. Somebody raise their hand. Cody, Cody, all right. Thank you, Seth. Come on. Okay, let’s get one more young man to come and join Seth. I need help. All right, Rob. Okay. All right. Seth and Rob, I’ll give these to you. Rob, let’s get you the other set. Okay, right there. You just go ahead and grab those other ones. No, sir. You do not get to keep what’s in it. No, sir. Can we get this on? This is for y’all. Nolan, you get to pick. Do you want to be a goat or a bird? You’re a goat. You’re a bird. All right. The mic needs to be able to pick up both of you guys. Okay. On the count of three, I need y’all to start sounding and acting like the animals that you just volunteered to be. On the count of three, I need y’all making that noise I did. Okay. One, two, three.

May God be gracious to us and bless us. May He make His face shine upon us so that Your way may be known.

All right, we’re good. Let’s give it a round of applause for our volunteers. Thank you so much. Did anybody hear the psalm I was reading? You maybe a little bit who in that moment said we were having like a really pious, worshipful atmosphere. That’s what Jesus stumbled on. Jesus has come to the very center of their Jewish faith. He has come to the very epicenter of the worship of the God of the universe. And what He doesn’t find is a bunch of people prostrate complaining about their sin and asking for God to help them. What He doesn’t find is people celebrating the works of God in their past. What He finds is people with all this commotion, all this distraction, all this issue because these merchants and the money changers had been brought. So Jesus does the only thing that the Son of God can do. Get out! Get this out of here!

Let’s continue, verses 17 through 19. His disciples remembered that it was written, zeal for Your house will consume Me. So the Jews replied to Him, what sign will You show us for doing these things? And Jesus answered, destroy this temple and I will raise it up in three days. If your Bible has any sort of footnotes, you’ll notice in verse 17, zeal for Your house will consume Me, is probably written in bold or italics and it actually references a different psalm from the Old Testament, Psalm 69. The disciples were remembering this psalm that’s written about the Lord’s anointed. These are just a couple of verses. For I have endured insults because of You and shame has covered my face. I’ve become a stranger to my brothers and a foreigner to my mother’s sons because zeal for Your house has consumed me and the insults of those who insult You have fallen on me. Listen to this. Listen to this prophetic word about Jesus written in Psalm 69. Insults have broken my heart. I am in despair. I waited for sympathy, but there was none for comforters, but found no one. Instead, they gave me gall for my food and for my thirst, they gave me vinegar to drink. Anybody else remember Jesus on the cross and says, I thirst. One of the guards takes this sponge, puts it on the end of his spear, dips it in the vinegar and puts it up to Jesus’ lips for Him to suck the vinegar out and take His final sip.

Jesus had this ultimate zeal for God’s house, and it would drive Him to the cross. But in the meantime, that zeal would drive out these money changers. The authorities are seeing what Jesus is doing, and look at the question they ask: “What sign will you show us for doing these things?” Anybody else catch what they’re actually implying and agreeing to? They’re not saying, “What are you doing?” They’re not saying, “Why are you doing this?” They’re saying, “What sign do you give?” See, these Jewish leaders are not questioning the rightness of what Jesus is doing. They are questioning by what right He does them. They are recognizing that they have made the temple into a place of commerce. They are recognizing that they have taken what God has commanded and capitalizing on it. They have recognized that in this place of worship and devotion and piety, they have made it a den of commerce. The issue for them is not, “Is Jesus correct?” The issue is, “Why does Jesus have the authority to do it?” They ask for a sign. And what does Jesus say? “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days.” Once again, Jesus is speaking with a little double entendre. He’s got two meanings going here. One, He’s saying, “If you take apart this temple physically, I have the ability to raise it up. I’m God. I can do that. You’ll see me do wilder. You’ll see me raise the dead from, you’ll see me raise people back from the dead.” But on the other hand, He is saying, “I am the real temple. You destroy my body. I’m coming back to life.” Amen, right? “You take me down, and I will come right back up.” You see, the Jewish people would be guilty of both destructions. The Jewish people, through their sin and through their issues, God really would send an invading Roman army to come and sack the temple in Jerusalem in AD 70, about 60 years after Jesus will take His final earthly breath. Romans will be standing in the Holy of Holies, desecrating the whole thing, tearing it down, because God’s people had so waywardly sinned and gone against His holy ways that God brings judgment on them through destroying this temple that they, in this current moment, then Jesus’ lifetime, are also destroying. Do you see it? Do you see how the people, these religious leaders, by bringing in the money changers, by bringing in all the animals, by taking this place of this purified sacrifice and worship and turning it into a place of commerce, they were destroying it? And God would finalize that destruction physically later. They would do the exact same thing to Jesus. They would look at Jesus, this ultimate place of God and man together. They would look at Jesus, this ultimate epicenter of worship. They would look at Jesus, the very center of life itself, and destroy Him. Yet, what do we know, Miss Donna? You sacrifice Jesus, you kill Him on Friday, and on Sunday, He’s rising. Isn’t that incredible? Amen, right? Jesus has the authority to both lay down His life and take it up again, He’ll say later in John. No one has authority to take the life of Christ. No, Jesus lays down His life because He is the boss. He’s the man. That’s Him. He’s not just sweet baby Jesus. He is a rescuing, resurrected, victorious Savior. In fact, in the book of Revelation, chapter 21, verse 22, read this later, man. Jesus, or, sorry, John, the apostle John, writing on the island of Patmos about the end of all things, has this window opened up into heaven. And what he sees, the new heavens and the new earth coming down. John explicitly says, there is no temple there. There’s no temple. There’s no need of it, because God will dwell with man. Man, isn’t that incredible, Sonny? Isn’t that incredible, Clyde? That we have an eternal destiny living forever in the visceral, personal, physical presence of God. Man, isn’t that exciting? It’s exciting, I think, for me, Eddie, and Donna. Isn’t that exciting, church? That’s what you’ve been made for. You’ve been made for that. Man, when you were made, you weren’t made for this world? You weren’t made to pad your 401k? You weren’t made to marry into the right family and raise kids? Your ultimate destiny? Man, it’s not. It’s not sports, Seabrook. Your ultimate destiny is so much better than that. Man, your ultimate destiny, whether baseball is here for a long time or no, your ultimate destiny is to dwell with God. That’s what God’s made you for. And along our pilgrimage on this earth, we get to have jobs. We get to have families. We get to play baseball as stewardships and gifts from God. And we use those things to prepare us for the right ultimate thing, heaven. Jesus says, get all this stuff out of here. The Jews say, what sign do you give? And Jesus points to the future. When you slaughter me like one of these lambs, when you take my life like one of these ox, when you snuff me out like these doves, I’m coming back.

Verse 20. Therefore, the Jews said, this temple took 46 years to build and you’ll raise it up in three days. But he was speaking about the temple of His body. So when He rose from the dead, His disciples remembered that He had said this. They believed the scripture and the statement Jesus had made.

Verse 22. When He was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in His name when they saw the signs He was doing. Jesus, however, would not entrust Himself to them since He knew them all. And because He did not need anyone to testify about man for He Himself knew what was in man.

So this moment begins with Jesus dramatically purging the temple and making this improbable promise. It draws to a conclusion with this indisputable proof of who Jesus really is. God in the flesh. Jesus says, you want to know my credentials? You want to know what right I have to do these things? Listen here. When I die on that cross, you will bury me in a tomb that you will then send guards to protect. Because you’re deathly afraid of my influence. But those guards won’t be able to hold back two angels that God is going to send. They’re going to roll that stone for y’all to be able to understand what’s going on. I’m going to leave my burial clothes in that tomb. And then I’m going to start appearing to my disciples across many days.

Guys, don’t y’all recognize our faith is not built on mere stories? Don’t y’all understand that our faith is not just simply a tradition that’s been handed to you by your grandparents? No, the resurrection account, y’all, is the most historically verified event in all of human history, right? Man, if you don’t know this, all right, anybody go to see the Odyssey movie, the Christopher Nolan movie recently? How was it? Was it okay? Ooh, okay, I think that’s good. We read the Odyssey, or at least we used to in school. The version that you read in high school textbooks is a compilation of four or five different broken fragments all put together in the best understanding that modern scholars have. And we give it to kids saying, Homer wrote this. You could trust for sure that every line leads to the very next line. When in reality, our faith in the Odyssey story is built off of a lot of conjecture. Four documents. Y’all, oh baby, 6,000, 6,000 documents have been compiled for you to hold this in your hands and know to an infinitesimal degree that every one of these words is verified true.

Now that’s just believers. Some of Christianity’s most hateful critics still recognize there was a man named Jesus Christ from the town of Nazareth that gathered a following who did miracles, whom the Romans crucified at the behest of the Jews, whom really was laid in a tomb owned by a name of, owned by a man by the name of Joseph of Arimathea. And after three days, He walked out of that tomb. Haters of Christianity believed that. They believed it. They wrote it down for all posterity. Y’all, whose grill do I need to get in right now? Our faith is not built on myth. It’s not built on well wishes. Man, it’s not built on sweet baby Jesus. Our faith is built on a resurrected Savior who really lived, who really died, and really rose again. And isn’t that good news? Man, such good news. We miss it, man. We miss it. I mean, this good news becomes old news to us. We just miss it.

If you’ll allow me, I want to offer three potential impurities of our worship. Jesus walked into the temple that day and found a pretty glaring impurity. I think the first one, the first impurity of the modern church is legalism for rules. We assume legalism equals love. I mean, you look at the Pharisees. They followed the rules to a T. They said, man, God has told us to sacrifice, and boy, will we be wrong if we don’t sacrifice. God has told us that every male is supposed to bring in a tax, and boy, Will we be wrong if they don’t bring in a tithe? Their legalism and their love for rules fueled their greed. Can’t you see it? Why sell the animals at all? If the pure worship of Yahweh was really the goal the whole time, why do that? Just, man, just give the people the animals. If sacrifice is the ultimate point, then man, why go through the hoops of all this money changing, and certainly, why would you bring it into the temple complex? Their legalism fueled their greed.

Has legalism gotten in the way of your love for God? Where you think God loves you because you attend church. You think God loves you because you do your daily prayers. You think God loves you because you serve in one of our ministries. You think God loves you because you grab one of those devotionals off the back table, and you read it before bed. Man, legalism does not inspire real love for God, and God certainly doesn’t love you for keeping the rules. The cleanse for that impurity is to confess Christ as Savior.

There are so many well-meaning people sitting in pews in churches today who know all the stories, who have John 3:16 memorized, who have taken the Lord’s Supper and been baptized, and they’ll take their final breath here and take their first breath eternally in hell because they’ve never trusted in Jesus Christ. Just go through the motions of all this religious rites and rituals, and they think God loves me if I do these things. And Jesus came not to exact a perfect sacrifice from you, but Jesus came to be the perfect sacrifice for you so that God would be able to show you His great love.

The second impurity of the modern church is the opposite of legalism. It’s this: God’s love means there are no rules. God loves me as I am. Why don’t you? God loves me as I am. I don’t have to change. God loves me as I am, so why would you judge me, you hypocritical church sinner? Man, you see this all the time whenever people don’t want you to push on them. You try to give them some accountability. You try to help them change. You try to help them grow into the image of Jesus, and they start recoiling and pushing back and bristling up at you.

The thing is, though, amazing grace is always transforming grace. If you recognize that God has sent a Savior for your soul because you are a sinner, then naturally you would want to change into the image of that Savior. In fact, the Bible calls Jesus the firstborn amongst many brothers. A firstborn ideally would have some resemblance born unto him by all the other kids. Let me put it in this way: By God’s grace, me and Becca, we now have four children. And the older those kids get, the more they look and act like me and Becca. Just the older they get. I don’t have to tell them, “Now you know, Dad drinks coffee. A good Simmons drinks coffee.” I don’t have to tell them, “Now Dad has quite the hankering for fajitas. That will be your Mexican food of choice as well, son.” I don’t do that. They just see me drink coffee. They just see me enjoy Mexican food, and they just naturally grow into that. And the genealogical stuff, man, all of our kids, they pop out looking the exact same. This blonde hair, blue-eyed kind of mass, then it grows to look more and more beautiful like Becca. That’s just kind of how it goes. I love my kids, truly.

That’s how it’s supposed to be with us and Jesus. Once you are born again, once you start following Him, you’re supposed to grow into His image. The things He loved, you’re supposed to slowly start to love. The things that He did, you’re supposed to start doing. The way He carried Himself, you’re supposed to start carrying yourself that way. But man, we bristle against that. We don’t want God to actually change our lifestyle and the things that we watch. We don’t actually want God to change our financial choices. We don’t actually want God to change how we spend our time. We don’t. Man, life’s comfortable. I’ve got Jesus and everything else. Why would I give up anything? God loves me as I am. But that’s foolish too.

The cleanse for that impurity is to pursue holiness. Romans 12:1-2 gives you part of the answer. God’s Word says this: “Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, i.e., because God loved you as you were, in view of that, I urge you to “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.” That’s true worship. Don’t be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing and perfect will of God.

Man, my encouragement to every follower of Jesus in this room is to pursue that otherworldly transformation at all costs. Let me give you a help. I’ve mentioned this a number of times. I’m going to keep pounding the table about this. LifeWay and the Center for Bible Engagement did this study of over a hundred thousand Bible readers ages eight to eighty across a year. They wanted to find how do we grow? How do we change? Here’s what they found. When someone reads the Bible one time a week, almost nothing changes in their life. Their cursing is the same. Their bad habits are the same. Their lack of helping others follow Jesus is the same. No noticeable difference whatsoever.

Now, when somebody reads the Bible two times a week, it’s the same situation. No noticeable change. You might come here on Sunday morning and do a devotional one other time a week. That’s actually not going to bear any change in your life, statistically speaking. Three times a week, it’s the same situation. Three times a week does not actually improve your living for Christ. It does not change who you are. It does not change how you live. It does not change what you look like.

However, four times, there is something that God has wired into our souls and who we are as people. Not as a legalistic rule to keep, but as a means of God’s grace to transform you through His word. If you get into the Bible four times a week, that’s when the good stuff starts happening. Who else in this room wants to live a life of peace and joy? Who else in this room wants to live a life that makes a difference for eternity? Who else in this room wants to stop doing the bad habits that we know keep our friends and families up at night? Who else in this room would like to live a little more like God and a little less like themselves? Man, that’s a lot of volunteers to start reading the Bible four times a week. I love that. God saw all of y’all. God’s going to give you the help that you need this week to do that. Four times a week. For some reason, God and His economy, that’s what He’s chosen. Four times a week.

Man, I’ll say it one more time. How many times a week? Now, will God love you more if you do this? Thank you, Michaela. Will you love God more if you do this? Yes.

The third impurity that I see in the modern church is this. Jesus went through the trouble. I don’t have to. American Christians prioritize comfort and preference and convenience over everything else. Man, I remember living overseas for a couple years with the IMB. Thank y’all so much for your financial support back before you ever knew who Jeremy and Becca Simmons were. Lived over there for a couple years just doing some work and trying to help churches grow and try to help lost people become followers of Jesus. And we come back to America. And man, I was just shell-shocked at the amount of convenience and comfort that we’ve woven into the life of church here. And man, I say this now as the pastor of this church for three years. Like, man, I feel guilty of this. Of how much, even here at Sauldam, that we try to weave around your preferences and your comforts.

Man, Jesus did not die to save a bride so that she could say, she could choose yes or no to following Him with all of her life. Jesus did not die to rescue you from your sin so that you would get to pick and choose from the buffet of Christianity what you will and won’t do. He didn’t do that. Yet that’s how we lived. Jesus showed us that love for God and love for people requires self-sacrificing inconvenience. Man, discipleship to Christ I have found in my 18 years of following Him is a steady, slow walk down as I’ve got to sacrifice and humble myself. Man, everything in me recoils at that. But Jesus Christ Himself, did He not do the same thing? Did Jesus Christ Himself not leave the heights of His heavenly throne and come and dwell here? Did Jesus Christ Himself not also choose to take the knee and wash the feet of His disciples, including the one He knew would betray Him and put Him on that cross? Did Jesus Himself not take advantage of His rights and His equality with God and chose instead to become a humble servant of us? If I’m going to follow Jesus, then I’ve got to reflect that. I’ve got to grow into that. Man, the way you be cleansed of the impurity of your comfort and your preference.

This is an eight-week discipleship challenge I put out to our church. Man, I’m so proud. I’m so proud. We’ve got about three dozen adults so far that have committed to being in a men’s or a women’s group. Three dozen of y’all are so ready to start growing and walking with the Lord in a deeper way. I’m looking out over our room. I’m not trying to shame anybody. We all need to be part of the discipleship stuff.

Jesus did not just die to rescue us individually so that we could just wait until that day that He zaps us up to heaven. No, He died to redeem a bride that would help one another love God more in this pilgrimage. Man, that’s my invitation to you. In the bulletin, you’ve got that adult discipleship sign-up thing. There’s time. There is place for you. Man, we have, for the women, we’ve got stuff happening in the mornings and in the evenings. Man, for guys, we have seven different groups meeting throughout the week. Most of them are every other week. For the guys, man, there’s a place for you. There is a way for you to be able to do this. Man, every adult in this church needs to be doing this.

As we begin to close, we do this, we just close your eyes, bow your heads. I’m going to read these three impurities of the modern church. Can you just pray and ask God, God, would You reveal if I’ve got this impurity and You’re trying to cleanse it too? The impurity of legalism over love or the impurity that God’s love means there’s no rules. Or third, the impurity, preference and inconvenience over sacrifice. Say, God, do I have one of these? God, do I have one of these? Legalism, no rules, my preferences. God, do I have one of these? For anybody that you know that God is revealing something, you just say, God, I’m sorry. Cleanse me. God, I’m sorry. I need Your help.

Heavenly Father, all praise be to Your name. We’re sending Your Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sin. The real temple who purifies us, who makes us clean, who gives us a mission to live for so much bigger than anything this world could ever offer. From school to sports to money to careers to families, all those things You have made good, but they are not our ultimate destiny. You are. Help us to live for that ultimate destiny as we continue this life here. Thank You, Jesus. Amen.