Romans 3:1–4Scripture
Man, we've been going through Romans as a church family, and today we're getting to kick off Romans chapter 3. And chapter 3 as it starts is, it is definitely a continuation of chapter 2. So if you're new to Echo, or maybe this is your first week visiting, I'm not sure, I haven't seen everybody's faces yet, after I just had to, like, bear my soul to everybody, I kind of hope maybe there's not any first-time people in here, but, you know, if you are, welcome to our church, and you are loved. But you definitely need to go to our website and you need to go back to the beginning of this Romans series and watch it through over the next couple weeks, so that you can understand where we're at, because if you just pick up in chapter 3, verse 1, you're going to miss the last few verses, especially of chapter 2, where Paul gives a thorough talk on circumcision. And if you all thought that Pastor Shawn having to preach on circumcision last week was in any way, shape, or form awkward, you should have been the guy teaching it to the kindergarten through sixth grade kids, because that was my job last week.
Thank you, Chad is in our sound booth. Oh, a year and a half ago, somewhere, I'm not sure how long ago it was, Chad Getz is Jesse's husband and used to be one of my children's ministry teachers, and then Jesse stole him away to the media team. But he came to me with this great idea of, what if in our children's ministry, in our elementary-age ministry, the preschoolers and babies don't do this, just so we're clear, but what if we taught in conjunction with what Pastor Shawn is preaching to the adults? What if, on a Sunday, because we've become so family-focused and so discipleship-focused as a church, what if on a Sunday an entire family could leave church and go to lunch and have a family discussion about the same Scripture that they all got to learn from? And I thought to myself, well, that sounds
Introduction
Like a really awesome idea, but it also sounds really challenging. And that proved itself to be true last week when we got to dinner, and my son likes to do this thing that we call Hi-Lo Buffalo, which is where everybody shares their high from the day and the low point from their day, and a buffalo is just something random that happened that maybe was unusual or caught you off guard or you learned something new or whatever. And they go around the table, I mean, we do this now every night at the dinner table. I just, like, wait for, "Can we play Hi-Lo Buffalo?" Like, it's what we do as the Brown dinner time, we do Hi-Lo buffalo. And they come around to me and he said, "Dad, what was your high?" I said, "I think my high today was that I got through my entire lesson and not one kid interrupted me and said, 'But what is circumcision?'" That was my high from last week. But we're picking up on chapter 3, and as I was preparing, oh, that was gross.
As I was preparing, and looking at the book of Romans, it's really broken down into four components, and we're still in this first one where we're learning and talking about Paul's writing and teaching about the wrath of God, and we're going to move out of the wrath of God, and in several weeks still, and we're going to move into a component of Romans that's all about the grace of God, the unmerited favor of God, and we'll move from there to the plan of God's plan for the church, God's plan for the world, and then he sums up this letter to the Romans by really getting into the will of God, what it means to live and be obedient to the will of God. But in chapter 3, even though our terminology has shifted, the first two chapters, the word "wrath" was pretty heavy in there, and now we're shifting to "righteousness." And at first I glanced into chapter 3 as an elementary-age preacher, and I was like, "Thank God, I get to quit talking to the kids about wrath." And then as I started to read chapter 3, I'm like, it's just more of the same thing, he just changed the word.
Fooled me. Fooled me. Romans 3, verses 1 through 4 says this: "Then what advantage has the Jew?" Again, if you just pick up here, you have no idea what we're talking about. He just got done talking about physical circumcision doesn't mean anything if there's been no spiritual circumcision. "Then what advantage has the Jew?" We thought, the Jews thought that they were awesome and chosen by God because they were willing to do this horrific physical ceremony and be circumcised. They thought that physical circumcision was what was getting them into heaven. If that's not true, Paul, then what's the point? What's the advantage of being a Jew, or what is the value of circumcision?
"Much in every way. To begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God? By no means!" I love how he writes "by no means." "Let God be true though every man be a liar, as it is written, 'That you may be justified in your words and prevail when you are judged.'" This is one of those Scriptures that, again, if you just pick it out by itself and you read it, if you're not following along with us through our study, and this is the first, you've, I looked at, like, the Scripture was up there, and this is the first that you've glanced at Romans, you very easily could have heard me read through that and be thinking to yourself, "What? I don't even know what we're talking about right now."
And that would be an honest assessment to make, because often Paul, this well-educated Pharisee, wrote in language that is hard to understand at first glance. And I love this. I was watching one video of another pastor preaching on this same Scripture last night, and he brought attention to this Scripture from 2 Peter that made me laugh, because even the apostle Peter acknowledges that Paul is sometimes hard to understand. I'd never picked this one Scripture out of the Bible before. 2 Peter 3:15 and 16, Peter says, "And count the patience of our Lord as salvation, just as our beloved brother Paul also wrote to you according to the wisdom given him, as he does in all his letters when he speaks in them of these matters. There are some things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction, as they do the other Scriptures."
Peter is saying, y'all, sometimes Paul, he gets to talking, he gets to writing, and his education comes in, all of his training comes in from his former life, and the dude starts to use five-syllable words that you ain't gonna get. Sometimes Pastor Shawn throws down theology words and I'm like, "oh yeah, definitely, for sure," right? Paul writes like that. So if you don't take the time to study God's Word like we're doing it, and it may seem we've hit different Scriptures where I've looked at the text for the week and been like, "I don't know how I'm going to build a message out of this for elementary kids," like when we have to talk about circumcision, but if you don't study God's Word, you'll miss so much in the
Point 1Paul answers objections to lead people to truth
Word. The style of writing is called diatribe. It's a diatribe style of writing where Paul asks rhetorical questions and then he gives you the answer to the rhetorical question for the purpose of leading people who are in error into truth. Like, if somebody's in error and you know they're in error, you don't ask them a hard question because you know they don't have the right answer. So you ask the question, then you give the answer, so that you can disciple them, so that they can be brought from error into truth. And the style of writing makes sense when we look at Paul as an author who has also been charged as the apostle with carrying the gospel to the Gentile world and being met with Jewish opposition in, let's say, nearly every synagogue that Paul enters. And here's Paul's M.O., if you don't know, like, you get this from reading more of the whole of Scripture and then looking at all of it together. Paul goes, and he journeys, when he goes from city to city to visit and to preach the gospel, first thing Paul does when he gets into town is head to the synagogue. And it doesn't say this verbatim in the Bible, but this is kind of how I think about Paul, because we can see it in a lot of his language and how he talks. So my version of what I think Paul is doing is he goes into the synagogue so he can size up the religious leaders that are already in the community, get an idea of what his opposition is going to be like, and then he goes out to the streets and he starts preaching, but he gets opposition everywhere. So as he's writing this letter to Rome, he's literally writing, and this is my understanding, writing in questions that he's assuming people are going to be asking. All right, Jews, here's what I want to talk about. I just dropped this bomb on you, that your physical circumcision means nothing if there's not a spiritual circumcision that takes place. So then Paul can go into his memory bank: every time I've had this conversation, here's the questions that I get bombarded with, here's the answers to those questions. Now can we move forward and live our lives submitted to Jesus?
Throughout Romans, Paul, throughout Romans 3, Paul does four different things, and I'm only going to get to a couple of them in these first four verses today, but I've labeled them all with A's for those of you who like to take notes. Like my daughter has three different notebooks that she takes notes in, and depending on where she is, I love it, but that's completely contrary to how I function. Four different things that the apostle Paul does throughout Romans 3: he poses some arguments, presents the arguments before any Jewish person has the opportunity to rebut. This letter that he's sending to Rome, he poses the arguments: here's the truth, here's what you want to say, here's what you want to defend yourself with. Poses some arguments. Then he gives answers, he gives some answers to those arguments. That's number two. One, poses some arguments; two, gives some answers; three, then he states advantages on why what he's saying is superior and truth over whatever the understanding was, he states some advantages; and then the fourth is he gives an admission, he gives an admission, admonition, that's what I meant, admonition, not admission. He's not admitting anything. It's Paul, dude's bold. An admonition. I don't know if I'm saying that word right. Oh man.
So we're coming out of chapter 2 talking about this external circumcision, and then the question is asked, so what's the point in being Jewish if everything that you're telling us is truth and that this ceremony that we've been begrudging, like, I don't think anybody ever walked into a circumcision ceremony and was like, "Circumcision Sunday!"
In the line, we have begrudgingly followed Abraham's teaching, and now you're telling us that we're wrong? Do you know what the priest did to me, Paul? And I'm wrong? What is even the point? Is there any advantage? Because listen to me this morning, listen to me this morning, I've said this a couple times recently, and the first few times I said it, I was thinking to myself, am I even politically correct? Is this right? Should I be saying this?
But the question is there any advantage to being Jewish, is a good question, because there's a lot of disadvantages to being Jewish.
They are God's chosen people, but there's a lot of disadvantages. And now that we can look back at history, like, i'm not so sure that, as they went through history, that I would have wanted to be Jewish. And we're talking about God's chosen people, enslaved in Egypt for over 400 years, wandered in the wilderness for 40 years, and then once they received their Promised Land, had to fight tooth and nail to keep their promised Land. Civil war broke out in Israel, the northern kingdom taken captive by Assyria, and the southern kingdom, exiled. I said exiled, it was late last night, exiled by Babylon. I mean, thing after thing. And not to mention, talk about the Jewish Holocaust, where over 6 million Jewish people were murdered in some of the most horrific ways that somebody can be murdered. So that's a good question. It's not a bad question to ask of Paul. If what you're saying is truth, then what's the point? What were we chosen for, Paul?
Point 2Being God's chosen people carried real advantage
And immediately he gives the answer. He asks the rhetorical question and then he answers it. Is there any benefit? Is there any advantage? Absolutely there is. You are God's chosen people. Deuteronomy 14:2 says, "For you are a people holy to the LORD your God, and the LORD has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth." Israel, you were chosen.
Paul never said that being Jewish wasn't important. He's just trying to make the case to these legalistic Jews that being Jewish isn't enough. It's not that it's not important, it's just not enough. So he says this answer, "to begin with," or "for starters." You know, anytime you're going to give off a list of reasons, and he only gives the one right now, we get into chapter 9, months from now, he gives more of a list of the advantages of being Jewish, but for starters, number one, the most important is, you've been given, he says, lost my spot, hold on, "to begin with, the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God." You are the chosen people, entrusted with the oracles of God. Number one advantage. And I found it interesting, and I admitted in our small group this last week, and some of our staff discussions and our leadership meeting, there was a question in our small group study on, you know, what do you believe oracles to be? What do you think that is? And my initial answer was just the law. That's what I wrote down. My wife likes
To write novels for her answers and I try to keep it
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to, like, two- or three-word answers. And then we began to have some discussion, and I was like, oh yeah, I
Missed this one, because there's a lot more to the oracles of God than
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just the law. The Jews did possess the law, but they possessed God's entire plan.
They possessed the promise for a Messiah, they possessed the promise of eternal life. They weren't just given the problem, they were given the promise and the solution.
They had everything that they needed. God had put his full plan and covenant in the hands of the Jews, in the hands of Israel, but still many of them were unfaithful. I thought about this: they had the full presence of God. Like, I don't have time, I thought about putting the whole tabernacle map up there for you so you could see the outer court, the inner court, and the Holy of Holies. I don't have time to give you an explanation or a breakdown of the ark of the covenant and what was inside of the ark of the covenant. Like, they possessed, and they carried with them, the presence of God. So when God went to Moses during a battle and said, just put your hands up into the air, think about what the generals of the opposing army are thinking, like, "Who's this guy doing...?"
How dumb did Moses look? All this opposing army have to be looking at this fool going, "Who is this idiot?" And then they get smoked on the battlefield, and then word has to start going around, "Don't mess with Israel. Whatever's in that box that they carry around, Israel's got some power that is unheard of."
They possess the fullness of God's plan and the presence of God, and they still manage to fall short. But did any Jewish person's sin or denial
Point 3Human unfaithfulness never changes God's faithfulness
Of God's truth hinder God's faithfulness? That's the next question that Paul presents. No, by no means. It doesn't matter how much they messed up, it doesn't matter how legalistic they got, it doesn't matter that they were lining up for circumcision ceremonies thinking that's what was going to get them into heaven, God's faithfulness to them, his promise over them, doesn't waver, and it's not hindered. God is still true even when everyone else is a liar.
Scripture says in Romans, "Let God be true though everyone were a liar." By no means, he says. Deuteronomy 7:9 says, "know therefore that the LORD your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations." God is God, and his covenant, his end of the agreement, does not waver.
If you're finding yourself in a wilderness season in your life, it's not because God wavered, it's not because God changed, it's not because God stopped moving, it's not because God took a sabbatical from his throne.
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Israel had to wander in the wilderness for 40 years because they disobeyed him, not because he fell short, not because he changed his mind, not because he messed something up in his divine plan. God is God, and he is faithful, he keeps his covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments. Do you see the expectation in this Scripture? For those who love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations. One of my other favorite Pastor Shawn-isms is "God is God all by himself." He is 100 percent, totally and completely God.
Nothing you do causes that to change or waver.
You can't make him any less God, and despite what sometimes we think, in our good works, you don't make him any more God either.
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You don't make him any better God either. Your part in carrying out his plan for your life is just for his glory. It doesn't make him more God.
It doesn't help him be God.
People have the oracles of God, the full message and plan of the sovereign God of the universe, and they still mess it up. They still don't get it. They still argue, they still squabble, they still get legalistic, they still get judgmental, they still think that they're better than everybody else, and they have the whole thing laid out for them.
And a few thousand years later, the church of Christ, the church, the body of Christ, still does the same thing.
Three thousand years later, as the body of Christ, we haven't learned much. That we can possess the oracles of God, we can possess the divine Word of God, and still mess it up and still not get it and still inject ourselves in places that aren't meant for us and still ignore and not acknowledge the things that are meant for our sanctification.
Man, we played Bible Taboo the other night with a few friends, and my daughter was there, who's going to be 13 next month.
It's kind of crazy. Not that old. They were playing Taboo, and we've got these almost-teenage girls at our table, and some of these questions that are coming out, they're just shouting out answers to. I'm like, I'm going to make sure your youth pastor knows how smart you are. Somebody gives the answer "sanctification."
I'm like, if kids can get it, if students can get it, then why is so much of the church walking around with our heads buried in the sand? We have the full oracles of God's full plan for salvation, God's full plan for joy, God's full plan for peace, God's full plan for eternity, and yet we still botch it on a regular basis. I don't get it. How in 3,000 years has God's chosen people, and I don't have time to go into this, but go look into the whole Gentiles being grafted into the promises for the Jews kind of thing, you are God's chosen people. As the body of Christ, we are not Jewish by heritage, but we are co-heirs with Christ.
How in 3,000 years, my timeline might be a little fuzzy, how have we not figured it out? How are we still sitting in the same place where Paul is writing this letter to new believers and Jewish people in Rome, trying to get them to understand?
Like Israel, like the Jewish people, we possess the same advantage. Okay, excuse me. God's given us his Word. Listen,
Point 4We have the resources; our view is off
The issue wasn't that the Jewish people didn't have the resources that they needed to live righteously under God. They had everything they needed, just like the church does today. The issue
Isn't the resources, the issue was their
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view of the resources that they had. The issue in the church today isn't that we don't have the resources, isn't that we haven't been equipped with what we need as Christians to live our lives righteously unto Christ. Everything you need is in this book.
The issue isn't that you don't have the resource, the issue is that you don't have the correct view of the resource.
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And I had to run this by, like, I was up late last night, y'all, so I had to run
This by, I ran it by Chad this morning to make sure that this would make
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sense, and he assured me it did, so if it doesn't, it's Chad's fault.
You will never view God's Word correctly until you have an appropriate view of God's Word. You will never view God's Word correctly in your attempt to study, to interpret, to apply God's Word to your life. You will never view God's Word correctly until you have an appropriate view of his Word, until you have an accurate understanding of what it is and what it's for. So this morning I want to ask this question: how do you consider God's Word?
Point 5Three views of Scripture: only one is true
This is where I started to become a little bit of a hypocrite in my writing. How do you consider God's Word? And there's three positions. I wanted so bad to come up with some, like, four-syllable word to identify each of the positions so I could put them up on the screen like Pastor Shawn does and challenge you with some deep theological words, but I came up with nothing. But there's three positions in this, how do you consider God's Word? The first is that the Bible is God's Word, that it was given to the church, it was given to the world through men, it was given by God, it is his Word. The second position is that the Bible is just merely words of men, that men wrote it, some of it's flawed, it's not 100 percent accurate. And the third position is a combination of the first two.
But the first position is that it's God's Word, just so we're clear. That's my position, that's the position of our church, should be your position, just so we're clear. 2 Timothy 3:16 says, "All Scripture is breathed out by God." This is Scripture, all right. In this book, that I think mine, this particular one cost me somewhere around sixty dollars because it has a soft leather case, and when Jesus talks, mine's in red, because I like to differentiate that.
And this is my preaching Bible, so there's not a bunch of room in the margins to write stuff, there's not a bunch of notes, but the font's bigger so I can preach out of it, right?
God breathed this. Listen to me, God breathed, just like God breathed the life into the little dirt figure that he created when he made Adam, God breathed this Word.
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"All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work." Some translations here say "inspired." That's okay if your translation says "inspired." I don't necessarily like that English word as much as I like my ESV version that says "breathed out by God," because I think "breathed out by God" gives a fuller, gives a better explanation of where the Scripture comes from, because this word "inspired" can mean a lot of different things. But even look the word "inspired" up in the Greek word that Paul wrote here, and it just means that it was given from God. God is the originator, is the author of this text. That's what makes it sacred, and that's what makes it so important. When in this text he said don't try to take anything away from it and don't try to add anything to it, because it's not yours to mess with, it's God's Word.
The second position is that it's the Bible is words from men, it's poetic, it's inspirational. That's why I like to make sure you understand the difference between, if your version says it's inspired by God, doesn't mean inspirational. But those who believe that it's just words from men, it's inspirational,
It's poetic, it's challenging, but it's just from men. And this view reduces the Bible down to just encouraging words.
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But listen, if God's Word is not inerrant, if God's Word is not sovereignly breathed out from him, it possesses no authority.
And so just because it's challenging, just because it's inspirational, just because it's poetic, doesn't give it any authority over your life.
The third view is that it's a combination of these two, and this view personally may not seem as dangerous, but it's actually more dangerous than the second view.
To view God's Word as a combination, some of it's divine, some of it's breathed by God, but some of it's not, some of it's flawed, is even more dangerous than just claiming that all of it's written from men, because if it's all from men, you can just stick it on the shelf next to your Narnia and next to your C.S. Lewis books, and it's a great addition to your library. But when you come to this convoluted position that it's a combination of the two, this view is even more dangerous, because then it relies on someone else, someone other than God, to decide which parts are from God and which parts aren't. "God did say that, God didn't say that." And when we begin to do this, which is done rampantly in our culture today, it's sickening to me how often.
Pastor Shawn, really, like, I have friends and people in my life that are, like, my go-to for different things, right? If you want to hear a good dad joke, go talk to Lucas Coy, he's the king of dad jokes. Pastor Shawn's famous for me and sending me at random moments different quotes from spiritual leaders in our culture, or video clips from different church services in our culture, that are so just flagrantly and completely in denial and in disobedience to God's Word that it makes my stomach hurt sometimes. Like just this last week, he shared on Facebook, Pastor Shawn did, three different posts that he had seen from popular religious leaders in our culture that were nothing but heresy, but people eat it up because it makes them feel good. And so when we go through the Bible, then what happens is the person presenting the Word gets to sit in the authority seat of God and tell you that this is from God, but this isn't. And where that always leads is what makes us feel good, what makes us comfortable, what it almost always leads to is what makes us comfortable in our sin, because Scripture cuts to the heart of a man, but if I can look at Scripture and I can say, "No, I don't think that part's accurate," then I can justify my sin. Then let's go back to 1 John, where we claim to be without sin and we make him out to be a liar and his word has no place in our lives. From our culture, in our world today, from this generation, there is a growing and growing, longer and longer line of people who, I'm not saying that this is how it happens, this is just my analogy, but go to stand in line thinking that they're going to heaven and then have to face the harsh truth that they were lied to and that they believed a false gospel. And they will not go to hell because, in their life on this earth, they knowingly rejected God. They will go to hell thinking they were going to heaven, but they believed a lie.
God's Word is either one hundred percent breathed out by God, it possesses a hundred percent inerrancy, or it's just written by men, or this third view, there's a combination of the both. I read this blog post on denying the inerrancy of Scripture, and I want to read this to you.
I'm admitting that this isn't my original thought, but I'm not really citing who it's from because I don't know them that well, and if they happen to put out something that's complete garbage, I don't want you thinking I recommended them, but this particular post is good. It says this: "Inerrancy means the Word of God always stands over us and we never stand over the Word of God. When we reject inerrancy, we put ourselves in judgment over God's Word. We claim the right to determine which parts of God's revelation can be trusted and which cannot. When we deny the complete trustworthiness of the Scriptures and its genuine claims with regard to history, its teachings on the material world, its miracles, and the tiniest jots and tittles of all that it affirms, then we are forced to accept one of two conclusions: either the Scripture is not all from God or God is not always dependable. To make either statement is to affirm what is sub-Christian. These conclusions do not express a proper submission to the Father, do not work for our joy in Christ, and do not bring honor to the Spirit who carried along the men to speak the prophetic word and author God's holy book." Questioning what God did and didn't say, listen to me, questioning what did God say and what did God not say, what's in there, what's sacred, what's not, what's from God, what's not, is the same tactic that the devil used on Eve: "Did God really say?"
And several thousand years later he's still playing the same game. And what breaks my heart is how many people
Will get moved from one line to another because they bought into it. But we have
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to answer this question for ourselves: how do you consider God's Word?
Having the right view of Scripture is crucial, because a wrong view doesn't change its
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truth. Having the wrong view of Scripture doesn't change it.
Not believing the truth doesn't nullify truth, it just puts you in the wrong line. So is your life submitted to the authority of God's Word, or are you living like the Jews that Paul's addressing in this text? Are you submitting your life under the inerrancy of Scripture, or are you picking and choosing, attempting to be God yourself? "I like this one, I'll soak that one up. I'll go to Mardel and I'll buy the pretty sign that has that Scripture written on it, but that stuff about sanctification being burned in, you don't see any pretty signs about sanctification."
Here's the good news: the good news is it's not hard to tell how somebody considers Scripture. The bad news is other people around you can tell as well.
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I saw this post on Facebook this last week, and then it really made me laugh, because the origin of it is from a page that a lot of friends of mine also follow, this Facebook page, so a lot of friends of mine saw this same post, and then I watched over the course of a couple days how many people didn't just share the original author's post, but they copied and pasted it as if it was an original thought of their own. I'm like, who you trying to fool?
I've been reading this post over and over again for two days. But it was this: "If the apostle Paul could see the church in America, we'd get a letter."
And sometimes Paul was mean, y'all. I don't think that our letter would be one of those, "Your testimony is known throughout the world, throughout the surrounding areas." It wouldn't be one of those letters. It'll be like a Corinthian letter, like if first Americans got put in there, it'd probably be the harshest of Paul's writing. Paul probably, we got halfway through the letter and be like, "Forget it, throw the letter away, go get his horse, and just come and rip us a new one in person." I loved it. If the apostle Paul saw the church in America, we'd get a letter.
Have you ever seen, I'm coming to a closing here, who's seen the Jeff Foxworthy "You might be a redneck if"? Yeah.
Well, if your joy is caught up in carnal, worldly things, you may not have a right view of Scripture. If God's Word is not the final authority in your life, you may not have a right view of Scripture. If you're seeking wisdom from men before wisdom from God, from his Word, you may not have a right view of Scripture. And I got another one, but I just gotta pause here, because it baffles me, and i've said this from different sermons, I don't even know how many times, but I'm at the point that it makes my head spin in frustration when people say things like, "I just really want a word from God."
1,875 pages. Take your pick, right? Amen. What are you dealing with today? I got a, what do they call it, a concordance, got a chords in the back.
What are you dealing with? It's in there. Adultery, it's in there. Lust, it's in there. Grief, it's in there. Betrayal, it's in there.
There's a season for everything, but seasons come to an end, it's in there. If you're seeking wisdom from men before wisdom from God's Word, you may not have the right view of Scripture. This is the gut-puncher: if you're losing a spiritual battle, notice I didn't just say fighting, but if you are losing a spiritual battle, you may not have a right view of Scripture. That doesn't mean that the enemy is not wreaking havoc in your life. Oftentimes, and I want to say this because there's a couple of you, and I know the personal battles that you're going through, oftentimes it's not your fault that we lose a battle, because other people have to fight too.
But just because the enemy wreaks havoc in your life doesn't mean that you have to lose that spiritual battle. I thought of the song as I was writing this, "i'm in the Lord's Army." Who's saying the Lord's army in VBS growing up? Sir, come on, let me see, please show me. Okay, thank you.
It's not happening. But it says, "I may never march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, or shoot the artillery. I may never fly over the enemy, but I'm in the Lord's army now." Listen, when you give your oath, you do your swearing in, like, I have a brother who was in the army, when you get sworn in, you're in the battle. It's interesting how we teach even songs to our kids, like you can be part of the Lord's army and not get dirty.
You're going to fight battles, you're going to get dirty, you're going to have pain, you're going to have seasons where you feel broken, but if you're losing that battle, you may not have a right view of Scripture, because John 10:10 says, "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly." He ain't talking about, he ain't, sorry about that, he's not talking about eternal life, he's talking about your life now, that it may be abundant. Not that everything is going to go hunky-dory, not that you're not going to come up against hardships, not that you're not going to suffer trials, but that you may have abundant life in it. Why? Go read James chapter 1, I have to wrap it up, to even find joy and build up perseverance and character through trials. The thief came to steal from you, the thief came to leave you broken. Jesus says, "I have come that you may have abundant life." So are you living in this abundant life through the advantage that we have and our possession of the full oracles of God, or are you just fighting to get by? I can tell you, when the latter, one second, one, not fun.
If you're there today, you can come see me afterwards. It's not fun. It's not fun, feeling defeated. It's not fun, feeling broken.
Depression is a tool from the devil to keep born-again believers, soldiers in the Lord's army, beaten down.
Pastor J.R. Brown · 45:56
Let's pray.
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