Pastor Jeff and Cheryl Orluck
Jeff: There, how is that? We are talking about the joy group; joy, just older youth, just us kids. Next Sunday, Sunday evening, July 18th, we are all going to meet at 5 O'clock at Brian Jacque's. We are going to do another outdoor bonfire, hot dog cookout, and sing along. So all of you, 55 and older, or if you are younger, you can sneak in. We are going to all have a great time. You can show up over there about five. If you can bring a salad or dessert pass, you can actually sign up. We've got a signup sheet on the table back there, and you can let us know what you are bringing, so we've got an idea what's coming. And then in August, the end of August, on a Wednesday night, we are going to meet at the Maple Grove town green, and there is a band there playing oldies. We are going to bring a picnic dinner about 5 and secure a spot to sit and listen to them and have a fun night listening to old rock and roll. And then on October 30th, we are going to the Chanhassen dinner theater to see the music man. We are going to get that announcement out. You can buy your tickets ahead of time. You can put down a deposit. We'll look for final payment in September for that. So that's about it.
Brian: Thank you, Pastor Jeff. Pastor Jeff is going to be bringing a message to us here shortly. I had asked him. I knew that this past week was going to be a long one and a hard one for me. And so I just felt like it would be more fruitful for all of you to have him speak today than maybe for me. We just want to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your love and your support during this time of loss for my mom passing. Yet this was a great home going for her. Yesterday we had a wonderful celebration of her life. As Jacque mentioned earlier, we do have some food left over, so if you would like to hang around to have a quick lunch after church, or if you live close to the church and you are watching her livestream, hurry on over here after the benediction and you can get part of the lunch as well. That would be great to see you. We just thank you for all of that.
How many know that prophecy and the spirit of prophecy have a long shelf life? I feel like Lou had something she wanted to share that God had for us today. It didn't kind of work to have her share right at the time that she came forward, but God's spirit is still hovering. And so Lou, why don't you come? The whole thing about prophecy is the legitimacy of it is not how spontaneous it is, but the legitimacy of it is who it's coming from and how God gives us words. I know you have a word of encouragement here for us.
Lou: As we were singing, there is none like you, no one else can touch my heart like you do, the Lord said to me, do you realize that I'm singing that over you and to you? There is none like you. No one else can touch my heart like each one of you do. I have searched the world over. I have searched, remember? I was sent to seek and to save them that were lost. You are one of them and I am still seeking you and my heart is burning, burning, burning, burning with love for you. I will never condemn you. My arms are open wide to you. One look from your eye has stolen my heart. Come, come, come and be with me and let me love you. Let me pour my love on you.
Brian: Well, let's just do that. Let's just let God pours love out on us today. Lord, we receive your grace. We receive your love. Jesus, when you came to earth, you came to present God to us. You painted a beautiful picture of what our father in heaven was like. You made it clear what love looked like from heaven. You made it clear what the father's love for us was like by how you lived, but it didn't end there, Lord. When you rose and you ascended into heaven, you blazed the trail to present mankind to God, the father as well. We just thank you that Lord Jesus, you have not only made a way for God's love to come to the earth, for God so loved the earth that he gave his one and only son, but that Jesus, you have made a way for us to enter into eternity as well. That's the love of our father in heaven that has captured us, the love that was shown through Jesus, the love that we experienced by the presence of Holy Spirit.
Lord, I pray that all of our attempts to become presentable to you would fall by the wayside because Lord, you have loved us with a never ending love and a love that will not let us go. So father, we look to you who are the author and finisher of our faith, whatever faith we might have, Lord, you began it in us. You who began a good work in us will be faithful to complete it. You deposited your love and you gave us a revelation of your grace and you presented yourself to us through Jesus. And now we want to respond and give ourselves holy to you and walk completely into surrender of our fears and our unbelief and surrender of our attempts to purify ourselves so that we could be presentable to you, but rather let your love simply purify us, change us, transform us, deliver us, Lord. It's in you and only you that these things can happen.
So we just thank you that Lord, not only can we sing to you, there is none like you, but then you also sing that over us. That is your heart for us. We struggled to believe that. We struggled to believe it, but help us with our unbelief, Lord. We do believe. We are moving in the direction of believing, but help us, Jesus, with our unbelief. This we pray Jesus in your name and for your wonderful sake. And everybody said, amen. Amen. I appreciate Pastor Jeff. Let's give him a great welcome and his wonderful wife, Pastor Cheryl, thank you for being here and take us even higher. God bless you.
Jeff: There we go. Oh, it's amazing what happens when you flip a switch. It's a lot more fun being up here with you than alone. Thanks. We are going to talk about the ways of the Lord today. Something I have actually wanted to talk about for quite a long time and it seems like this is a good opportunity to talk about it. We'll just jump right in with a scripture. And then we'll just let the Holy Spirit take us along his path from that point on. So we are going to start with Isaiah. Actually, this same scripture is found in two Old Testament, prophets; Isaiah wrote these words and so did Micah. They are almost identical, but I think this is Micah 4:2 that is up here. Cheryl, why don't you go ahead? You can read that first scripture for us.
Cheryl: Isaiah 2:3 and Micah 4:2: people from many nations will come and say, come let us go to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of Jacob's God. There, he will teach us his ways and we will walk in his paths.
Jeff: We are going to talk about the ways that God teaches us and the paths that he leads us on. Actually, the title of the message is God's ways bring blessing, because I think many of us have discovered in our lives that as we've lived the ways that the Lord has taught us, our lives keep getting better. Has anybody found that out? It just keeps getting better. Actually, it says in another place in the Old Testament, the Lord's blessing brings riches and he adds no sorrow to it. That's the goodness of the Lord. There are lots of ways to get riches in this world, but sometimes there is quite a cost you have to pay to do that. But with the Lord there is no sorrow. There is like no underlying cost of pain that you have to pay in order to receive his blessing. He gives us his blessing because he loves us.
Cheryl and I were actually talking this morning, and she brought up a really good point about this. When we say God's ways bring blessing, that's actually true. You are can say something? Okay. What we are not saying is that you have to walk in God's ways for him to love you and to bless you. Those are two different things and we to make sure that we differentiate between the two of them. God loves us all. We are made in his image. He loves us because he loves us, not just us who are sitting here, not just us, who are in the church of Jesus Christ, not just us who are Christians, but all people who have lived on the face of the earth have been made in the image of God and loved by the father equally the same. His love is the same for all of us.
Because the father loves us, he loves to bless us. Just like you as a father or mother love to bless your children. It's just what we do. The blessing of God comes to us in many different ways, simply out of his love and many times whether we believe in him or not. Jesus died before we deserved it. Jesus' death was for all mankind before anybody deserved it. And so his love for us and his blessing comes to us through that love whether we deserve it or not, whether we believe in him or not. Some of you have stories. I've heard all kinds of stories about how God saved people, intervened in dangerous or near death situations and save them long before they actually knew who he was. Has anybody had something like that happen to them?
God does things for you before you even know who he is. That's how good he is. But at the same time, what we are talking about this morning is the fact that when God calls us into his love, he also calls us into his ways. When we learn his ways and when we live in his ways, we get additional blessing, not because we've earned them from God, but because that's the way it works. There are spiritual laws that are at work in the world. The law of sowing and reaping is one of the primary ones that we all live under. It's all a matter of accepting and receiving the consequences for the actions that you take. Paul said, very clearly, don't be deceived. God's not mocked. Whatever you reap you'll sow. That spiritual law is taught in many religions, not just Christianity.
The reality is that if you live in the ways of God, you are sowing seeds into your life that result in a good harvest. So if you learn the ways of God and you practice the ways of God, your will get better whether you know Jesus or not. It's interesting, isn't it? You don't have to qualify for him to love you and you don't even have to know him to receive the blessing of his ways because it's simply a matter of you doing them and you get the blessing. So people that don't know Jesus, people who are other faiths, because every faith teaches some ways that are the ways of God— And in any faith, you can better your life if you practice ways that are the ways of God.
Many people find that their lives improve even when they convert to a non-Christian religion because they stop doing the bad things they were doing, and they start practicing the ways of God and their lives get better. This is a matter of sowing and reaping. But for us as Christians, it's important for us to understand that as much as God loves us, the real blessing and richness of our lives comes when we learn his ways in walk in his paths. That's when life gets better and better and better. That is a lifelong experience. That's what we talked about a couple of weeks ago: that lifelong experience of learning to have the mind of God.
One of the things I was going to say about that, and I lost it, so we'll just move on. It will come back. Let's go to Isaiah 55: 8 and 9 because this is kind of the heartbeat of it all. This is something I had. This is a scripture I've used for years to teach what holiness is. So go ahead, Cheryl; you can just read this one.
Cheryl: For my thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Jeff: This is why Jesus had so much trouble when he came because he was expressing the thoughts and the ways of the father and nobody understood them. They thought they did. They thought they did and because they thought they did, they figured he had it wrong. That's the problem with those of us who are fairly religious; we think we know it all. And so we learn our religion and then when Jesus comes and tells us the truth, it doesn't mix with what we've learned. We say, well, one of us is wrong; it has got to be you because I was taught this out of the Bible. The Pharisees had a huge problem with this. Jesus kept doing things that made him go tilt. This can't be God. He healed on the Sabbath. You have to keep the Sabbath holy. Something is wrong here. It has got to be him. We spend our whole lives arguing with Jesus about what truth is and it would be so much better if we just shut up and listen.
Everything Jesus did demonstrated the fact that God's ways are different than ours. That's everything that he did. As I said a couple of weeks ago when we were talking, we have an idea of what truth is. We have an idea of what God is like based on our life experiences and what we've been taught. Believe it or not, when we come into relationship with Jesus, all of that needs to be laid at his feet, so he can reteach us his ways and we can walk in his paths. Oh, it just came back to my mind what I was going to say, so we'll just do a little caveat over here.
I just want to take a second and talk about the difference between the ways of God and the will of God. The will of God is a very real thing. You'll find scriptures all throughout the Bible where it talks about God's will, but I find that in Christendom and at least in my part of Christendom and evangelicalism, we really have a misunderstanding when we talk about God's will for our lives. It seems like so many wonderful believers in all kinds of different churches spend their whole lives trying to understand what is God's will for my life? What is God's calling on my life? What am I supposed to be doing for God?
I think the problem with the words, the will of God, for most of us here is that they are task oriented. They are action oriented. We figure if we are doing the will of God, we'll be doing the right things. We'll be in the right place. We'll be where he wants it to be. We'll be doing what he wants us to do. Until we figure out what that is, we feel like we are not living a life that's pleasing to him. Has anybody ever struggle with that? That's a very common thing that we struggle with. One of my goals is to help us understand this morning that it's not important for you to understand God's will for your life. What's important is that you learn his ways. Because when we learn his ways, we start walking his path, and when you walk on his path, you find yourself in his will. You don't need to know his will to do his will. You need to walk in his ways and you will be in his will. Does that make sense?
We struggle to understand the wrong things and what we really want to do is we want to let Jesus teach us his ways. His ways flow into as will. But you can't do it in the reverse order because most of us are thinking, what do I need to do? What Jesus wants to do is to make us be. I had a friend who said we want to be do be-ers, but Jesus wants us to be be-doers.
Jesus taught us to pray in the Lord's Prayer: thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. I think Pastor Brian in one of his recent messages said the Lord isn't so interested of getting you into heaven as much as he is getting heaven into you. This is where we are going. It's really great to know there is heaven. It's really great to know that life doesn't end here on earth, that this is just the beginning of a whole adventure with God that's going to last a long, long, long, long time, but Jesus didn't come and die just to get you into heaven. That wasn't the point. He said repent for the kingdom of heaven is near; it's here. As I've said, many times, he wasn't meaning in terms of time, it's like it's near in time. What he was saying is near is he is talking in terms of geography. It's near to you this way. Many, many times I felt the Holy Spirit. He says if you want to live in the spirit world, just reach out your hand. I mean, it's just right here. It's right here.
Cheryl: I never thought of that that way.
Jeff: Oh my goodness.
Cheryl: Geography.
Jeff: Geography.
Cheryl: Wow.
Jeff: Geographic rather than chronological. Yeah.
Cheryl: That's good.
Jeff: The ways of God are higher than our ways. They are higher than heaven is above earth. That's right. When I was reading this the other day, it struck me that in Ephesians, Paul says that we are seated in heavenly places with Christ Jesus. So we are higher than heaven is above earth already. The ways of God that he wants to us, the thoughts of God are not unattainable. Jesus intends for us to learn them. He intends for heaven to be infused into us. He intends for us to have the mind of Christ. Paul talks about that in Corinthians. He talks about who can know the mind of the Lord. In fact, I think we got this one. First Corinthians 2:16, Deb. Let's have Cheryl read that one.
Cheryl: Who can know the Lord's thought? Who knows enough to teach him, but we understand these things for we have the mind of Christ.
Jeff: That's a wonderful promise. I think a couple of weeks ago— this is good to confuse everybody. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about how the 18 inches from here to here is a long way to go, but the Lord wants to get his understanding of who he is from here down to here. Now we are going to go in the other direction. The mind of the Lord is here. It's in your spirit. He who joins himself to the Lord is one spirit with him. When you moved into a faith relationship with Jesus, the Holy Spirit connected with your spirit and you were made alive. Jesus called that new birth. That connection is in the deepest part of you. It's in your spirit. That's down here. And so now what we want to talk about is the mind of Christ is down here, but we need it to be renewed in our mind. We need to get it from here to here. It's a long journey. It's lifelong journey. That's the thing.
Cheryl: Both ways are good.
Jeff: What's that?
Cheryl: Both ways are good. I think we need all of that.
Jeff: I think we do. Yeah. I think we do. Actually, when we were talking about knowing the love of God, we were talking about getting it from our head into our heart, our soul, our feelings, our emotions, our understanding, and now we are talking about even a deeper place in that coming up into the way we think, which affects our emotions and our feelings and our understanding. So just to confuse you all.
The Lord's desire is that we begin to learn his ways and he is eager to teach us his ways. I think that when we talk about discipleship, this is what we really want to talk about. When someone comes to Jesus or all of us who have walked with Jesus for a long time, we want to keep on learning his ways. There is more and more to learn. He is an infinite God. As it is with getting a grasp of his love, it's the same with his ways. It's a lifelong journey, but we want to be on the path. We want to start learning because everything that we learn of his ways, when we start walking in those ways, life gets better. The blessing follows us when we walk on that path. And so it's very important that we walk on that path. There are certain aspects of it that I think we all understand.
In fact, I was going to just briefly mention three common ways of the Lord that I think we understand that have been a part of Cheryl and my life for a long, long time, and that I think has resulted in us living really a blessed life. So let's just look at three. There is a whole bunch, but these are three that you will all relate to. I think they are valuable talking about just to kind take this out of the ethereal and let's bring it down into reality. Okay. The first one is covenant. I think we have a scripture in Genesis. Let's see here. It is way back in my notes here. Not in yours either. I must have cut them out. Do you have them, Deb? Do you have a Genesis one? Okay. Oh, that's because it's Matthew. Jesus was quoting Genesis. Jesus was quoting Genesis, Matthew 19: 3-6. I was making these outlines and the Lord said, you know what, you are just going to end up throwing that over your shoulder. I'm going to take you where I want you to go.
Cheryl: Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason? Haven't you read, he replied, that at the beginning, the creator made them male and female and said, for this reason, a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh. So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.
Jeff: Covenant is a way of God. To live in covenant is a way of God. It's something that has been totally lost in our culture. It's something that, for the most part, our generation of the church has in many ways failed to convey to the next generation so that the concept of marriage has become optional, if you like each other after a while. And of course, it's only mandatory if you still like each other after a while. But covenant is a way of God. What covenant does is it binds us together so that we don't part ways when it gets hard, because every covenant relationship gets hard. There is not a marriage under the sun that doesn't have problems. Most of them are pretty serious. Some of you might've heard Brian and Jacque's story back when we were doing stories of hope on Sunday nights. They had serious problems. Cheryl and I had our years when it was really, really, really hard. Everybody does. You always find out that the person you thought you married isn't the real one. That's just how it works. It's like, so I married an ax murderer.
Cheryl: And I was just fixing handles on axes.
Jeff: Yeah, you were.
Cheryl: Are you talking about me?
Jeff: I hope not. When Cheryl and I do pre-marriage counseling, we tell the young people that we are marrying that you will never have a 40 year relationship if you get married four times for 10 years. A 40 year relationship, the depth of a 40 year relationship only happens if you stay true to each other for 40 years. It's the only way. It's more than just— when we talk about covenant, we are not talking about living separate lives, but staying together for the kids or because it's financially better or for whatever reason. That's not the point. The point is to love and to cherish and to find a way to do that through all the difficulties of life. That's hard, but that's what covenant brings us to.
One of the things I've discovered lately is when we divorce, obviously, we've lost, we give away and we lose a lot of valuable years that have led up to that time, whether we've been married 5, 10, 20, or 40, but the greatest loss, isn't the past, the greatest loss is the future because what's coming for you now that you've been married 20 years and you've got three kids and you are going to have grandkids, the loss is even greater what would be coming to you. Not that you won't have your kids and grandkids, but the relationships will be just completely different.
When you decide that you are covenanted and you find a way through all the difficulties that life brings you, your life is blessed. Of course, it's easy for us to end up judging each other or feeling judged over this issue because it's prevalent, not only in our culture, but in our church. Many of us, some of us sitting here have been through it. We've had the heartbreak, we've had the brokenness, and we've experienced the pain. We understand that those things happen, and here we are, and there is nothing we can do to change it. But you know what the great news is? No matter what has happened in your life up to this point, God is here to bless all the rest of your years. You can experience a new life right now today, no matter what has happened in the past, no matter what you've done wrong, no matter what has been done wrong to you. Right now, today, you can step into the future with Jesus and he has blessing for you.
Right now, today, if you have departed from his paths or didn't walk in his paths and you reap the whirlwind as a result right now today, you can begin to learn his paths and you can step into blessing. No matter how old you are, no matter what has happened, it is the same for all of us. His grace his new, his mercies every morning, every morning, every morning, this morning, tomorrow morning, the next morning, every morning, always. Horrible things, horrible things that happen in our lives, God walks us through and he gives us new tomorrows.
I was just talking to a friend yesterday at the funeral, after the funeral, who had a horrible experience couple of years ago, and I heard these amazing stories about how God was with her. At the end, she said something like, so maybe that's wrong. And I said, you know what, we always try to figure out if something was right or it was wrong or was good, or it was bad. And that really doesn't matter anymore. The point is you are here. Jesus got you here, and now we get to move forward with him. That's how good God is. That's what redemption is. That is mind-blowing, but it's true.
I want that to be kind of the underlying truth as we talk about his ways. Because when we talk about ways they can become for us what we should have done. I've had those feelings, like I've been in church and there is been some model family on the stage and I thought, oh man, I have just really blown it. I'm never going to have what they have. Has anybody ever felt like that? You see the perfect ideal in front of you and it's just like, man— it's just not true. You always have an opportunity to take it from there. If you've got kids that are estranged from you, most of us do you just walk in his ways, you learn how to love them even better because Jesus teaches you, and guess what, you find your way through. So that's covenant. That's covenant. Another one, this one we'll call service. The scripture is Colossian 3:22 and 23.
Cheryl: Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything. You do try to please them all the time. Not just when they are watching you. Serve them sincerely because of your reverent fear of the Lord work willingly at whatever you do as though you were working for the Lord rather than the people.
Jeff: This passage of scripture happened to become very true for me when I was a young man. Here is what you learn: when you walk in the ways of the Lord, you serve your masters willingly and you serve them well. I've never been a slave. Sometimes at certain jobs, it feels like that. If you are self-employed, it's even worse because now you are at the mercy of your customers. But in any case, whoever your master happens to be, and we all have them, if you serve them well, you are the one who's going to get promoted. I understood early on that my number one job as an employee was to make my boss look good. That's how I live my life in my work life, and I've been blessed. It's just the blessing of the Lord. Maybe you haven't and your vocational life isn't so good. That's okay, but you can. You can no matter how old you are. You can, if you are 18, you can. If you are 45, you can. If you are 65, you always have a master you can serve. If you serve them, well, you get promoted. That's just how it works. It's the blessing of the Lord. He makes rich and he adds no sorrow to it. Sometime it's just simple faithfulness in our duties and we end up rich. I mean, we do end up rich.
I don't know about you; the Lord has completely redefined wealth for me. It's nice to have money, but that's really not the point. The wealth is so much more than how much money you have. You can have very little money and be very wealthy and you can have a whole lot of money as many people do in our culture and be depressed, on medication and miserable. How is it that someone has successful and wealthy as Howard Hughes died a hermit? How can that be? Well, it is, but that wasn't wealth. The wealth is in here. That's another simple way of the Lord. I've found that it has brought great blessing to my life.
For people who are self-employed, I just think of like my son-in-law, Ben. He breaks his back to take care of his customers. They are his masters. You guys probably do too, John and Bridget. You do whatever you have to do. There have been times when to make a sale happen, he had to go spend a whole day of his time cleaning out someone's garage because it was a mess. Not only did that sale happen, but the people were so blessed by how he took care of them that another sale happened with the same customer. That's just how it works. One more, let's just talk about giving. This is Luke 6:38.
Cheryl: Give and you will receive. Your gift will return to you in full. Press down, shaken together to make room for more running over and poured into your lap. The amount you give will determine the amount you get back.
Jeff: Generosity is one of the main qualities of God that I've really come to understand. He is so generous. He is overwhelmingly generous. He gives and gives and gives, and he doesn't expect anything back. Giving generously is a way of the Lord. When we become givers, we are blessed. Understandably, this scripture has been used in very manipulative ways in many church services to get people to give with promises you are going to get it all back 10 times, a hundred times, blah, blah, blah. That's not the point. It's just not the point. What Jesus said is true. It's just true, but I don't need to tell you what you are going to get back, because again, wealth, what you are going to get back is way more than just the money.
When you give to the poor, when you give to your church, when you tip generously, when you help a friend who needs help monetarily, when you give to someone who asks of you, you get back. It wasn't the beginning of this lesson, but one of the things that really blew my mind some years ago was— remember when Rob gave us the book, the Blessed Life, and it was such a powerful book, we gave it to the whole church. If you haven't read it, it's amazing. You get a really cool understanding of what it means to give and receive back. It's just such a simple way of life. It's not a formula. It's the way we live. It's the way of the Lord. When we learn the way of the Lord, we begin walking on that path. When we walk on the path, we experienced the blessing, the fruit, the result of what we are doing. So that's just three simple ways.
There are all kinds of the ways of the Lord that we learned. I just want to close with one more scripture, because it's important to put all this in a very important context in terms of how we look at this in our life. Let's look at Colossians 3 verses 12 to 15.
Cheryl: Since God chose you to be the holy people he loves, you must clothe yourself with tender hearted, mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Make allowances for each other's faults and forgive anyone who offends you. Remember, the Lord forgave. You see, you must forgive others. Above all, clothe yourselves with love which binds us all together in perfect harmony and let the peace that comes from Christ rule in your hearts. For as members of one body, you are called to live in peace, and always be thankful.
Jeff: There are some ways of the Lord there, aren't there? The problem, the biggest problem that we have with learning the ways of the Lord is that over time, his ways become our rules. Rules are about doing ways are about being; they two different things. The things that I shared with you, those three points, I learned them as a very young Christian. We've been practicing them our whole lives. At some point in time, those ways became rules. When they became rules, they became things I did because I should and they became things that I judged others by for not doing because it was because I moved from a relational experience to a task-oriented perspective. I moved from love to rules. That easily happens to every one of us and to every church.
I've been part of several church plants, and we all start out with the best intentions and we all end up in the same place: stuck in a bunch of rules that started out as ways of the Lord. It's not that they were bad. It's that they just got compartmentalize in the wrong place and used in the wrong way, so that I end up assigning value to you as a believer based on whether or not you are following the rules. It's good to follow the rules. It's not that the rules are bad. It's that I've made them into rules. We we've left the path and we charted our own trajectory here and we've taken control. Very easily, what happens is that the truths of God become the things that we use to give ourselves power. They become our weapons. They become what we use to separate.
Cheryl: We get our eyes off of the one and we start to focus here. All the focus is the one.
Jeff: That's good; off the one and on the one. We had a teacher years ago who always talked about the me in me and the Jesus in me. What we always need to come back to is this relationship with our heavenly father, this relationship with that is based on love, and choose to walk in his ways. When we are on that path, there is no need to judge anybody else. What we want to do is help each other. We would talk as leaders in the church about, well, this person is not doing this and this person is not doing this, and can you believe what this person did? Oh, man, how are we going to fix all these problems? We are going to have to have these confrontations, all this nonsense.
All the time that we are doing that and I'm doing this, his ways are down here. It is the ways that we are down here that kept jamming up against those rules I was following, was this scripture right here. What literally happened to me a long time ago, more than 20 years ago, I was reading the scripture and I had been following all the rules. I was doing everything as right as I understood it. Most of the ways were ways of the Lord and I was doing them. I was determined to do them right. I was determined to make everybody else do them right. I read this passage of scripture, this is the one, and I realized, oh my goodness, I've had it all wrong. I've had it all wrong. It has all been about what you should and shouldn't do. It has all been about the rules. It has all been about controlling your thoughts and controlling your actions and controlling your words and doing it right. Mercy, kindness, humility, gentleness and love: they weren't in that formula at all. I had to repent. I had to repent of all my rules.
I actually had to say, Lord, I missed it. I've been all wrong. The amazing thing is that we were all wrong, but having lived the ways of the Lord, we were blessed. See, that's how his ways work. When you walk in the ways of the Lord, you can even have the wrong attitude, but you'll be blessed because of his ways, because of the law of sowing and reaping. But that's not where we want to be. We want to have his ways. We want to be on his path. We want to have his heart. We want those things down here. I've probably shared this, but I would be doing what I thought it was supposed to do as a pastor. I would be having his confrontational meetings with people about sin in their life and it all felt wrong, but I knew it was what I had to do. There wasn't one of those meetings that didn't go south and ended up bad.
Down here, I knew it was wrong, but that's because his mind is down here, but it wasn't up here. I needed to get his mind, his ways, his thoughts from down here to up here. That's the goal: to begin thinking his thoughts, to begin looking at each other the way he does. When we see each other, the way he does, there is no room for judgment criticism, malice, resentment, bitterness. None of that fits. None of that is down here. It's all up here. But if we let his love his mercy, which triumphs over judgment— there is another law of sowing and reaping. That's when that became real to me about this same time. It says judgment will be merciless to those who have shown no mercy. Mercy triumphs over judgment.
All of a sudden I realized in my relationships with people as a pastor, as a leader, as a boss or whatever they are, I want to make sure if I err in a decision with people, I err on the side of mercy, because I want to get mercy. It's selfish. It's just simply, I'm going to be merciful because I want to get mercy, but that's true. You see, it's true. What we want to do is we want to move into this relational part of our relationship with Jesus. We want to learn his ways. We want to find his path. We want to walk in them. When we walk on that path, our lives are blessed. When we walk on this path that Paul described in Colossians, the lives of others are blessed. When we were living in the rules, we weren't really a blessing to anybody. Our family resented us. We were going down the wrong path with our children, because everything was about what you had to. Literally for us, with our oldest daughter, one day, the Lord just spoke and he said, if you don't lighten up, you are going to lose her. That was the Holy Spirit. Those were his very words when she was about 14 or 15.
The Lord is with us all through it. I mean, that's the most amazing thing. He doesn't give up on you. He doesn't quit. He doesn't stop. He just takes you from where you are and he leads you into his path. Wherever you are at this point, you can just yield to him. You can let go of what he is showing you was a rule or the wrong way and you can choose to begin to step into his ways. If you are not quite sure what they are that's okay because the one thing he loves to do is teach us. The one thing that I think I would love to spend the rest of my life doing is teaching people the ways of the Lord. We have the mind of Christ, but we want to get it up to here so that we think with his thoughts, we feel with his feelings, we see with his eyes and we bring his kingdom to earth. Anything else you want to say? So that's it. Let's pray. Lift up your hands to the Lord.
Father, thank you that you are always present, always willing to bring us a new, fresh breath of your grace. Lord, every time we talk about things like this, there is always room for a sense of failure, shame, condemnation, so wherever the enemy is trying to do that, we break it off in Jesus name and we release mercy and hope for the future. As we trust you, Holy Spirit, to teach us all things as Jesus said, that you would teach us all things. Thank you for being so close to us right here right now every day and teaching us the ways of the Lord. We love you for that. We trust you for that. Amen. If you would like prayer, Cheryl and I would be happy to pray for you, or you can pray for each other. We trust you will have a lovely afternoon and a great week. The Lord be with you all. You are going to say something?
Brian: We will have lunch for anybody that wants to stick around. Pat, maybe if you could grab a couple of guys and bring some tables out so we have a place to sit around the tables and stick around for another 30 minutes and enjoy each other's fellowship. We just thank you for being here today. God bless you. Thank you, Pastor Jeff. You did a wonderful job today. God bless you and Cheryl. Have a great day. Bye-bye.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 7-11-21. If you would like to watch the full service, click the link below.