Pastor Jeff and Cheryl Orluck
Cheryl: What a good thing to remember, just my father, our father. Wow.
Pastor Jeff: It's great to come and share the words from the place of glory Thank you Tammy and Adrian. Don, you got me on? Test, test? Something is unplugged somewhere then. Am I on? test, test. Maybe this isn't on. We are sorry guys.
Cheryl: I'll take it from here. Now, to begin with
Pastor Jeff: Test, test. There we are. He said to turn the on button on.
Cheryl: I knew that would get fixed as soon as I was going to take it from you.
Pastor Jeff: Yeah, right. Can't let you do that. Henry Blackaby did a great bible study that we did here at Hope for a number of years ago. One of the things that he taught in his spiritual gifts bible study was that God has a vision for a church. He has dreams and he has plans that he wants to fulfill. He does it through the people that he brings to the church. Every single one of us, it's good for us to understand that the Lord brought you to Hope because you had something that you could offer that would help fulfill his vision for hope. Every one of you. You may or may not know what that is, but you belong here because Jesus put you here to accomplish something. I couldn't help but think that when Adrian and Tammy were up here and thank him that he brought them to help accomplish what we needed to accomplish at Hope. Thank you, guys.
But not everybody gets to sit up on the stage in wow us like that. And it doesn't matter. You have a part to play that is critical to the fulfillment of God's vision for this church. If we all understand that, the Lord will plug us into all the things that we are gifted to do, and it's going to make this place run on all eight cylinders. I also wanted to plug in quickly, the Joy Group and the men's ministry of team together, and we are sponsoring an all-church event on August 13th. we bought 30 tickets to the St. Paul Saints. It's a matinee game, a little after two o'clock on Sunday the 13th, so we can all just head down there after church. The game starts at two something, the gates open like as like 12:30 or something.
You can go down there, you can bring a lunch, you can buy a lunch, we can tailgate, we can do whatever we want. Buy your tickets. It's a family event, so if you want to bring your kids or your grandkids or your friends, you can tell them now. If we need more tickets, I'm sure we can get them. I'm sure we can't get in the same location. But get them now and we will have a great time on August 13th watching baseball or maybe not watching baseball. We'll just have fun.
Cheryl and I are teaching through just different things that inspire us out of the words of Jesus, the Jesus way we are calling it. Last month we taught that Jesus said that we had authority to crush the power of the enemy and to trample on serpents and scorpions. Maybe we'll just quick read that scripture and remind ourselves of where we started a month ago, and we are going to continue that on today.
Cheryl: When the 72 disciples returned, they joyfully reported to him, Lord, even the demons obey us when we use your name. Yes, he told them, I saw Satan fall from heaven like lightning. Look, I have given you authority over all the power of the enemy, and you can walk among snakes and scorpions and crush them. Nothing will injure you. But don't rejoice because evil spirits obey you. Rejoice because your names are registered in heaven.
Pastor Jeff: That's a very powerful promise statement that Jesus made to us as his disciples. Last month, we kind of talked through where that authority comes from, that it comes out of our identity, and that our identity comes from heaven. That's why Jesus said, rejoice because your names are registered in heaven. Because your identity and your destiny all come from heaven. The more that we begin to embrace and understand who we are in Christ, the more fulfilled our life will be and the more authority that we will walk in, the more success we'll walk in as his children. We talked about where the power came from, what the power was for all of those types of things.
This morning we want to get a little more practical. We want to talk about more about how to employ that power, how to actually live in that power in our daily lives. As we were talking this through and looking through scriptures over the last couple months, one of the scriptures that that I was brought to is an Ezekiel 2:6, which really opened up this whole thing to me. Let's read that one. This is in the New Living Translation,
Cheryl: Son of man, do not fear them or their words. Don't be afraid, even though they threats surround you like nettles and breyers and stinging scorpions. Do not be dismayed by their dark scowls, even though they are rebels.
Pastor Jeff: Here, I think the Lord is talking to Ezekiel about men and he's referring to them as scorpions. But I want to broaden this out because what really caught me on this is he said, "Do not fear them or their words." When I read that verse, what I began to, what just came to me, the understanding I received was that the real power of our enemy, of the devil, of the demons, and of enemies, of truth is words. That's where his power lies: in his ability to lie to you. In fact, the scriptures tell us that the Satan is a liar and the father of lies. As much as we give credence to the lies that he feeds us that much, we give him power over our lives.
The more that we employ the truth in resistance to those lies, the more we rise up in our authority and we crush his power. So as much as words are his greatest weapon against us, words are our greatest weapon against him. Because when we speak the truth, when we employ the truth in our conversations back to him, just as Jesus did when he was tempted in the wilderness, we win the battle. And so that's what we want to talk through today: how we use truth to break the power of lies that are able to destroy our lives or incapacitate us.
Cheryl: We don't think a lot of times that our own thoughts are lies. Sometimes you have to rise up against yourself. You have to think, what is that? Where did that come from? You don't have to believe everything that comes in your head. It seems like it's right in here. It's just, it's the thing and your brain is up there and it causes you to take action or to embrace things. I don't know, I think we don't think a lot, what's going on?
Pastor Jeff: Just because you think it, you don't have to believe it.
It's true. I can think about a person in another car when I'm driving, you know, a certain way about them, and then I stop myself and think, how do I know that? How do I know that about that person? Well, I don't. I don't know that. That happened on the way here. I want to be awake and I want to be aware of my brain and the words and my thoughts and where they are coming from. If I live my whole life not being aware of that, I'm going to be stuck in that. I'm going to make me a certain person that I don't want to be. Let's get somewhere and let's keep growing in this. It will change your life if you start thinking about, what is this thought? Where is it from?
Pastor Jeff: And then if you realize the thought is wrong and you resist it, I mean the scriptures tell us, if you resist the devil, he will flee from you.
Cheryl: He will flee. Isn't that kind of fun to think of making him flee? I like that.
Pastor Jeff: Yeah. I said this before, but one of the messages of one of my favorite pastors to listen to other than Pastor Brian and Pastor Robert, he said, "To the degree that you are living in hopelessness, it is to the same degree that you are believing a lie." Think about that. To the degree that you live in fear or anxiety or depression is the same degree to which you are believing a lie. You are encased in things that aren't true. A part of this battle that we have, and part of the authority that the Lord has given us is to employ the truth against the lie so that we can rise up into what God has called us to and what he's made us for. That's a tremendous and exciting way to live. Let's look at John 8 verses 31 and 32.
Cheryl: The Jews who had believed him-- to the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, if you hold my teachings, you are really my disciples, then you'll know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
Pastor Jeff: Amen. It's the truth that sets you free. Truth will set you free from despair. Truth will set you free from discouragement. Truth will set you free from fear, knowing who God is, knowing who you are in Christ, and calling those forth or even on behalf of others. When you have people that you love who are in a place of bondage, you have authority to act on their behalf, to speak in their behalf. Many times, when I pray for people who are struggling, one of the things I'll do is I'll just command the devil to leave him alone. I'll just clear the spiritual air around him. I'll open up opportunities, I'll open up a channel. I'll say, holy Spirit, come bring your truth, and I'll declare what's real over them.
Sometimes, you can pray for somebody that you love for many, many years and you don't see a change. But here's the question. You maybe don't see what the change is, but you can't see what their life would've been like if you hadn't been doing that. I've seen in our lives with people who over the years you pray for them, you see that God is sustaining them because of you. If they can't defend themselves, you can step into their place and defend them in your prayer life and it's real. Don't be discouraged because you don't see all these magnificent changes because you don't know what their life would've been like if you hadn't been doing that. Keep on praying; keep on declaring what's real.
As we say this, something that I think is really important to understand is that only what's true is true. But we have to understand, you can't make something true by believing it. You can't make God real by believing in God. Either God is real or God is not real. Either Jesus is a redeemer or he's not a redeemer. And you believing in him won't make him a redeemer or not a redeemer. And not believing in him won't make him one either. You can't make God go away by not believing in God. Do you understand? What's true is true.
Jesus said, "I am the truth." That's what we understand. And so everything that Jesus embodies and all the things that Jesus said are true for us. If they are really true, they are true for the whole world. They are true for everybody. It's important to understand that truth is not a compilation of facts that you can argue about. You cannot debate truth. You can discuss it. And it's actually very encouraging when you discuss truth among yourselves. But it's important to understand that you don't make something true by winning an argument. What's true is real and it impacts our lives because it's real.
That's what I love about Jesus: that through the centuries and even through the recent one hundred years that we can look back in history, we can see how Jesus has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands, millions of people, people who were lost and had no hope, who were strung out on drugs or who were living in poverty. And Jesus came and their lives became different. Their lives were better because Jesus did something. He became real to them.
Right now, I'm reading a really, really fun book about Joy Davidman who is the New York eight Jewish atheist who came to faith and began to correspond with CS Lewis and ended up in later years becoming his wife. I don't know if any of you watched the-- CS Lewis wrote a book called Surprised by Joy and it's all about his conversion experience. They actually did a film on it. We watched it one time. It's kind of a documentary film, but it's a pretty good film. What was really interesting about a man like CS Lewis is that he is totally an intellectual. We all ooh and awe about his books because he just can so logically and clearly make the case for faith.
He was very much in his head, and his story shows us how he was very much in his head. He had to somehow resolve his intellectual arguments against the reality of God. But in the end, his life didn't change because of an intellectual conclusion. He met Jesus. He met Jesus and he became a different man. It was the same with Joy Davidman. She was an atheist. She proclaimed she was an atheist and a communist when she was a teenager. But in a moment of desperation, she prayed to the God she didn't believe in and he showed up. She met Jesus, and her life was never, never the same.
This is what truth does. It impacts our lives. It's real. It's not an argument. It's not a discussion. It's not something that we intellectually conclude. There are good reasons to discuss. It's good to talk to people about why they should believe because they are in intellectual barriers to them even considering it. But in the end, it's the reality of the person of Jesus that changes our life. It's not our Christian doctrine, it's not our Christian tradition. It's not all the good things that we do for Jesus. It's Jesus himself because he is truth. I don't know where that came from.
Because truth is truth, it dismantles all of our arguments. You can't argue against it. That was the problem the Pharisees had. They hated that Jesus was confronting all of their traditions and the way of life they had practiced for thousands of years, but they couldn't silence it. The only way to stop truth is to kill the one who's speaking it. That's why they did it to Jesus. Power brokers have killed the people who have declared truth all through history, all through the nations, all through history. We can see it in history all kinds of times, and we can see it today.
We see it in America in a different way. We see ridicule and fear and all kinds of types of disapproval that try to silence truth. If we let it, it can silence us. But if we declare that Jesus is the solution to every single problem and every single life on all of the earth, and we speak these things that Jesus taught us about what real life really is and what love really is and what living for Jesus really is, people's lives will change. The people in power who want it their way will hate us for it. And you can be a wonderful, loving, nice Christian all you want to, they'll still hate you because you are saying something that they can't argue with because it's real. That's actually what the word truth means in the Greek. Aletheia means reality. What we are trying to do is come into a relationship with a God who is real so he can bring us into real living. That's the goal. That's what we want to do.
Now, just to say something just really quickly. It's an interesting thing that Jesus said. When he was talking to the disciples in this place, he said, "I've given you all power over all of the power of the enemy. You can crush it. You can tramline snakes and scorpions." And then he said, "And nothing will injure you." Nothing will injure you. It seems to me throughout history, there's been all kinds of Christian martyrs. But what Jesus said is true. I want to encourage you that they can take your house, they can take your family, they can take your life, but nothing can injure you. Because what's real is something that's much deeper than your house or even your family or even your life. What's real is something that's eternal. What's real is something you carry inside. Luke 12:4. Let's read that one
Cheryl: Dear friends, do not, don't be afraid of those who want to kill your body. They cannot do any more to you after that. To which I say wait. Huh? I try to wrap my brain around that. That's a big scripture to me.
Pastor Jeff: We all struggle with fear when it comes to sharing Jesus with people on all kinds of different levels. But if we don't, if we let that fear silence us, there are a lot of people who need his salvation who won't get it. It's our part to live dangerously, to follow the path that Jesus took, and if they put us on a cross, so be it. But how many lives were changed because of what Jesus said? How many lives are changed because you dare to carry and speak and live what's really real?
Cheryl: I think about the people who have given their lives in that way, and how much change has come from that? I mean it's not like it hasn't happened a lot, you know? Yep.
Pastor Jeff: Okay, let's go on. This would be a little sideline now it suddenly got really serious in here. Let's go to John 16.
Cheryl: I still have many things to tell you, but you can't handle them now. But when the friend comes the spirit of truth, he will take you by the hand and guide you into all the truth there is. When I think of the Father taking me by the hand, I actually was thinking about him doing that. And when someone is taking you by the hand, remember that they were leading you, they were taking you. Most of the time it was like a nice thing. He's taking us into all the truth there is. I love the truth. The truth! I love it.
Pastor Jeff: Yeah. It changes our lives every day, every day. The Holy Spirit is our number one champion in this war of truth. He's the one that opens up the scriptures to us. He gives us prophetic understanding into the words that we read on the page. Jesus said, "My words are spirit and they are life." His words were never intended to become doctrines. They are not dogma; they are spirit in their life. It's the Holy Spirit who opens up understanding to his words that makes them come alive inside of you so that you live them, so they become part of your makeup.
The one caveat, the one thing about this is you have to be willing to let him confront your thinking because the truth the truth that Jesus is, is different than the way you think. We all are continually growing in truth, but there's not one of us that understands it all. Never was, not on earth. The number one thing the Holy Spirit's going to do with truth is he going to confront your thinking. He's going to start confronting things that you've decided are true and he's going to show you that they are not.
Yeah. Amen. Who said that? Thank you, Lord. One of the things about this, because God is so much bigger than we are, and truth is so much bigger than our ability to understand it, is we have to hold our truths loosely. We live them passionately, but we have to be willing to let God confront them and bring us farther into who he is. Because we don't have it all, and if we lock ourselves into what we've been given to this point, we are going to stagnate and we are going to get stuck. And he has farther to bring us.
Personally, I think that we are going to be growing in truth, probably through most of eternity
because that's how big God is. We are going to come into heaven, not with a perfect understanding of all these things. We are going to be learning more and more and more in heaven just like we are here. But the one key to being able to grow in truth is that you are willing to. Are you willing to be wrong about the things you are convinced of?
Cheryl: That's a big one.
Pastor Jeff: I mean, passionately embrace them until the Lord says, whoops. Because he does all the time, right? I mean, he does for me anyways. I just find myself confronted all the time by the Lord. You are reading the scriptures and all of a sudden there's a whole new different picture in those scriptures. I'll never forget. I love the one where they come to Jesus and they said, Lord, didn't we do miracles in your name? Didn't we cast out demons in your names? And Jesus said, "Depart from me. I never knew you." Holy Spirit says, you know, those were Pentecostals. Cast out demons, spoken tongue, did miracles. Don't you love it when the Holy Spirit just talks to you like that? He just says it straight and you go, oh, that hurts so good.
I want to borrow some phraseology from our current culture wars if I could. Right now, there is all kinds of stuff and a lot of angst lot of anger, a lot of hatred around the issue of who we really are and who we identify with, or who we identify as. I'm this, but I choose to identify as this. I want to pull that into our discussion today. Because the reality is if you don't identify with who you really are, we've got a problem. This is a problem for every single one of us right here, sitting in this room, all of us listening on the livestream.
Let me ask you a question. Are you a child of God loved and valued or do you identify as someone who has been discarded, who is unloved and who is all alone in this world? Do you identify as what you really are or do you identify as something different than what you really are? Because your life is going to go, the way you identify as. If you actually know in your heart and you understand that you are loved by the father and that he is with you and that he is for you, then you will live in an understanding of favor that affects everything about your life. If you actually identify as someone who is unloved, unlovable, incapable with no hope or future, that's going to affect how you experience your life
Cheryl: And you wear these things; you wear them on your continence.
Pastor Jeff: Fully. Fully. Are you provided for by a loving father or are you trapped in poverty with no way out? I don't know, Cheryl and I have always lived hand to mouth, but we've always known that Jesus was our provider. I can just look back and see miracle after miracle after miracle of his provision. Yeah, been there, done that. It's so easy to live with a poverty mentality though. It's so easy to think that you are the one who has to be your provider and you can only trust yourself. It is so easy to live a life that is stingy and poor compared to generous and rich. It has nothing to do with how much money you make. These are realities that are aside from your income. Do you understand?
These are realities that you embrace and if you embrace what's real, your life will flow in the direction of what's real. If you embrace an identity that's different than what's real, you are going to experience less than you could have. Your life will be less than it was intended to be. So it's important for us to embrace what's real and live in what's real. And of course, that's a battle, right? That's why we need this, this message because we all struggle with lies that the enemy is throwing to us or lies that people have spoken to us or lies that exist in our culture and we don't even know their lies. We are living in these lies as if it's normal life. When we begin to understand that there's something else that's true, then we actually have to fight. It's actually a struggle to embrace the truth as compared to something that's been normal for us most of our lives. That's not an easy transition.
We all struggle with it. And that's why we need each other. That's why we need to love each other. That's why we need to show mercy to one another because we all need the same mercy because we are all in the same struggle of learning how to embrace what's true about God and us as compared to what's a lie and stepping into what's real as compared to what's false. The Lord gave me a picture once of a well-worn path and he said to me, "This path is how you've been living your whole life. It is a well-worn path. You go down this path all the time. And so you can see it's used a lot." He says, "but here's what happens: If you look over here, there's actually a path there, but it's all overgrown by weeds because you haven't used it at all."
If you change your path, if you start to walk down this path, it's not easy at first because it's been overgrown, but the more you walk down the path of truth, the more it becomes a well-worn path. And the path you used to walk down will start to be overgrown by weeds. But it's a process. It's time. It takes time for that to happen. It takes a consistent struggle of faith, making the right choice, choosing the truth over the lie, embracing what's real. We need each other for that. We need worship for that. What Jacque shared this morning was powerful. When we worship together, it's real. Jesus comes and meets us. That sustains us. When you are struggling with a lie and you break into a song and you begin to worship the Lord, so many times, the power of that lie is greatly diminished. But you see it's not an easy thing.
CS Lewis said this, I love this picture. He said, there are three images in my mind that I must continually forsake and replace with better ones: The false image of God, the false image of my neighbors and the false image of myself. That is our life, and it's a good life because Jesus gave us authority to trample over all the power of the enemy. You see, he gave that to us. He has given us himself. He's given us Holy Spirit who brings us into all truth. As we wage the war of truth against the lie in the large ways and sometimes in the smallest ways that we think-- you have to wage the war of truth against lies in your relationships.
A marriage counselor told us once, she said no assumptions. We make assumptions. Most of the assumptions we make about our spouses are based on lies. When you are struggling in your relationships, you have to employ the truth about the people in your relationships. My wife is a woman of God. She's called of God. My wife is beautiful; she's smart. I better listen to her more.
Cheryl: I like that.
Pastor Jeff: My children have a destiny in Jesus. They are made in the image of God. They are wonderful as compared to the "they ain't going to amount out to nothing." What kind of children do you want? Let's speak the truth over them. Let's believe who they are in Jesus and tell them that because it's the truth that breaks the power of the lie. One last scripture, then we'll wrap it up: Ephesians four 14 to 15.
Cheryl: Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won't be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever, they sound like the truth. Instead, we will speak the truth in love growing in every way more and more like Christ who is the head of his body, the church.
Pastor Jeff: That's where we get to go. We'll no longer be influenced by every wind of teaching and will no longer be deceived by things that sound true because the Holy Spirit is there guiding us through the words of Jesus, through the scriptures to help us understand what's real and what's not. What's life and what's death. We are the ones who are called to live that way. We get the privilege of living that way and helping others find that same path. That's who we are. Let's pray.
Thank you, Lord. Father, we just thank you for sending us Holy Spirit and giving us the scriptures and breathing into us, the life that is in your words and forming our hearts to be like you. Thank you that you tell us we have the mind of Christ, that we can think your thoughts, we can have your understandings, we can look at our lives, we can look at others, we can look at our world and we can see it the way you see it. We can see it with your understanding. We can see it with your love. We can see it with your compassion. We can see it through the eyes of redemption. We can see our family members that way, our work associates that way. Above all, Lord, we can see ourselves that way.
Just come, Holy Spirit. We just open our hearts to you and we welcome your intrusions into our settled dogma. We really don't want to be like Pharisees. We want to be like-- we are going to be like sponges, willing to take in the things that you speak to us, to lay down the things that have been normal, to pick up the things that are true. And Lord, we want to be willing to live that truth and speak that truth and not be afraid. Amen. Pastor Brian.
Pastor Brian: Thank you, Pastor Jeff. Jesus always equated freedom, which we celebrated this past week in our nation, 4th of July, freedom from tyranny, and Jesus always equated freedom with knowing him as the truth. Freedom wasn't just an arbitrary thing that one could hopefully discover in this journey of life, but that there is a specific way for that freedom to be discovered. And in our world today, we are discovering more and more ways to try and bring peace, freedom, and joy to our lives that eliminate the only way that peace and joy and freedom can come. And that is through Jesus. So thank you again for the recalibration. It's always good to recalibrate, isn't it?
This week, let's just keep asking, Lord, help me to know you the truth more deeply. And as we know him more deeply and his ways, we will come into a greater sense of freedom, so that even if as the scriptures that we read this morning, even if our lives are lost in that, there's nothing really lost. There's nothing really lost. Lord, help us to have that level of faith and understanding, that tenacity to be willing to pursue that, to love you Jesus, with all of our heart, our soul, our mind, and our strength. May we truly live and move and have our being in you and all these other things that you do want to bless us with, your sermon on the Mount, especially in Matthew chapter six, the things that you wanted to bless us with. You do care about those things, but the deeper thing that you really care about is that we know you whom to know is life eternal. Help us to never lose our vision of Jesus. We ask this in your name.
Let's raise our hands together. And now may the Lord bless you and may the Lord keep you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. And may the Lord turn his face towards you and give you his peace. And may you always pursue him, the truth. This we pray in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, amen.
God bless you. Hope you have a wonderful time at the picnic today. I need to beg your indulgence that Jacque and I will not be in attendance at the picnic. We have a wedding that we have to be a part of here in about an hour and a half. And so we are going to be running over to do a wedding. But please enjoy the picnic and we'll see you at the rib fest for sure, which will be in August, right? Yes, August 6th. God bless you. Have a wonderful day. Thank you, Pastor Jeff for everything. Thanks. Jim will be serving communion here today after the service and we will have people to pray for you. Thank you.
Transcript taken from the Sunday morning service 7-9-23. If you would like to watch the full service, click the link below.