The 2-Part Contract

Title is a two-part contract. The two-part contract. I have one right here. It's a contract I have with the Hampton Inn. And I have to sign every year. They give me their prices, and we negotiate what we can with each other. And then I have to sign. They have to sign and date it.

But it is a two-part contract. It tells me first what they're going to do for us, and then it tells what I'm going to do for them. That means get them paid. All of you have signed many contracts before, I'm sure, for various things.

And it's very important. Now, it's part of the legal stipulations in this country. There's your part and there's their part. And each one must fulfill their part for the contract to not be broken or corrupted and to be enforced. I think most of us realize that a contract is an agreement between two parties, or multiple parties, but most of the time it's two parties. And we are very well-equipped to understand when we get baptized that we are making a baptismal covenant, as it's called, a baptismal contract. When we make this contract, as I've had here before with some of you that have actually done the ceremony, the first question I ask is, have you repented of all of your sins, to which the person will go, hopefully, yes?

Otherwise, it's a short day, not a very wet one. And then the second part of you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, to which our hope is they will say yes. As William is here somewhere, we did in Guyana just about a month ago, wasn't it? A few weeks ago, a month ago, we had three there we baptized. And baptism is important. I think we realize that it is important to God, and it should be important to us.

It may be the most important decision we ever make in our life, besides accepting the call as we heard about in the first message and doing something about that call. I want to go to a scripture that reminds us of this at the end of the Bible, almost, if you'll go with me, to the book of Revelation. Revelation 12. And this tells a story. I won't go into the story. I've done that before, and I'll do it again as we get towards the Feast of Tabernacles.

But it talks about the woman pictured there as the church, Jesus Christ, the head of that church, and that she is pursued by the evil one, the dragon, the devil. And he hides. Christ is able to hide some. There's a place of safety that is talked about for times, times, and half a time. But in verse 17, it says, and the dragon was enraged with the woman, picturing towards the end time and this symbolic of the devil and the church, and he went to make war with the rest of her offspring. Okay. That's her children. And he re-emphasizes here how do we know who her children are.

And it carries out two conditions that make us her children, make those people at that time her children. And it says, those who keep the commandments of God and have the testimony of Jesus Christ.

Hmmm. Sins repent except Jesus Christ. Very same thing we do with the baptismal covenant. So basically, God is showing us here even at the end time, and it has been from Christ time to this time, that there's a covenant. There's an agreement. You might even say there's a contract between God and us. He asked us to do our part of that contract. Keep the commandments, have the testimony of Jesus Christ. That's a contract. Very simple. Very simple contract as this one is from Hampton Inn. I don't know if any of you have signed contracts, but you may five signed contracts with ten, fifteen, twenty pages on them before where every little thing is stipulated.

But basically, I want to talk about this contract that we have with God. It's pretty simple, so it's not hard to understand. You don't need a lawyer for this contract. I've had contracts I basically had to call a lawyer on. When I had my business, I had contracts quite often I would turn over to my lawyer and see if he wanted to read the fifty-something pages and see if he could tell me if there were any issues in there. Didn't feel like reading half of it. I didn't know because they tried to phrase things in such a way that you need to pay an attorney to read it.

And sad but true. So I want to look at in the short time I have here today this contract that you have that I have, that we all have, that the offspring of God has with God. And I want to look at our part, his part. I want to look at the two stipulations that we are responsible for. And the other we don't have to worry about.

I had a businessman one time. I respected him a lot. Matter of fact, before I ever started my company when I worked for another company.

Am I getting low here or something? I went off.

I sure did. There it goes. Oh, the battery's out. Oh, I see it flashing. Mm-hmm.

It ran out. There we go.

Thank you, sir.

All right, got the green light.

So yes, as I was telling about my friend, older man, 25 years older than I was, has successful business. He'd had that business for about 18 years. And so I wanted to know what made him successful. I said, if you just spend me time, I brought him over to lunch. And because he wouldn't leave his office, he would stay in his workplace. Never went out for lunch. So I brought him lunch and said, give me 30 minutes or an hour your time, which he did. And it was very interesting because I said, can I see one of your contracts for what you do business? He said, I don't have one. I said, you don't have a contract? Nope. Haven't had one for 18 years. I said, wait a minute. You do this work, and then you get a down payment, big down payment, before the work? He goes, nope. They just pay me after the work is done. I said, wow! Aren't you afraid somebody is going to beat you? He said, 18 years, hundreds and hundreds of customers, only one person has ever not paid me. And he said he intended to beat me, and I let him. And then he came back and needed more work done. And he had to go 30 miles to Nashville to get it done.

You can't do that today. I spent many years ago, over 30 years ago, since I had my business. Yeah, wow! I'm 35. You can't do that. You got to have a contract today. Because people will beat you. They will find that out. The world has changed a lot. And in the future, it's not going to get any better. It'll get worse. And people will even look at contracts to see how they can beat you out of that. Well, God's not trying to beat us out of this contract. He wants us to fulfill our part, and then he will fulfill his. So let's go. The very first one, he said, keep the commandments. What commandments are he talking about? Ten. I mean, it's pretty basic. This is a basic contract. Just two points. So it's pretty common. As a matter of fact, the last disciple alive, outlived most of them by 20 to 30 years, was the apostle John. And he writes about that. He's at least in his late 80s, if not 90 years old. And he writes to the church because it had changed a lot since he had been in prison on the island of Patmos. He had found out, slipped. A lot of people were slipping. They were finding they didn't really think they had to obey, per se. So let's go. I'll go to 1 John 3. I'll turn back in my Bible. 1 John 3. And in verse 22, it says, And whatever we ask we receive from him, because this is kind of like a stipulation. And whatever we ask we receive from him, because we keep his commandments. That's a real part of the contract. We keep his commandments. Will we do it perfectly? No. Should we try? Yes. Do we try? Yes. Are we going to keep them perfect tomorrow? Might. Might not. But he expects us to try. Every single day. And do those things which are pleasing in his sight. What's pleasing in his sight? Keeping the commandments. What are the commandments about? Loving God and neighbor. No? Heard about that. Today. We can do a better job of that. And God knows we can. But that's the love of the commandments. It's all about love towards God and towards fellow man, woman, child. It's what he wants us to do. 1 John 5. 1 John 5. Verse 2 and 3. 3. By this we know that we love the children of God when we love God and keep his commandments. Oh, wait a minute. He already said that, didn't he? How many times does he have to say it? Over and over, as Diane says. Over and over. Because it's that important. He wants to make sure, obviously, he went back to Ephesus after, we know from Patmos, he went back and he started to go to churches. They didn't even want him there. One ran him off. This was the last disciple who spent time with Christ, the one that Christ loved his set. And they didn't want him there. And he didn't go back to Ephesus, where he spent his last days, as they believed, through history. And he found it wasn't the same church 25, 30 years later when the book, when the letter was written to the Ephesians, things have changed. We'll look at that later on, too, in another sermon. Verse 3, For this is the love of God that we keep most of his commandments.

You know, if we try, you know, because we can't keep them perfectly, as someone told me one time, well, if you can't keep them perfectly, why should we try to keep them at all?

Because God asked us to. We hopefully do them better. It's what we look at, John, right? When we look at Passover, and we go to that, and we kind of look and examine ourselves, and that's what we say, okay, well, I kind of blew that one quite a few times this year, but I'm going to do better. As I always compare it to Whack-a-Mole, that game where that mole pops up, as soon as we smack that thing down somewhere else, it pops up somewhere. Now, maybe that's not true up here in Vero Beach, but it's true in Fort Lauderdale. You may not have to play spiritual Whack-a-Mole, but we do down there. And for those who joined us last week, you find traffic makes you do that sometimes. Right, David? Diane? They're not missing. Coming down. Because it's a test. Let's finish this up and keep His commandments. And His commandments are not burdensome. It's not hard for me not to kill anyone. Oh, excuse me. That translation is there. Murder. It's really a burden. Do I want to say it? It's really a burden that I can't just go kill somebody. Look at it. Right. It's really a burden to keep from lying when telling the truth is so simple and you don't have to remember what you thought you said or what you might have said. Right. Stealing. Oh, wow. That is such a burden. Oh, man. I just want to take something. I'll take these tissues. I don't need them. I just want to take them. Do you see? I've simplified it, but that's what it's about. It's not hard. It's not hard. As a matter of fact, the more you do them, the easier they become. And the more you practice them, the easier it is to do them. When you get used to when I was young, my father had this, I guess, I would say it was a contract. I didn't sign it. He didn't sign it either, but it was a contract. If I wouldn't lie to him, he wouldn't whip me. And you know, that worked pretty good about lying, because if I lied, I got the belt. Truth built. With us, truth, people trust you.

Today, how many people can you trust? Oh, it's so rare, because people have found in other ways, oh, it's easy to lie because I don't care if people know or not. But we have reputations. Lawyers don't care, do they, Julie? No. No. Lawyers are known to lie. They phrase things, and they don't think anything. It's kind of a joke. But we have been given these commandments. It's part of what we do. Who we are. Let's, uh, let's say that we are not Let's go over to 2 John. 2 John 1 and verse 6. This is love. This is love that we walk according to His commandments. We're showing love. Same thing from Deuteronomy. Same thing from Exodus 20. Deuteronomy 5. That's the commandments He gave to humanity, not just to them. For everyone to live peacefully with each other. Have some peace. Okay. This is love that we walk according to His commandments. This is the commandment that you have heard from the beginning. You should walk and hit. Hit. What? What? Love. Love is why He gave the commandments. This is what we do. You fulfill the terms of the contract. How about a house? Most people here bought a house. Okay. I bought a house in 1988. Not that house. But I bought a house in Tennessee. Well, I bought it from the bank. The bank financed it, and I built it. And there was a contract, and it was...