The Authority Of God Part 1

in other sermons. What I want to do today is start a beginning of a series of sermons that actually answers some questions that were brought to me. We're going to, when we get into the scriptures, we're going to be going through some very, very simple scriptures. But you know how I always say, if we don't know the premise, we have no idea how to get into the conclusion. So we're going to go into some basic premises that we know, but then how do we apply them?

And this sermon will supply the basis for that, and then we'll study how to apply this in the next two sermons. So there will be a three sermon series. The United States Declaration of Independence, I have a copy at home, not in the original, not that old, but I have a copy at home, copy of the Constitution. It laid the foundation for the principles of what this country we live in, what the principles of that government and of that society. And they claimed, and I'm going to read this, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with their creator with uncertain, unalienable rights, and among them is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Now that statement alone became sort of the foundation of society, and the Constitution was built out of that. It contains some very problematic logic issues, and it also contains some theological issues. What exactly entails rights, and how do you determine what a right is? And that's been argued and fought over in this country, and is still today. What is a right? What is a human right? What exactly are the limitations to the pursuit of happiness? What are the limitations to that? I mean, they never thought that through.

Now there is some biblical basis for some of the principles they came up with, but other parts of it were actually from the Enlightenment that it happened in, it's a movement, a philosophical movement, that happened in Europe.

And so there's these ideas that they mixed in from the Enlightenment and the Bible, and sort of came up with this idea. Okay, if I don't like the person that I'm married to, how many times can I divorce? 10 times? 15 times? What is pursuit of happiness? Or that liberty means I can do what I want with what I own with my property.

Does liberty mean you could put a toxic waste dump on your property and poison all your neighbors? Does it mean that? So there's some very interesting philosophical, logical issues that come up right away if you read through this. But we also have that this is given to us by God. Right? This is given to us by God. Well, if our rights come from God, which that claims, then we must accept, and this is really important, God's authority to give us those rights.

Now, if I talk to a thousand people, and I don't care what political spectrum them on, they're on, and I'd say, look, our rights are given by God, therefore you must accept God's authority, they'd say, no, no, no, no, no, that's not what this is about. But we say it's God that gave it to us. Well, they said it was God. They couldn't even agree the founding fathers, and on a definition of God, they had differences of opinion about what even who God was.

Thomas Jefferson didn't believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. Benjamin Franklin wasn't sure. He goes sort of back and forth. Years ago, I wrote something on the website about that, and I got a scathing letter from a man who said he was a scholar who spent his life studying Thomas Jefferson. What I said wasn't true. And I said, well, have you read his translation of the Bible?

Well, it wasn't a translation. He just sort of took the New Testament, shortened it down, and took out all the references to miracles and anything that made Jesus divine. He just took them out. And he said, well, he was doing that just for the Indians. So finally I wrote back and said, look, just go to the National Archives and look up his letters.

They listed some of his letters where he claims he didn't believe the divinity of Jesus Christ. And he wrote back and said, oh, I had never read those before. So even they debated on exactly who is God and how should we worship God. That's why freedom of religion was so important.

They weren't thinking of Islam or Hinduism. They were thinking of all these different varieties of Christianity they had. And it was like, okay, we've got to be able to allow all these different viewpoints of Christianity. But if God's given us his rights, then we've got to know who God is. We have to be able to define God. The United States has never defined God where everybody agreed on it. So guess what we still argue over? What's our rights? If God has the authority to establish rights, this is real important as we go through this. He also has the authority to establish the laws that govern rights. You can't separate law from rights. You can't separate those things. And also any country that claims rights from God would have the responsibility to obey the laws of God that determine the rights. Now once again, I don't care whether... Unless you're a part of that sort of fringe Christian group that believes in Christian nationalism, which by the way would shut us down because we're not... We're too far considered too weird of a religion.

If you believe... Except for that group, yes, Christian nationalism, we have to take over the government and enforce Christianity. Except for that, nobody else would agree with, well, no, no, no. That's not what this is about because it's about freedom. And so what we look at, the founding documents of the United States, they're brilliant. The Constitution is brilliant, but it's not biblical. Look, but some pieces of it are. That's one of the reasons why it's had some success. But in the end, it's not biblical. In the end, it's a mixture of some biblical ideas and the European Enlightenment and a group of people are men who wanted to get out of the rule of England because they didn't want to pay taxes. They're brilliant men and actually in all of history, they're a very special group of men, but let's not pretend they're something they're not.

They did create the most remarkable government in the history of mankind, but it's still a government of mankind. It's still a government of mankind. So, how do we break down the concept then of authority? Because the issue here is, does God, if we have rights from God, doesn't God have the right because it comes from His authority?

He has the right, if you will, it is His right to govern. It's His right to govern as the Creator.

So, if He gives us rights, does He not have the right then to govern us?

And that's where the Constitution will fail because it can't lead us to God governing our lives.

So, as brilliant as it is, it will fail just like every other form of government that any society comes up with. You and I have just been privileged to live under it, but it will fail. It started to fail the moment they signed the Declaration of Independence. It started down a pathway then because it can't govern under God. It can't govern under God. So, let's set some now biblical premises for what we're going to be covering today and over the next couple of weeks because this will define everything we're going to cover over the next two service.

Let's start in Genesis 2. Oh no, he goes back to Genesis about a fourth of the time. Yeah, can't help it. Genesis 2 verse 15.

Then the Lord God took the man, put him in the garden of Eden to tend and to keep it.

And the Lord God commanded the man saying, of every tree of the garden you may eat freely, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die. Now, the importance of this, of course, is that God is telling them, I have created you with free will. You can make choices. As long as you do what I do, what I tell you to do, okay, God's authority to tell us what to do, as long as you do that, life's going to be okay. They would have a relationship with Him. They would not have sin. They would not have destructive behavior. They would have a perfect relationship with each other or with God. That's what was being offered. But if you choose for yourself, I will be like God and choose the difference between good and evil. Remember, that's what Satan told Eve, you will be like God. You know, the old man's not giving you all the info here.

Don't you understand? He doesn't want you to be like him because you'll be as smart as he is.

And she bought into that. And Adam came along and just did it because of her.

It was just too weak, the reason it out.

And so what we have here is the very beginning, God's authority. But in that authority, he gave you in beings the ability and he had to for us to be conscious and for us to learn how to love. We have to make choices. A cow doesn't ever have to make this kind of choice. Right?

Even elephants. Elephants are amazingly intelligent. I just, they're the only animal they found out that can recognize themselves in a mirror. You think about that process.

Every other animal looks at themselves in the mirror and he's either afraid of it or attack it or just curious. Most elephants will look at it for a while and they'll feel it with their trunk and then they'll start turning their heads. They're open their own mouths.

They're, oh, they recognize it's a reflection. That is a brain process. It's absolutely amazing.

But they don't make moral choices like we do, do they?

They're not made in the image of God.

They're not made in the image of God. They had a responsibility for their choices because all choices have consequences. And he said, if you choose this, your life will just go down a path that's terrible and you will die. I'm not sure if they knew what death meant.

They'd never seen anything die. I'm sure he explained it. You won't be alive anymore. You won't be conscious anymore. You'll be gone. I'll be gone? They'd never seen anything gone before.

And Satan came along and played with them and they chose wrong. What they did is they chose that they would take authority over their own lives. Now God had already given them authority.

He gave them dominion over the earth. There is a delegated authority and that's what we're going to have to talk about in the next two sermons. What is delegated authority and what are the limitations of delegated authority? There's a difference between God's authority and delegated authority. Dramatically difference. A dramatic difference and we need to understand that.

But God told them, I am delegating to you authority over the earth. They chose to become like God in their minds and be able to tell the difference between good and evil without him telling them. And we know the rest of it because we live in it, right? Nothing's worked from that point on onward in human history except what God has done. Except for God intervening, nothing has worked in human history. The most brilliant people, the people with the best intentions, nothing really works. And you know in your lives, there's times when nothing's working very well.

Sometimes we get discouraged. Why isn't the church more dynamic? Why isn't the church more... Why do we have issues and problems in the church? Why do people still struggle with sins within the church? Well, just read 1 Corinthians. Or Galatians or Ephesians or Colossians, 1st Thessalonians, or the book of Acts. Just read what it is. Nothing works the way it's supposed to. We are trying because of God's spirit. We're trying because God has called us to be different. But we have to understand the world as it is. So God gave human beings laws and rights. You know, last week I talked about, or last time I spoke here, I talked about justice. The biblical concept, especially in the Old Testament, that mishpot. Remember I talked about justice is more than just you're guilty, you're guilty, you're guilty. Justice is about how every person has a right before the law. They have a right to a fair trial. There has to be witnesses. There has to be elders in charge. They just can't be a lynch mob. Remember they brought the woman before Jesus. They were going to stone her for adultery. She had committed adultery. She was guilty. Jesus let her go. Because the lynch mob was against the law just as much, or the stoning mob, was against the law just as much as what she had done. They couldn't do that. That's against the law of God. She hadn't had a proper trial. And when it was done, he just said, you're guilty. Go and sin no more. He made a judgment.

So we have to understand, and remember I went through, that even if you were a Babylonian or an Egyptian, if you were traveling through Israel and you were accused of a crime, you had to have the same rights before the law as an Israelite. That's the concept of justice. The law is fair to everyone. When we look at those kinds of rights, we understand the law gives all of us rights. Thou shalt not murder says that every human being before God has the right to life.

And where does that come from? His authority is creator. You and I don't get to determine. He determines. Now, when we get into the authority of civil government, we'll see that he has actually given civil government certain rights. And one of them is to take the life of a murderer, but he had to give it to him. Or humanity did not have that on their own.

That's a delegated authority. God said, you can't kill each other unless I tell you, you can kill each other. So when we judge God for killing people, we're denying his authority as creator. We'll talk about that too. We're denying who he is. Thou shalt not steal defines the idea that people can have private property. It defines that. Nobody can come take what is yours and you can take what is somebody else's. Thou shalt not bear false witness is another one of those mishpot concepts that you have a fair trial. If someone gets up and accuses you of something and it's false, they have committed a crime. They've committed a crime against God. So you can't separate law and rights. All human beings have certain rights before God, but it's all based on his law. It's all based on his authority. And God's laws tell us how we can interact with him.

God says you can't make graven images that represent him. That's illegal. It's a law.

God says, remember the Sabbath day. When we break the Sabbath and show disregard for the Sabbath, we're committing a crime. We're actually committing a crime against God. So we don't want to use that. Well, yeah, well, yeah, I don't mean a crime. Yeah, that's what it is. These are the laws and they govern us and they tell us what our rights are. And to disregard the Sabbath is a crime before God. He defines how we interact with him. We can't take his name in vain.

Now, one of the hallmarks of spiritual maturity is recognizing God's authority as the creator and responding to his goodness and his laws. Here's the problem. One of the hallmarks of the Pharisees was that they understood God's authority and made up a religion to submit to it that wasn't what God wanted. So when we recognize God's authority, we have to begin to understand more his will. That was one of the questions that someone asked me, that was sent to me, where it talks about we have to learn the whole will of God. How do you learn the whole will of God? Well, that's part of this. How do we do that? Because if we try to enforce the laws of God through our will, we'll actually pervert the laws of God. We'll actually pervert them through our own human nature.

So we have to accept that as creator, he has authority because he owns us. This comes down to God's ownership. And we automatically reject that. I am my own person. I do what I want.

Oh yeah, I can worship God, but the idea that he owns me, and since he owns me, isn't he going to mistreat me? Isn't he going to not take care of me? So we don't have faith. We don't have faith because one, we don't like his laws or two, we actually don't believe he's good. We don't believe in his goodness. And the reason we don't believe in his goodness is because so many bad things happen. But we don't live in his world. We've been called out of the authority of Satan and human beings to come into the authority of God. So we're one foot in one world, one foot in another world, and that doesn't work either. The only thing that works in our lives is when we are submitting to the authority of God, and then we get punished for it. That's good. Now I'm not trying to be negative here. I'm trying to be, we have to understand that there's joy and there's happiness in all this. Why? Because we understand who God is, and we are following him. And there is a path that leads to a conclusion. We're on a life that leads to a conclusion. You say, well, I don't like this. Well, then go live in the world without hope, without a conclusion where nothing works and live for the moment. Isn't that what most people are doing? They're living for the moment because that's all they have. So we have to understand that we are owned by God. There's two places in Isaiah. We're going to just look at one. Isaiah 64. Isaiah 64. And let's go to verse, just one verse here, because there's two places he uses this analogy. We've all heard it a hundred times. Isaiah 64 verse eight, because this is a comment about God's ownership.

But now, O Lord, you are our father. You created us. Okay. Father is a, you know, right? You're, if you're a father, you're a mother, you created children.

God created us. And this is the understanding that's being brought out here. You are our father. We are the clay. You our potter. We are all the work of your hand. In other words, we understand, it's a bad word, authority. You know, sin is a bad word, even in Christianity.

Oh, you can't say sin. You offend people. Authority is a bad word. You offend people.

Well, God has authority. He has power over us. And he has a right to have that because he is our father. And we are, we're not, we see ourselves as human adults, that in relationship to God, we're just little babies. In relationship to God, we're just little babies. And he is the one who shapes us and molds us and takes care of us and works with us and lets us suffer at times because he has a purpose in us. God's purpose isn't to punish you because he hates you or because he just looked at you as a rotten person. God's purpose is to help you grow up to become a functional person forever in his kingdom. You know, if you're working with a two-year-old, you know what it's like to work with someone who doesn't always accept your authority.

But why do you keep working with them? Because you want them to be able to get through school, interact well with other people, have a good job, get married, have a family, right? You want them to be able to do all those things. And if you let that little two-year-old just run rampant and you know, you do, sometimes you see children that don't have a parental guidance and you just look at them and they're six, seven, eight, ten years old and you think if someone doesn't intervene these children are going to end up in jail, right? You can see it. You know it. But you know what? That two-year-old thinks you're torturing them. Why are you causing such suffering in my life?

I like eating three snickers bars. See, that's what God's doing with us.

We're suffering as God teaches us how to become his children. He is our father.

And so he's shaping and molding us.

And that means we have to really understand he has the right to do that. Now he gives you the choice. All of us have the choice to reject that. You don't have the right to have control over my life. He says, okay, go see what that's like. Go ahead. He doesn't make us.

One of the most remarkable things that you see in the New Testament is when the centurion, Roman centurion, sent someone to Jesus to say, I want you to please heal one of my servants.

And Jesus says, well, I'll go. And the centurion says to him, oh, no, no, no, no.

I'm not worthy to have you come into my house. He said, you know, first of all, I'm a Gentile, Jews don't come into our houses, but you're someone special here. You're from God. You can't come into my house. He said, besides, I understand. I'm a man under authority. He said, when I say something to my soldiers, it's done. And when you say something, it will be done because you have the authority to do that. And it says Jesus looked at his disciples and said, I haven't seen this kind of faith in all of Israel. Yes, I have the authority to make it happen. On his word, God would make it happen. That's the reign of God. There was another question that came up, and I'll give a sermon on this probably six, seven months from now, but about how are we now in the kingdom of God? Well, obviously, God's kingdom isn't reigning physically on the earth like when Christ comes back and sets that up, but we are citizens of the kingdom of God. And what's that mean? It means he's reigning in our lives now. God is reigning in our lives. We are submitting to his authority because we know it's the only way. And his authority is always carried out with love, always. We're submitting to his authority in our lives now. And so in Satan's reign, in the reign of whatever nation we're in, we have all kinds of levels of government.

We have a mayor and a city council, and we have a state government. We live under all these different layers of governments, right? But we are under the reign of Christ in our lives now.

And that means we've accepted he has the authority to do that. And actually, we want the authority. We have to get to the place we want the authority because that is the foundation of faith. God knows what he's doing, so I will try and follow. Sometimes it's hard to keep up, like a little child following a parent, and they're practically running and they can't keep up. Sometimes it's like, slow down. God, please, I can't keep up because we're just trying to keep up.

But what's his purpose? It's not because he wants to punish us all the time. It's because he wants us to become what he made us to become. And it's his authority to do so. Now, I think of Abraham.

I struggle with years, for years, with the concept of God telling Abraham to kill his child. It's against the law of God to do human sacrifice. It's against the law of God to go kill someone, to murder them. But if God tells you to, it's not murder. But there's no moral clarity to the whole thing. But actually, there is. There is moral clarity. So God was going to watch him cut his son's throat and watch him bleed out. That's what God wanted. No. The issue was, does Abraham understand my authority and my love? That's the issue here. Not God. It's Abraham. So he gave him an impossible decision. An impossible decision. The outcome was going to be the same in a certain way. I'll show you what I mean. Let's go to Hebrews. Hebrews 11. Hebrews 11, verse 17. Hebrews 11, verse 17. By faith, now you look at when Jesus, or when God asked him to do this, he had already put Abraham through decades of training in faith. And you also will read, there's three major times that Abraham failed in his test of faith. Three times?

God just kept working with him, kept working with him. And finally he says, go sacrifice your son.

By faith, Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he would receive the promises offered up his only begotten son of whom it was said, in Isaac your seed shall be called. God said, I'm going to give you a child. Well, he and Sarah came up with a child.

Sue Agar. He says, no, I said I was going to give you and Sarah a child. And then perform this miracle and they have Isaac. And then God says, go sacrifice him. And he had promised him, through Isaac, you will have descendants and you will become a great nation. Either that's true or God was lying to him, which made God, how do you worship a lying being? He's no different than Satan.

Concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense. Abraham said, God will not ask me, in his mind he had to raise up, to do anything unrighteous, but he owns me.

And if he says to do this, there's a reason, and he will resurrect him. I know he will resurrect him.

God stopped him. Now, how would you think about this? There's two ways this could have turned out.

Abraham could have said, I can't do this. And God would have said, okay, we got to work on your faith some more. And Isaac would not have been sacrificed. Or Abraham would have said, in his mind, okay, I'll sacrifice him. And God said, stop. I'm not going to have you sacrifice him. You learned your lesson, which means he wasn't going to be sacrificed. Isaac was never going to be sacrificed.

Either decision, he wasn't going to be sacrificed. God wasn't going to sacrifice Isaac. The point is, to him, do you believe me so much that if I ask you to kill him, you'll think I'll resurrect him?

And he said, yes. Now, that's not what he asked him, but that's what he had to reason through. He had to, yes, you will. Okay, go ahead. No, stop. You're not going to do this.

But you learned the lesson. You learned the point. I know what I'm doing. It's not just my authority. You have to believe in my love. You have to believe that I'm going to do what I say I will do.

And it took me a long time to realize, because I worked through every possible scenario here, and I always came down, he had to make one decision or the other, and either one of them, Isaac was not going to be sacrificed. Boy, but Abraham had to work that out, right?

He had to work that out. Even if he would have killed him, he would have been resurrected and brought back to life. But God wasn't going to ask him to do it. Well, actually have him do it.

The point is, God taking you up to a point where there is no other choice than God saying, choose me and I will take care of the issue. Choose me and I will do it. But Abraham chose God, his authority, who he is. He had the right as the creator to say, do this. And he said, yes, Lord. Now, I can't imagine what three days going there, what went through his head. He had to wrestle with it for three days. I don't think he slept for three days and three nights, right? Probably passed out for an hour or two here and there. As he wrestled with, how could God ask me to do this? Then how could I not do what God says?

He's fulfilled every promise in my life, even when I failed, because he can look back and see where he failed. He knew when he failed. He knew when he went to Egypt and told Sarah to lie, and then became somewhat wealthy as she was now being introduced into the harem of Pharaoh.

He was doing quite well over it. Not that he wanted to do it, but he was afraid of him, and then he got a reward. And God had intervened and Pharaoh said, why did you do this to me?

Would you tell me this is... Well, she's my half sister. I don't care. It's your wife. And God is punishing me because of you. And Abraham had to face the fact I failed. And then Pharaoh said, get out of my country.

Just get out of here. You go through those failures of Abraham and you realize how he learned every time until finally he realized God will not let Isaac not have children. He will have children because he told me he would. So I'll kill him and God will resurrect him.

And it was never God's intention to kill him anyways.

He said, well, God's playing a game. No, no. God's going to take us up to those limits, just like you do with a child sometimes. You can do this. No, I can't. Yes, you can. No, I can't. Yes, you can. And we'll take them up to those limits because we have to. Children have to be pushed to the limits to learn. But I can't do my homework. Yes, you can. But I can't eat my carrots. Yes, you can. But I can't clean my room. Yes, you can. And they think we're torturing them and we're mean. And why would you do such a thing to me, your loving child? Right? And we push them to those limits because why? They become better people.

God's creating children and he wants us to be literally his children. And he pushed him to the limit. And he said, yes, you have the authority to push me to the limit. You do? He decided he has the authority to do that. And I willingly submit to it and he'll work this out. He'll work this out. We don't like the idea of God's authority because he pushes us to the limit.

Because that's the only way we grow. We grow when we're pushed to the limit. Right?

You prepare to run a marathon. Where's Chris? Back there. He has to push himself to the limit. Right? That's why Paul uses the concept of training for sports in some of his writings.

Because you're going to push yourself to the limit all the time. That's what God does.

Not all the time because sometimes he lets us rest. But he's pushing us to the limit to say, you must learn to trust me and remember tomorrow isn't the outcome. The outcome is when Christ returns. That's the outcome. I used to think, well, when I get to be 70, I'll probably retire and sit around and play with my grandkids and drink piña coladas. Nah, that's not the outcome.

I realize that now. That's not the outcome. God said, what? No, no, no, no, no. We keep pushing the limits here. You get less and less capable. I mean, we have more and more limits as you get older, but you keep pushing the limits. And it's because he's the father and he's the potter. How do we respond to that? We respond by saying, I want to understand your will. What is it you really want? Because that's what's good. Romans 12. Here's a scripture that someone had asked about in terms of a part of a sermon. Romans 12 covered this in the Bible study.

It's still going to take probably three more Bibles, at least two, maybe three more Bibles to get through Romans. Then we'll start 1 Peter. So we've been in Romans a long time.

Paul says, I beseech you therefore, brethren, concerned by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, wholly acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. And as I've said before, that's an oxymoron. A sacrifice is killed. So you present yourself as a living sacrifice. You're a living, dying person. You're talking about pushing to the limits. We're a living, dying person. The old person is dying and a new person is being created. So we are sacrificing our lives to God and learning how to live so that we can live forever.

And do not be conformed, verse 2, to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Everything about us has to be transformed. That's what conversion is. We must be transformed into what God wants us to be, that you may prove what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God.

So how do we prove this? You prove it by struggling with it every day, and you learn it by wrestling with God every day. No, that doesn't mean we don't have peace.

God gives us peace. God gives us joy. We have lives of joy, peace, but remember long sufferings in there too. I like love, joy, peace. I have to admit, there were years I used to say, God, please give me the fruits of the Spirit. Love, joy, peace, and I'd always stop at long suffering. It took a long time before I started to pray for that. Okay. It just was hard for me to ask for that one. So it's not like we're gloomy people, but we do struggle and we do suffer. That's part of the Christianity, as we wrestle with God to prove what is His will. Because sometimes we'll think it's the will of God and we'll do something and it'll fail. And we think, oh wow, God must be mad at me and God said, nah, you didn't figure that one out. Sometimes he gets angry with us. If we're doing that in a rebellion, and sometimes it's just because we don't understand, like the two, three, four, five year old, like the eight year old, like the 15 year old, who you realize just didn't understand. You're upset with them. You're angry with them. Why did you do that? And you know, most 15 year old boys will look at you and say, I don't know. And the truth is they don't know. At that moment, it seemed like a good idea. It seemed like such a good idea at that moment. And they do it. So sometimes you look at the 15 year old and you say, boy, that didn't work out very good. Did it? No. Yeah. This is how you learn.

This is how you learn. It's how we become men, right? It's how we become men. Sometimes we're really stupid. And that's, you either learn from that or you stay stupid. There's a, it's your choice. It's not like you're not going to make stupid decisions as a 15 year old. The question is, do you learn to be a man or you stay stupid? That's the, that's what it is. That's the question.

And this is the way God was, is with us spiritually. You say, well, I'm 40 years old. God says, yeah, you're 40 years old in, in, you know, that, you know how that's measured? That's measured by the sun, the earth going around the sun. That's how that's been. God says, yeah, that's just 40 years in earth time. You're, you're really small here, kid. In terms of eternity, yeah, you're, you're a blink right now. So learn, grow, become what I want you to become.

So it's the transformation by being a sacrifice that we begin to learn the will of God. And you will, the more you wish and want and desire the will of God, the more you'll wrestle with it because sometimes you won't like the will of God.

Oh, wow. That's terrible. Oh, come on. There's times all of us don't want the will of God. You've had it in your life. Oh God, there has to be a better way than this.

I really liked this job. I know I'm not supposed to work on the Sabbath, but I really liked this job or, or, you know, all kinds of things. When am I, one of the ones that have shocked me over and over again is, but I'm not happy in my marriage. Therefore I want to divorce my husband or wife and marry somebody else. Okay. But learning to be spiritually functional in a marriage is part of the learning process.

So the will of God is you stay married. Oh, it can't be the will of God. No, no. Cause he wants me to be happy. And now I've heard that. I don't know how many times, but he wants me to be happy.

Oh yeah. So you divorce her and you go marry somebody else. You won't be happier because you have to learn something yourself as a Christian.

We have to learn what we're supposed to be before God as, as he is the father. And then he says he's also a potter and we're just the clay.

God leads us to his will in two predominant ways. One is through the scriptures. That's why you and I have to be in this Bible all the time. And we have to be very humble before the scriptures. You know why? And I only know this cause I've done it. I've read the scriptures, twisted into my mind and came up with a false understanding of that scripture. I've done it.

And then maybe years later say, Oh man, that's not what that really means at all. I don't know what that really means. Or boy, that's a rather immature viewpoint of that. There's actually a more mature viewpoint of that scripture. That's why the Bible, if we're really in the Bible, we'll never understand all of it.

If we're really in the Bible, we're growing from this book all the time. And we're also humbled by it because we're all should be, when we're in the scripture, we should all be humbled by it because we all should feel corrected. If we read the scripture and say, Oh, that applies to this person, that applies to that person, instead of what applies to me, then we're missing the point.

We're not letting God be the potter. We want God to be the potter in everybody else's life, but not ours. Not my life. I'm pretty good. The second thing to understand, okay, it's revealed in the scripture, but it is motivated by God's Spirit.

Understanding is submitting to the will of God is not something you and I could do on our own. Oh yeah, I'm going to figure God out.

I had a person tell me one time, I can't pray to a God I don't understand.

And I said, I can't pray to a God I do understand because that's a pretty small God.

I mean, we understand what God gives us, but you know what I mean? God's bigger than what I can understand. How do I... He has to be that or I'm doomed. If he's like me, you're all doomed, right? We're all doomed.

Romans 8. Romans 8 just went through this in the Bible study a few weeks or a few months ago now.

Verse 5, for those who live according to the flesh, set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God. It's the enemy of God. It's actually against God. It's not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. For that those who are in the flesh cannot please God, but you are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now, if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not his. And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness. We are motivated... We go to the Scripture to search.

We're motivated by the Spirit of God. And you have to go ask God to give you that motivation. You have to go on your knees and ask God to help you work through your corrupt human nature.

Because our corrupt human nature is holding us back all the time. All the time.

Our own self-righteousness, our anger, our bitterness, our needs to control.

We're just being held back all the time. And what we have to do is ask God for the motivation through His Spirit, then to follow Him. And then we submit to the will of God.

You know the most incredible story about submitting to the will of God in Mark where Jesus, knowing what's going to happen, right? He knew exactly. He helped... He inspired the prophecies that would tell what was going to happen. And He's there knowing that the soldiers are coming to get Him. And He knows that He's going to spend all this time, all night, all the next day, till 3 in the afternoon, being tortured, spat upon, made fun of, and die one of the most horrible torturous deaths a human being could go through. He knew that was going to happen.

And He goes to God and He says, if it's possible, take this away from me.

Now, fortunately, we know Jesus was going to submit to God, the Father, because He came from God the Father. But think of this in Abraham. Isn't this Abraham? The same thing. You want me to do this. But this is what has to be done. It has to be done as the sacrifice for all humanity.

And He struggles with it, just like Abraham did in that journey to get to where he was.

But this case is different, because God's intention always was for Him to be sacrificed.

And He knew that. And then He said, not my will be done, but yours. In other words, this is what I'm supposed to do. It's what we designed as the Father of the Word. It's what we prophesied, and it will be done. And He did. That's understanding entirely the will of God. Only Christ could do that. You and I will never reach that point in this life.

Well, we may, when we finally say, okay, God, I'm going to be martyred for your sake, your will be done. Maybe then we get it. Maybe Stephen got it entirely. Maybe Stephen got it entirely.

But we'll wrestle with it, and we'll wrestle with it, and we'll wrestle with it.

And we learn the will of God because we wrestle with it. It's because we're always, okay, yes, this is what I must do. And then the peace comes and you do it. This is the decision I must make. The peace comes and you make the decision. And then you trust in God to help you throw it. And if it's a wrong decision, you trust in God to do what? Help you throw it.

Because it's God that gets us through it as the Father, as the Creator, and as the Potter.

God doesn't want us to be automatons. He could have made us with instinct.

And we have some instincts, but not like animals. He's given us free will. We choose between good and evil. He wants us to recognize his right to ownership. It is his right to have authority over our lives because he made us. And that authority is based in ownership. All delegated authority from God has nothing to do with ownership. We'll talk about that next time. His is unique. It is an absolute ownership. And we have to recognize that. And we have to submit to his ownership and that he is going to do what's best for us because in his end plan here, we actually get everything that we could ever possibly want. To be changed at that point, we get everything we could possibly want. Beyond. It says it's beyond what we can imagine in the scripture. And I, that's pretty amazing. Beyond what we can imagine.

And only he could do that.

Now, as we desire God's authority in our lives, we now have a whole other set of things we have to deal with. How are we to interact with human authority? How are we to interact with secular governmental authority? What does the Bible mean when it says, wives, you have to submit to your husbands? What does that mean? So we'll discuss that as over the next two sermons.

We will discuss what delegated authority is and what it means. And because it is not based on the right of God to have the authority, but it's something he delegates, there are responsibilities and there are limitations to all human authority. So we'll talk about that next.