Rejecting Bitterness and Craving Sweetness

Happy Sabbath, brethren! Oh, come on. Happy Sabbath, brethren! That's much better. It was just 20 years ago that my wife and I and our three daughters came to Cincinnati, 1993. That's 20 years ago, right? And 1,600 members attended church here at our Combined Holy Day services. Five different congregations, and we were with Cincinnati Central congregation to begin with. Eventually, once United started in 1995, we met more as a Cincinnati church, and then eventually Cincinnati East, North, South.

And here we are today, combined with quite a few people, but it seems like some faces are missing. As you know, our numbers have gone down. It is a tribute to you, if you stop and think about it, that you are here today. Many, many people whom we've known totaling 150,000 at one time in the church have gone somewhere else.

And Jesus said that it was the Father's will that you bear fruit, and that that fruit remains. So we're not to the end yet. We have not crossed the finish line of any of our races. We are still plugging along, but it's an honor to be here with you today. An honor and a blessing that we can be here on God's Holy Sabbath to try to keep holy what He has made holy by His presence within this day, and His setting it aside.

Thank you very much for the opportunity for my wife, Mary, and me to be here. I thank many of you who have traveled as far away as from Florida to be here for this 50th anniversary. It is wonderful to see you. And I don't know if you know how much I respect the membership in Ohio. There are many personalities around the world, and many of them are very fun-loving, and many of them are very enjoyable to be around.

The Ohio people have a special place, in my heart, for respect and honor. This is where a lot of the engineering of this country that's impacted the world has taken place. And engineering is a very precise science. You'll see some of the world headquarters that remain here, that grow here in the Cincinnati area. And those things endure and last because of the values on which they are founded. And they're not superficial. And so, consequently, I always feel it's an honor that the United Church of God has its headquarters here in Cincinnati, where fat gets held to the fire a little more than in other parts of this country that are a little easier going and a little more freewheeling, as it were.

Here, there is a close watch on the Word of God, a close watch by individuals, members on what is right and what is ethical and what is wrong. And those things continue to be tested and tried and the good things stay and stand and remain.

And it's an honor to be invited to be with you here, to come here for council meetings, to come here at every opportunity. And you are a group that I tell you I have great admiration for, not for just accepting everything, but like the Bereans to study, to prove, to test and to hold fast, and to make sure that this church, the work of God, and what is taught is holding fast.

You know, we each have that responsibility. Jesus taught right in the Scripture that there will be false teachers in the church. There always will be. There will be wheat and tares. And we all have an individual responsibility, don't we, to know with God's Holy Spirit what is truth, what is right, what He has taught, what the true doctrines are, and to hold fast to those.

And so even though this is a small group today, and it would be smaller without some of us visitors here, you continue to be a core that is honorable, reliable in the eyes of God. And along with our other brethren around the world who fight the same fight and must endure the same temptations and sometimes things that are not quite according to the book, as it were, you continue down that path.

And I am very proud of you. Having once pastored several of you, many of you, along with many other ministers and pastors down through time, I'm delighted to be back here with you. Thank you. To begin the sermon, I would like to ask a favor of you. If you would turn to the back of your Bible and find a map of Egypt, a map that shows the most of Egypt that you can find, maybe one that refers to the Exodus. In this particular version of the Bible that I'm holding, the first map is the Age of the Patriarchs, and that shows not only the Near East, but quite a bit of Egypt, North Africa, going across to Libya and a little bit further east.

Now, when we look at that map, we see this Herod Desert that's running west of the Nile, the fertile Nile Crescent, the Nile River that runs south, whose headwaters are down in the country of Uganda. You tend to think of all the history there, from the Nile Delta and Alexandria and down through Memphis and Thebes, and we have Cairo today.

You see the pyramids just outside of Cairo, and those pyramids are just dramatic testament to a civilization that was once there. You can go further south from there into the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens and sort of be awed by the architecture, much of it underground, unfortunately. You can go over to the other cities and constructed areas that follow that Nile River. You can see temples and grandeur on a scale that just boggles the imagination.

And throughout the country of Egypt, you can get the idea that something really, really great happened there. The only thing is, you have to ask, how did all that come to be? Where did it start from?

When you see the palaces and you see the temples and you see all of the stuff that just seems to keep coming and coming and coming as you tour the region, where did it all begin? Where did it all start? There's a recent book written called The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt, and it was written by an Egyptologist, Toby Wilkinson.

And he has put together some of the more current research in the history of that culture. And it goes back before 3000 BC, going back before that time. That whole area, if you look at Egypt, that looks dry and you see the Sahara Desert, that was a seasonally fertile area. Those were grasslands out there with seasonal lakes. And there were two types of people that lived in the region. One were the shepherds, and the shepherds ranged with their families and their herds all across what we called the Sahara Desert. And the others were the farmers. The farmers like to live close to that Nile River and other permanent lakes and use the water source to grow their crops. They were a very stationary group. About 3000 BC, the continuing climate change of that area dried out the desert to where it was no longer a seasonable grazing area. Now, those pastoralists or those shepherds were considered wealthier, because they had animals, than the farmers.

Thus, they saw themselves in a higher class than the farmers. And so it was at around 3000 BC, when the grasslands gave out, the pastoralists came to the river country. And they joined the cities, the civilization, the communities of the farmers.

And they came in thinking they were greater. Now, archaeologists have found that out there in the desert, they have found a location of what they believed was the first temple, the first beginnings of what became the religion of Egypt. And it was the shepherds who had that. It was one of their little temples and their icons that they had begun. And so, it is presumed and assumed, I'm not sure how much actual record there is of it, that the shepherds, when they came to the river, brought with them a philosophy, an arrogance, and a religion that layered on top of the farmers.

The most effective tool that the shepherds are said in this book to have used was proclaiming that the gods had established them as the teachers and had given them the religion to teach to others. In other words, they were the upper class.

The farmers were a little more humble, and they accepted it. And they put themselves in a lower class. They accepted servitude, as it were, underneath the shepherds. The upper class utilized something we would know as a form of gnosis. We have knowledge. Knowledge of previous life and knowledge of afterlife and knowledge of gods.

The farmers didn't know this. And they have told us that we are greater and that we must teach these things, and we must have temples. Will you help us build them? Oh, and will you help feed us? And will you help fund us? And the pageantry that they began to use, and the sophistication in the buildings, just continued to make the shepherd class a higher, higher, more exclusive class than the farmers.

In the end, the iconic imagery was overpowering. Kind of subdued them, made them feel inferior, that being the farmers. They got the food from the farmers for the priests and the religion. They got the farmers to come and build the temples. They got them to essentially lose their lives for things like pyramids and the afterlife and the great gods that were then invented and fostered on these people. They helped foster a special class by restricting cloth. Quality cloth could only be worn by those who had previously been the shepherds. The fine foods were only available to those who were previously the shepherds. Thus, you had common food and common clothing, and then you had an aristocracy that was built above it. It was at this time that a new invention took place in Egypt. I call it an invention loosely. The year was around... it was between 2,000 and 3,000 B.C. Most people put it at 3,000 B.C. The invention was leaven. The Egyptians discovered this right about the same time as this aristocracy was laying over the farmers. And they credited leaven, the discovery of leaven, or the invention, if you want to call it, of leaven, to the same gods. And they worshipped the gods, and they praised the gods for bread that was leavened, which became the new bread of life, as it were, for the Egyptian society. It was a culture which used and abused, and was symbolized by this wonderful bread which the god had brought.

Centuries later, the Bible introduces the Israelites to us as at the bottom of the farmer class. If you stop and look at your map, you'll see up there in the Nile Delta, as it runs out into the Mediterranean Sea, you'll see that fertile area, and the Israelites inhabited an area up there of Goshen. They were farmers. But they were lower than the farmers. They were the lowest of the low. They were foreign farmers. And their lives weren't worth much at all. They were despised. They were expendable. In fact, Pharaoh oppresses them, even killing their children, and then seems to be trying to figure out ways to make their miserable lives even more miserable.

You can look in Exodus 5 and read the account there of how they were assigned to make bricks. But then they took away the straw, and they had to continue making the bricks. And that was done so that they could be whipped when they couldn't keep up.

Moses prayed to God, and he said, God, this Pharaoh has done evil to this people. Evil to the people of God.

Then something unique happened. We might use the term bottom feeders of society through the eyes of the Egyptians.

Suddenly, they were rescued and made the top, the very top, intended to be the top people of the world, the model nation of the world.

They were rescued from the very bottom by a God with a new mind, a new mindset, a new society.

Imagine the Egyptian society here, and suddenly here's a new God with a new society.

A society where the old one has flipped on its head. They were led out by a different ruler.

The foundation was a code of mutual respect, of a conduct of mutual submission and appreciation, and a raising up and encouragement and a sharing of what the highest had with the lowest. Of the very God ultimately bringing a people to be his own.

Of course, in the New Covenant, to actually join his family and share the inheritance of the Godhead.

A dramatic reversal. And along came a new bread of life with the new God.

Now, it's interesting when we look in Scripture and we see the philosophy and the invention, as it were, of leaven bread, and the introduction of the new God and a new way of life, and a different bread.

Yet, both breads had the exact same ingredients. Historically, they were flour, water, and salt.

And yet, you can do two totally different things with those two ingredients.

In Galatians chapter 1, we find their story with the first Passover and the first Exodus, and our story with what we might call the second Passover and the Exodus that you and I are on.

This trek out of sin that you and I are on described. Galatians chapter 1. We see great synonymity between their situation and our situation.

Galatians chapter 1, verses 3 and 4.

Paul says, or the graciousness of God to you, and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, this is where it comes from, this is the head, who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil age according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever.

They, like us, live in an evil age, and we have been rescued, just like they have been rescued.

Today I'd like to examine some of the bread symbolism that God uses in the spring festivals.

We won't get into anywhere near all the symbolism that there is, but I'd like to focus on a little bit one lesson that can be extracted from the symbolisms of leaven and unleavened bread.

In this sermon, entitled, Rejecting Bitterness and Craving Sweetness.

Rejecting Bitterness and Craving Sweetness.

You know, the concept of self-promotion and me getting what I want at the expense of others, which is what sin is, comes from a different mindset. It comes from the God of this age.

Adam and Eve were tempted by it, and they bit. Civilization has followed it.

In fact, some of the books on Egypt state that Egypt was the civilization on which all successive civilizations have been born.

And modern have been modeled, including our modern civilizations today.

If you stop and think about that, you can see there's a mind that put that together at some point in time.

And that has had an appeal, and it is worked, as it were, for carnal humanity.

And it's been repeated time and time again, down until our day. In James chapter 3, verses 13 through 16, I'm sure this is read often, but it is a powerful statement to not only sort of aim at others, but to aim at me, and to keep this desire and this mindset, this thing that could grow in us again after we have stamped it out, after we've been washed clean of it. It could grow again if we're not careful. And so to read this is important. James chapter 3, verse 13, says, Who is wise and understanding among you? Let him show by good conduct that his works are done in the meekness of wisdom, God's wisdom.

But if you have bitter envy and self-seeking in your heart, self-seeking, self-promotion, ooh, how can I accomplish something? How can I attain something? How can I feed what I have as desires?

Do not boast and lie against the truth. That is not the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

That wisdom, verse 16, does not descend from above, but it's earthly, sensual, demonic.

For where envy and self-seeking exist, confusion and every evil thing are there.

And that is the basis for our evil age. It comes from the mind of the God of this age.

Now, we all know these things. The result of those things is bitterness, broken lies, shattered relationships. Whenever Adam and Eve sinned, the first thing it did was it shattered a relationship between them and God.

We then saw it would shatter a relationship between themselves, and it shattered relationships between their children.

And relationships were so shattered by the time Noah came along that God had to drown civilization and start over.

And history is just a record of the shattering and fracturing that takes place when following this mindset of self-promotion or self-enhancement.

But a different mindset of enhancing relationships with both God and man comes from a different God. That comes from the ruler of the next age, the one we look forward to bringing his kingdom, the kingdom of God, to this earth.

We see in verse 17 of James 3, but the wisdom that is from above is first pure and then peaceable.

And peaceable, you know, it really brings things together.

The Greek word, Irene, has a meaning that means to bring together, to stitch together.

It is something that God is doing. Jesus said in this prayer to the Father in John 17, it's my will that they be one with us, all one, I and me and you and them and them and us. We've become one. So God is bringing together.

Was it...

The Magellan, when he sailed into the Pacific, having been into the Atlantic with its stormy seas, named it Pacific.

Pacifica is one of the words that this word, peaceable, translates from the Greek into. It is very different than what the human passions result in.

It is gentle, it is willing to yield, it's full of mercy and good works without partiality and without hypocrisy.

Now the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace.

Harmony is another word that can define that Irene in the Greek. Harmony, that stitching together, that harmony is a very challenging thing to put together in all the harmony so that all works in a very sophisticated but close knit way as the body draws itself together by the love which every part provides.

So that is what God is doing.

Imagine the contrast on the night to be much observed for the Israelites. Can you just see it? Now here we are, bricks being killed, and we're under this one system.

And now we've had a Passover, we're free, night to be much observed. We're the people of a God who loves and cares, serves. We are elevated.

The bottom is now the top. We're being given jewelry. He's feeding us. We're now leaving.

We're bound to become a great nation in a promised land.

What a wonderful change that must have been in their minds.

And so for that particular time, God established two symbols for two mindsets. You have leavened bread and you have unleavened bread. And again, both symbols have the same recipe.

Back then, you see, they didn't have such a thing as yeast.

Yeast is a modern invention.

Before the 1700s, people just put their bread out.

They put their dough out and hoped for the right kind of yeast to get on it. You just never knew.

Once that happened, you could keep a starter and you could stick some in a loaf. But if you didn't have a starter, you just put it out there and you hoped. And you never knew what you were going to get with all the molds and the spores of things flowing around.

And sometimes there was nothing in the air.

And it never rose.

But here we have leaven.

And it comes along and can change those ingredients if it takes hold and actually breeds within the dough.

We're going to see that the mindsets of sin and righteousness dwell in the same brain, same mind.

God created man with a mind. He said he was good. And that man can, with the same mind, grow in righteousness, or he can let another influence come in and filter in. He can grow and putrefy in a very evil way. What is it about leaven that makes it a symbol of evil during the Feast of Unleavened Bread? You ever think about that? I've looked at bread, unleavened bread. What's the big deal here? You think, well, this one's got gas in it, you know, shouldn't have gas. There are a lot of things that we could look at. We know that Scripture refers to Egypt as being synonymous with a sinful society. Revelation 11, verse 8. The Israelites were enslaved by a sinful society. We know that leaven is often synonymous with sin, as in 1 Corinthians 5.8. But why leaven is a symbol for sin? What is it about that? Our modern yeast first had a form of cream. You could buy it in a cream back in 1780. It was finally made available from beer makers. And the beer makers would sell it to bakers, finally. And the bakers didn't have to sit around and wait for this whatever to happen to their bread that caused it to leaven. It was not understood what caused bread to leaven. But somebody figured out that if you put some yeast from beer in there, which made it bitter, you could make bread. Well, in 1825, Germans began to figure out how to make that yeast into a cake. It was a soft, moist cake of yeast. So that became very popular. It wasn't until the beginning of World War II, about 1940, that Fleischmann, a group of Germans in the United States, developed powdered yeast. Dry yeast, we call it. And it's really changed the world to where people can have yeast whenever they want it or don't want it. You just sort of insert it and it makes it a little more flavorful. But the way that bread has been made down through the time was just exposed it to air. And it became leavened with somewhat random results. So leaven is an external influence on grain. You and I are called to produce fruit, much fruit for the harvest. Various types of fruit, grapes, grain, etc., are used in symbolism. Flour is just ground-up grain. We are to be the right kind of fruit, a fruit that is good, a fruit that is Christ-like. It's godly. And we have external influences that can either take us towards the righteousness of God or take us towards a product that is leavened. What exactly is leavening? Leavening isn't just fluffing up bread. We tend to think, oh, leavening just makes it fluff-duff. No, it doesn't.

Leavening actually is a process that involves the wholesale destruction of the grain flour. Think of that for a minute. It is an entire process whereby that grain, which was made into a flour and then water and salt added, is totally destroyed. Now, the European Union yeast industry describes leaven as a process where enzymes first begin breaking apart the grain fibers, allowing bacteria and yeast spores to further decimate its structure in order to get at the complex sugars that are stored in the wheat or the grain. Aggressive microscopic bacteria systematically break down those sugars into smaller and simpler molecules step by step. They're broken down into simple sugars. And then aggressive yeast spores devour the sugars and rapidly reproduce themselves.

The expanding yeast colony, as it works its way through, eating and devouring, it exudes a liquid. It excretes a liquid, which releases ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide into the dough, resulting in fermentation and a rising, a gaseous raising of the bread. Adam Clark Commentary speaks of this in this way. Leaven itself is a species of corruption being produced by fermentation, which in such cases tends to putrefication. This is the whole systematic destruction of the host grain.

Now, it's interesting that the breads that are made in this way from airborne yeast and bacteria and molds that would invade and begin these colonies tend to produce a bitter-tasting bread. Unlike that which you make when you use a yeast, these are bitters. It's the old sour dough type of concept. It was the original bread concept. And the taste of it is tangy, somewhat bitter. Just like human slavery is bitter, the Israelites were slaves in Egypt. It was a bitter time for them. Just like slavery to sin for you and me was bitter. It was a bitter time in our lives. It was difficult to deal with. In Exodus 1, verse 14, it says, "...and they, the Egyptians, made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and brick, and in all manner of service in the field. All their service in which they made them serve was with rigor." That was the Egyptian culture. In a sense, that is what our world and society today is unknowingly living in. They are slaves to sin and it just gets worse. It's as if somebody is out there just trying to make the bad part of society get worse than it already is. And lives just tend to go downhill. You see and read of it all the time. European, I'm sorry, Egyptian culture, the culture itself, was a bitter experience. Not just for the slaves, but for all the people, especially the previous farmer class. Egyptologist Wilkinson deduced from all the archaeological discoveries and the various things that have been found out over time, looking at all the structures that you can go see, it was a very different society than most people, especially the tourists, would expect. He said, ancient Egyptian society brimmed with deceit, despotism, brutal repression, corruption, and was rife with internal fragmentation and even civil war at times. And he goes on to say, it became the model for all future civilizations. Coincidentally, this leavened bread, or was it coincidentally, had a bitter taste to it. I don't know that God made it that way or used what was there, but it is really an interesting symbol, is it not? When you relate that to sin, when you relate Egypt to a sinful society. The botany department of the University of Hawaii has written, The effect of the leavening process made the breads of antiquity slightly bitter tasting. Again, you and I, before conversion, were in a mindset. A mindset of experiencing the thoughts of the human race, what everybody's out there doing. We thought that was pretty good. It had an appeal to us. It's a mindset of sin that seems right to a man. And leavening enhances the appeal of bread. Just like Satan's ideas that are promulgated into society have an appeal to us. Ooh, that sounds interesting. That sounds exciting. That sounds good. You know, when the bread is in the oven and you walk in the house, you have good thoughts.

You have high expectations. This is going to be great.

Baking911.com says, Leavening transforms a rather tasteless flower into a variety of textures and shapes with an appealing aroma.

You know, that old unleavened bread, not so appealing.

But leavening, wow, that really makes it look good. The Council of Elders this week released a statement regarding the Feast of Unleavened Bread that says, The Church believes and teaches that we should observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread by removing all leaven from our homes, by refraining from eating leavened products, and by eating unleavened bread, as stated in the booklet, Fundamental Beliefs. And that booklet says, During this festival of unleavened bread, leaven, an agent such as yeast that causes bread dough to rise during baking, symbolizes sin and is therefore removed from our homes and not eaten for seven days. By eating unleavened bread during this time, we picture living a life of sincerity and truth free from sin. Now, that's nice. Days of unleavened bread, we eat unleavened bread, picturing, and there's the word, the operative, picturing a life free from sin, free from sin that is full of sincerity and truth. The question I like to ask myself is, do I live the life free from sin and of sincerity and truth? There's one thing to go around with a symbol and say, oh yeah, I like this feast. This is good stuff. Good symbol. But do I live it? Like Jesus gave in the parable of the wise person who built his house on a rock, he was the one who did what God said. The foolish one who built his house on the sand, remember, he was the one who heard. But he wasn't a doer. He didn't do it. We have to also not just be believers, but doers. I think this is an interesting phenomenon, as it were, about unleavened bread. When we come to the feast of unleavened bread, how much do you desire to eat unleavened bread? It's not at the top of my list. Here's a feast picturing unleavened bread and the good things of unleavened bread, and it pictures good things, but I kind of want the old leaven. I kind of like that smell of the bakeries you go by, and hope you're not in the mall and go by Cinnabon, you know, with a capital S, Cinnabon. It's hard to get excited about just plain old unleavened bread. It's not so immediately appealing to us. It's known to the Israelites as the bread of affliction. Perhaps that's how they looked at it. But during the feast of unleavened bread, the eating of unleavened bread can symbolize our desire, my desire, your desire, our intent, our goal, as it were, to become spiritually unleavened like God, like Jesus Christ is, like the Passover symbol that we just had used. Now we have this symbol again, and it can become our goal, our target, that which we yearn for and long for. In 1 Corinthians 5 and verse 7, notice how the Apostle Paul uses this and encourages us. 1 Corinthians 5 and verse 7 says, Therefore purge out the old leaven. That's our job. We need to do that. We can't just be complacent and say, Oh, I don't have leaven. It's like 1 John 1. If you say you have no sin, you've got a problem. But if you confess your sin and repent of it, God's faithful and willing to forgive you of that. So we need to purge out the old leaven that we may be a new lump. Do we do that? Do we do that? It's a paradoxical question, in a sense, that I'd like to ask. Does symbolizing being unleavened mean that you are unleavened?

You see, as we go through the feast, if we eat unleavened bread, does eating that symbol mean that you are unleavened? Well, that's an interesting question because Paul says here again in verse 7, to purge out the old leaven that you may be a new lump. So on the one hand, we can see this as a goal. Just like Paul said, I wrestle with the remnants of my carnal nature, and I'm in this battle and this struggle, and sometimes I win and sometimes I don't. So he didn't say, like in Philippians 3, he said, I have not attained. I'm not yet perfect. So he's in the race. He's fighting against that. Like the Israelites. Yes, they had a god and they were free, but they had to travel for six days, didn't they, to get to the Red Sea before they could get out of Egypt. Couldn't just sort of sit there and be happy with unleavened bread. They had to move. We have to move. Meanwhile, Pharaoh was pursuing them, trying to enslave them again. Satan is pursuing you, trying to enslave you again, if you've been baptized. So in one sense, eating unleavened bread represents a goal, doesn't it? That's our goal. That's what I want to be like. That's what I'm striving to be like. And I'm looking around, trying to find an unleavened in my life, in my home, and make sure that's out. Let's ask the question again. Does symbolizing being unleavened mean that you are unleavened? Well, Paul says in the next phrase here, you are unleavened. You are unleavened.

So in the New Covenant, we kind of have a dual situation, don't we? And you see this in many ways. It's sort of the New Covenant conundrum, you might say. On the one hand, of course, we are doing those things which we don't want to do, like Paul said. We have to repent and ask for forgiveness daily, as the model of prayer tells us.

But on the other hand, when we are in, faithfully in that process, God is forgiving us. He's a very gracious God, and He sees us as righteous, and not living in sin, and not part of the sinful world. We're to be out of that and remain free from that. But we shouldn't be complacent with the free side, and not fighting the battle, nor should we be dejected in the struggle that is so difficult at times, not to realize that we are approved by God, and that He considers us His righteous children, when we are fulfilling our purpose for which we are here with His Holy Spirit to do.

In Romans 7, verse 21, again, let's see what Paul says. Romans 7, verse 21, I'm so thankful that Paul had the humility and the honesty to open up here and share what he went through, because we can share this with ourselves. We can know that we are brothers and sisters if we are finding ourselves imperfect on a regular basis, but fighting the good fight. Romans 7, verse 21, he says, I find a law then in my members that when evil is present with me, the one who wills to do good, the one who is holding the unleavened bread, the one who is unleavened, I delight in the law of God according to the inward man, but I see another law in my members.

And we cannot put this one away and say, oh, I don't want to see that one. We have to be in the war. I see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity at times to the law of sin, which is in my members. Oh, wretched man that I am! Can you remember back to when you were counseling for baptism and the minister was a little reticent to baptize you?

But you told him, listen, I can't go any further. I have hit a wall. I am so frustrated. I see my sins. I try to overcome them, but I'm powerless. I don't have the tools. I know there's more to learn. I've learned what I can learn, but I know there's... It's like looking in a library through a glass window. It's full of books and I can't get to them. I need help. I need a breakthrough. Otherwise, on this side of the wall, I'm toast. I'm dead. I remember standing by a lake or sitting by a lake, praying over in Bricket Wood, England, back in 1971, and telling God, you know, just kill me.

You know, this is the most frustrating thing. I don't want to go on living like this. I never shot anybody, killed anybody. I never kissed a girl. But here I am. God had convicted me to know and believe that my nature was so wrong that unless I could get rid of it, there was no use going forward. I didn't need to go into what human civilization has experienced in the last 6,000 years.

Now, you, I'm sure, have been to that same place. And so it's a wonderful thing to be brought through our release from slavery, to be given the tools of Jesus Christ and God the Father living in us through the Holy Spirit, of having their power and giving them the glory for the lives that are not bitter. They're sweet. They're challenging. But they are welding together. They're honorable. They're respectable.

They are enjoyable. They have hope. And they're just full of good fruits because of the God that lives in us and what He's doing through us. So that's the struggle that He gives us there and the solution to it. And Jesus Christ, my Lord, He is the one that brings us out, just like He brought the Israelites out with that pillar of cloud and fire. One way of describing our conversion process, which is led by God, is to come to reject, come to despise bitterness. Bitterness smells so good, though. Bitterness that looks so nice. Come to despise that. I'll give you a visual here.

Beautiful. Great with brie cheese. Heated up. Expanded. Nice. Airy. Soft. It's hard for human nature to look at that which human nature likes and say, I don't want that anymore. I don't want what that does to me anymore. I want to reject that. And what I want to really crave is this. That's the new bread.

That's the new...the thing I love. I tried this on my granddaughters last night. Didn't have a lot of success. But in putting butter on it and putting it in the oven and melting it, put a little salt on there, and then getting them to try it, one of the four-year-olds said, that is great!

And then her daddy asked her, why is that great? Because of the butter. It wasn't about the bread. Craving unleavened bread is not really something we humans do. Even during the Feast of Unleavened Bread, we can have a little challenge with that. You might call it an acquired taste through God's Holy Spirit. That this, in fact, does become what we want. This is the pure bread. This is the real thing. This is the genuine, sincere thing. This is what makes you feel better and live better in a spiritual sense.

Not necessarily a physical sense. But it's an acquired taste that we grow into, and then we would have none of this in our lives eventually. And I'm not talking about physical bread. Jesus gave us the overarching goal in Matthew 5, verse 48, that said, Be you therefore like your Father in heaven is.

Go for that perfection. Go for that fulfillment of what you are here on earth to perform and do. Be fully filled with that. Be like your Father in heaven. As God commanded the Israelites to come out of Egyptian society, we are to come out of a sinful society and to not sin. We're to follow Him in living a life of righteousness. And yet, at times, the Israelites wanted to go back. They said, oh, you know, that horrible upside-down user society is appealing. Even though it has a bad edge to it, a really bad edge to it, it's appealing.

Kind of like to go back to that. And the same for you and me. Even though we're called and we're cleaned and we're in the Church of the Living God, there is that other side that smells good, looks good, seems good.

We know it's not, but it still has a certain amount of pull to it. We profess at times to embrace God's commandments, but like Paul said, sometimes that which I profess to do is not the thing I end up doing in every case. And so it is, during the days of Unleavened Bread, we might have difficulty not wanting some of that. You ever found yourself during Unleavened Bread just happen to, by accident, go back to the old ways? It's possible.

You know, you can be sometimes like that and a friend says, what are you eating? You say, oh, it's Unleavened Bread! God chose us to use the Unleavened Bread of sincerity and truth as the main symbol of the feast. It's actually the name of the feast, is Unleavened Bread. We needed to develop this desire and craving for something that is not typical for humans. It represented Jesus Christ in the Passover, his broken body, his life-giving divinity, the sense of perfection that he has that is pure. It also was used to describe his church in 1 Corinthians chapter 10 verses 16 through 17. This is about godliness. It's about the mindset of God. Strong's, let me just say this, God named this the festival the Feast of Matzah in Leviticus chapter 23 verse 6.

The Hebrew word for unleavened bread is matzah, and I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that. It's more like matzah-sah-sah. It's got a bunch of S-T's and T's in it.

But in contrast to the slightly bitter taste of leavened bread, Strong's defines matzah, or matzoth, or matzoh is where that brand came from, as sweetness in a sense of greedily devouring for sweetness.

So the word that we have for unleavened bread, two words, actually is matzoh, and Strong's defines the meaning as sweetness in the sense of greedily devouring for sweetness. Or you might say craving sweetness.

Craving. Greedy wanting it. It's the feast, really, that has, according to that definition, more than just a static, placid description, but one where it shows the observers are actually compelled and drawn to its symbol. Keelan DeLeach's commentary says, the significance of this feast was in the eating of the matzoh, i.e. of pure unleavened bread. As bread, which is the principal means of preserving life, Keelan DeLeach says, it might easily be regarded as the symbol of life itself. So the matzoh, or unleavened loaves, were symbolic of the new life as cleansed from the leaven of a sinful nature. By putting leaven out of our homes before the feast, and by putting unleavened bread in our bodies during the feast, we can symbolize and portray the spiritual process by which God leads us to salvation.

We can portray the replacing of the old man with the new man, with the old man that links back to a nature associated with the God of this age, to the new man, the man from above, the second Adam, the life-giving Jesus Christ. In conclusion, eating unleavened bread during the Feast of Unleavened Bread is symbolic of our need for God to lead us in leaving behind the bitterness of sin and coming to crave the pure sweetness of God's righteous way of life. I hope you have a very meaningful feast of unleavened bread when it arrives.