Spiritual Brokenness

I gave a sermon a few weeks ago. It was a request by a number of people here in Murphy's Road that I do a sermon on marriage. And it wasn't the kaina sermon everybody expected on marriage. Basically what I did is I went through all the dysfunctional ways we bring into, as human beings, into marriage, dysfunctional ways of dealing with marriage, conflict.

And how we bring that with us. It comes from personality, it comes from experiences, it comes from our family of origin. I mean, but we bring different dysfunctions into that relationship, as we do with all relationships. And we struggle because we bring it with us. And I didn't give any solutions. So I said, I'll be doing another sermon. The solutions today are going to be different than what you think.

You and I were born in a dysfunctional humanity. You know, we look at our own lives and how we have to deal with, you know, conflict at work. We have to deal with conflict in our families, conflict with our friends, conflict with our neighbors. Well, you know, everything is conflict.

Politics is nothing but conflict. We're dealing with all this dysfunction. And we also know that inside of us, inside of us, there's an extremely difficult problem. There's a dysfunction in each one of us. The reason for this dysfunction of humanity is because emotionally, spiritually, mentally, we are broken at the core of who we are. We're going to deal with something real difficult today. You know, it's easier to get up here and talk about, well, let's just do this doctrine right. Let's just keep the Sabbath more correctly. Let's just do this. Let's do that. But you know, in order to actually understand and live those things and do those things, we have to deal with a brokenness that's in each of us.

And if we are honest, we know what's there. And we spend much of our life trying to pretend we're not broken. Everybody else is, but not me. So we're going to go into accepting our brokenness and what we must do to have it healed. Remember, we bring into all of our relationships our own brokenness, and we want other people to help heal our brokenness. And we can help each other. Being married and having children, for me, helped a certain part of my brokenness, but it didn't heal it at its core. I mean, really, being married and having children and raising a family, and now having grandkids, it just made my life wonderful.

But you know, it didn't fix the problem at the core. I still bring that problem into those relationships. We can help each other, but only God can deal with the core brokenness we have. Only God can do that. So you say, okay, I want to have a better family life. Okay? First step, understand the dysfunctions in your family. We covered that last time. And then understand the first thing that has to be worked upon. Oh, if you just fix my wife, everything would be okay. If you just fix this kid of mine, everything would be okay.

If you just fix my dad, everything would be okay. No. No, that doesn't mean there aren't issues there that need to be dealt with. But we can talk about how to deal with those issues all day long. And until something happens inside of us, we're always just dealing with symptoms. We're never dealing with the root causes that's in each of us. And that means we have to deal with this individual spiritual, emotional, mental brokenness that we have. Now, I'm going to give you a couple examples, because I don't want to zero in on family. I want to zero on a bigger concept. But to show you what I mean about how we bring all this with us, whatever gets broken in us, even as a baby, because we live in Satan's world.

That's where the brokenness actually comes from. All this brokenness is in us. We bring it into every relationship. Our family of origin always has brokenness in it. And guess what we do? We usually bring that into the next generation. Every once in a while, a generation will break that. As I've mentioned before, my grandfather was an alcoholic. My dad was not. I am not.

It's because my dad broke the cycle. So it was never an issue for me. Otherwise, it would have been. If he had just been an alcoholic, guess what I would have been? An alcoholic. He broke the cycle, because God came into his life. That's why. God came into his life, and he wasn't going to go down that path. So let's look at just a couple issues that we bring into our families that can come from our family of origin.

By the way, we also bring other things just genetically. You know, if your mom had one of those quick tempers, you know, exploded, and then forgot it five minutes later, probably one of her children has that genetic makeup. And they have to deal with that, right? Because you can't live life like that and have good relationships.

Or even keep a job. So there's genetic issues that are passed on from families of origin, too. And it's so easy to go back and blame them. Well, some of those genetic issues, I mean, who gets to pick certain genetics? It's just passed on. We have to learn to deal with the reality of our brokenness, no matter where it comes from. Let's look at one thing that can come from our family of origin, is we look at everything as negative.

Now, this could come from maybe you came from a family where you were constantly told that you were stupid or bad or worthless. You're constantly told that.

And you never did anything right. Everything was always bad. And you come to the conclusion everything in life is negative. And as you get older, that's how you treat everything.

And so you can go a couple ways with this. Maybe you're this way. I've met lots of adults this way, where every comment that comes from anybody is automatically taken as an insult or a put-down. Or, yes, I'm worthless. That's what they were told. Somewhere along the line, that's what they believe. And you can be an adult and someone says the simplest of comments like, oh, you got a haircut. You don't like it, do you? That's the automatic response. No, I just noticed you got a haircut. Well, just men usually don't notice anything, so this is a woman issue, right? The man says, oh, you got a haircut. That means you were shaved bald. Oh, you got a haircut. That's all we notice.

But what we do is we take that that has been developed into a thought and emotional process. And that's how we respond to everything in life. So everything is negative. It's very difficult to be success at anything. You're always telling yourself, I'm bad, I'm stupid, and that brokenness becomes the way you think. Now, you go to the other extreme, is that you you say, okay, what I'm going to do in my next generation, I'm never going to correct my child at all. So you let them just do whatever they want. I'm never going to tell my child that they did something bad. I'm never going to correct them. And guess what happens with that? Those children grow up believing they can do anything without a moral compass, and guess what? They pass on to their kids. The opposite of what you got, they pass on. You're okay no matter what you do. This is what happens in the environment inside our own families, or can't happen. And another, just another, because I just want to go through this quickly, because I want to get into this concept of brokenness, but to show you how we pass these things on. If you lived in constant fear because of an alcoholic or a violent parent, you can go a couple different directions. You become obsessed with control. If I control everything, nothing bad can happen to me. So you control, try to control everything and every person.

Of course, the problem is, God could do that, but even God doesn't do that. We've all known of somebody, or maybe you are somebody, that's ingrained to, I got to control, I got to control everything to the point of obsession. Everything has to be controlled. Why? Because then I'll be afraid. Or you go to the opposite extreme, where you just would draw.

You've been put down so much through violence, because violence does something to us. Violence does something horrible to the way we think and feel. And what happens is, you just hide all the time. I mean, I've known people that hadn't left their house in years, because they're just afraid. Somebody may do something bad to me, and they just hide.

Now, we can come up with dozens of behaviors, but this isn't just about behaviors. But I just wanted to show you how this is passed on, and dealing with hundreds of people over 40 years. I've heard the stories, and you listen to it when you realize, okay, how does this get healed?

I want you to really listen to this, because this is important. The important lesson you and I must learn is that our spiritual, emotional, and mental brokenness shapes our thoughts. Because the brokenness is so deep inside us, it shapes the way we think, but even probably more importantly, it shapes the way we feel. It shapes the way we feel. So our thoughts then shape our emotions, but then they become slaves to our emotions. You ever been upset over something? Woke up in the middle of the night, and that's what's on your mind? I won't ask for a show of hands.

Right? It's on your mind, and you wake up, you're upset, you don't even know why. You don't even know why you're upset, or you have the weirdest dreams, because you want the bed upset.

So inside the complexity of the mind that God gave us, we have to learn that our thoughts and emotions shape our behaviors. We start with thoughts. What we want to do is fix our emotions. I have no idea how to fix your emotions. You fix your thoughts, and then they help shape emotions. I gave a sermon a few years ago on self-talk, remember? How you have to go to the scripture and let the Bible tell you what to think. I give up, and then you go to a scripture that says, but God is with you always. Right? Okay, I'm not going to give up. God is with me always. God is with me always. God is with me always. That's what he promises. And you go ask God, and you pray about it. And the thoughts over time help shape the emotions. But just to say, don't feel this way. You know, any of you have ever been in a crisis and had someone say, well you shouldn't feel that way, realize that is an absolutely ludicrous statement. Well, just don't feel that way. Well, okay, now I'm mad. I'll punch you in the nose and tell me not to feel that way. Well, you know, what? So, we have to work with thoughts. So, let's talk about our brokenness. Oh, good. Five steps to dealing with brokenness. No. Maybe later.

We have to open something up. Just like last time, we had to open up the dysfunctions we bring into our families and we tend to pass it on. And it's always amazing to see people break that. And the next generation doesn't have the same issues.

But somewhere along the line, people have to deal with their brokenness. Let's go to Luke 4. Now you think, I'll look for here what this has to do with brokenness. This is just a sermon by Jesus. It's his first recorded message, really, from a synagogue. Luke 4, verse 16. So, he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up. And as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read. And he was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. When he had opened the book, he found the place where it was written. Now, he's standing in front of the synagogue. The women would have been separated in one place, the men in another. Gentiles would sit in another place. They were all separated. And he gets up and he reads this to everybody. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of the sight to the blind, and to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. He goes and he sits down and everybody's staring at him because, well, expound upon that. Because that's what, you know, to get up and read a passage, you could expound upon it. This is how things were done in the Jewish synagogue. But he didn't preach anything. He went and he sat down. Verse 21, he began to say to them, I mean, that's a messianic prophecy. They knew it was a messianic prophecy. And he gets up and tells them, that's why I'm here. I'm here to free captives. I'm here to heal the brokenhearted. And that's why I'm here. Now, being typically broken people, this message made them angry. They didn't want to hear how broken they were. They didn't want to hear how they needed help. They just wanted the messiah come and save them from the Roman Empire. And he just said he was the messiah and he didn't say anything about the Romans. And so, being broken people, they decided to kill him. What's amazing about this? These were people he knew. These were people that were friends of his family. There were people that, as he grew up in that area in Capernaum and Nazareth and that area around Galilee, as he grew up in that area, he and his father, as a carpenter, probably more of a stonemason than anything else, would have known lots of people. They interacted with lots of people. Everybody knew him. He was Jesus. That he's a good worker, a good kid. You know, probably illegitimate, right? Probably illegitimate. And he gets up and he's welcome to speak. He's respected as an adult. He gets up and they try to kill him. We're not broken. And yes, we are. You know, he's quoting here from the Hebrew, and of course, that it's translated into the Greek. I'm going to read from the Jewish Publication Society of Psalm, I'm sorry, Isaiah 61, because I want to, I think it's a little bit interesting how this is more perfectly translated. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because the Lord has anointed me. He has sent me as a herald of joy to the humble. I am bringing you joy. I'm bringing you keys to happiness.

He has sent me as a herald of joy to the humble to bind up the wounded of heart and to proclaim release to the captives and liberation to the imprisoned. Both physically and spiritually, he was here to release people from spiritual imprisonment.

We're always trying to deal with symptoms, and we have to learn to go here first. And this isn't fun, but it's where we got to go because each of you know if you take time to think about it and cut out everything else, you know there's something broken in you. You know it!

We try to fill it. We try to pretend it's not there, but it is. What you see here is why it's so hard to deal with our own brokenness. It's because it's our identity. They identified as the people of God. They and they were. They identified as the people who came from Abraham, and they were. They identified as the people who descended and come out of Egypt and a Red Sea had opened and followed Moses, and God had personally given the Ten Commandments to them. And they were. They were the people God promised the Messiah to come to, and they were.

They weren't broken, but they were.

We defend our self-centeredness. We defend our need to control others. We defend our hatreds. We hold on to our hurts and our abuses, our disappointments. We even hold on to our sins. We will hold on to our sins even though they're breaking us. And the reason why is it's become who I am. I don't know anything different. I remember one time reading, it was in a Denver newspaper. This is many years ago. Little child, I want to say four or five years old, had been kidnapped. They couldn't find her, couldn't find her, couldn't find her. Days went by, and then they found her in a state park up in the mountains. And she was almost naked, just had her panties on, and they had whoever kidnapped her had dropped her into one of those outhouse toilets. And she was down in the bottom. She'd been there for days. And when they found her, the guy looked down and said, what are you doing down there? And she said, oh, this is where I live.

This is where I live. You know, some adult came in and put me in here. I guess this is where I live. That's fascinating, because that tells you what we do as humans. You and I live in Satan's cesspool, and what's our answer half the time? God says, what are you doing? And her answer is, oh, this is where I live. We're so broken, we think this is what God wants for us all the time. He wants a lot of good things for us. There's a lot of good in the world. I'm not saying everything in the world is evil and bad. There's a lot of good in the world. I'm talking about dealing with Christ saying, I've come to do this. And that message is for you and me, just as much as it was for them. I've come to do this.

So what we try to do, we try to force our broken image of ourselves into relationships.

And what do we do? We withdraw, we nag, we can't control our tempers, we become a workaholic, refuse to take care of our family. We don't take care of our own health. We're always trying to do payback. We suffer from depression and alcohol, drug abuse, or overeating. We become addicted to video games. And how much more dysfunctional behaviors do I mean, I can just listen, listen, listen. And it's because there's something broken, and we don't want to deal with the brokenness. So we deal with it this different ways.

First thing we have to understand is that this brokenness cannot be healed except through God.

You can escape it for a while. You can spend 20 years in your career working 12 hours a day and not feel broken until at 55 you have a heart attack and you realize you're never going to get your health back and you wonder, what did I do it for? What did I do it for?

Okay. Brokenness towards God. Now is, oh good, he's going to give me step one on how to become unbroken before God. Step one is the opposite of what you and I think it would be.

In order to be healed of this brokenness, we have to be broken more.

What? I'm already broken. I mean, what can you do to me? There's a different kind of brokenness. We have to understand there's two kinds of brokenness. You and I suffer from the brokenness of being human and we're all broke up inside.

In one way or another. I mean, some people are more functional than others, but let's, you know, down deep enough, we're all broke up inside. Now we got to face it.

What do you mean I got to be broke more? Psalm 51. We know this story here and I'm just going to read a part of this. Psalm 51.

David, of course, is being faced with the fact that he had seduced a young woman against her will.

Wasn't raped, but the Hebrew is she didn't want to do this. He seduced a young woman, got her pregnant, killed her husband, and then hid from God. Right? And that's about as broken as you can be. Now in this brokenness, he could say, I'm worthless, just kill me. I am worthless, I have no hope, so I'll just go out and do whatever I want. God can't forgive me of this. What does he do? Verse 12. Verse 7. Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean. He knew there could be, he could be clean. He could not escape all the repercussions of what happened. He could not escape the penalties of what would happen, but he could be clean before God because he could be forgiven.

Wash me and I shall be wider than snow. Make me hear joy and gladness. I'm broken. What do I need? Remember what Jesus says? I came to heal the brokenhearted. This man's broken because he realized I thought I was a good man. And deep inside, I'm a corrupt man. And my behavior shows how corrupt I am. My behavior shows how before God, I'm not a good man. He could have said, I'm so broken, God can't fix me. I've had people say to me, I don't know how many times. I've had people say to me this to me who have lived pretty good lives. I've had people say to me this to me in prison. God can't forgive me. I'm too broken.

You can't be any more broken than this as far as evil, right? Well, you can be. You can you have given your life over to evil. I mean, there's some people that are so given over to evil. God can't reach him.

He says, make me hear joy and gladness that the bones you have broken may rejoice. Now, I find that fascinating. This is typical Hebrew poetry. It's imagery.

David had no broken bones.

Nobody had broken any of his bones. God hadn't gotten...there's nothing. God actually broke his bones. What he's saying is, I'm broken inside and I acknowledge it. Heal my brokenness. That's a powerful Hebrew idiom there. It's typical poetry. It's an analogy. It's like you've broken me up inside because I...and I see why. Because I am broken inside. Hide your face for my sins and blot out my iniquities. Create a clean hearted me, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence. Do not cast me away from your presence. Do not take your Holy Spirit from me. He saw God take the Holy Spirit away from Saul and he watched him go insane. Please restore me. Verse 17. Oh, and verse 12. Restore me to the joy of your salvation and uphold me by your generous spirit. The more we have God dealing with our brokenness by being this kind of broken. See, it's a different kind of broken. The more that is healed, the more that is healed, the more we experience the joy of salvation. The more we can work on our relationships with other people, the more we have the ability to do certain things. Without that, we're just struggling along.

He says, verse 17, the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and a contrite heart. These, O God, you will not despise. So, oh, what God wants me is to be depressed. God wants me to be worthless. God, that's not what this says. He says, restore to me to the value only you can give me.

Put me back in a relationship with you, because that is the only way this life really works.

And that means I have to be broken enough to come ask for that. I have to get rid of my pride. This kind of brokenness means not being prideful.

Our original brokenness is a lot of times because we are prideful.

For that pride to be dealt with so that we now are absolutely submissive to God is that we go to Him with our pride broken.

To be spiritually broken, you have to absolutely desire God's healing.

And desiring God's healing means that God's going to, you know, make you take some medicine. God's going to make you do some things. Some of it's not pleasant.

You know, David being this man after God's own heart talks about this in other places in Psalms.

Just go to Psalms and look at how many times he talks about, what you want from me is a broken spirit. What you want from me is this contract, this soft heart that comes and says, Father, just help me. I'm not worried about everybody else anymore. Just help me because everybody else has their own set of problems. And we do this with each other. Well, I'm sure I'm not that weak. Of course, somebody else is looking at you and saying, I'm sure I'm not glad I'm not weak like you because we all have different weaknesses, don't we? So what we have to do is seek God first, always understanding how broken you are and understanding He can heal you of that. He can change you. And as long as we have this broken humbleness before God, all the other brokenness, the broken... See, this kind of brokenness, the be humble before God doesn't make you depressed. The be humble before God doesn't make you sin. The be humble before God doesn't make you hate others. The humbleness before God doesn't mean you're in constant conflict with everybody. Humbleness before God is, I am broken before you and you do something in me. And I am willing to submit. I am willing to follow.

I am willing to obey.

Let's go to Jeremiah 18.

Wow.

Jeremiah 18 is a fascinating passage here in Jeremiah. It's a prophecy to Israel, but I want to break this down as a prophecy or a lesson for us, okay, in the church. Verse one.

The word which came to Jeremiah from the Lord saying, Arise and go to the potter's house, and there I will cause you to hear my words. Then I went down to the potter's house, and there he was making something at the wheel.

So he goes to the potter's house. There he is. He's making this this pot. And the vessel he made of clay was marred. He made an imperfect vessel in the hand of the potter. So he made it again into another vessel as it seemed good to the potter to make. Then the word of the Lord came to me saying, O house of Israel, can I not do with you as this potter says the Lord. Look as the clay is in the potter's hand. So are you in my hand, O house of Israel, because Israel was marred. They weren't following God. They were a pot that was not usable. When God calls us, we're all unusable pots, and God is working with us. But what's interesting here, he's working with a pot that is marred. It's cracked. It can't be used. So he's working with a pot that is marred. See, when you and I come to God, when he calls us, we come to God unusable, unless we become broken before him. There's something here I never realized until recently.

You know, a potter, a really experienced potter, can take a pot that's already finished.

You think, well, a pot that's finished and it cracks, or you look at it and there's a real fault in it. He maybe even glazed it already, you know, and painted it, and he said, oh, what do you do? You throw it away, right? A really good potter doesn't do that.

I watched videos on it. It's fascinating. They take some pot and they scrape the glaze off, which I didn't even know was possible, and they get a little hammer and they pound it up.

They break it into pieces, and then they take some tools and they grind this pot into dust, and they add some water to it, and they begin kneading it, and they add some more water, and they begin kneading it, and pretty soon, you know what they have? A clump of clay.

Anybody ever see this? How many of you are potters? How many know this?

Oh, you're all wiser than me. Good! I'm glad somebody knew it. I didn't want to make it up.

You can reconstitute clay! You know, now that I watched it, I thought, well, that just makes sense. But at the time, I thought, you can't do that. I asked, can you do this? I typed, can you do this? Then I started watching all these videos. Yes, you can!

Now, that is what he's saying here. You already come to me, a pot that can't be used.

But I can redesign you, I can recreate you, I can make you into something.

I can heal the brokenhearted. Right? I can save the captives. Right? That's what Christ said. I am here to do this! And they wanted to kill him because their identity was, that can't be me.

I mean, the Romans are broken. You know, and if you're a pharisee, you're saying, whose sages are broken? And if you're a sagese... Well, if you're an Essene, you're saying, man, everybody is broken. The Essenes, the Essenes made the Pharisees look like liberals. I mean, religious liberals, they were so strict. They're not even mentioned in the Bible, but they were a party at the time, a religious group.

They all knew the others were broken, but not me, because our brokenness becomes our identity. It's who we are. And we have to start seeing ourselves the way God wants what he wants us to be. What he's willing to do. What he wants to do in you. Do you understand that? Well, yeah, but God could deal with somebody else, but not me. No, you're here because God says, trust me and look what I can do. Of course, I'm going to have to take and scrape all the paint off. And then I have to take this little hammer and pound you up into pieces. Now I have to grind you all up in the dust and then I'm going to pour some water in and knead it. And that's going to take a long time. And then sometimes they have to let that set for a while and bring it back and pour more water into it until I get the right consistency. And that's what life is. It's God doing it. And then he puts us on the wheel and he begins to shape us and mold us and do things with us and make us what he wants. That's how God sees you. That's not how we see ourselves because we carry around our brokenness. We think it's permanent. My brokenness is permanent. Or I'll simply compare my brokenness to somebody else's and I'm better than him. It's just one pot saying another broken spot is, well, you have more cracks than I do. There are still broken pots.

God has called you to do what Jesus said he came to do. This is why this is more than just head knowledge. We can have all the head knowledge and still be a broken pot.

It's about conversion of the mind and the heart. My dad said something to me. He was one of the wisest elders I've ever met. When I came into the full-time ministry, he said, you're going to have a great problem because there's something you don't understand. I said, oh, what's that? He said, you don't realize that a lot of people become converted in the mind in terms of knowledge, but they stop and don't truly become converted in the heart. And I said, I have no idea what he's talking about. 40 years later, I do. 40 years later, I do. It took a long time. I know what he meant. And he was trying to tell me, you're going to have to realize teaching them isn't just teaching them, you know, Christ was in the grave three days and three nights. Yes, we need to know that. We need to know the Sabbath. Yes, we need to know that. We need to keep the Holy Days. Yes, we need to know that Christmas and Easter is pagan. Yes, we need to know all that. Yes, he was trying to tell me, you can teach that, but you're going to have to take him someplace else too, which means I had to go there. Okay, he's probably dad's thinking, boy, no one dead. You're going to have to get broken up some. Then you can teach others.

This is what God is doing with you.

We accept that brokenness and not be left in despair. That's the point here. We either defend our brokenness. Well, yeah, if you came from my family, everyone who teaches you our stories, some of you were beaten, some of you were abandoned. Some of you came from very good families, and yet you're still broken. We're just broken in different ways. Some of you weren't loved.

I mean, everybody here could bring some story, and maybe it was in your family. Maybe it was something somebody else did to you. Maybe what other people did to you, and you're broken.

But I tell you something that we all need to understand. Satan broke every one of us. It doesn't matter what other people did to us. Satan broke every single one of us. And God said, okay, I have to call you in order to restore you back to what you were.

That's the reason if God doesn't call somebody now they can't be restored. They can't. He has to call them first. And that calling is more than just knowing there's some God out there.

It is about being moved and called and led to a certain relationship with God.

And then we have to deal with Satan has broken every one of us.

This transformation as a pot, like I said, I did not know you could reconstitute Clay.

He was just like, wow, that makes this thing in Jeremiah. That makes this passage so much more profound. I'm taking a broken pot and fixing it is his point.

We are being reconstituted. We are being changed. It's little things. Yes, it's behaviors.

Yes, it's doctrine. Eventually, it's the internal drives and forces and thoughts and learning to deal with our emotions, our broken emotions.

It's a transformation. So I started by talking about brokenness. And I didn't I know it was negative. It has to be. If you really understand how broken you are, it's a negative thing, isn't it? But I wanted to show you there's another kind of brokenness that changes that. That's between you and God. It's understanding what Jesus said. He meant it. Here's why I've come. Here's why I'm here. It's why he died for you. It's why he's doing now it's resurrected and sitting beside the right hand of God. He is working with us and God's Spirit comes into us to heal us of this brokenness. You won't totally be healed until you're changed. Okay? He's, oh good, do I wake up tomorrow healed? No. But there is a point. You do wake up and you are healed. It's going to happen. And between now and then is learning it.

Let's go to Ephesians chapter 4 as we close here.

We're going to try to eat somewhere around 330, something like that. And then come up here, somewhere around 430, and go ahead and do have our meeting.

One of the reasons why I just let you know, that we've talked for a number of years about the possibility of buying this building. It's been difficult right now. It's hard to even know who owns this building.

But we're moving forward with proposing that we buy it.

Now, there's a lot of things involved in it. I'm not saying we're buying it. There's their side, our side, and whether the council will agree with the amount of money it's going to take. But we want to present what we're doing at this point to everybody.

Ephesians 4 verse 17. Paul says, This I say therefore, and what I find interesting about what we're going to read next, Ephesians was written to a church that was primarily non-Jewish.

That's why he talks about predestination in this.

Because he was telling them, God worked through the children of Abraham. You can see that all through the Bible, because they had what we call the Old Testament. That's how they learned.

And then he said, now Christ came. He said, you're predestined. In other words, he's saying it's your time now. You are being called.

The world before that point, almost nobody was called of God between Abraham and Jesus.

There were some that wasn't an Israelite. They didn't even know. And he says to them, your time is now. In this plan, that's what predestination means, he's now destined to call people in a different group to come and join this group. And so this is written to those people, because Ephesians is driven hard in that first chapter. Paul is driving hard, you people now. Now they're being called out of rank paganism.

They're being called out of a world that the Jews at the time in the first century, they just saw as so evil and wicked. They didn't want anything to do with it. And they shouldn't have anything to do with it. But these people will be calling out of that.

He says, this I say therefore, and testify in the Lord that you should no longer walk as the rest of the nations or the rest of the Gentiles walk in the futility of their mind. So he tells these people, don't live like everybody else. You're coming into a new experience. You're coming into something where God's going to be involved directly in your life. Having their understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the blindness of their heart, who are being past feeling have given themselves over to ludeness, to work all cleanness and greediness. He said, that's the world you're part of.

That's the world you and I are part of, by the way. It's not different.

It's a greedy world. It's a violent world. It's a pagan world with Christianity thrown into it.

It's not a good place. It's not God's kingdom. There's lots of good things, and there's people that do good things, but this isn't the kingdom of God.

But you have not so learned Christ. So he tells these people, remember what Jesus Christ taught you, and I want you all to go back to what we read in Luke. Here's why I'm here.

I'm here to fix the brokenhearted, to heal those who are captive, to heal those and help those, to break their chains. This is why he came, to do those things. And we're still holding on to the chains sometimes. We're still allowing ourselves to be in darkness. Why? Because it's become our identity, and you and I are to have a new identity, because we've learned Christ differently.

If indeed you have heard Him, and been taught by Him, as the truth is in Jesus, that you put off concerning the former conduct, the old man, which grows corrupt according to the deceitful lust, and be renewed in the spirit of your mind. We need to go ask God all the time to be renewed. You and I have to get on our knees and get out our scriptures and say, renew me in my mind.

Renew my spirit. Change who I am as the great potter, so that I may be your child, and that you can put on the new man, which was created according to God, and true righteousness and holiness.

Oh, you say that didn't answer all my family problems.

Yeah, I'll give a sermon, you know, seven points on how to have a better family or better marriage. Yeah. But unless we do this, understand the dysfunction in our families, the first sermon, and we learn that only God can heal us of the internal dysfunction that motivates us all the time, then we simply create the same problems over and over and over again.

Now, we may fix something small, but we don't change the big picture.

Christ came so that we could be healed.

We need to turn to Him and let Him do that healing.