What’s Holding You Back Be a Living Example of Righteousness

Good afternoon. Happy first day of Unleavened Bread once again. Let's start today by playing a little bit of a video here. So if you turn your eyes to the screen here, and it's going to play a short clip, and we'll see how many of you recognize this. When you're traveling along the road in your car at 30 miles per hour and you crash, you crash around too, and you get hurt by the steering wheel or the windshield. But if you wear safety belts, they restrain your movement inside the car and reduce your chances of serious injury by 70%. Think about it. If you're not wearing a safety belt, what's holding you back? How many of you remember that commercial? Okay, a handful. Anybody want to take a guess what year that came out? 1962. That was actually 1985. That particular one. And that's not to say maybe it didn't come out a little earlier than that at some point in time. Hard as it is to believe, so that's about 40 years ago. Hard as it is to believe, at that point in time, seat belts were not required in a lot of states. My parents were safety conscious, and so they had a seat belt rule. And the seat belt rule was if you were in the front seat, you had to wear a seat belt. But in the back seat, physics didn't work back there, apparently. That was the role that the front seat would stop you. But as time went on, we all learned. My parents learned, we as society learned, automobile manufacturers learned that you could be injured in any part of the car and buy all sorts of things. You could bounce off even that padded seat in front of you if you hit it hard enough. It's going to hurt. Or maybe you go sideways and you just bonk into your sister's head or something like that. You could have pretty serious injuries. So laws changed, and seat belts became required all around. And of course, we get the gist of the commercial, right? The gist of the commercial is if you're not wearing a seat belt, nothing's going to hold you back from hitting your head or, you know, other parts of your body and sustaining, you know, a pretty serious, if not fatal, injury. Now here on the first day of Unleavened Bread, I want to ask you a question. What's holding you back? What's holding you back from putting the unleavened bread of Jesus Christ in you and being a living example of righteousness?

So we're going to look at today being a living example of righteousness. It's a little twist on the concept we saw on the video. You know, there the seat belt is to hold you back to avoid fatal injury, but we're going to look at some things today that would hold us back and perhaps cause a fatal spiritual injury. Now the first and most obvious answer would be what? Here on the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Sin, right? Yeah, sin. That's the first and most obvious answer. All right, so we're not going to actually spend too much time on that. I think we all know that. We've spent some time examining ourselves, looking at our shortcomings. I'm sure that over the past couple weeks, you know, if we weren't aware of them before, we were are even more so aware of them now, acutely aware of them. Hopefully we're all doing better than what we were a week ago, and if we've been at this for 10, 20, 50 years, whatnot, hopefully we've proved quite a bit over time in terms of getting that sinful nature out of us. None of us is perfect. We all fall short of the glory of God. We make mistakes. We know that. And so sin, of course, is something that holds us back, and it's a lifelong problem. But laying that aside for today, we're going to examine the command to be righteous, and we're going to look at a few of the things that sometimes might hold us back from doing that, and what it is we can do to overcome those things. So again, if you like titles or title, simply today, being a living example of righteousness. That's our, you might say, what's holding you back? Being a living example of righteousness.

Now, we might not think of being righteous as a command. We don't see a statement that says, you know, necessarily explicitly, thou shalt be righteous. When we think about righteousness, we oftentimes think about the problem of self-righteousness, right? And we'll talk a little bit about that. But we'll see that being righteous is a command, even if it doesn't, isn't necessarily directly stated. Let's turn to Leviticus 11 and verse 44.

Leviticus 11, we're just going to read one verse. We'll kind of summarize what this chapter is all about. You probably are already very well aware. One of the primary things we think about when we think about Leviticus 11 is clean and unclean food, right? Fins and scales, you know, cloven hooves, chewing the cud, and all that. But what I want to draw your attention to today is what God says at the very end of that when he gives out all these commands. Chapter 11 of Leviticus in verse 44, he says, For I am the Lord your God, you shall therefore consecrate yourselves, and you shall be holy, for I am holy. Neither shall you defile yourself with any creeping thing that creeps on the earth. You know, you might remember again, if you go back in church a few years, a time when this particular doctrine was attacked, right? And one of the arguments that was used about eating clean and unclean foods was that, well, you know, God kind of put that out there as a health thing for us, but with advanced modern medicine and yada, yada, yada, you can kind of see that it's not necessarily, you know, necessary anymore. And of course, that was a utter lie and heresy. There is perhaps some correlation about eating clean and being healthy, but that's not why God did it. It is, was, will always be a holiness precept.

God said, do it this way, because I want you to think. I want you to be holy because I'm holy. I don't want you just to take any old thing that you find out there creeping around in the woods, you pull out all the water and just shove it down your mouth. He said, I want you to think about it.

So I want you to be holy. Now here, during the Feast of Unleavened Bread, we have an additional food law, don't we? Not to eat any leavened bread. Not to eat anything leaven. It's temporary. It only lasts seven days, but it is as much a food law as any of the rest. It would be as much a sin for me to go eat, you know, a loaf of bread or a piece of bread right now as it would for me to eat a piece of shrimp or a pork chop, right? We're told to do that. Just like the food laws of Leviticus 11, you know, the command to do something physical represents something spiritual, something much, much deeper. Let's go to the New Testament, turn to 1 Corinthians 5.

1 Corinthians 5. We read this in the sermonette. We've heard a lot about it over the past few weeks. We've thought a lot about it over the past few weeks and for good reason, but you're not done hearing about it because we're going to read it again. 1 Corinthians 5.

And we're going to pick it up starting in verse 6. 1 Corinthians 5 and in verse 6.

It says, Your glorying is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven, and that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleaven, for indeed Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

Paul reminds us that a little leaven can spread very quickly, can leaven a whole lump of bread very quickly, and just like that, sin can spread very quickly and ruin our lives.

So to get rid of physical leaven, we purge it out, we go, we throw things out, we don't eat it for a week. But more importantly than that, we examine our lives and we say, Have I let any sin creep in my life? If so, where? And what I need to do to get rid of it? And of course, we don't just stop there. We then, after that sin is gone, we put that unleavened bread of Jesus Christ in us. That's why we eat that little piece of unleavened bread, or maybe more than just a little piece, all throughout this entire feast.

And of course, we eat that little piece of Passover, symbolizing taking in Christ's life. But we eat unleavened bread and put it into our body to represent we are putting in the character, the character qualities, the nature of Jesus Christ into us. So whether it's not eating certain foods to be holy as God is holy, or putting the unleavened bread of Jesus Christ into us, we are to be righteous. You know, understanding what we should and shouldn't eat, understanding that we need to be sincere, that we need to be true. You know, those things are sort of definitions of what's right and good. And being righteous, then, is the outcome.

So being holy, what's sincere, what's true, those are sort of definitions. But being righteous is the outcome, and that's the outcome that we desire. That's what we want to be. We want to be living examples of righteousness just as Jesus Christ was. Turn over to 1 Peter 1. 1 Peter 1.

Pick it up in verse 14. 1 Peter 1 and verse 14.

It's picking up kind of mid-sentence here. It says, as obedient children, how do we know what to obey? Well, we got to know what God's laws are, right? We got to know how He defines holiness. We got to know what truth is. We got to know what it means to be sincere. It says, as obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lust, as in your ignorance. Again, we picture coming out of what we once were. We picture coming out of Egypt, out of sin at this time. Verse 15, but as He who called you is holy, you also shall be holy in all your conduct, not just seven days out of the year, all of our conduct. Because it is written, be holy for I am holy. Peter calls back to that command there in Leviticus 11.44, this principle, this holiness precept, that we are to be holy like God is holy. Be the embodiment of what is good, what is true, what is sincere, what is holy. Live a life that is an example of righteousness, just as Jesus Christ did.

In many ways, I think you could kind of say that that's the sum total of being a Christian, or being a disciple of Jesus Christ. Yes, you know, we eat this, and we don't eat that, and we meet on these days, and we give offerings, right? And we try to do nice things for people, and we be compassionate, all that kind of stuff. But those are kind of individual things that are by-products of being righteous. Those are all good. We should do them, you know, but those are just sort of outcomes if we are something greater, which is being righteous like Jesus Christ was.

Speaking of which, Jesus Christ has a little bit to say about being righteous, specifically with what enthusiasm we need to pursue it. Turn to Matthew chapter 5. Matthew chapter 5.

The section of scriptures commonly, you know, referred to as the be attitudes, kind of says, we should be like this. This should be our attitudes, is how I always think of it, but it's kind of this connection of a beautiful sort of a mindset that we should have. And so Jesus Christ is giving this message here, and we're just gonna pick it up in verse 6. He says, Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled. So he uses a physical analogy here of hunger and thirst and being filled, but the subject is different, right? He says, what you should be hungering and thirsting for is righteousness, and you'll be filled. Well, what are we going to be filled with? The bread of life, Jesus Christ. Right? You know, thirsting after righteousness, that's telling us how we need to pursue this. This should be something we desire always. Now, how did you feel at the end of your fast? I don't know. Most probably took a day, set aside for prayer and fasting as they prepared for the Passover. At the end of that day, I'll be kind of hungry. A little thirsty? I bet you would. Did you say, Oh, I could go on and do this for weeks? I bet you didn't. I bet you wanted a glass of water. Pretty bad. Pretty bad. He says, that's how we should desire righteousness. We should be thirsting for it. He goes on to mention some other things. Here it says, Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be sons of God. Again, these are sort of things that add up to righteousness. You know, being merciful to others, being pure in heart, being a peacemaker. If we are righteous, we're going to be all those things. We're going to do those individual actions that lead to that. One last scripture on this particular point, Psalm 106.

Psalm 106 and verse 3.

Psalm 106 and verse 3. He says, Blessed are those who keep justice, and he who does righteousness at all times. It's not easy being righteous, but it's very clear that that is exactly what we are to be. We are to be righteous. So, while it might not be listed anywhere as a thou shalt or thou shalt not sort of command, clearly we can see the command to be righteous, right? We're supposed to thirst after it. Christ doesn't say thirst after being above average. He says, don't thirst after being good enough. Don't thirst after hoping God shows and extends enough mercy that I make it into the kingdom. He says, thirst after righteousness. So that's what we're supposed to be. Now, go back to Matthew 5 for a minute, if you would. Matthew 5.

You see, Christ says something else about righteousness in this section of scripture. And I think it's here that we can start to see one of the things that can hold us back from being a living example of righteousness at times. Matthew 5, verse 10, he says, Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Living a righteous life, pursuing it, is going to bring persecution. We understand, we think about, you know, the end times and how God's people will be persecuted, and certainly some will be spared, and we pray for that. We look for that, but we also know some will be persecuted.

Of course, Jesus Christ and disciples, they were persecuted for living a righteous life.

One of the challenges of being righteous is that oftentimes when we do what is right, when we live righteously, we are perceived by others as being self-righteous. We're perceived as others as being self-righteous or holier than now, right, in some way. You know, we might work very hard to do the right thing. There might be something that tempts us, and it's very hard for us to avoid. For me, one of the things that tempts me greatly is cottage cheese rolls, particularly at this time of the year, right? We've got some snacks laid out there after services.

We're going to be having a potluck there on the last day of unleavened bread in Statesville. Imagine for a moment that your temptation is cottage cheese rolls. You've already been through the line once, and you go back up there again, and you go up, and there's one left. It's just glistening in the light, and you can tell it's the most perfectly cooked cottage cheese rolls. Just a little bit gummy on the inside, but it's got that hard crunch on the outside. Maybe it's sitting on a warming plate.

It smells so good. You've already had one, but there's that one left. So you pick up the tongs, you go, and you start to take it, and you think, you know what? I should leave that for somebody else. I've already had one. I'll put tongs down. I start to walk away, and his voice from behind you says, oh, look at you, Mr. Goody, two shoes over there. Aren't you so righteous? Go and leave it for somebody else. Now, hopefully that's not what happens, but human nature being what it is, you could kind of imagine it. It might have been a real temptation for you.

No, that's no sin to go eat that last cottage cheese roll, but maybe it was a temptation, and you had to say, you know, I want to say no to Dan, and Dan's gonna let that. Somebody else have that. You walk away, and people perceive that as self-righteousness. And now everybody's gonna be scared to death to have a cottage cheese roll after services. No, have them to your content. You know, you get the idea, though, right?

Sometimes doing the right thing, it can be perceived by other people as a self-righteous act. So how do we deal with this? This thing that could possibly hold us back from doing what we should be, being a living example of righteousness. Well, start as we often should, and look and see how did Jesus deal with such situations. Let's go to John chapter 8.

John chapter 8. I'm gonna kind of skim through a little bit of John 8 here to illustrate this point, but we'll start towards the beginning. John chapter 8, verse 3. And you're going to recognize the story right as we get into it here. John chapter 8, verse 3, says, Then the scribes and Pharisees brought to him a woman caught in adultery, and when they had set her in the midst, they said to him, Teacher, this woman was caught in adultery, and the very apt." So there's no doubt what was going on here.

It was 100% guilty. "...Now Moses and the law commanded us that such should be stoned, but what do you say? They said this, testing him that they might have something of which to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down and rode on the ground with his finger, as though he did not hear." So his enemies were trying to set him up for failure, right? And I say, oh, we're going to show this guy who's boss, right? He thinks he's so hot. We're going to give him a question he can't possibly answer. You know, maybe he'll make a really harsh judgment, or maybe he'll try to weasel out and say, well, that's not what the law really says.

So who knows exactly what they were wanting. But continuing in verse 7, he says, "...so when they continued asking him, he raised himself up and said to them, He who is without sin among you, let him throw a stone at her first." So he acknowledges the law. The law was that she should be killed. She should be stoned, right? But he puts a little qualification on it. He said, okay. He said, if you're righteous, if you're without sin, why don't you throw the first stone? He says again, he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

Then those who heard it, became convicted of their conscience, went out one by one, beginning with the oldest, even of the last, and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. And when Jesus had raised himself up and saw no one but the woman, he said to her, where are those accusers of yours? Has no one condemned you? Now, he turned it back around on them. His accusers were the ones who actually had the issue of self-righteousness, right? They looked at Jesus Christ as being self-righteous, but they were the ones who had the real issue.

So he turns it around on them, and he brings about a blessing to this woman in the process. Her life is spared. Verse 11, she said, No one, Lord. And Jesus said to her, Neither dare I condemn you. Go and sin no more. Then Jesus spoke to them again, saying, I am the light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life. Then the Pharisees therefore said to him, You bear witness of yourself. Your witness is not true. Though they were really not happy with him. He made them look pretty foolish. And he says, He is the light. And they say, Wait a minute. You can't point to yourself as the example. You can't say that you're the light. You're the one who's true. You're pointing to yourself. That's a self-righteous example. Now, for any of the rest of us, that would have been true. But this, of course, was Jesus Christ, the one who never sinned. And it was true for him to say this. This was perceived, though, as self-righteousness by his accusers. It caused people to be incredibly jealous and hate him, which is where the lesson for you and I comes in.

Jump forward a few chapters to John chapter 15. John chapter 15 verse 18. We read these scriptures just the other night.

John 15 verse 18 says, If the world hates you, you know that it hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own, yet because you are not of the world, but because I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

People are going to hate us for what we do. It could be something minor, something that causes them to accuse us of being self-righteous. Or it might rise to the point, as it did with Jesus Christ, where people are actively trying to kill us. But it happened before. And remember what Christ said. You're not of the world, and it's because of that they're going to hate you. If the world loves us, we probably have a problem. But if they hate us, it's because they look at our example and they know that it's a living example of righteousness, if we're reflecting the life of Jesus Christ.

Verse 20, he says, Remember the word that I said to you, a servant is not greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also also persecute you. You know, Jesus Christ is greater than us. We are his servants. They persecute him. They're going to persecute us. It says, If they kept my word, they'll keep yours also. He said, But all these things they will do to you for my name's sake, because they do not know him who sent me. People didn't understand Jesus Christ because they didn't really understand God the Father. They weren't willing to submit to God to his laws, to his requirements, in order to be righteous. What did Jesus do wrong? The only thing he ever did wrong was obeying God and being righteous. That is, in terms of what the world thought of doing wrong. He didn't do anything wrong, of course. Christ went on to say many other things. But he points to the example, you know, we can expect to be persecuted. We can expect to be hated. We can expect people to think that we're self-righteousness because they thought the same thing about him. He concludes this section, though, over in chapter 16 here, with some very encouraging words at the end of chapter 16, verse 33.

It says, These things I have spoken to you, that in me you may have peace. People are going to think bad things about us. This just goes with the territory. If we're doing what we should do, people are going to think we're self-righteous, even if we are just being righteous, as Christ was. So these things I've spoken to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world. You know, we can fret and worry about what other people think about what we say and do. And they can accuse us of all sorts of things.

But we can be encouraged, knowing they did the exact same thing, to Jesus Christ.

And as He was, we are not of this world. Don't let criticism and persecution hold you back from being a living example of righteousness. Instead, be pushed forward, knowing that Jesus Christ has already overcome this world.

And what other challenges might we face when it comes to the things that hold us back? We talked a little bit about sin. We need to put that up our lives. But once we do that—and again, we don't do it perfectly, but what's an ongoing thing—we find ourselves in a state, particularly right now, having examined ourselves, where we're probably, as I said earlier, we're probably in better shape right now than what we were a couple of weeks ago. All right, hopefully we are. We should be. And that's very good, but it's not enough. It's not enough. Turn to Luke 11.

Luke 11.

Verse 24. Luke 11 and verse 24.

Luke 11 and verse 24. It says, Now, this is talking about someone, you know, if they had a demon in them and it was cast out, and it's gone, that's great. But, you know, that demon goes around, can't find anywhere else to go, and it goes back and it sees this guy, he's there, and his house, spiritually speaking, is empty. In other words, there's been nothing put into it. So there's not only room for him, but seven of his little hellion friends to come back and make that man's life even worse.

This is the principle being taught here, right?

You and I did a lot of sweeping this past week, probably in a physical sense as well as a spiritual sense. We looked through all the nooks and crannies, tried to get all the breadcrumbs out of our lives. We looked at sins, we looked at shortcomings, and so we moved those things out, which of course is very good to do. But you know, inevitably we wind up still falling short. By the way, I have to ask, how many of you have already failed this feast of unleavened bread from a leavening standpoint?

Just me. Okay. Well, you probably will before this is all over, but I'll tell you this quick story. This past week, my wife and I were going through various duties and things like that. You know, I've cleaned the cars out and she was cleaning the kitchen and other parts of the houses. One of the things she had done is she had done the oven, and our oven's got one of those self-cleaning cycles on it, right? She had done that the night before, and it goes basically turns everything into ash on the inside. The next morning, she was going to work that day, and she said, hey, a couple things if you could help me do this. If you could finish, you know, a vacuum in the living room and sweeping up in this area over here. She said, if you feel froggy, she said you could vacuum out the stove there, get that ash out of it, and pull it out and get anything behind it. I said, okay, I'll see if I can get to that. I went through and I did that. I did the first two things, which were the must-dos on my list, and the third was kind of like a push goal, right? What they call an extended goal. I thought, well, you know, I'll really impress her by getting the oven done. So I went and I got the vacuum out, and I vacuum all the ashes out of the oven, and I pulled the oven out from the wall, and I got behind there and cleaned that all and put back. She got home from work that day. She said, hey, you know, were you able to get those things done? I said, yeah. I said, I even got the oven finished. She said, okay, great. That's fine. Fast forward to this morning. We were making those, we call them Dutch babies in our house. If you have the old, the Unleavened Bread, Savoring the Savus cookbook, and it's got the Unleavened Bread section in there. I think it's called German pancakes, right? And to do those, what you need is a nice, heavy sort of a cake pan, and you put some butter down there, and you make up the batter, which is basically flour and eggs and milk, and you put it in there. But you need these heavy pans. So this morning, Kimberly went to grab those, and she pulled that drawer out that's underneath the oven, and she said, Dan, didn't you say you cleaned the oven? I said, well, yeah, you asked me to vacuum it out and pull behind it and did that. She said, well, what about the drawer underneath the oven? And I said, well, you didn't say anything about that. She found not a crumb, not a crouton, but an entire biscuit from about three weeks ago. Now, mind you, I wouldn't have wanted to eat it, but it was still 11. It was still there, right? We make mistakes. We fall short.

But you know, this scripture points out something important, you know? If all we do is get the sin out of our lives, then we've left an empty house, and it's not going to take long for it to get filled back up again. Next Sunday morning, most of us will run out, do some grocery shopping, right? Pick up that loaf of bread, baking soda, yeast, whatever. I remember many nights on the last day of Unleavened Bread, if it fell on a school night when we were kids, you know, we might go out to eat someplace on the last day of Unleavened Bread with friends, and then after sunset on the drive home, mom would have dad stop by the grocery store and pick up a loaf of bread so she could make, you know, sandwiches the next day, just soon as it was after sunset, right? And there's nothing wrong with that, because it's no longer sin. But what will we fill our spiritual habits with? If we gave up certain bad things, will we turn right back to them? Or will we replace them with something else? You know, if we like to drink too much, are we going to just replace that with gambling or online pornography instead? You know, if I have a short temper, am I going to replace that with just kind of being sullen, bitter, withdrawn from people? Well, I stop being so negative and critical just to become apathetic and unloving. It's really not the purpose, is it?

If we leave our spiritual house empty, something will fill it. What is it going to be?

Let's go back to 1 Corinthians chapter 5. 1 Corinthians chapter 5.

1 Corinthians chapter 5. I'm going to read these same verses again. Think about them as we do. 1 Corinthians 5 verse 6. It says, Your glory is not good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump? Therefore purge out the old leaven that you may be a new lump. That's what we just did, right? We looked at the old leaven, we looked at the sin, we cleaned it out so that we're a new lump. Now what's going to get into that new lump? Some wild yeast going to show up?

Maybe a little teaspoon of baking soda? What's it going to be?

It says, For indeed Christ our Passover was sacrificed for us. Therefore let us keep the feast, not with the old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. Again, that unleavened bread, that little piece we took at Passover, that unleavened bread we eat during each day of this feast, represents Jesus Christ and what we need to be putting into our lives. So how does that relate back to being a living example of righteousness? You know, if all we've done is cleaned our house without putting something new and better into it, then we've become spiritually stagnant. We've become spiritually stagnant. We're just sort of stuck in this cycle. I clean my house, sit back, don't seem to really do anything. I turn around and all of a sudden, without anything ever happening, really I look and notice, bam, my house is dirty again, which is not unlike my regular house. But spiritually speaking, right, we get it. If we don't do anything, guess what? Those old habits? They're going to come back, or even worse, maybe worse habits are going to come back. So how do I avoid being held back by spiritual stagnation? Simply put, we need to be putting in all those individual little things that add up to righteousness. We touched on a few of them earlier in Matthew chapter 5.

Saw how we need to be merciful, be peacemakers. Corinthians there here, we just read how we need to put in sincerity and truth, which all sounds good. But how do we do it? How do we go about being that living example of righteousness? The simple answer is we have to be intentional in our actions. We have to be intentional. We can't just be passive. We can't just clean out the house and just turn around and kind of see what happens. We have to think about what am I going to put in here? If it's a physical house, I'm going to put in a new piece of furniture over there. Am I going to put in new carpeting? What am I going to do? Spiritually speaking, we have to be intentional. We have to be people who are willing to, desiring to be living examples of that righteousness. Peter has something to say about this. If we turn over to 1 Peter, or back to 1 Peter again, we're going to go to chapter 2 this time. 1 Peter 2.

1 Peter 2 verse 1, he says, Therefore, laying aside all malice, all deceit, hypocrisy, envy, and all evil speaking—that's, again, that symbolic of the evil things that we put out, right? We've doubled down on our efforts to get rid of these things this past week. Verse 2, As newborn babes at clean house, desire the pure milk of the word that you may grow thereby. Thirst after righteousness says, If indeed you have tasted that the Lord is gracious.

Now, we have tasted. We do know that the Lord is gracious.

Verse 4, he says, Coming to him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God, and precious. Jesus Christ was a living stone. We need to be living in that same way, not a lump that sits around waiting for the house to get dirty. Others might not see our value just as they didn't see the value of Jesus Christ. But, you know, we are precious and chosen here. We're reminded. God sees value in us. We need to do something. We have a purpose. Verse 5 says, You also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. And we're being put together to be used for something. Of course, we think about the future. We think about the kingdom of God. We think about being kings and priests and being teachers. And we will be, but we have to be doing something now as well. Or we're not going to get there. If we're not these living stones now, for just a lump that does nothing, our house is going to be filled up with some more garbage. Maybe it's a different name, but it's still garbage. God expects us to be offering sacrifices by imitating His Son, Jesus Christ. So what's it look like? What's it look like? Instead of just holding back your tongue, praying that you don't say the wrong thing, maybe instead we need to go into a conversation, even a conversation that we know is going to be difficult, looking for thinking about the things that will bring peace. Maybe instead of simply praying that God showed mercy on us and our sickness or our trials, we need to look at others and think about what would a merciful act look like to this person? And what can I do to help bring that to them? Instead of complaining about all the things you don't have, or maybe even the things you don't want to happen, consider all the blessings that you do have and how you can spread those blessings to others.

That's not something that necessarily comes natural. No, we've been in church a while. We know, okay, I shouldn't say it's bad. I need to try to get that out. But taking that next step to be intentional, to put that unleavened bread in, is to be like Jesus Christ, to take action.

That's a whole other thing. Getting our house swept clean is a vital step here as we enter the Feast of Unleavened Bread. But if we already get the entire meaning in this feast, we need to move past that and work actively to put the unleavened bread of Jesus Christ in us, to be living as He did. Take action. Be intentional. Do what is good and right. Don't just avoid doing what's wrong.

We must do all those little things that bring peace, that show mercy, that spread compassion, you name it. All those little things that add up to being that living example of righteousness. Now, that probably doesn't come as a surprise to any of you, right? It's been around a while.

And there's a tendency, of course, leading up to this particular feast, to focus on putting sin out. And we need to do that. And by the time the feast rolls around, we're reminded each year, oh yeah, that's right. It's not just about that. It's about putting that unleavened bread in us. Now, I need to be doing that, being more like Jesus Christ. Again, I don't think that it comes as a surprise to any of us. But it's not the knowledge of doing that that's a real problem, is it? It's not the knowledge of doing that that's a real problem. The real problem is not knowing our understanding, but rather having the desire to do it. And we just read there in 1 Peter 2, it said, like, newborn babes desire the pure milk of the word.

We need to have a desire to be like Jesus Christ.

I don't make statements like this very often, but if you don't have a desire to be like Jesus Christ, I can't help you with that. That's not really something I can do for you.

I played volleyball, has a team on a team, a boys team in church. We were well coached. We had some very talented players on our team. But I remember during one particularly important and critical match, we were really floundering. We were doing very poorly. The problem wasn't that the other team was better. The problem wasn't that we didn't know how to bump set or spike or where our positions were to be or that we didn't have the basic skills. The problem was we weren't putting in the effort.

Our coach had already called a couple timeouts and kind of, you know, gave us a good dressing down on what we were doing wrong. By the time he called the third time out, he said, listen, guys, he said, I don't know what else to do. He said, I've told you everything that you need to do. He said, you've got the skills to do it. He said, but I can't want this game for you.

He said, if you don't want it, you're not going to win it. He said, so you got to decide whether you want to win or not. And that was the end of his pep talk. We went out, we played, and as I recall, I do believe we won. Of course, this has been 30 some years ago, so I don't remember the exact outcome, but I do remember that little speech. You know, our coach couldn't go out there and play for us. You know, if we didn't want to win the game, he cannot want it for us. We had to do that. I can't make you desire to be like Jesus Christ. What I can do, however, is remind us of something that can help renew our desire to be like our Lord and Savior. Let's go back to Matthew chapter 5. Matthew chapter 5.

It's still part of that same sermon that we read in earlier, but a little later on, Matthew chapter 5, verse 38.

Matthew 5. Starting in verse 38, he says, you have heard that it was said, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

Christ is talking about those who might do us harm here, but you know what he's pointing to was a basic tenet of law, right, at the time. Under the old covenant, that was what the law was.

You know, somebody pokes out your eye, you take their eye for that, a tooth for a tooth. He points to the basic tenet of the law. Likewise, you and I, keeping that basic tenet of the law, putting sin out of our lives, that's the minimum requirement, right? That's just the basic part of it. Verse 39, he says, but I tell you not to resist an evil person, but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take away your tunic, let him have your cloak also. Christ goes beyond the basics of that law and says, okay, we're going to step it up a notch here, and guess what? You're going to have to go past what your normal desire is. Your normal desire might be to take that eye or to take that tooth. He said, but you have to go beyond that. Verse 41 says, whoever compels you to go one mile, go with them too. Give to him who asks you and from him who wants to borrow from you, do not turn away. As we enter this holy day season, there's a lot of things to think about. There's the removal of sin. There's the putting in of Jesus Christ. And then there's some other things that that kind of might escape us completely if we don't think about it. One of those things is that because of Jesus Christ's sacrifice, you and I can have the most precious gift of all, the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit can change us. It does change us, including the things that we desire. Christ starts this little section talking about the obvious things. Okay, here's a basic tenet of the law. He goes a little bit beyond that then and says, you know what? You need to do good to others, even those who are evil, even though that's not our normal desire. But you know, that desire can be different. That desire to pay somebody back can be different. We can desire to pay to help them, to go that extra mile. Likewise, we can change to desire righteousness. Go back to verse 6, near where we began today. It says, blessed are those who hunger and thirst, or you might say, blessed are those who desire righteousness. You find yourself lacking a little bit in desire? Ask God to continue to heal you, to change you, to increase that desire, to be more responsive to the Holy Spirit, and to desire righteousness like He desires righteousness. While only you can have the desire to be more like Jesus Christ and to be a living example of righteousness, in God's loving mercy, He gave us a helper, the Holy Spirit, to help us grow to change, to overcome our moral desires, including a lack of desire to be righteous. I'm going to close this morning in 2 Corinthians chapter 5. 2 Corinthians chapter 5.

Verse 20.

2 Corinthians chapter 5 and verse 20. 2 Corinthians chapter 5.

2 Corinthians chapter 5.

3 He made him who knew no sin to be sinned for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

Being righteous is a command of God for you and I. It's part of our duty as disciples of Jesus Christ.

There are a lot of things that can hold us back from time to time. Fear of criticism, persecution, spiritual stagnation, even a lack of desire.

But let's not forget we can and do indeed have Jesus Christ living in us.

Through his sacrifice, we can move past the things that hold us back. We can move forward as ambassadors of Jesus Christ with help from the gift of God's Holy Spirit. When we do that, absolutely nothing can hold us back from being living examples of righteousness.