All right, come on up here
We got an expert. All right, so put your hand behind your back here.
This is for where you totally can't see where you're at.
I can do it, but he'll be like, ah!
All right, so I have placed Chris in handcuffs. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions.
So first of all, is Chris arrested?
Arrested or not?
He says no.
The term arrested, as we use it in our society most of the time, means to be apprehended by the police, taken into custody, taken down, booked, basically.
So it means to be arrested that way.
There are actually six or seven definitions of the word arrested.
The simple term arrested means for something to be stopped, and you use this term, you know this term, because you've heard the term cardiac arrest, right?
So you know that when they say the man died from cardiac arrest, that the police did not come and put his heart in handcuffs and take it down to the police station, and he was left standing there without it, and that's why he died, right?
So cardiac arrest means that your heart stopped. Cardiac is heart. It means to have your heart, and arrest means stop.
So now, let's say I gave Chris this bottle of water here, my life-saving bottle of water, and I said, go ahead and take a drink.
Okay, here we go.
So now I ask you again, is Chris arrested from taking a drink of water or not?
So he is. So he's arrested, but he's not arrested.
So what's the difference?
Okay, context. How so?
Okay, so now he's physically arrested from grabbing the water or taking a drink, right?
But he's not arrested in a legal sense. That's what you mean by context. So in the context of the water, eh, arrested.
Context of legal system, going to go to court, whatever, not arrested, right?
So context in that way.
So what is the difference between the two contexts?
This is about what? His what?
About his ability to take a drink of water.
And when the police arrest you and take you downtown, that is about freedom, or being able to go somewhere else.
So if this was sitting at home on his counter, and the police came and arrested him and took him downtown, now he's equally unable to drink it, right?
Even if they put him in a jail cell and they don't cup him, this is not in the jail cell with him, he's unable to drink it.
So this is about ability, could be about location, whatever is ability to drink the water or not.
But being arrested by the police is about the police have that authority.
They've been given that authority to detain, detain at length, haul you in front of a judge, right?
All those kinds of things.
So now we have the key to the cuffs.
The first step would be really easy because it's not really technically cuffed.
Alright, and then we have this, I'll let you do the other side.
That'll be fun for you.
Yeah.
There you go, okay.
Alright, so notice that I know how you're going to see me.
Thank you for your patience, appreciate it.
So notice that whether he was arrested or not was dependent upon context, dependent upon, one was about ability and the other was about the authority,
whether somebody had the authority to detain, send a charge, that kind of thing.
But either way, this would solve the problem, right?
So if you happen to have a handcuffed key in the back of your belt or whatever and the police put you in cuffs,
and then they set you somewhere and they're not paying any attention, you use the key and you let yourself out and you leave there,
so you're not arrested either way.
You're not detained anymore because you've left of your own ability.
You had the key, you unlocked the cuffs, you let yourself out and you're not arrested from taking a drink of your water.
You could be arrested under the authority of the police, pull the key out, un-let yourself out, grab your button, take a drink,
and then you're like, hey, I don't really want to resist arrest, so you can hand yourself back and put the key back away.
So you could do that and you would still be arrested in the first case because you did not take the opportunity to get away.
If you did take the opportunity to get away, you'd probably be arrested again later with more charges.
But if you have the key, you have the opportunity to get away from being arrested regardless of which type of arresting we're talking about.
That make sense?
There are other definitions of the word too, but those are the two primary ones that we're familiar with.
Now, let's see if Jesus was arrested or not.
Grab your Bibles if you would and go with me to Matthew chapter 26.
Thank you.
This is God's word and from here on out, whatever I get right or wrong, if you listen to the Lord, you may well grow
and the light may shine in you more brightly than it did before we began, not because of what I say, but because this is the word of the Lord.
We're going to begin reading in verse 47, picking up the story briefly just so we know what's going on.
We are indeed in the garden of Gethsemane and they have been doing some praying there.
This is right after Jesus had that horrendous, I should say horrendous-ferocious kind of combination.
I made that word up.
But in that horrendous time of prayer, we were praying so fervently to the Lord about what was about to happen.
And then it says in verse 47, while he was still speaking, behold, Judas, one of the twelve came up,
accompanied by a great multitude with swords and clubs from the chief priests and elders of the people.
So we've got a whole bunch of folks in this here crowd.
They're not all chief priests and elders, but the chief priests and elders, some of them are probably represented there.
We know Judas is there and there's a big old crowd of folks and they have swords and clubs.
I submit to you that the two swords of the disciples have whiled away, probably not really enough if they were going to try to fight back.
So they're there for another reason.
Verse 48, now he who was betraying them gave them a sign saying, whomever I shall kiss, he is the one, seize him.
And immediately he went to Jesus and said, Hail, Rabbi, and kissed him.
And Jesus said to him, Friend, do what you have come for.
Then they came and laid hands on Jesus and seized him.
So they snatched him up. They've grabbed him, right?
And behold, one of those who were with Jesus reached and drew out his sword and struck the slave of the high priest,
and cut off his ear.
Jesus said to him, Put your sword back into its place, for all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword.
Or do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels.
A legion is a common term to them, would have been easily understood to be about six thousand soldiers.
So we're talking about seventy-two thousand angels like that, if he asks for it.
Five, how then shall the scripture be fulfilled that it must happen this way?
So we'll stop there for one second to make sure we understand the scene and then we'll go just a little further.
So Jesus is in the garden. He prays, comes back to the disciples.
It was kind of back and forth that went on there between him and the disciples that were with him.
And then he comes and he says, It's coming. It's happening right now.
And then Judas and the others show up.
And forty-six he said, Arise, let us be going. Behold, the one who betrays me is at hand.
Judas and the others show up. They snatch up Jesus.
One of the disciples whips out a sword, cuts off the guy's ear.
In the other gospel we know that Jesus put the ear back on. That's all cool.
All these stories are told from perspective.
But the key here is that they were thinking he was being arrested.
And he drew his sword to stop that from happening.
He was going to save Jesus from being put to death.
He could be the hero of all mankind. Save the Messiah from being put to death.
In your mind you're going, something mathematically doesn't quite work out right there.
If he saves Jesus from being put to death, then my sins wouldn't have been dealt with.
And so that's not very heroic to me.
But still, you could make the headlines by doing that. Save the Messiah from being put to death.
So he whips out his sword, cuts off the guy's ear. Jesus warns him and says,
Put your sword back into its place. For all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword.
In other words, that authority which you use to carry your own way, if you will,
or to make things happen the way you want them to happen, that you think is right,
be careful because that same authority becomes your destroyer.
That's a difficult teaching to swallow.
Jesus said, Do not think that I could call upon twelve legions of angels.
Seventy-two thousand angels could be called right now to rush and save me.
But then if I did that, how would that bring about what God said was going to happen
exactly the way God said it was going to happen?
And that's what's happening, by the way, in the Garden of Gethsemane that night.
The prophecies about Jesus are being fulfilled letter by letter.
Verse 55 then, I'll read 54 again in case you didn't quite catch the end of that.
How then shall the Scriptures be fulfilled that it must happen this way?
55. At that time Jesus said to the multitudes, Have you come out with swords and clubs
to arrest me as against a robber?
Every day I used to sit in the temple teaching, and you did not seize me.
But all this has taken place that the Scriptures of the prophets may be fulfilled,
and then all the disciples left him and fled.
Now, I've read in my Bible many times that phrase right there where it says,
then all the disciples left him and fled.
And I thought of myself like, man, I wish if I was a disciple and I was there,
I would not have left him and fled. I wish I would have stayed with him, you know?
I hope that I'll stay with Jesus.
And I could have written a sermon about staying with Jesus, because there they are, they run.
And then we know how it goes. You know, Peter goes and denies him three times
as Jesus said he would.
And then he says, Jesus had told them that when he was arrested that they would all scatter.
He had already told them that would happen.
And then it occurs to me, this is exactly the way it's supposed to be.
Even though it reflects badly on them that they leave Jesus in his moment of need,
this is the exact way it's supposed to be.
All the disciples left him because that's what was supposed to happen.
So the question then remains, was Jesus arrested or not?
Now the three points that come out of here, but the more powerful ones,
the ones that we can kind of really use for ourselves,
are really in the conclusion that arises out of these three points that I'm about to share with you.
They are a play on words. The first one is this.
Jesus was arrested according to plan. Jesus was arrested according to plan.
So indeed, he is taken into custody and authority by those who thought they had the authority to do so
and taken off to court to be held in front of the high priest and they'll question him.
In fact, they'll do all of that fairly illegally.
They have court overnight, which they're not allowed to do.
They use people that are not allowed to be there.
They bring up people to testify against him, try to get multiple witnesses to say the same bad thing about him.
They force him to testify against himself, which is against their laws.
They do it all very illegally, right? It's all very trumped up, if you will.
But that being said, in this moment, he was arrested according to plan.
Even Jesus said it would happen just exactly as it's been said it would happen.
And Jesus allows it, if you will, because he doesn't call the 72,000 angels,
or even one is all it would have really taken, to stop himself from being arrested.
Whose plan? Well, first and foremost, you know, it's God's plan, right?
Because God prophesied this hundreds of years before Jesus was ever born,
that it would go exactly like this, that he would be betrayed, that he would be arrested,
that the high priests and the servants thereof and so on would take him,
and that his people would scatter, those who gathered to him,
and said that they would never leave him, that they would all leave him.
All of that was prophesied by God.
And we're still in the midst of fulfilling the over 300 prophecies about Jesus that were prophesied,
that make sure we know with absolute certainty, beyond a shadow of a doubt,
unless you really want a doubt, then you can doubt if you want to,
but there wouldn't be any logical reason for it, that God's plan was being carried out.
So it was according to God's plan.
But it wasn't only according to God's plan, was it?
Because Judas went and told them, he said, this is how we'll do it,
and he wasn't doing it because he had heard it was a prophecy,
and he thought that was the way it was supposed to be,
he was doing it because he was offended at Jesus.
He was offended at the way things were going, and the way Jesus was using the money,
and the way Jesus was talking, right? He was offended at things.
And so he went to them, and he said for a certain price that he would betray them.
And he said, the one I kissed, that's the one you arrest.
And so, whose plan? Jesus was arrested according to plan.
Whose plan was it? Well, it was God's plan, and in Judas' mind, it was Judas' plan.
Now there's an important thing to be learned there,
because a lot of times you make your plans and you think things are going to go a certain way,
and even you might do so corruptly.
Like you might go, well, I'm going to get away with something here,
but all of that really winds up being part of God's plan.
While you're in sin, the things that I did, or as Arjo was sharing,
the things that he did before he got saved, the things that we were doing before we got saved,
that was all part of God's plan in the long run.
God knew that I would eventually encounter the gospel.
God knew that I would turn myself over.
Do you understand that if you go to heaven when you die, and I hope you will,
and you will if you've accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior in earnest,
then God is already there, already there right now,
ushering you into heaven and saying, well done, good and faithful servant,
or refusing you from heaven and saying, get away from me, I never knew you.
I hope it's the former, obviously.
God is an eternal being.
He exists since before time, essentially was ever created,
and would, if there was such a thing, exist after.
But he'll just exist forever. He's already there now.
So you're like, well, how can we have free will?
I don't want to get on a rabbit trail, so to speak,
but how can we have free will if God already knows that what we do is part of his plan?
See, God can see every choice that anyone could make.
God is the master chess player to the four millionth degree.
He can not only see what any of us would do next,
but also what we could do next in every myriad possibility.
And then he knows based on who you are in yourself outside Christ,
who you are in yourself, which of those possibilities you're going to choose.
Because he's that omniscient.
He's a master chess player in the millionth degree.
So God knew that Judas would be offended at Jesus.
God knew that Judas would hatch a plan.
God knew that Judas would go to the chief priests.
God knew how much money would be offered.
God knew that Judas would be repentant afterwards,
but not repentant enough to turn to God, only enough to kill himself.
God knew that Jesus would be arrested according to Judas' plan,
because Judas' plan was part, in some small way, of God's plan.
Jesus was being used, we'll come back to that later, to glorify God.
Lastly, and maybe most importantly, Jesus was arrested according to his plan.
It's hard for us to kind of justify that terminology when we talk about being arrested.
That would be like turning yourself over to the police for jaywalking.
Like, okay, go ahead, take me in and find me.
I jaywalked yesterday.
Or whatever other crime you want to use.
You could say a more severe crime.
The crime that they would eventually essentially hang on him
and claim to be the king of the Jews.
That would be Pilate's version of it.
That he claimed to be God in the flesh.
That would be the high priest's version of it.
And while he was indeed the king of the Jews and claimed to be God in the flesh,
neither one of those things is truly punishable by death,
but they would still kill him, nonetheless.
This was all according to Jesus' plan.
Now we know that he begged God that there would be another way.
And I always thought, you know, he was begging God and saying,
he says please take this cup away from me.
And I always thought he was begging God to do it another way.
But the truth is, even Jesus is begging God to do it another way in the flesh,
which was necessary for his human body,
because your body has a desire to survive.
You have a drive to survive.
In the desert, you will search for water until you die of thirst.
On the sea, men will, they have such a drive of thirst
that they will eventually drink the sea water and get sick and die.
Go mad first and then get sick and die.
Because you have such a drive to survive, your human body is designed to survive.
And so there was the crux, the moment at which Jesus was truly suppressing
his human body's desire to survive and submitting, if you will,
and surrendering, if you will, that desire unto the Lord.
And he successfully did so when he prayed,
but your will, not my will, be done.
So I submit to you that Jesus was arrested according to plan,
to God's plan, to Judas' plan, and even to Jesus' plan.
Next, I'll say to you that according to Jesus,
according to what we read in here, to Jesus,
the plan could have been arrested, meaning stopped, right?
According to Jesus, the plan could have been arrested.
Now what's interesting is you have the same power that Jesus said.
You can stop God's plan in your life.
You can choose sin and wickedness over righteousness and goodness if you want to.
Theoretically, even as a saved person, even as a person who followed Jesus.
Now you shouldn't, you probably never would choose that, but you could do that.
You could arrest God's plans for you, just as Jesus is saying,
could I not have called 72,000 angels to stop this from being carried out?
Could I not have stopped myself from being arrested
just the way that God said it would come down?
And God would answer in this moment and send those angels,
and we would reset everything, we would change everything,
we would break the prophecies.
I could do that. I will not do that.
Jesus was saying that God's plan, Jesus' plan, Jesus' plan,
all of it could have been arrested. That's what he said.
Now Jesus says over in John 3, he said,
when the Son of Man be lifted up, and he's talking about making a parallel to the brown serpent.
Now you remember this story in Numbers 21,
the Israelites are coming out and they're wandering,
and people start getting bit by snakes.
There's a lot of complaining going on, and they're kind of harassing and stuff,
and so they start getting on the edges of the camp getting bit by snakes,
and they're dying from the poison of the snakes.
And God tells Moses to craft a bronze serpent. He said,
lift the bronze serpent. And this is how the story is so often told.
He says, lift the bronze serpent up over the Israelites,
and they will be healed from the poison of the snakes, and they will not die.
Does anybody know that story enough to say that I missed a key and most important part of the story?
The story is often told, lift the bronze serpent up over the Israelites,
and they will be healed and not die. What did I miss?
Say it again. They have to look at it.
They have to look to the bronze serpent that Moses crafted.
And it says, if they don't look, they will still die.
But if they look, they will survive, because God was setting the stage for the bronze serpent
to represent the coming of Jesus Christ, and Jesus had to be lifted up.
You can arrest the plan of God in your life by failing to look.
By knowing that you should look and failing to look,
you are choosing not to allow God to work his plan in your life.
Or by choosing, however frequently, to forget that you had to look.
It's very easy to say that I surrendered my life to the Lord Jesus Christ on May 26, 1996.
It's very easy for me to do that.
And then to later go, yeah, I surrendered my life to Jesus, but today, not so much.
It's very easy to do that, to forget that you had to look to Jesus to be saved
and therefore to live your life in a way that is contrary to the plan that God has for you.
You can choose frequently, or however frequently you choose,
to forget that you had to look to Jesus to be saved.
Some form of self-reliance, or even invoking godly intervention
to overcome tribulations that you're facing,
could lead to God not being able to work.
Now, it's not that God's not able, not that he can't just crush you like a bug
and do what he wants to do anyway.
But you wind up appealing to God like Judas,
here's my plan, God, I'm going to do this, God, not like Jesus.
He said, God, carry out your plan. Your plan is the best.
And the question is, do you want to be like Judas?
Here's my plan, God, you've got to do this.
And you're in your prayer class, and you're going to say,
God, send me 72,000 angels because I've got influenza A and my throat's a little sore.
Or you're going, God, fix me, can't possibly be sick, can't possibly be hurt,
God, fix my relationship, I can't stand it to be like this,
God, you've got to fix it.
And you can do the same thing, you can arrest the plan of God
by refusing to acknowledge that when you got saved,
you had to look toward the cross, toward the crucifixion of Jesus,
toward the sacrifice of Jesus, toward the resurrection, toward God's power,
and to submit yourself to the plan of God for your life.
And if you did not do that at that time, you did not get saved.
No matter what you said or did at that time, if you did not do that at that time,
then you did not get saved.
And if you didn't get saved, then it makes a lot of sense for you to say,
well, I don't have to look and I'm still here.
I didn't have to trust, I didn't have to surrender fully, and I'm still here,
and I'm saved now because I said some certain words,
but I didn't really have to look toward Jesus, I didn't really have to submit myself,
I didn't really have to surrender.
And could there have been somebody in the camp of the Israelites who overcame the pain
and the effect of the poison and didn't die but didn't look to the staff?
And you want to say, yeah, sure, there could have been somebody
because there were tens of thousands and thousands of God.
And some people don't die from snake bites, right?
No, actually what the text says is that if they did, after that point,
if they did not look, now previous to that point, they might have survived.
It's possible. Most were dying from the poison of the snakes, but they might have survived.
But now the bronze serpent has lifted up and said if they did not look, they died.
And Paul says in Acts 17, in the olden days, God kind of laughed at your screw-ups
and your scoffing at what God had called you to.
But now that Jesus has been made evident, he expects all men to repent.
That means look to him, turn to him, be changed in the way you think.
He expects all men to repent and now to be saved.
According to Jesus, the plan here could have been arrested.
And I submit to you, you can do the same thing by failing to look toward the salvation of Jesus
or by choosing, however frequently afterwards, to forget that you had to look.
Now that does not mean you will not be saved. If you did look, you will be saved.
But in your life afterwards, then because you're forgetting that you had to look,
forgetting that you had to surrender, forgetting that you had to submit
on a semi-regular basis, or even if you only did it once, right?
You disrupt or arrest the plan of God, the good things that God intends.
The kingdom of God is that person, place, or thing in which God reigns and has his way.
And we pray, Father in heaven, your will be done here on earth as it is in heaven.
Lastly, you can arrest the plan of God in your own life by refusing to walk in the light,
or refusing to walk openly.
In 1 John, John writes that he who claims to be a Christian, basically claims to be a father of the Lord,
but still walks in the darkness, he's a liar.
To whom do you belong? Are you covering up your weaknesses, or are you owning your weaknesses?
In weakness is found strength. We talked about that on Tuesday.
And so if you will own your weaknesses, work on your weaknesses, expose those things to God,
and be able to go, look, I'm struggling with this problem, but I'm going to defeat it in Christ.
I know it's going to once and for all not be a problem anymore.
Then, then you've confessed your sins. Then he is faithful and just to forgive you.
Then he is faithful and just to cleanse you of all unrighteousness.
But if you're walking in darkness, if you're pretending that you're okay,
pretending that you surrendered your life, or having surrendered your life,
pretending that you continue to surrender your life, then you are arresting the plan of God in your life.
And God has said what it will be like for Christians.
Jesus came to give you life and give it more abundantly.
He came to prosper you. And I don't mean make you rich, but He came to make you out to be something
that the world will look at and go, I kind of want to have whatever that person has.
And then you can lead them to have what you have.
But you can't do so by refusing to walk in the light.
Okay, so Jesus was arrested according to the plan. That's God's plan, Jesus' plan, Jesus' plan.
And according to Jesus, the plan could have been arrested by failing to look,
by choosing however frequently to forget that you had to look, or by self-reliance,
and even invoking God by refusing to walk in the light.
The third thing to see in this text then is that the plan proceeded un-arrested according to Jesus' choice.
So let's look at the three points. The first one, Jesus was arrested according to plan.
The second one was that according to Jesus, the plan could have been arrested.
And the third one was that the plan proceeded un-arrested according to Jesus' choice.
This is free will, as Ron said, properly enacted.
You can do as a Christian literally whatever you want.
All things are now acceptable for you, but not all things are profitable.
And we must be sure not to be ruled over by any of them because you have one master now, that is Jesus.
This is free will, properly enacted. To pull this off, there's a certain formula that has to take place.
The first thing is, you need to know God's plan or at least recognize the moment of God carrying out His plan in your life.
Not to do that, you're going to have to study your word. You're going to spend time with the Lord.
You're going to have to seek Him out in the silence and solitude.
You're going to have to worship Him and Him alone.
You're going to walk with the Lord for day upon day of your life.
You're going to stack those dominoes up so that when God does a new thing, you go, okay, wait, God's doing a new thing.
Or when God consistently does the same old thing, you go, wait, God's consistently doing the same old thing.
They brought the loaves and the fish to Jesus and they say, we got nothing.
We got this little boy's lunch and we got 5,000 people who need to eat.
And they went, Jesus, we got to let these people go. They got to all go wherever they got to go to eat.
They're going to starve to death. They've been sitting out here for a couple days. They have more food amongst them.
We're in trouble here. We got a problem. We got 5,000 people can starve to death.
See, the disciples missed the fact that Jesus was about to do something incredible.
They went to Jesus and they said, Jesus, this man was born blind. Why was he born blind?
Was it because of his sin or his parents' sin?
That was the logical conclusion. We can do the same thing in our lives.
We can get on a course of action that we don't realize when God's about to do something amazing.
We've been trying to facilitate it. We've been trying to make it happen ourselves or whatever.
But we have to get in a place where if God is going to do something, He is going to right in that moment make it evident to us.
And that still small voice, boldly, loudly, when I was driving my car home from Bible college at 1 o'clock in the afternoon
after my four-hour Old Testament class and I'm driving home, I'm saying to God, God, I have my tears streaming down my face.
I'm like, God, I don't understand. We think we're right where we're supposed to be.
We're living in a house that you told us to move into and we asked you and we moved in there and we're living there.
And now, Sherry doesn't have a job. And at 328 resumes later, she still doesn't have a job.
And she's had third interviews and still no job. And I don't have a job. 126 resumes and applications later.
I don't have a job. I don't have an offer. I've only had a few interviews, no second interviews, no offers.
I said, Lord, we're losing our house. It's going into foreclosure. The house down in Norfolk is going into foreclosure.
We got nothing. $300 a week in unemployment and $125 a week I'm making at Anderson's driving forklift and filling fertilizer trucks.
It's nothing. It's nothing. God, I said, we're losing here. We're dying here. How can this be?
We're walking in your will. And God said to me, very plainly, He said, I'm going to move you back to Toledo.
And just two days before, I told Sherry, no, no, that's not going to happen. He said, just like He was sitting in the front seat.
But where was I? I was at a place where I had looked to Jesus to be saved.
I was at a place where I realized I had to look to Jesus because I didn't have it. We were losing our houses.
We were losing everything. We were going to go into living with my parents or something.
Or with her mom in her little apartment, which would have been crazy. Whatever.
We didn't know what was going to happen. It was all going away. Everything that we thought that God had built was just fading into nothingness.
And I'm tearing down on my face and God says, in that moment, He says, you're going to move back to Toledo.
And I said, but God, we just knew we were where we were supposed to be.
And God said, you're going to move back to Toledo because Stuart's going to get sick. And he's going to die.
And I want him to know his grandchildren before he goes.
I'm like, and Stuart wasn't sick. I'm like, oh man.
So I go home to Sherry and the same time I go home to Sherry, she comes and she wants to come.
She says to me, I know you said we're right where we're supposed to be. We're exactly where we're supposed to be.
She said, but I was just on Toledoblade.com and there are six jobs in Toledo that I want to apply for.
So I know you said we're not moving back to Toledo, but I just feel like really God's compelling me to apply for those jobs.
Two hours later, we came home from a meeting at our church and four of those jobs had asked her for an interview.
Three of them went to a second interview. Two of them went to job offers and one of them came with a free apartment.
There's going to come a moment in time at which if you're not paying attention, we could have stayed there.
If I wasn't begging God, if I was out hunting for a job or if I was praying, God, give me a job.
God, give me a job. God, give me a job. And insisting, God would have gave me a job.
God would have let me arrest the plan that he had for our lives, which was to come back here.
And little did we know to plant this church. We had no clue.
You've got to get to the point where your free will is there specifically for the purpose of submitting it to God,
to surrendering again and letting God do what it is that God wants to do.
To pull that off, you need to know God's plan or at least be able to recognize the moment of when he's about to do something.
Also, you must have the ability to call for aid and you do.
You don't need the ability to call for aid so you can call for it the moment God's about to be doing something.
God's already about to be doing it. You can pray, Lord, that would be nice if you did this today.
God's up there on the throne thinking, yeah, I got that. It's just at three o'clock today. It's already covered.
And you pray, Lord, your will be done on earth just as it is in heaven.
You might want to pray, forgive me my trespasses, Jesus said, too, because that's kind of important when God's about to do something.
And then you say, okay, God's about to do something. And I realize I could cry out.
I have the ability to cry out and call for aid to go this way, the way I see, the way I want to go.
But actually what I choose to do is to say, Father, your will, not my will be done.
I choose not to cry out for aid. I choose not to call the 72,000 angels.
I choose not to beg for money or beg for jobs or beg for people to do what I want them to do.
I choose rather to say, God, you do what you want to do.
That's what Jesus did, exactly what he did.
And he chose not to call the 72,000 angels.
And because of that, God's plan proceeded unarrested.
And it was according to Jesus' choice.
Now let me tell you, just real quick as a little aside, here's how you get to heaven.
This could be the whole sermon, but it's not. We're going to the conclusion.
Here's how you get to heaven and hear God say, well done, good and faithful servant.
That's what we all want, right? Every Christian in the room is going like, yeah, that's for me.
I want God to wrap those spiritual arms around me, comfort me for all my suffering.
All of this kind of washes away. All my tears are gone. All my pain's gone.
Everything. And I just want to hear God say, well done, good and faithful servant.
Here's how you do it. Every time that God's about to do something,
every time that God's about to move in a plan in your life, every time that God's about to go to the next step,
instead of you in your strength, in your intellect, in your reason, in your resources,
using whatever God has blessed you with, or your ability to cry out in the name of Jesus
and invoke God doing something amazing, instead of you doing that to fix your situation,
you cry out to God and say, God, you do what you want to do.
That's how you arrive at the end of the road and hear God say, well done, good and faithful servant.
It is not by being a better tender of the sheep or a better budgeter of your finances
or a smarter calculator of the course ahead.
It is by, in the moment in question when God is going to move to do something,
every time that happens, once, 50 times, 5,000 times, every time that happens,
you recognize God is about to do something and you say, God, you do whatever you want to do.
That brings us to our conclusion, which is this, that free will is provided for those who follow the Lord,
according to John chapter 8, and it is provided to play a three-part harmony,
which is this, surrender. First, surrender. Yielding to God's plan, we say,
oh Lord, you do whatever it is you want to do in my life.
That's what I did when I walked down the aisle at East Little Baptist Church,
terribly, terribly frightened that people would be looking at me,
that I was going to be in front of a room of people.
You know how comical that is? God would call me to preach, and then preach,
and we record our podcast and it goes to 17 countries all over the world,
and we get on Facebook Live, and we're public right now.
So the things that I've said that have been offensive since I began speaking a half an hour ago,
somebody out there could be fretting or fuming or plotting to put a bullet in my head.
Before you say that'll never happen, there's been a couple of times it's been close.
So what I'm saying is, this is a public forum in that regard.
It's why someday we won't be able to have it a public forum,
because we won't be able to preach the truth in here without somebody suing us.
The truth is the truth whether we like it or not.
First and foremost, we have to surrender to His plan.
I was deathly afraid to walk down the aisle.
In fact, I said to myself, I prayed the week before I was going to make my decision,
because I put God off for two weeks, and I prayed.
I said, Lord, I don't think I can get down the aisle.
And when the time came, I was standing there with my shaking knees and my sweaty palms,
my cotton mouth, and I'm going, okay, this is the moment I've got to give my life to Jesus.
And I went like this.
And the next thing I know, I was nose to nose with the pastor.
There were no steps in between.
I had no recollection or memory of the 30 steps that it took for me to get to the front of the room.
And I didn't have to walk past people.
I didn't have to see people on the way by.
I was just there suddenly, and he was asking me, and I was saying yes, and yes, and yes.
And I was surrendering my life to the Lord, and I remember it like it was yesterday.
And every time I'm in a stupid position where I think I know better than God,
or I'm going to run on ahead of God, I remember that I was not free until the God of the universe bestowed on me freedom.
I've been in a cage.
I've been in handcuffs.
I've been in the back of a police car.
I've been under a moving vehicle.
I've been pinned under a car when the jack slipped.
I've been in a lot of places where I've been trapped.
But there's only one freedom under the sun.
And it was administered by the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ who was God the Son.
Amen.
Do you want to be free?
You get freedom from Jesus.
And it starts with surrender, yielding to His plan, because your freedom is part of His plan.
That's how it works.
Secondly, obedience.
We say, OK, I'm going to do what it is that God wants me to do.
I'm free, but I choose to do what it is that God wants me to do.
In the Ten Commandments, there's honor and obey your parents.
We love to quote that verse to children.
It's also in Ephesians 6.
And they may be directed specifically at Christian children.
But in the Ten Commandments, it was written to adults, 30 and up, basically.
Now, it's not that the children and young men weren't also being administered to you at that time.
But 30-year-old men told honor and obey your parents.
Human moms and dads mess up their kids.
That's kind of what we do.
We may try really hard, try to point them toward God.
But the truth is, you point them toward God.
If God grabs a hold of them and gets them moving in the right direction,
then that's your only chance of success.
Otherwise, humans tend to screw up their children.
That's what we do.
And they were told to obey.
Those human parents, those stiff-necked parents who would not follow God,
would fall into false worship.
And they were told to obey their parents.
Man, obedience.
Obedience can be a challenge.
But obedience to God is not a challenge like that because God will never make a mistake.
He didn't make you a mistake.
He'll never make a mistake in your life.
He'll never make a promise that He doesn't keep.
He never told a lie.
He's God.
So it's okay to obey God and do exactly what God says.
I was listening to a radio program this weekend.
The speaker was on there talking about,
if you were in a situation where you had to commit a sin or die,
what do you think God would want you to do?
I'm like, well, in my right mind, I'm thinking about the Lord the way I think about the Lord.
And He'd rather me die.
Sin is just that bad.
My soul lives forever.
I live for 100 years if I'm lucky or blessed
or whatever God decides to do entails me being here for 100 years.
And then I'll be in infinity years in heaven.
So I really want to live for there, not here.
So I choose to die rather than to sin.
For a lie or for stealing or for killing somebody,
for murder, anger in your heart, lust?
Yes, that's serious.
So then He says, so now what if somebody else has to die if you don't sin?
So you sin or somebody else has to die.
It's harder because we know Jesus is about service,
about love, bringing people close, that kind of thing.
But still, I think fundamentally, ultimately, sin is just that bad.
And you say no and you don't intentionally sin against God.
And I thought about it, I just realized exactly how extreme this is then,
this obedience thing that we're called to.
But now we've moved from talking about obedience to talking about something else, haven't we?
Talking about faithfulness.
Not just obedience, not just one time God says do not do that.
But now it's about faithfulness.
Over and over again I choose to do what it is that God would have me to do.
Over and over again God begins to reveal the next segment in His plan in my life
and I say I freely go into that plan God.
I freely do what it is that you would have me.
I freely accept your judgment, your wrath, your punishment if it has to be that,
or your mercy and your grace and your abundant life, whatever it has to be.
I freely accept that.
In my freeness that you paid for that I could never have had anyway,
as I am unarrested myself, I choose to surrender, to obey, and be found faithful.
Revelation 3, 5 says this, He who overcomes will thus be clothed in white garments
and I will not erase His name from the book of life and I will confess His name before my Father and before His angels.
And it's in the He who overcomes.
Overcomes what?
Well we know temptation, right?
Because the world tempts, evil spirits tempt, demons tempt, devil tempts, system tempts, flesh tempts, lust of the eyes, lust of the flesh, pride of life.
There's temptation abounds.
What I submit to you is not just temptations, it's also tribulations.
How do you overcome your tribulations?
When your gas tank gets empty, how do you overcome your empty gas tank?
Well everyone wants to say, why go put gas in the tank?
No.
An empty gas tank is not solved by gas in the tank.
How did it get empty in the first place?
Well I need to make more money.
No.
That's not the solution.
Because the trick is this.
How do you with an empty gas tank or while making money or not making money,
how do you surrender to the Lord, obey the Lord, and remain faithful?
What if on the way to put gas in your empty gas tank with your 20 bucks in your hand,
to buy gas to put in your empty gas tank, God says use that 20 bucks for something else.
Are you going to do that?
You'd better.
Because nothing else is surrender, obedience, and faithfulness.
We overcome the temptations and trials and tribulations of this life
by during the temptations and trials and tribulations of this life,
surrendering our freedom to the Lord and saying, Lord, whatever you want to do,
recognizing that this moment might be the moment in which He's going to do something incredible.
Your 20 bucks that you could use some other way, could take you somewhere,
at a moment in time you share the gospel, that person gets saved.
That 20 bucks is nothing.
That tank of gas is nothing.
Your car is nothing.
Your ability to walk is nothing.
Compared to a soul in heaven for eternity.
Yours, mine, ours, somebody we don't even know yet.
Overcoming is about surrendering, obedience, and faithfulness under the circumstances in question.
There will be those who were born to resist, to be crushed as an example.
But the offer of salvation is to all.
Judas was one such guy.
The Pharaoh was one such guy.
Paul writes in the book of Romans, for the scripture says to Pharaoh,
for this very purpose I raised you up.
Who was he?
He was the king and worshiped as a god on earth of Egypt,
one of the greatest powers that existed at that time.
God says, for this very purpose I raised you up to demonstrate my power in you
that my name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.
If the offer of salvation is not accepted,
if the offer of following God's plan for those people is not accepted
or not followed up with obedience or continued with faithfulness,
then questions arise.
And I submit to you that it is one particular question.
We're going to go to the book of Jeremiah chapter 7 and locate it.
This will be our last text and we are on the last point.
Jeremiah chapter 7.
Now this of course was written a long time before Jesus was born.
But I submit to you that in some sense Jeremiah understood the ministry of the Messiah
and had powerful insight to it.
So we're in Jeremiah chapter 7 verse 1.
We're talking about how God's people have been unfaithful.
They have not surrendered.
They have not maintained obedience, resulting in faithfulness.
The three-part plan of God with their freedom has been abused, not followed.
Jeremiah 7 beginning in verse 1.
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord saying,
Stand in the gate of the Lord's house, and proclaim there this word and say,
Hear the word of the Lord, all you of Judah, who enter by these gates to worship the Lord.
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel,
Amend your ways and your deeds, and I will let you dwell in this place.
Do not trust in deceptive words, saying,
This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.
For if you truly amend your ways and your deeds,
If you truly practice justice between a man and his neighbor,
If you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, or the widow,
Do not shed innocent blood in this place, nor walk after other gods in your own ruin,
Then I will let you dwell in this place, in the land that I gave to your fathers forever and ever.
I think that's very clear.
Verse 8.
Behold, you are trusting in deceptive words to no avail.
Will you steal, murder, and commit adultery, and swear falsely, and offer sacrifices to Baal,
And walk after other gods that you have not known?
Then come and stand before me in this house, which I call by my name, and say,
We are delivered, that you may do all these abominations.
Has this house, which is called by my name, become a den of robbers in your sight?
Behold, I, even I, have seen it, declares the Lord.
But go now to my place, which is in Shiloh, where I made my name dwell at the first,
And see what I did to it because of the wickedness of my people Israel.
And now, because you have done all these things, declares the Lord,
And I spoke to you rising up early and speaking, but you did not hear.
See, God was all the time talking to them, but they were not listening.
And I called you, but you did not answer.
Therefore, I will do to the house, which is called by my name, in which you trust,
And to the place which I gave you and your fathers, as I did to Shiloh.
And I will cast you out of my sight, as I cast out all your brothers, all the offspring of Ephraim.
As for you, do not pray for this people, and do not lift up cry or prayer for them,
And do not intercede with me, for I do not hear you.
Do you not see that they are going, I'm sorry, do you not see what they are doing
In the cities of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem?
The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire,
And the women knead dough to make cakes for the queen of heaven.
And they pour out libations to other gods in order to spite me.
Do they spite me, declares the Lord?
Do they not themselves, they spite, to their own shame?
Therefore, thus saith the Lord God, Behold, my anger and my wrath will be poured out on this place,
On man and on beasts, and on the trees of the field, and on the fruit of the ground,
And it will burn and not be quenched.
Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel,
Add your burnt offering to your sacrifices and eat flesh.
For I did not speak to your fathers, or command them in the day
That I brought them out of the lands of Egypt concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices.
But this is what I commanded them, saying, Obey my voice, and I will be your God,
And you will be my people, and you will walk in all the way which I command you,
That it may be well with you.
Yet they did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own counsels,
And in the stubbornness of their evil heart, and went backward and not forward.
Since the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt,
That is to say, since the day you were set free, until this day,
I have sent you all my servants the prophets, daily rising early and sending them.
Yet they did not listen to me or incline their ear, but stiffen their neck.
They did evil more than their fathers.
So what I said to you is we would go to that passage of scripture,
And look for the one question that is raised,
The one question that is raised when we do not surrender,
When we do not practice obedience, when we are not found faithful.
And God said, do they spite me? Really?
Do you not understand that when you turn God's plan away, you are not hurting God.
When you like Judas make a plan that you think is contrary to what God might want to do,
Or what Jesus might want to do or whatever, you are not hurting God.
Your disobedience, your unwillingness to surrender just becomes part of His greater plan.
That is what happens.
So that is not the question, really.
The question is, he said in 19, do they spite me declares the Lord?
Is it not themselves they spite to their own shame?
Do you not understand that when you work contrary to the plan of God that God has in your life,
And that God is about to bring about, when you take that free will that He has blessed you with,
And rather than saying, okay Lord, I surrender myself to your plan, whatever it is,
Whatever suffering I may need to endure, whatever it is, Jesus surrendered to crucifixion for crying out loud.
Whatever it might take, when you do that, you get the best thing.
You are like, I might have to battle cancer, or I might have to go without a job for a while,
Or I might struggle my finances or struggle my relationships, or I might feel down and out,
Or I might have to give up my Sunday pursuit, or I might have to not take that job that I make $25,000 a year more,
So I can be faithful to the Lord.
Whatever. I may have to suffer without something that by all rights I deserve.
Hello Spirit of Judas.
Now, understand this.
You need to know when God is about to do something.
And you need to take the free will that God has blessed you with,
And you need to turn it over to the Lord and let Him use it for His glory.
You need to submit yourself to His plan.
If you can't figure out when He is about to do something, and I submit to you, He is often about to do something.
If you can't figure that out, then you need to be actively surrendering every moment until you figure it out.
Just keep doing it over and over. Just keep saying, Lord,
By our daily prayer is your will be done, here on earth as it is in heaven.
Because we might not be figuring out. We might be missing it. God might be about to do something.
And silent prayers by someone else might accomplish something amazing,
Because they just surrendered themselves to God's plan.
While boisterous prayers and devoted giving and incredible serving,
And proud and arrogant talk like, See what God has done through me or in me.
Just takes you to a place where like Judas or like Pharaoh,
You wind up at the top of the heap just so God can knock you down and show everybody
That the actual way to do it is through surrender, obedience, and faithfulness.
In Jesus' case, Jesus was arrested. He was arrested according to plan.
God's plan, Judas' plan, Jesus' plan.
According to Jesus, the plan could have been arrested. He could have stopped it.
And Jesus has now bestowed that power and authority into us.
We can arrest the plans of God in our own lives.
And I submit to you, probably have on many occasions.
And if you know of one where you have done so, you need to repent and turn back to the Lord and say,
Okay, Lord, I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm going to let you do what it is that you want to do in my life.
Because it's not God that you're spiting.
It's not God that you're despising. It's not God that you're hurting.
It's not God that you're dismissing. It's not God's resources that you're taking.
No, it's yours.
You're losing the great thing that God had planned.
Sometimes that great thing is a person, a situation.
And we know that ultimately that great thing is us in heaven for an eternity.
And it starts with that surrender.
So if you're here today and you have not surrendered your life to Jesus,
you have not said, Okay, Jesus, you get to be in charge. You've clearly earned it.
You need to understand that you are missing the key and currently arrested.
You cannot truly see the plan of God unveiling in your life.
You cannot live for Jesus because you have not surrendered your life, your thought processes, whatever may come to Jesus.
Now, if you have surrendered your life to Jesus, but you recognize that you have secret disobedience,
you think you're getting away with something,
or you're not trying very hard to know when God's about to do something so that you can surrender your free will at that time,
even maybe you're trying pretty hard not to know when God's about to do something so that you don't have to surrender your free will,
then you need to repent.
You need to turn to the Lord and say, Lord, I recognize that what Jesus really paid for,
what he really made possible was my freedom and I surrender to you so that I may be free.
And that as a free man or a free woman, I surrendered you not so that I'll miss out on something this life has to offer.
Like some people think that's what happens.
But so that your great plan for me can unfold.
Are you ready for that?
Because that's also what it means to reach new heights in Jesus.
And we are all in different places on the journey, but that three-part harmony must play.
Surrender, obey, and be found faithful.
Jesus knew it.
And when they came to arrest him, he surrendered himself, he obeyed, and he was found faithful.
And in his surrendering in obedience and faithfulness is our salvation.
Every man's salvation, whoever has been saved, without exception.
Lord, help us.
We surrender ourselves into your hands.
A glass of praise to you to come and lead us in the closing hymn at this time.
If the Lord has spoken to your heart today and you realize that you need to make some kind of a public decision,
you need to repent of some kind of sin or repent of some kind of activity you've been involved in
and just say, no, I'm publicly not serving the Lord.
Maybe it's because you're not going to let him fulfill that plan.
You just say, no, I'm just going to go ahead.
Then you publicly make that decision.
So obviously you're going to say, maybe you're here today to say, I know this is my church.
I know what ministry the God is calling me to.
I know I didn't even need baptize, if I was the son of the Holy Spirit.
Or I know one thing, just one thing I need to do, more public accountability and say, how can that be?
And then we'll hold you accountable.
We'll ask you to do that thing that you say the God is calling you to do.
As we sing this song, the Lord is working with me today.
Make it known because maybe you're working with somebody else today and your boldness,
which is not really your boldness anyway, it's God's right.
That boldness could be used to help break them through as well.
Just stand with me and sing this song.
This is our closing, but it's our opportunity to respond.
We're online listening to the podcast.
Let us know.