Alright, so the title of the sermon is fairly simple.
The lighting point is a summary point that you can use to talk about it with others.
We started two weeks ago on a sermon series entitled Becoming a Fanatic.
And you may have begun before that thinking, I'm not sure I want to be a fanatic.
But I want you to stop and think for a moment.
A fanatic is this.
A fanatic is someone that people see as firmly believing or having great zeal toward religious
beliefs.
And there's one word in there that makes people stumble a little bit.
And it is, if you look up the definition, it is extreme religious beliefs.
That's the problem, isn't it?
It has that intonation to say that it's just a little bit too much to be a fanatic about
Jesus.
But let's be really realistic, shall we?
We're talking about a being who created the universe, was present at its inception.
Without him, nothing was made that was made.
And then he came in the flesh to live on the earth, a sinless life, to die a sinner's
death, and to raise again on the third day, offering not a better life, not a better chance
at life, but truly a life, life and more abundant.
That we can be resurrected as he is resurrected.
And because of that, we said two weeks ago, we realized that we are dead in Christ.
For if he died for us, then all have died.
And if you have died, then all the things that you owned became an inheritance.
That's what happens when you die.
They become an inheritance.
And you are now using them, stewarding them, if you will, for the Lord, rather than actually
owning them the way you used to do before you were saved.
For if one died for all, then all died.
Also, in that moment, if you will, he reminded us with absolute certainty that our great
storehouses, that place at which all the riches, all the wealth, all the power and authority
of our family is actually in heaven.
So we look to the storehouses of heaven, not to our storehouses on earth or amongst men.
Both of those teachings are extreme.
That you would divorce yourself of an attachment to things of this earth.
That you would instead do all that you do as if you do it for the Lord.
That you would instead do all that you do looking for the benefit that is to come in
the kingdom, that is to come to full culmination at his next appearing.
To be able to divorce yourself from an attachment to all things.
And the truth is, as much as anyone might not want to admit this, to if necessary detach
yourself from all people.
You realize that if only you go to heaven, you must go.
Because the alternative is hell, literally.
And so for people to say that this is not an extreme position would be foolishness.
It is always spent in an extreme position.
Jesus was killed by the people of his day, the faith people, the religious people, the
people that were following God, God's supposed people.
He was killed by them and others who realized that this was an extreme position.
For a long time the way, the Christian faith as we understand it, was part of Jewishness.
It was part of the faith and religion that they held.
In fact, it was protected by the Roman government because in that day Christianity was considered
to be a sect, a spin-off, part of Jewishness, to be Jewish.
And therefore the Roman government said, well that's protected as we have given protection
to the Jewish religion.
But eventually even the Jewish people said this is too extreme a sect.
Christianity is too extreme.
And because it is too extreme, we'll have nothing to do with it.
In about 70 AD, both all the Jews and all the Christians were kicked out of Rome because
they were back and forth and back and forth over this extreme variation as far as the
Roman government was concerned, this extreme variation of being a Jew.
Being a Christian has always been extreme.
If you have managed to skate by not really talking to your friends about being a follower
of Jesus, if you have managed to work on the job alongside coworkers for years not bringing
up Jesus, not talking about what it really means to be a follower of Jesus, if you are
able to go out to restaurants and see your server and either pray silently without bowing
your head so no one will know or to pray when surely everyone is not watching or to not
pray at all, then you have missed out the extreme nature of what it means to be a follower
of Jesus.
Do you not understand that almost all of the disciples of Christ were murdered, let's call
it what it is, murdered for their faith and they did not recant.
And since then there have been thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe millions of
people who have been killed for being Christians and they would not recant their faith.
This Christianity is an extreme belief and to follow it by definition would make us a
fanatic if we follow it the way it is real.
Which brings us then to walking it out.
How do we do it on a daily basis?
And you will notice that I have given you everything and nothing in today's lightning
point.
And we know what but not necessarily how or when we use boundaries, guidelines and priorities
instead of rules and ultimatums.
A rule is something that tells you exactly what to do, how to do it.
If I got out of bed this morning and I had the tenfold laws of Christianity and I followed
every single one of them, I could call myself a devout Christian.
But guess what you will never find?
The tenfold laws of Christianity.
That does not exist.
Are there things in the Bible that the Bible says you should do or don't do?
Does the Ten Commandments do enough to tell you what it means to be a Christian?
No!
There are no ten or one hundred or one thousand rules of Christianity.
Also ultimatums don't really work.
If you don't do this for Jesus, you are not a follower of Jesus.
If I say to you, for example, as I just said, if you manage to avoid praying in public or
manage to not witness to your friends or co-workers, then you have managed to avoid the extreme
nature of Christianity.
I still cannot say to you that because you have not done that, that you are not a Christian.
That's not up to me.
That's up to God.
That's up to Jesus.
And we are saved by the standard that He sets.
And the standard that He sets is not a set of rules, nor is it an ultimatum.
Jesus did not come to condemn, rather He came to save.
To save.
And He's still doing so today.
So we're going to look at the third part of becoming a fanatic.
And I submit to you that Jesus says it very plainly.
It's in His words and we'll read it so we get every last little preposition and pronoun
out of there.
And maybe I think with a little excitement or a little bit of just let's focus on just
this what Jesus said about this.
And it's not maybe exactly where you'd expect to find it.
It's in the middle of a passage where He's teaching about something else, but He says
it very clearly.
I don't want you to hoot.
I don't want you to holler or say amen.
Let's just have silence as we look at Matthew chapter 6 verse 33.
Turn your Bibles here following along.
Matthew chapter 6 verse 33.
Now you may already know what this says if you like to study your Bible.
You may already know what this says if someone has taught this to you before.
Or if you discovered it on your own.
Jesus is in the middle of talking about worry and regret and I'll just kind of give you
just a little foreshadowing.
We will talk about that next week during the Sunday sermon.
But in the midst of that He says, but seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and
all these things that's talking about the other things of the world, the things that
you need on the journey, all these things shall be added to you.
But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things shall be added to you.
Now too many people, way too many people have preached this sermon this way.
That if you'll just do right, if you'll just be righteous, just always do the right thing,
you'll be a follower of Jesus and that's what He calls you to.
Now does He tell you to follow His commands?
Yes.
Does He say that it's He who follows the commands of the Father, not just He who says,
Lord, Lord, we'll enter the kingdom of heaven?
Yes, He does say that.
But here He says, seek ye first His kingdom and His righteousness.
And so then we ask ourselves, well, what is His righteousness?
Well, righteousness is that which you receive from God when you trust in the Lord Jesus
Christ.
And I'll come back to that in a moment.
His kingdom is that place in which He rules.
Now I can't really do justice to the topic of His kingdom today.
I can't boil down on it.
I would encourage you to go back and look.
If you're a Tuesday night attender in your folder, you'll see we did three weeks on the
kingdom of God, the kingdom of heaven.
Matthew uses the term interchangeably just about a month ago.
And you can get really thickly into, we looked at it very thoroughly in those three weeks.
Or you can go online and listen to the podcast of those three same messages.
And actually, you want to just kind of skip the, kind of do it quicker.
There's a transcript.
You can see a transcript of everything we talked about on those three nights and what
the kingdom of God is.
But very simply put, I'm going to give it to you in the very simplest boiled down version
for any of you that weren't already there and others are kind of got it ticking off
in their head, the things that we talked about on those three nights.
But basically the kingdom of God is that person place a thing in which the Lord reigns or
rules, right?
That's what the kingdom is.
It's where God rules.
God rules there.
That's his kingdom.
And then we talked about how there's a problem with that simple interpretation because his
kingdom has come.
The kingdom has come.
And yet, it is yet to come.
And yet, even after that, it will come in its fullness.
And that's what we really spent our time in the last week talking about was how the gospels
teach and Jesus teaches over and over again through various parables.
The seed, the sower, the leaven, etc., etc., etc.
How the kingdom has already come, it is yet to come, and it is yet to come after that
in its fullness.
So we're talking about that person place a thing in which Jesus reigns.
Let's step aside for a moment.
I was five years old.
Now, I don't know if you know this about me, but I have memories all the way back until
I was two.
Now, most people don't.
I understand that.
I don't know why I do.
I can't explain it, except possibly the Lord has blessed me with those things so I can
use them for sermon illustrations of how goofy I was.
My earliest memory, I was a little over two years old, and my mom put me in the car, and
I put the car and drive and drove the car up onto the porch into the gas meter.
That's one of my earliest memories.
I take it back.
I just remembered one where I was crawling, diaper laid on the living room floor in the
house there.
But neither one of those is the memory for today.
This is the memory.
My dad said to us, he said, you know, money's been kind of tight.
We've got this big space in the side yard.
You like to play out there, play frisbee, play football, these kinds of things.
Mind you, I'm five, so about almost five.
So the bigger kids did most of that.
I mostly would ride my big wheel around or my tricycle, that kind of thing.
But I would play with them when I could.
And he said, but you're not going to be able to do that anymore because we're going to
plant a garden.
And I said, okay.
I don't know what that means.
And he said, we're going to plant a garden in the side yard.
We're going to grow corn.
We're going to grow tomatoes.
We're going to grow green peppers.
We're going to grow onions.
We're going to grow all these things in our side yard.
And I'm going, I don't like corn or tomatoes or green peppers or onions.
I don't like any of those things.
I did not like vegetables when I was a kid.
I didn't, in fact, I didn't eat my first salad until I was 26.
No joke.
So I, that's not good.
Don't follow my example.
It's a very bad thing.
But that being said, I'm like, okay, but growing things sounds kind of cool.
And we're going to eat what we grow.
I'm not sure I understand that exactly, but okay.
So I go out in the side yard that afternoon, we're ready to start yet.
And I went out and I looked at it.
I'm like, this does not look like a garden.
I don't understand how to make it look like a garden.
And then I asked my mom, my dad wasn't home.
I said, how do you do that?
And she said, well, you got, we're going to have to take a shovel.
We're going to turn over the soil and bust it all up till it like you would with a rototiller.
That's pretty big yards, about 40 by 60.
And I'm going, that seems like quite a bit of work, but I'm going to get a head start
on it.
So I went in the shed and I got a shovel and I'm five years old.
And so the shovel, the top of the head of the shovel was almost up to my knee, I think,
or it was pretty high anyway.
And I put the shovel in the ground.
The ground was pretty hard and I jumped up on the shovel to drive it down.
It went down about two inches.
I managed to pick up a piece of soil that was about this big and about, I just kind
of laid over a flap.
I didn't even cut it off.
It's kind of laid over a flap of the ground.
It was about, about as wide as a shovel and about that deep.
Which point in time I said, well, there's got to be a better way.
And I left the shovel laying in the yard.
I got yelled at for that later.
The next Saturday morning, about 7 a.m., my dad hauled my brother and I out of bed.
My brother's four and a half years older than me and my mom.
We all go outside and took some water out with us.
We got a bunch of shovels and we go out there.
And mind you, I still didn't shovel a lot of ground, right?
Because I wasn't very big, but I helped as much as I could and they would get it.
So when they got those flaps, they'd flip them up like that.
I would run over and I would tear the flap off and turn it over for them so they wouldn't
have to cut it on the other side.
That became my job.
When you're going to grow a garden, one of the first things you got to do is change it
from a lawn into a garden.
A lawn is what happens.
Maybe it don't look good.
Some lawns look good.
Some lawns don't.
But the first thing you got to do is change it from a lawn over into soil that you can
actually plant in.
Then we got about half of it done on that Saturday.
It's about six or eight hours.
We got about half of it done.
And my dad said he was going to rent or buy or get from a friend a rototiller.
Now, a rototiller is a gas powered thing that's got these things on the front and you push
it and it turns over the ground.
And he got that thing.
And after we did six or eight hours on the yard the one week, the next week he did the
whole rest of it in like half an hour.
And I'm going like, I don't know why we didn't start with that.
But anyway, so we got the whole yard all tore up, dirts up and everything.
I saw worms, bugs, and it was awesome.
We broke it up real good.
And then we threw down some seed.
When you want to turn a yard into a garden, one thing you have to do is put down some
seed.
Now we didn't just go out and scatter the seed in just kind of chaotic places.
Right, there's some tomato seed, throw it out there and onion and corn and just like
that.
We laid out what was what.
So when the plants were coming up, we kind of knew what we were getting before.
So the corn came up.
All the tomatoes are starting to come up.
So you'd like when you want to build a yard into a garden, you got to have a little bit
of plan, some steps, some things that you're going to do.
Right.
So we're going to put the corn here.
We're going to put and we put the little packets upside down on a stick to mark.
This is the row of tomatoes, a little upside down on a stick.
Mark this is the row of onions and so on.
We did that.
We did it all out.
Lo and behold, some time passed, sun and water.
You want to turn a lawn into a garden.
You're going to need some sun and some water.
Right.
Plants need sun and water.
They pretty much produce their own energy, but they need plants.
They need sun and water and then they get the nutrients from the soil and that's what
does the job.
And we grew tomatoes.
I don't like tomatoes.
We grew onions.
I like onions.
All that we grew.
I don't like, but you know what I did like?
I did like the praise.
The whole time it was growing, my dad was talking about how we helped plant that garden,
how we grew up those plants.
When my mom and my dad were eating those tomatoes and stuff, they were talking about how good
they were and how we helped do it.
And for several years in a row, we planted that garden and we brought up those plants
and my parents ate them and my brothers ate, my brother ate some of them.
I never really ate any of them.
My mom tried to get me to eat them, but I didn't really eat them.
I fought back pretty hard.
But I really liked the praise.
I want you to keep that in mind then as we talk about the kingdom of God, because Jesus
very clearly in a number of parables talked about how the kingdom of God is like that
garden was.
It's a problem because it's something we need to take into account if we're going to live,
if we're going to live as a fanatic.
And I've already explained to you that that is exactly what we're called to.
So Jesus gave one more kind of, let's say, qualifier, if you will.
And it's in Mark chapter 10.
Before I go any deeper in what it actually looks like to follow this lifestyle.
In Mark chapter 10, in verse 15, and again, you may already kind of know it.
Jesus said, back to 14, but then Jesus saw this, which was that they were trying to bring
the children to them and then the disciples rebuked them.
And he was indignant.
Jesus was indignant.
That means he snorted through his nose, or at least he had the emotions that accompany
that gesture.
And he said to them, permit the children to come to me.
Do not hinder them for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
And then in 15, truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a
child shall not enter it at all.
That's a qualifier.
That's a requirement.
That's a restriction.
So then much conversation has gone into how does a child do things.
And so we say a child would receive the kingdom of God with adoration.
It's the greatest gift a person could ever have is the God of the universe reigning and
living in them.
A child would receive the kingdom of God with excitement because, yes, I've just received
the greatest gift and my father loves me.
A child would receive the gift with dependency, recognizing that they cannot do this themselves.
They can't grow the garden that God is trying to grow themselves.
They can jump on the shovel, but they'll maybe just turn over a little flap, right?
They would be dependent on the Lord.
They would receive the kingdom of God with trust.
And we'll look at why trust is so important here in a second.
And also humility.
This is how a child would receive the kingdom of God is with these traits.
And notice that he said, if you do not receive the kingdom of God this way, you shall not
receive it at all.
You will not enter it at all.
So your very salvation is at stake.
Over in the book of Romans then, Paul writes about the kingdom of God.
And I think we can with reasonable certainty say that the apostle Paul had received the
kingdom of God and maybe even was seeing it coming into further fruition on a regular
basis in his life.
And he wrote this about the kingdom of God.
And it's in chapter 14, beginning of verse 17.
He said, for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace
and joy in the Holy Spirit.
So when he's saying it's not eating and drinking, he's talking about it's not about what you
do.
He's more clear about that in the other, in the rest of this paragraph.
But he says, it's not really about what you do or the choices that you make, but it's
righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.
For he who in this way serves Christ is acceptable to God and approved by men.
In other words, God will take you if you will do this.
Seek righteousness, combining the two verses together, seek righteousness and have peace
and joy in the Holy Spirit.
And then we're going to look at one more verse also by Jesus and it's in Luke chapter 17.
So if you're flipping around in your Bibles following along, that's great.
Luke chapter 17, a classic verse about the kingdom of God and it is verse 21.
And I'm going to go back to verse 20.
So we see the context a little bit.
Now having been questioned by the Pharisees as to when the kingdom of God was coming,
remember kingdom of God, that's what we desire.
It's here, but also it's coming.
They weren't necessarily accepting that it was there in their presence, but they were
desiring it.
The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed.
That's what Jesus said.
The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, look, here
it is or there it is.
For behold, the kingdom of God is in your midst.
Now this translation to American standards says in your midst, but that word there is
also translated within you.
It's a thing that's inside.
Caleb, do you have the kingdom of God inside you?
Are you following the Lord?
Jason, do you have the kingdom of God inside you?
Do you follow the Lord?
Then there should be times at which the Lord reigns in us and we see an outward display
of that obedience, but the truth is you really can't see that, right?
And that's what he's saying.
You can't see it.
It's within you.
Also it's among you.
It's in your community over all other communities, all other people that you're connected to.
Christians have a community that is in Christ, that is the kingdom of God.
And also it is in the midst of you.
It's between you, like connecting you.
It is what preserves our connections.
So the kingdom of God is in us.
The kingdom of God is between us.
And the kingdom of God is all of us together.
But the kingdom of God is already present in all of those places, but also yet to come
in all of those places and also yet to come in full culmination.
When Jesus comes again, the matter will be settled and the kingdom will be here in fullness.
So the first thing I want you to see as we put all these texts together is that the kingdom
of God came.
It's in you.
It's among you and it's within you.
And if it came, then you must tend to it, right?
What do you do?
If you have a garden and it's growing, how do you tend to it?
You water it, maybe fertilize it, depending on what you know the condition of the soil
is.
You weed it.
There is work that is to be done to care for that which is already in place in you.
It's in you.
It's also among you.
So there are relationships that we have in the church.
People in this room you know and don't know.
And the kingdom of God exists in the relationship between you and them.
So what do you need to do?
Well, you need to tend to it.
You need to take the weeds out.
That means you treat them with kindness, love, and respect.
And when they have something less than that for you, you hold them accountable.
You ask them to treat you with love and kindness and respect.
When a brother lies or cheats or steals, we hold them accountable and ask them to move
in God's direction so that we can all be in community together.
And then it's within you.
It exists in those relationships.
It exists in the lines between us.
And we must tend it.
We must preserve it.
We must fertilize it.
Notice also that in this text, it's coming.
The kingdom of God is coming, which means it's coming in us.
So daily I am growing to be more like Jesus.
And if days or weeks or months go by and you don't become a little more like Jesus in that
period of time, then it is because something is not happening in the garden that is growing
in front of you.
There's no fruit.
There's no steps forward.
There's no stretching.
There's no getting outside your box.
There's no challenges met and overcome in the Lord.
But the kingdom of God has come in you, but it should also be coming in you, so saith
the Lord.
If it's coming yet, then we must be receiving that which is yet coming.
When the little plant comes up and there's no tomatoes on it, just a bud.
That's when we chop her down, right?
No.
When the little plant comes up and there's just a bud.
If there's a plant here that comes up and there's just a bud on it, and a plant over
here that comes up and there's no buds on it.
This one over here has a bud on it.
We weed around it.
We fertilize it.
We water it.
We make sure it's getting plenty of sun.
If the frost signal comes up, it's going to get frost.
We cover it, make sure the frost doesn't kill it off because it's on the verge of producing
a tomato.
We're going to get a part of our salad, right?
And so when what's in you starts to do something, what most people do is they get all afraid.
I feel the Lord telling me I should talk to people about Jesus.
I feel the Lord telling me I should be honest here.
I feel that conviction that I didn't do what was right.
Instead of repenting, they go and pretend they can hide their head under their blankets
and the Lord won't see.
And that's not how it works.
The Kingdom of God is coming in us just as it is already in us.
And it is yet coming in us.
We're going to grow.
We're going to stretch.
We're going to reach outside as we exhibit our spiritual disciplines, which means we
seek His coming.
That's weeding out, right?
We read our Bible so we can see the things that we're going to weed out.
We seek in prayer, talking to God, explaining the difficulties that we're having and trusting
Him to deal with our problems.
We stay ready for that growth.
We pray.
Remember, we pray every day.
Your Kingdom come.
Our prayer should be all around God's will being done here on this earth.
That's what it's all about.
And especially in us and especially between us and especially in the relationships that
we have with one another.
It's coming and we should be ready to receive it and we should stay ready and we should
prepare the soil through prayer and Bible study and giving and service and worship and
fellowship.
And it's all of what it means to be the church as we realize it's coming not only in us,
but it's also coming in our relationships with one another and in our community at large.
And then also notice it will come completely.
Eventually there will be a full culmination of the Kingdom.
Here is the beauty of it.
Let me put it this simply.
There will come a time in which Jesus Christ's reign will be so total and so complete that
there will only be two places left.
Two places geographically, spiritually, however you want to think of it, two places.
In his presence with him and the Lord, with God.
That's one.
And the alternative is not there.
It's just like a light switch on up.
You'll be with God for an eternity or you'll be elsewhere for an eternity.
And since you were created to be with God for an eternity, when that Kingdom comes in
culmination, when it comes in totality, when we can be with him forever and we have been
perfected and we have put on this incorruptible self and put on this incorruptible self and
we can be with him for an eternity, there will only be there and elsewhere.
Now the Bible calls elsewhere hell.
We're not preaching on hell today, but the bottom line is it is coming in its totality
and it will come completely.
So what do we do?
Well, in us we look to growth until that day comes, but there's going to be a moment.
You could grow your whole life and grow to be a little bit more like Jesus all the time
and you're growing, growing, growing.
You always see a little bit of growth.
I'm studying, I'm reading, I'm praying, I'm growing, growing, growing.
And then when the time comes and Jesus truly comes in earnest, there's going to be still
stuff that's got to go.
Weeds that got to go out, fertilizing that's got to be done.
But it's going to be boom, here's all of it right now.
And it's just going to be an instantaneous perfection provided by Jesus.
But because the Kingdom of God is already present, yes, we build it, we receive it,
we stay ready and pray and search it out and so on.
But because we know it will come completely and all of our efforts aren't going to be
enough, we look to the day of His glorious appearing at which our suffering finally comes
to an end.
We go outside the gate to suffer with Him.
We talked about that in the last couple of weeks.
We go outside the gate to be with Jesus who suffered.
Do you realize Jesus suffered?
This is an extreme faith to the point that if necessary, it would be better that you
cultivate the garden of growth of the Kingdom of God inside you than live.
And that's why martyrs die for the faith.
Because it would be better that I say Jesus is Lord and be crucified or burnt at the
stake than I say, well, Jesus is somebody and survive.
We need the Kingdom of God and it has been delivered by the salvation, by being born
again by the Holy Spirit coming and taking up presence in us.
It is present and yet it is coming and ultimately is coming in fulfillment inside us, in our
relationships with one another and in our community.
And we look to the day of His glorious appearing.
So somebody in the church bothered you.
They said something you didn't like.
They did something you didn't like.
That's a reminder that Jesus Christ's Kingdom is eventually coming in fullness but has not
yet.
Every time you run into anything, you don't like it, you try a food and don't like the
taste, you watch a movie and don't like the plot, you read a book and don't think it was
worth the money.
All of that is a reminder that Jesus Christ's Kingdom is coming in fulfillment and we look
to the day of His glorious appearing.
And if you believe God's promises, and you have to, because He promised He would send
Jesus and He did.
He promised Jesus would die on the cross and He did.
He promised Jesus would be resurrected and He was.
He promised to send the Holy Spirit and He did.
And if you're a follower of Jesus Christ, you have to believe the promises of God and
if you believe the promises of God, then the fulfillment of the Kingdom is coming and you've
got to be ready.
You look to the day of His glorious appearing.
We elevate in the thinking, in our thinking, the value of the whosoever.
Who is that?
Who is the whosoever?
Well, before I got saved, the whosoever believing was me.
And then when I started believing, I realized I actually am in the whosoever.
And your brother and your sister and your friend and your schoolmate and your workmate
and your person walking down the street that you just happened to bump into for a second
or the guy you bought your socks from.
They're all part of the whosoever and if we will elevate our understanding, our thinking
of the whosoever, then we realize that preparing for that day, don't you realize this is what
I don't think people get?
The moment that we stand before Jesus and He says, well done, good and faithful servant
or He says, well, this one belongs to me.
We're going to forgive all this and burn that stuff off one way or another.
You're going in because you believe, trusted in me and you said, I'm yours and you're
mine and I know this one and this one's mine.
And He says that there's going to be other people there and they're going to be judged
for their sins because of what they did with the Son of God.
Because they refuse the salvation offered by Jesus.
And you just might see one of your workmates, your schoolmates, the person you brought your
socks from, they might be there.
And you think that the devil, evil spirits or even God Himself can't bring up in their
mind at that moment that you brought your socks from them and never mentioned Jesus?
There are people that I remember that said things to me when I was unsaved, some of them
about Christ, some of them not, that I will never forget in my lifetime.
And it just well could be that one aspect of hell is that people who are burning there
for an eternity are thinking about the people who didn't share Christ with them and they're
in agony, mad, hateful, spiteful for an eternity because you didn't mention Jesus or I didn't
mention Jesus.
We've got to expand in our thinking, to elevate in our thinking the value of the whosoever.
And if people will come to Christ, you, me, anybody will come to Christ, they will experience
the kingdom of God when it comes in its fullness.
And they will experience it to some degree now in them and they will experience it to
some degree now in their relationships with others in the church and they will experience
it to some degree now in the church community as Jesus said.
The kingdom of God has already come.
The kingdom of God is coming and the kingdom of God will come in fullness.
It has already come inside you if you've become a born again believer.
And it should be pretty easy to believe then that we store up our treasures in heaven and
pretty easy to believe then that the old man of us died away and we've become made new.
And the kingdom of God is in our relationships with others.
And man, have you ever noticed how hard it is to communicate with people, to say what
you really mean or how easy it is to say something with a little bit of intonation?
Just text somebody and then they get all mad because they say, what he said and he made
me feel and I like this is terrible.
Whatever, it's the end of the world.
It's so easy to do that because we are not living in the culmination of the kingdom of
God.
We've all still got flesh to interpret everything through.
It all gets messed up between people, but present in that between people is also the
kingdom of God.
And it comes to the point at which you will say of the person who loves you and you love
them that you know, that you know, that you know, that you know that God put them in your
life and you for them and them for you and you know there's no more negative thoughts.
There's no more thinking, well they must have meant to hurt me.
It's all gone because the kingdom of God has been elevated to a position that it transcends
those issues.
But when those issues do arise, they arise to remind us that there will come a day when
the kingdom of God is in totality and there are only two places left.
This brings us essentially to our conclusion, but there is a little something to it.
So first if you follow along your Bibles, go with me to Galatians 5.
Galatians is one of those kind of small size-ish books in the middle of the New Testament.
Galatians 5.
We're going to read starting in verse 16 and it says as follows, Paul writing to the church
of Galatia, which is really multiple churches because that's kind of like a region of the
world if you will.
Verse 16, but I say walk by the spirit and you will not carry out the desires of the
flesh for the flesh sets its desire against the spirit and the spirit against the flesh
for these are in opposition to one another.
Now what spirit are we talking about?
We're talking about the human spirit.
Now we're talking about the Holy Spirit of God.
So we're talking about the kingdom of God, the Holy Spirit of God reigning and we're
saying if we walk by the things of the Holy Spirit, that is in opposition to the things
of the flesh.
But if we walk by the things of the flesh, that is in opposition to the Holy Spirit.
So if we want to cultivate the kingdom of God in us, he's saying walk by the spirit.
Verse 18, for if you are led by the spirit, you are not under the law.
Now the deeds of the flesh are evident which are immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry,
sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, dissensions, factions,
envying, drunkenness, carousing and things like these of which I forewarn you, just as
I have forewarned you, that those who practice such things shall not enter, I'm sorry, shall
not inherit the kingdom of God.
Now I know the world wants to say otherwise and it's always been that way.
Anybody been on social media in the last week or watched a little TV?
Did you notice all the ads popping up?
That's a new thing, right?
Like in the last 25 years or so, social media has really gotten going and now all those
ads always pulling at your mind trying to get you to buy this, that or the other thing,
think that you can be a better person if you go after that thing or do these particular
episodes to handle your hanging tummy, you know, all of those things, that's a new thing,
right?
So I have before here, before me here, a book called Science and Mechanics.
It's a magazine actually, right?
This book is the, has, I don't know what actually Euro published in, but it cost 25 cents, it
was in the month of February and it has the performance report on the 1956 Ford.
So it's been around a hot minute.
February 1956, that's when this was produced.
Now I want to show you, I can't show you right now, if anybody wants to look at it after
you're welcome to do so.
This here, this here, that's what you call classified ads, ads that somebody paid for
to try to get you to buy whatever they're selling.
I'll take that out for a second.
Here's an ad where you can train at home to jump your pay.
And if you eat, sleep and live cars, turn your hobby into a career.
There's eight more ads, ones for shrinking your hemorrhoids.
You ever see that on social media?
I have and I don't have hemorrhoids.
I got it.
Study at home.
It just goes on and on.
Money in donuts.
National school.
One man sawmill.
You can buy a one man sawmill.
There's a way to make money.
Weld, braze, solder or cut, $14.75, buy your own welder.
It just goes on and on and on and on.
And that's my point.
It just goes on and on.
As long as mankind has been trying to get ahead, and that pretty much dates back to
the Garden of Eden, men who do not know the Lord have been trying to get people who do
not know the Lord to give them their money or resources.
Because they've forgotten that the storehouses of what they get is actually in heaven.
If you're a follower of the Lord, your storehouse is actually in heaven.
Because they forgot that they died and it's now an inheritance and they're supposed to
be using it.
So every company has an allotted promo budget.
I run a couple of companies myself and I have an allotted promo budget.
The bottom line is you spend that money to try to get others to recognize they can buy
something from you.
This book is just the social media of 1956 February.
That's all it is.
And if you look in here, you'll find stuff trying to win people over to follow one religion
or another.
My guess is you will not find anything here trying to win anybody over to Christianity.
That would be my guess.
Somebody could search it if you want to search the whole thing and try to find out.
But you will find subtle things trying to win people over into Buddha worship, into
New Age stuff, and things like that.
False teachings.
What I'm getting at is always getting appealed to by all of these things of the world.
We have instead a responsibility.
Our responsibility is to recognize that the Kingdom of God is the most important thing.
It has already come in us.
It has already come in our relationships with one another and it has already come in the
community.
But it is still coming in all three of those places and it will come in its fullness at
the end of the road in all of those places.
Right before those verses that I just read to you, going back to verse 12, it says,
Would that those who are troubling you would even mutilate themselves?
For you were called to freedom, brethren.
Only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one
another.
For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, in the statement, you shall love your neighbor
as yourself.
But if you bite and devour one another, take care lest you be consumed by one another.
But I say, this is verse 16, walk by the Spirit and you shall not carry out the desire of
the flesh.
The bottom line is day in, day out, you're going to encounter your wants.
They're always going to come on you.
You're going to want a little more food, something tastes a little better, something looks a
little better, something makes you feel a little better, feel a little less alone, whatever.
You're going to encounter your wants on a daily basis.
What you need instead is the kingdom of God, the kingdom of God reigning in you, in your
relationships and in your community.
Jesus said, you will only get there by coming to it as a little child.
And a little child comes to it in adoration, excitement, dependency, trust and humility.
You heard that, right?
If you're big enough that you don't need God to help you internally, then you're really
not all that interested in the kingdom of God.
If you're smart enough that you don't need God to clean your mind and set you on the
right path, then you really don't need the kingdom of God inside you, do you?
And Jesus said, I didn't come for those who, I am the great position, I didn't come for
those who don't need me.
I came for those who are just wicked enough, just foul enough to know that they do need
me.
And when the Pharisees and the Sadducees were before him, he said, the tax collectors and
the prostitutes will come and sit down in the kingdom of God before you will.
Don't be like that.
Are you okay financially?
Remember your treasures are in heaven.
Are you okay in your health?
You're strong enough to do the right thing?
Remember, you died and are now living a new life in Christ.
And the kingdom of God is in you and in your relationships and in the community and we
are always seeking it.
Seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you.
That's what Jesus said.
All that stuff that in your flesh you want, all that feeling that you think you want or
need, all that absence, or as Charlie said, that hole in your heart, all of that is in
the kingdom of God and in seeking the kingdom of God and he will take care of it all.
The kingdom of God is not a band-aid.
It's a territorial land grabbed by the God of the universe.
He has decided who he wants and he wants you.
And you're here today because he wants you and he's going to claim you.
He's going to claim space inside you and that space is destined to increase or will increase
constantly until that time at which you come into his presence.
By the road of death, your body stops working or because Jesus came again.
But remember, it's not about what you eat because this is what people will do.
It's all about righteousness.
So now it's all about whether I get it right.
Do I make the right choice, eat the right foods, go after the right things or not.
What he's saying to me is if I would just stop being a sinner, I could be saved.
That's not what I'm saying.
Not at all.
It's not about that.
It's about what you want.
What is your heart?
What is your desire?
Do you want the kingdom of God?
Jesus said, seek ye first the kingdom of God.
One last verse, one last four verses actually, and it's in Titus chapter two.
So it's the tiny little books back in the tease.
Titus chapter two, verses 11 to 15.
Verse 11 starts this.
It is a trustworthy statement.
For if we died with him, we shall also live with him.
If we endure, we shall also reign with him.
If we deny him, he also will deny us.
If we are faithless, he remains faithful for he cannot deny himself.
Remind them of these things and solemnly charge them in the presence of God not to wrangle
about words which is useless and leads to ruin of the hearers.
Be diligent to present yourself approved to God as a workman who does not need to be ashamed,
handling accurately the word of truth, but avoid worldly and empty chatter for it will
lead to further ungodliness.
Here is the bottom line.
I read the wrong verses, but that's pretty good verses, isn't it?
I'm going to go read the verses I intended to read, but that's pretty good verses that
fit.
For the grace of God has appeared, here we go, Titus 2.11.
For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all men, instructing us to deny
ungodliness and worldly desires and to live sensibly.
That fits a lot better with the sermon, doesn't it?
Okay.
Righteously and godly in this present age, looking for the blessed hope and the appearing
of the glory of our great God and Savior Christ Jesus, who gave Himself for us that He might
redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for Himself a people for His own possession,
zealous for good deeds.
These things speak and exhort and reprove with all authority.
Let no one disregard you.
There we go.
A couple of quick illustrations and we'll be through.
Before we even started, I told you, there's no set of rules to get it done.
There's still no set of rules to embrace the King of God.
You can dig with a shovel and some days you can dig with a razor.
You can organize your seed in nice, neat rows or you can scatter it.
And the truth is, there's a debate about which way you will get a better crop.
If you would scatter it in the garden very chaotically and tomatoes grow right next to
corn, some people think it might get better that way.
Bottom line is you need seed.
You need a garden.
Can you get away without weeding?
Some people think you can pretty much get away without weeding the garden.
You don't have to take the bad stuff out.
In fact, there's a parable, right?
Where the garden was sowed, the wheat and the tares grow side by side.
So should we go tear out the tares?
I said, no, don't do that because the roots are growing together.
You tear one out, you'll tear up the other two.
Some people say if weeds grow next to your crop, don't touch them.
But the bottom line is this.
The kingdom of God is in knowing Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.
If you will seek Jesus, seek His will in your life, if you will apply the standards that
we've been talking about in that if one died for all, all died, you're now living after
your own rebirth, after your own resurrection.
And that our storehouses are in heaven and that we seek, we desire most the kingdom of
God, that's God's reign in us.
If you will apply that standard on a daily basis, then when you run into something that
you shouldn't do, you'll be like, I don't think I should do that.
And if you can find it in the scripture, the scripture says specifically that you will
not inherit the kingdom of God if you do that thing, then it's pretty easy to go, there
it is right there in black and white, I better not do that thing.
But sometimes it's not like that.
Sometimes it's just about what you should say, about how you should feel, about how
you respond when somebody does a certain thing.
So it's not laid out, it doesn't say here, Caleb should not say that, right?
Or Haley should not go there.
It doesn't say those things.
It just says, seek ye first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added unto
you.
In other words, you desire every day to do what God would want you to do, the best you
know how, and you keep doing that and it grows in you a little bit, a little bit, a little
bit.
And then ultimately, he comes again and it grows in you to its finality.
It's done, it's finished.
I asked Josh this morning to give me a simple definition of a word that I knew worked for
what we're talking about in Excel spreadsheets.
I'm going to try to explain, I'm not a big Excel guy, but Josh is pretty good at it.
So if you need a better explanation, you can get it from him later.
Basically there is a command that checks three sets of data.
So the first set of data compared to the second set of data and the third set of data is added
in if the second set of data matches the first set of data.
So basically you got a column, column and a column.
We're going to add this in if this and this match.
It's closer to what Christianity is than the Ten Commandments or a book of rules.
Jesus Christ died for you, therefore you died.
If we died, there is a way that we should make our going forward decisions.
If we know that the King of God, which we are supposed to seek first of all things,
is in our relationship with each other, then there is a way that we should live those relationships
with each other.
And certain things are precluded and we don't turn it around and make it an ultimatum.
If you don't treat me this way, you must not be a Christian.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard things like that and it's just not right.
Actually Jesus says this instead.
He said, seek ye first the King of God.
In other words, in your relationship with other people, let's see the kingdom growing.
Let's see God reigning.
Let's see those activities lining up more.
So what did God do?
He served, He gave, He died.
He purchased with His own blood.
What kind of person should you be in your relationships?
And then in the community of the church, we together, when we pool resources that God
has invested in us, what does that look like?
Well there's rules, steps, things we've got to be.
You can't have that and you can't do that.
You can't be that way.
We don't need those rules.
Why don't we need those rules?
Because the King of God is in our community and when we embrace the King of God, we seek
the King of God, there will be certain things that are naturally forbidden, naturally don't
fit.
It just makes sense that it doesn't work.
And that's what God has called us to, to seek first the King of God.
How be a fanatic for Jesus?
How live faithfully this very, kid yourself not, this very extreme version of faith?
How do we do that?
We remember that we died.
We remember that now our treasures are stored up in the storehouse of heaven.
That's where it's truly at.
And we remember that the goal is not a set of rules or to never sin or anything like
that, but to embrace the King of God and to desire it more than anything else in us, in
our relationship and in our community.
When we start doing that, I remember, and I've used this illustration before and we
use it one more time.
I had a teacher in Bible colleges, my Old Testament teachers, they taught Old Testament
one and he knew the Old Testament like nobody I've ever known in my life.
Man, really knew the Old Testament really, really well.
And he was majoring in the major prophets and then the law and like that.
And then we had a different professor, we get into the minor prophets and so on.
And he really, really knew the word.
They told how he was a missionary in Russia and he went into a little house church in
Russia after the Berlin Wall came down and they kind of opened it up and Christians were
no longer, you know, they were, they were allowed to be there now and you could take
Bibles in there and stuff like that.
And he went into this little house church and he was going to teach and he was like
going down the hallway in the middle of the house to go to the bigger back room where
they were going to gather and he was going to teach a Bible study.
And on the wall were all these pictures of men and they were all like a picture of them,
you know, it was clearly a portrait, like they stood up or sat to get their picture
taken and there were dozens or maybe hundreds.
And as he was walking down, he was like, wow, this church really is something.
Are these all missionaries that you sent out?
He said, no.
He said, are these all deacons of the church?
No.
Are these all founders of the church?
He said, no, they're none of those things.
And he said, well, what are all these men?
There's hundreds of pictures on the wall.
What are all these men?
And he said, these are the martyrs of the church.
These are the people who died because the government found out that they were Christians
and they came after them and they would not tell what church they were part of.
They would not tell who shared Christ with them.
They protected the church by being martyred themselves, even though they were tortured
to death.
They didn't just die, shot in the head.
Most of them were tortured to death.
Those men who were hanging on that wall were men who realized that Jesus died for all,
therefore they had already died, that their treasures were already stored in heaven.
And lastly, as we saw today, that the Kingdom of God is more important.
We've got a lot of people out there in the world today that don't think the church is
important and that's just not a fact.
That's not a fact because the Kingdom of God is in the church.
He said, well, the Kingdom of God is in the world and every believer.
Well, yes, that's true.
Jesus said that as well.
The Kingdom of God is in the world and relationships between believers, yes, that's true.
But also it's in the community, the called out body of believers that we are.
Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and be a fanatic for Jesus Christ.
If you're here today and you've not accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior already,
that means if you don't know that Jesus is telling you what to do and you're supposed
to do it or you don't know that Jesus paid the price for your sins or maybe you do know
that now, but for the first time, then as we have this song of invitation, which closed
out our service, this is your opportunity to say, that's me.
I'm living for Jesus from now on.
Whatever anybody else thinks, I'm living for Jesus.
And he says, if you confess me before men, I will confess you before my Father in heaven.
But if you deny me before men, I will deny you before my Father in heaven.
Jesus said, I didn't say Jesus said.
If I get to heaven and you're there, whether you're going in or not, I will not deny you.
If I can possibly remember your face or your name, I will not deny you.
But it's not my job to decide who's saving or not.
That's Jesus' job.
And he didn't come to make anybody not saved.
They're not saved already by what they've done with the Son of God.
And so if you're willing to say the Son of God is my Lord and my Savior, then you respond
at this time and find the people.
And if you know something that God has been telling you to do and you're not going to
be nurturing, not been weeding out, not been letting the Kingdom of God blossom in you
or in your relationship or in your community, then you say, okay, I give in.
I surrender.
Lord, do in me what it is that you want to do.
Do through me what it is that you want to do.
Do in us what it is that you want to do.
Whatever that might be.
However the Lord's speaking to you today, you respond and make it public during this
coming song.
I ask the praise team to come forward and lead us.
And as we sing this song, if the Lord is leading you to respond, you respond.
Jason.
All right.
Would you stand with us and sing if you're willing and able to do so?
And then if the Lord is speaking to your heart, you respond.