All In

Opening Prayer

God, thank you for helping me get through these things and to speak them in the same light that you gave them to me as I studied and as I prayed and as I prepared. We thank you for the presence of the Holy Spirit who is our teacher, and he will speak to us, and our hearts are open to the sound of his voice and to his instruction today.

We believe that heaven can happen here, as we sang earlier, because of Jesus’s presence here. We believe that miracles, signs and wonders that would confirm your word to us will take place even as it’s taught and even as it’s brought forth today. We believe it will happen as we leave the house and leave the property. You watch over your word, the scripture says, to confirm it. And we thank you, God, that your spiritual gifts are at work in this place, that they freely are at work and manifest as you please, including that of pastor teacher. And we believe, Father, you said pastor teacher in the church to help us to mature and to equip us for the work of the ministry that you’ve given to each one of us, for the charge of the ministry, the assignments you’ve given each and every one of us, for the relational and legal trust that you have passed on to us. You have something for all of us to do representing the kingdom.

And God, we thank you again for accomplishing what would please you the most today. Thank you for giving the word freedom. We believe it will not return void, but it will accomplish what you please. It’s like the rain that comes down. It will not return without bringing moisture, much needed moisture to the earth. And by the way, God, we thank you for the moisture that is coming to our state and to our community. Thank you for the water coming from the clouds. Thank you for weather systems changing and shifting in our favor. Not bringing flooding, but bringing much needed rain. We thank you, God, for it in Jesus’ name. Amen.

All In

All right. I think what God has given me, no surprise, is right in the flow of what we’ve already been experiencing. We’ve been singing about it, leaning into it, talking here briefly about it. And it has to do with being all in.

I want you to say this out loud with me before we ever even get started here. Say, I am all in.

God’s doing great things in the earth. He’s doing great things again in our own community. He’s doing great things at Believer Church. And regardless of how big we can think, the scripture says God is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think. And God is calling us up and he’s calling us in. He’s calling us to deeper water. There’s so many verses of scripture that come to mind. He wants us to lengthen our cords and strengthen the stakes of our tent and our house.

Should Jesus wait to come for his church, his bride to be - we are betrothed to him, we’re engaged to him - but there is a wedding that is in our future, and a marriage supper of the lamb that’s all in our future. So just about the time you didn’t think it could get better, it’s going to get better. It’s going to get a whole lot better. Not just up there, but here.

The world is a terrible place. It is. It’s nasty. It’s vulgar. It is filled with and filling, overflowing with lies and untruth and deceptive things. It is frightening what we are accepting as our new norm today that we wouldn’t even have thought about doing even ten years ago, five years ago. Horrible things are happening in our world. But our mission is to the world. We can’t turn our back and hide in our church buildings and come and have a blessed time like we’re having this morning every week and forget about them, because God is not willing that one single person perish.

I was once that one person. He’s not willing that one person perish. He’s going to reach them through you and he’s going to reach them through me. He’s going to reach them through us collectively, because together we can do things we can’t begin to do just on our own. That doesn’t excuse us from doing what we should on our own, because we should each be responsible for our own race, our own walk, our own journey of faith, our own call to reach the world with the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ. But then to get to do it with people like you is over the top. To get to join hands with you and join resources with you and walk this thing out with you is so special, and something I pray we never take for granted.

People come and people go, but let’s hang on to each other as long as we can, and let’s make our time as special as it possibly can be, and let’s do what we can do together. Let’s not let an opportunity slip past us.

As harsh and seductive as the world is, greater is he who is in us than he who’s in the world. And there’s a promise from an old prophet that said when the enemy comes in like a flood, God will raise up a standard against him. No weapon formed against us will prosper. Every tongue that rises up against us, criticizing us, holding out judgment against us, God will prove to be in the wrong. And he’ll show his favor through you and through me.

There’s no reason from God’s point of view for you to exempt yourself from the move of God and what God has done, what he is about to do. And what he’s about to do is just going to be amazing.

I think God can energize us beyond our years. I want to say this: I believe the spirit of God would have me say this to you concerning your health. Regardless of how old you are, regarding your mind, regardless of how old you are, you have to get more aggressive than what you’ve been, to not just hold your ground, but to continue to grow. Moses was an old man, but the Bible says his eyesight was not dim and his strength was not abated. Why? I believe he loved the presence of God more than anything else, and it continued to energize him. They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings as eagles. They’ll run, not be weary, walk, not faint. Those that wait - the word wait in the Hebrew means to stay connected to.

During a recent time of prayer and worship, I found myself interceding for the church. Just a few weeks ago, here on the front row, during a time of worship, I began to intercede for the church - not just Believer Church, but for the church in our city, and I believe beyond - concerning the advancement of his influence in the earth. Romans 12:1 and 2 is something he had me begin to pray from. I didn’t have that slide prepared for you, but it came back into my mind this morning when I got up, and it leads into what I’m going to talk to you about today.

Loving God Above All

Romans 12:1 and 2 - Paul is beseeching. The word beseech is a beautiful word in the Greek language. It means to call very near to someone, to be alongside someone. The Holy Spirit is the one called to be always near to us. He will never leave us nor forsake us. And Paul is saying, I’m calling on you as a dear friend would. And what I want you to do - I want you to stop whatever you’re doing right now, and whatever is pressing in on your mind, I want you to stop thinking about that for the moment, and I want you to listen to what I’m about to say to you. I want you to take heed. I want it to be important to you. I want you to know it’s coming from my heart, and I care for you and I love you, and it’s coming from the Father’s heart. He loves you. He cares for you.

He said:

I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable Christian service, and be not conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you might prove or make manifest what is the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God.

In other words, that you might become godly people. You become people who wear godliness - people who have learned, and are learning still, how to put on Christ. Like Paul would write to other churches, be mindful of spiritual things. Put off the old man. Put on the new man. You have a new set of clothes provided for you in Christ. And God wants us to put them on. We’re his representatives. We’re not to go out representing our own opinion in everything. We’re to go out representing his way of life in everything.

That’s not freedom - oh, that’s freedom, that’s true liberty. Liberty is not doing what you want to do. Liberty is doing what God created you for.

And again, Christianity, if you understand it right, it’s not about all the do’s and the don’ts and crossing all the tees and dotting all the eyes. Those can be really important, but it’s about relationship on the highest level with God. No one loves you like God does. No one could possibly love you the way he loves you and cares for you.

Romans 12:1 and 2 makes it clear that one of two things is contending for our souls at any given time. We’re either choosing to be conformed to the world, to its ways, to its thoughts, its way of thinking, its culture - the principalities, the powers, the rulers, the darkness of this world that Paul laid out in Ephesians chapter 6, talking about that invisible, the invisible forces of darkness, the demonic that are in the heavenly places that bring their wicked influence, their evil influence upon earth and upon men. They’re managing earth in their ungodly ways. It’s not just to hurt you - hear me now - it’s not just to bring pain. It is to make your love for God bad. It is to move you from a place of being in Christ to divorcing God.

And we’ve got to take an aggressive position in Christ - not in our own power, that won’t work, never has - but in his power and ability and strength, his wisdom, his might, his mind, his way of thinking. Take a stand against it, saying, “Holy Spirit, help me first recognize it. Holy Spirit, help me resist it. Holy Spirit, help me to send it along its way. Holy Spirit, now fill me with what pleases the Lord Jesus Christ. Fill me. Help me not be conformed to the world, but be transformed.”

That word - transformed - is actually a word that lends itself to miraculous change, not just getting better. This is not talking about little change here and there. It’s talking about supernatural transformation. We get the word metamorphosis from the Greek word translated “being transformed” in that verse. That’s what God holds out to his church.

As I continued to pray about this whole thing, the Lord began to have me pray that our love for God and things most important to him would prevail over the present culture that again is being celebrated.

This message is not meant to beat anybody up. You get enough of that out there. It’s really not to scold anyone in the room. I hope it comes across as an exhortation. That’s what Paul was doing. I hope what I do today comes across as instruction, as pastoring. If correction comes, so be it. We all need correction. Wise people crave godly correction. They know they’re running a race. And we tend to drift out of the race. We tend to get our eyes off the prize and off the finish line, off of where the course is marked, and we end up entertaining things along the way that distract us, and we fall off into the ditch.

And if that’s where you are today, here’s the good news: you don’t have to stay there. God is there to help you. He’s not standing over you condemning you. He is here. He gets down where we are. When Peter sank in the water, he got to where Peter was. He reached a hand down to Peter and lifted him up and got him walking again, miraculously, on the water back to the boat. He does the same thing with us in life. We fall. We miss the mark. We get filthy. We get in that pig pit that Pastor David talked about last week or the week before. And we need cleansing and we need washing and we need help, and we need reminding of the good life that’s been purchased for us and the great price that Jesus paid for it, for us to be free.

And then he gets us up, and he begins to walk out the rest of the race with us.

The Great Commandment

Jesus said this in Matthew 22:36-39, Passion Translation:

Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest? Jesus answered him, “Love the Lord your God with every passion of your heart, with all the energy of your being, and with every thought that is within you.”

There are things that become important to us in our Christian walk along the way, and it’s like it’s all we can think about, right? We all do that. But we should never let any of that get above us loving God with our whole heart. Don’t get distracted, even by what you’re learning, and forget to love God in it. I see people all the time who love God - I’ve seen it throughout the decades - who work so hard for Jesus, they’ve forgotten how to love him. And there is no substitute for loving him. There’s just not.

It’s true in your relationships too, and those that are important to you - you get so busy doing this and doing that, providing for the one and then the other, that you honestly forget how to sit down and be quiet with one another, how to hold a hand and how to put your head on someone’s shoulder, how to whisper sweet - I don’t know why they call them nothings, because when there’s nothings you’d think they just wouldn’t matter at all, right? But when people whisper sweet anythings, marriages are changed. People are changed.

So Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with the passion of your heart, with all the energy of your being, with every thought that is within you.” This is the great and supreme commandment. The second is like it in importance: “You must love your friend in the same way that you love yourself.” Jesus summarized an all-in way of life, and he talked about how it fulfills the heart of the Father God and how it fulfills shared life. Loving God is the key. He made loving him and others the core issue of success in life. Not surprising for someone who is love, because God is love.

Matthew 24:12-13, just a bit later, Jesus brings up this warning. He says:

There will be such an increase of sin and lawlessness that those whose hearts once burned with passion for God will grow cold. But keep your hope to the end and you will experience life and deliverance.

Their hearts once burned with passion for God. Passion is hardly anything you have to talk about - you will talk about it. If you’re passionate, it’s hard to stop talking about it. Passion is not really something you can hide. And Christianity, when it’s right, is not something you and I can hide. In fact, it’s not something that can be beat. Satan can bring his full arsenal against us, but someone in a love walk with God just can’t be beat, can’t be stopped.

Three Categories of Love

I want to oversimplify this, but it’s the only way we can get it done in a session like this - three categories of love.

Fervent Love

Number one is fervent love. Fervent love is when we are in pursuit of life with him. We are actively moving towards him. Fervency is not always loud, and by that I simply mean you can be loud in worship but far from God. Even God said that. He said, “I see you, I hear you, I hear what you call worship. I’m watching, but your heart is far from me.” So it’s possible for anyone to be at that deceptive place where they’re substituting noise, making noise, and thinking that it really is something that connects with God.

I’m thankful for our worship team. I thank God every week for them and for what they do. Not just because of the skill that they have with their voices and with their instruments - we have extremely talented musicians and vocalists on the platform - but I hope what you’re really seeing are hearts that are worshippers. They worship off platform. They are worshippers in their everyday life, worshippers in their everyday walk. So it’s not just the outward part, but what we need more than anything, driving it, is sincere, fresh love toward God this week.

David said this - I love this again from the Passion Translation, Psalm 63:1:

Oh God of my life, I’m love sick for you in this weary wilderness. I thirst with the deepest longings to love you more, with cravings in my heart that can’t be described. Such yearnings grip my soul for you, my God.

“Pastor, that’s wonderful. I’m just not an emotional person. I’m kind of quiet. I keep to myself.” You’re not talking about anything emotional here. Emotions get involved, can be involved, but he’s talking about what starts in your spirit. God is a spirit, and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. If anything, our emotions are helped by our worship - our worship not necessarily helped by our emotions. But our emotions can be helped. You can go from sad to really glad if you stop entertaining and juggling emotions that are all over the map. Invite the Holy Spirit’s help and get your eyes back on God and Jesus, who is Lord over your circumstances and what you’re going through. He’ll dry your tears. He doesn’t laugh at them, but he will dry them. He needs you to see better moving forward because he’s going to move you forward. He’s going to heal you. You can grieve, right, and he’s going to heal you, and then he’s going to get you moving ahead. There’s more life in you than what you’re thinking right now. There’s more you can be and more you can do right now. I’m saying this by the Holy Spirit to you. Take it personal. It’s for you. There’s more than you’ve imagined that God has for you, and the opportunities are abounding, to allow God again his work in you to be expressed and to take hold.

Fervent love says to God, “I need you every moment of every day.” Wives, can I ask you something? Would you love that coming from your husband every day, if he didn’t put a condition on it - that he would want to have sex with you at the end of the day - because sometimes women don’t want to hear it because it comes with a condition?

I sat in my office one day and talked to a mature couple about their marriage, which was suffering and on the rocks. And it became clear that the wife no longer wanted to hear “I love you” from her husband, because she knew that if she heard “I love you” from her husband, there was a condition. If he brought flowers, there was a condition tied to it. If there was candy, there was a condition tied to it. If there was a date night, there were conditions tied to it. She didn’t want to hear him say “I love you.” It’d be nice just to hear “I love you.” “I just love you. Put my arms around you, give you a big hug, big old juicy kiss” - without the strings attached.

So I’m going to tell you ladies something about your man that maybe you’ve forgotten. I’m sure it was true at some point. He absolutely loves for you to touch him, to put your arm around him, to, for no reason it seems, stop and say, “Come here,” and to plant a kiss on his cheek. He loves that you still look at him the way you did when you were in your twenties. That’s important, I think, to good, healthy marriages. I know it makes our children go, “ugh,” and our grandkids just freak out. But in that moment, what’s important is that man you married, or that woman you married, and keeping that marriage strong.

Can I tell you that Jesus has a kiss for you today? Read it in your own Bible. It says he rejoices over you with singing. Just the thought of you causes him to break out in song. He loves it when you just come, and you don’t necessarily have something you need from him that day. He likes it when you ask him - don’t misunderstand me, pray and keep on praying, and part of our praying is asking, don’t apologize for that. He says, “Ask, he’s going to meet the need.” But it’s not all about that. I wish we didn’t start our prayer time always with that.

Revelation 3:15 and 16 - Jesus here is talking over the church at Ephesus. He says:

I know all that you do, and I know that you are neither frozen in apathy nor fervent with passion.

The King James Bible says, “You’re not hot or cold. How I wish you were either one or the other.” Verse 16 says, “But because you’re neither cold nor hot, but lukewarm, I am about to spit you from my mouth.” Some translations use the word vomit. It’s meant to grab our attention. It really is referring to that sickening condition where someone is just apathetic when it comes to loving.

You know what that’s like - some of you in your relationships didn’t know if he cared or didn’t care, didn’t know if she cared or didn’t care. And it bothered you and it troubled you that he or she couldn’t make up their mind. You may have said, “Well, make up your mind. It’s either her or it’s me. It’s either him or it’s me.” You know what I’m talking about. And God, who is love, feels it when we are apathetic.

Hot says, “You matter to me, God, and what matters to you matters to me.” Cold says, “You don’t really matter to me. No longer interested.” Lukewarm says, “God matters to me, but not enough to substantially affect how I live my life.” That’s apathetic - lukewarm.

Fervent love is a heart fully turned toward God. It values his presence, seeks his company, honors his voice, responds to his desires, protects the relationship, finds increasing pleasure in pleasing him, and when it fails, it seeks both mercy and grace to be quickly forgiven and restored.

Forgotten Love

Number two is forgotten love. I wish I could spend a lot of time here because this is where most of us are.

Matthew 24:12-13 again: “There will be such an increase of sin and lawlessness.” Jesus taught this - that those whose hearts once burned with passion for God and others will grow cold. But keep your hope to the end and you will experience life and deliverance.

Jesus describes a movement that ramps up in the earth before his second coming, resulting in a substantial apostasy, or abandonment of trust toward God and toward other people. It is an anti-love movement - anti-love for God movement. The spirit of Antichrist is in the lead of it. The word translated “lawlessness” is anomia. It refers to not merely breaking rules but living increasingly without regard for God’s order or his authority.

Jesus seems to describe an environment of increased disregard and disrespect for God and others that progressively chills love. Jesus is addressing a time where disregarding God, who is love, becomes the new normal, the new culture. Every generation has had issues with loving God and others, but it will multiply and gain a momentum that sweeps many away with it. Is that my opinion, pastor? No, it’s not. It’s what’s written in your Bible. Many will fall away. The love of many will wax cold. Scripture talks about it, predicts it. Nothing prophesied in your Bible, if it hasn’t come to pass yet, it will come to pass.

It’s never that God has forgotten us, but we can forget how loved we are and forget how to love him back. God, that’s my heart today - help us with this.

The phrase “grow cold” - get this - in the Greek language comes from the word psycho. So we could say biblically that someone who once loved God passionately, but who is losing their passion for God, is going psycho. Don’t say that out loud, because people don’t understand the Greek language, but I can say it in God’s house.

It pictures something that loses its warmth over time. It was used to describe the alarming decrease from strong respiration, breathing hard - passionately, we’d say - to a wheezing or almost imperceptible breath. From a hard-breathing, heart-beating heart to wheezing, losing breath, to almost your breathing being imperceptible, like you’re close to death. From something hot or passionate to something cold and half-hearted or apathetic. From something compelling, forceful, powerful, to something weak and unconvincing.

So what if you say you love God? You’ve got to really love God for those words to have some effect. Part-time Christianity is not only low impact, it’s no impact.

Jesus would turn to people clamoring to follow him. He seemed to make it hard for people to follow him, because there was a cost in Jesus’ mind - not to buy salvation, we can’t purchase or buy our salvation, that grace is the only offer on the table, grace through faith, we’re saved by grace through faith, not of our own works. But people were clamoring about following Jesus, and it seemed like he would say, “You don’t know the cost of this thing.” And to those who kept calling him Lord, Lord - you’ve read this in your own Bible, I’m sure - Jesus would stop in his steps and turn to them and say, “Why do you call me Lord, but you don’t want to do what I tell you to do?”

Jesus made obedience a love issue. We often don’t do that. But he said, “If you love me, you’ll keep my commandments.” It’s a love issue. Sin is nothing more, nothing less than a love issue. We can love God enough to stop what we’re doing if it’s wrong. And you can try to improve yourself and go to the library and get all the self-help books and listen to a hundred more sermons, but until you make up your mind that you want to love God with all your mind, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength - you’re not perfect, he knows that, he knew that when he said that. It’s not perfection he’s calling for, because he knows it’s not something he’ll ever get. But he can get love.

I’m an imperfect man, but I love my wife. She’s an imperfect woman - I’m sorry I said that out loud, I’ll pay for that later. She’s not perfect. Close. Really close. But she loves me and I love her. And that’s the story in the room here today. God gets it. God knows that. But come on - part-time Christianity impacts no one.

People rarely fall out of love all at once. Love thins out. We drift out of love. Movement toward one another becomes labored. The relationship may still have history, tenderness, loyalty, even affection, but shared life starts to weaken. Admiration weakens. Respect recognizes value, honor demonstrates value, and lawlessness begins to move in on our hearts, and we stop respecting not only God, but one another. Attentions begin to shift - really, they begin to shift more easily than what they once did. These are just sort of indicators that love is growing, or possibly growing cold.

Let me tell you something about the grief of the Holy Spirit. The Bible tells us not to grieve the Holy Spirit, and even the Holy Spirit will help us keep from doing that to him. But grieving the Holy Spirit isn’t always so much about what we did that was wrong - it’s about love going wrong. It’s about love beginning to fade. When that happens, again, God is love - when that happens, the spirit of God is grieved. Expressions of love, even the smallest of the greatest, begin to disappear. It shows up in a lack of curiosity toward one another and toward God. We stop seeking him. We stop hungering. We stop thirsting after him.

On our best day, we don’t know everything, right? God is so beautiful and awesome and amazing that all he has to do - once you think you have a beat on God and you have a really good understanding of God - all God has to do is move just a little, and you have a brand new side of God that you didn’t know. He’s amazing.

The heart grows callous. Distance becomes normal. What once would have bothered you, or would have threatened the relationship, matters less and less. Your guard comes down. You never wanted that, but it’s happening. Prayer becomes more and more occasional. You stop missing what you once treasured. That’s true in human relationships, and it’s true of the one we have with God.

Seduction becomes something exciting and stimulating. Other voices become more important. You can’t wait to hear from him or her - it’s their voice that you hear in your dreams instead of your mate’s. Paul said, like Jesus, Christians will give heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons. Their target is not just to throw you off in your thinking concerning the scripture, but to cause you to suffer love loss in your relationship with Christ. Are you hearing this? Conforming to the world again has less to do with certain do’s and don’ts and more to do with protecting the love you have with Jesus and growing it. Satan has a strategy to get you to renounce your love for Christ and your shared life with him, and he works at it every single day.

Eventually, the heart just begins to justify the distance. What happens is neglect gets explained and excused intellectually. We just end up repeating what the devil has been saying to us all along. Pride enslaves us. We can’t find our way back. It’s one thing to lose love. It’s another to make it okay.

Forsaken Love

The last tile, and I won’t have to spend much time on this, thankfully - it’s a hard subject, and I’m not trying to win a debate, I’m just trying to make the three points of love I see in scripture that are major. The last is forsaken love.

In 1 Timothy 4:1:

The Holy Spirit has explicitly revealed, at the end of this age, many will depart from the truth one after another, devoting themselves to spirits of deception, following demon-inspired revelations and theories.

He’s talking about Christians. He’s talking about believers. The Greek idea behind this “departing” carries a sense of a gradual, almost invisible withdrawing, departing, moving away. Although I’ve seen in the face of tragedy some people renouncing Christ on the spot, even though in most cases it will be a gradual move, it still has devastating, irreversible consequences.

You say, “Really? That’s in the Bible? I can lose my salvation?” No, it didn’t say you can lose anything. Jesus said, “No man can pluck you out of my hand.” But he didn’t say you couldn’t walk out. And that’s what Hebrews 6:4-6 has to say. You can’t ignore these verses. You can try to fit them into your particular theologies, but just look at the scripture - it’s clear here what he’s saying. He talks about fundamental things - faith and having faith and laying on of hands and repentance toward God, and the resurrection and the judgments. And then he says, “Let’s go on from fundamental things to deeper things.” And then he says this: “It’s impossible” - let it weigh on your heart right now - “it’s impossible to restore an apostate.” For once a person has come into God’s light, has tasted the gifts of the heavenly realm, has received the Holy Spirit, feasted on the good word of God, has entered into the power of the age that is breaking in - if he abandons his faith, not loses it, if he abandons it, there is no use even trying to lead him to repentance. By their sin of apostasy, they recrucify the Son of God and have publicly repudiated him.

Hebrews 6:4-6 makes it even clearer that these are people who were truly born of God’s spirit, knew what they were doing, their eyes were wide open to the decision that they made. All the descriptions are in the past tense: they were once enlightened, they have tasted of the heavenly gift, they were partakers of the Holy Ghost, they have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come.

Some teachers say that anyone who would ever do such a thing were never born again to begin with. I don’t know how you can read those verses and say that, or even try to argue that point. Again, Jesus said, “No one can be plucked from his hand.” Satan can come and do everything he can to rip you out of God’s presence, and God’s not leaving you. You could have fallen flat on your face one million times to date, and if you happen to look up at all, there was Jesus offering his mercies, which are new every morning. His mercies create a new opportunity, and grace comes along and gives us the power to make a success out of it this time.

Again, it’s not a matter of losing faith - all of us have done that. It’s a matter of choosing not to have faith any longer. It’s walking out on God for the last time after having known him. And God will have great grief, but he will honor your choice, as he did in the beginning when you wanted to be born again. But this is not a back-and-forth thing. It’s like a divorce with no hope of reconciliation.

And if you’ve ever committed such an act - because people will generally, when I talk about it at all over the years, almost always have someone come up to me and say, “I think I’ve committed that sin” - let me tell you something: if you’ve ever committed such an act, you’re the last one to wonder about it. You know it. You know you’ve been severed from the life of God, and that severing is permanent. God didn’t do it to you. You did it to yourself.

Listen, the devil couldn’t stop you from being born again when you said, “I want to repent and put my faith in Jesus, I want forgiveness, I want eternal life.” All hell couldn’t stop you from being born again. Guess what - if you say no to God, he will honor it. He is the protector of your free will. He will, if that’s what you want, that’s what you’ll get. You can’t fall into it - it’s not an accidental trip.

I met a man at the airport. He used to teach in the youth room across the hall in this very building. He used to teach some of our young people. He could sing, he could speak, he could lead people to Christ. They loved his personality. He was popular. And then one day we’re getting ready to leave the country, and there he is with his wife in a line. We’re waiting, and I recognized him and went over to him. I said, “How are you? Haven’t seen you in forever.” And he was real kind, and he gave me a hug, and he looked me in the eye and said, “I want to just say something to you, pastor, before you go on.” He interrupted the conversation to say this - he said, “I just want you to know I have renounced Jesus Christ as my Lord. I know exactly what I’m doing. I realize what the Bible says and what it teaches. I knew that before I made the choice, but I made the choice. He is not God’s son. He is not any longer” - his words, not mine - “the Lord of my life.”

It’s one of the saddest days of my life. And we’ve seen more of it happen in the last decade than I’d ever hoped to see in my entire lifetime. It’s something Satan is seducing you into. And so, what, pastor - you want to guard your heart, like the Bible says in Proverbs 4, with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life.

“Pastor, you’re just trying to scare us into heaven.” No. If I could - I do whatever necessary. Boo! Did that do it? I mean, if that’ll do it, I’ll do it, because I want to see you born again. No, I don’t try to hype you into anything. This is a horrible reality that many believers - many, God’s word, not mine - are going to fall into.

“I would never do that.” Make sure you keep your heart in love with God, then. Love him, not what you do. Love him. And loving him will give birth to good works, right? That will bless you and bless others, but it’s about loving him.

Closing: Return and Repent

Stand to your feet with me, please.

Revelation 2:3-5, Jesus again speaking to the church at Ephesus says:

I know how you have bravely endured trials and persecutions because of my name. Yet you’ve not become discouraged. But I have this against you: you have abandoned the passionate love you had for me at the beginning. Think about how far you’ve fallen. Repent and do the works of love you did at first. I will come to you and remove your lampstand.

He’s talking to a church. He’s talking about the lampstand being their influence, from its place of influence, if you do not repent.

Three things here. If you happen to be in this place, all of us today could pray this prayer in one way or another, of just wanting to come away from anything, everything, that is somehow whispering in our ear and working to seduce us from the marriage that is before us with Christ. It’s a real evil that is constantly at work, which means we have to meet it with a real good - the good of God operating in our life and a genuine growing love for Christ.

But if you find yourself in a place today where you’ve already renounced Christ, there’s nothing we can do for you. I am so sorry. But there’s something we can do to keep you from taking another step there, and there’s something actually you can do for yourself that will keep you from sliding down that path further, and it’s right here in what we just read.

He said, first, remember God’s faithfulness. Remember all the good things, right? We have to say that sometimes to married couples - “You remember when you were in love, what that was like? Wasn’t that great?” “Yeah, that was awesome.” “But now, pastor, it’s hell. What do I do?” One of the things we say is you’ve got to remember the good times, the good things, the faithfulness of God, his love for you.

Then he said, “Repent.” Again, that can be a real poorly used expression in Christianity. There’s a lot of love that comes behind that word repent. A lot of times we just hear it in scolding and damning ways - “repent or have your head cut off, God’s going to judge you.” What God is saying is, don’t go that way anymore. Love me. Let’s love one another. Repent literally means to change your mind - to have a change of mind.

And then he said, “Do the former works of love” - come back to what things were real and valid and genuine things, works that were really again - not that we did them because we had to, not because we were coerced to, not because we were afraid if we didn’t do them this would happen or that would happen - but come back to loving me and letting that love show itself, not only to me but to other people wherever you go.

Again, we close with this: what did Jesus say? He said, “Love me - how? With all that is in you.” All your mind and your thinking, all your heart, all your strength. Love him. Leave nothing out. Don’t put him second to anybody. And seek his kingdom, by the way, first, too. And he’s already thought about everything else you need, and he’ll help you.

Closing Prayer

So let’s bow our heads. Let’s all get really quiet, really still.

Jesus, in this moment, just pray this prayer with me. You don’t have to pray it out loud. I’m going to lead. Just include yourself in this prayer if you need be.

Father, in the name of Jesus, look at this group. You know their hearts. You see their being. You see what’s great and wonderful and heavenly and godly, what’s pleasing, and you see the other. And God, right now, I just ask that you work by your spirit. Because what I sense in this is you’re protecting us from something that’s coming - we’re already seeing glimpses of it, but you’re protecting us from something that’s coming. And you want us, God, to be in love, all in with you. And that, in that day, in that moment, will keep us sound and safe. We thank you, God, for it today. We ask your help as we turn to you in remembering and repenting and in coming back to things that really matter about relationship with you in life. Thank you for helping all of us today, God, who would pray that prayer or ask for that help. We thank you for it. In the wonderful, the powerful, the mighty name of Jesus, we pray. Amen.