Origin
Origin
Galatians 4, No Longer Slaves
Today we are in Chapter 4 of Galatians and our focus is, No Longer Slaves. God's plan for us has always been Sons & Daughters, Created in His Image with Purpose. The Plan was interrupted by sin and everything went awry. But Jesus Came and now we have a choice. We no longer have to live enslaved to this world's systems or to the law or to idols. We can live free as we choose not to love the world. We can live free as we recognize what might be at work from within to enslave us, whether it be pride, fear, greed/comparison, unforgiveness, living beyond our means, or a wrong view of God. We can choose to. live empowered by the Spirit and walk in freedom.
We are back at the Table of Origin, and there is a whole lot going on in the building today. The halls are full of all kinds of things. In fact, there are people working on the alarms, so it could be a crazy recording. Just bear with us. We are delving into the book of Galatians this season with the prevailing idea that we have been rescued, thank God, and we are not going back! Today, we are in chapter four of
Galatians, and our focus is:We are no longer slaves. Here at the table with me are my friends, Jina McAfee and Kyli Rose. They've been with us a long time in this journey of serving the Lord and in the journey of ministry. So let's get started.
Jina McAfee:We're going to start with Galatians 4:7, "Now you are no longer a slave, but God's own child. And since you are a child, God has made you His heir." Looking at a slave and a child, that's a night-and-day difference, right? As a mom and a grandmother, it's such a comforting thought that God looks at me as His child, and He's a perfect parent. I'm not a perfect parent, but I love my kiddos. So this is God's plan. It's His plan for you. A daughter, not a slave. A daughter with all the privileges. An heir. We share the same DNA. We watch all of these cop shows, and you know they identify a person by their DNA. So if somebody were going to check our DNA, they would say, "You are related to the God of the universe." You've got His blood running through your veins. And guess what? We get to pass Him on. He is in our bloodstream. Our Father.
Kyli Rose:We're going to start at the beginning, What does God say about who we are and what we were created to do? The very first thing we see in Galatians is that He actually calls us sons and daughters. We're not distant. We are not just this creation that He puts up with, but He actually calls us sons and daughters. This was always His plan. It was always the way He intended it to be from the very beginning of creation. And I love that you see this position restored in Jesus. We're going to talk about how that was always the plan. We're going to talk about how that plan was interrupted. But whenever we see Jesus come and we see Him die and we see Him resurrected, then we see Him create this plan for us. We see Him go back to the beginning. It was always the goal for us to have this clear, open, unfettered community with Jesus, fully lived. We're going to go all the way back to Genesis one. This is the very first chapter in the Bible. And we see that Genesis means "beginning" or"origin." This is our origin story. It says that we were created in God's image. Genesis
1:26-27 says, "Then God said,'Let us [Who is us? We see God lives in community, Father, Son, Holy Spirit. He said, Let us] make human beings in our image to be like us'.... So God created human beings in His own image...male and female, He created them." Sons and daughters. He created us.
ReGina Johnston:So He created us in His image, and He created us with purpose. It goes on to say in verse 28, "Then God blessed them and said, 'Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky and all the animals that scurry along the ground.'" So the plan was perfect. It was a perfect world created by a perfect God for His perfect masterpiece, man and woman. The man and the woman were made for one another and for their Creator. There was a world to govern and fill, and that was the purpose. They walked in perfect freedom and in perfect concert with God. The Bible talks about enjoying the cool of the day and a world in which beauty was created for beauty's sake alone, just for beauty's sake. And Scripture points out that the man and the woman were both naked, but they felt no shame. There's a freedom in that to be who we were created to be, and not hide anything.
Jina McAfee:Never hiding. We don't really know what that is exactly. We have the ability to live in that, but we still live in this imperfect world. We're still born into a sin-filled world. So we see God's plan and then we see that the plan was interrupted. We're stepping into Genesis three. This is where sin enters the world. We meet the tempter, Satan, the liar, the schemer, the snake. God refers to him as "the shrewdest of all the wild animals the Lord God had made." I looked up the word"shrewd." That's a word that almost sounds like what it is. Merriam-Webster says, "Shrewd is someone given to wily or artful ways of dealing; ominous or dangerous." We see that, right? The snake asks the woman, "Did God really say you must not eat the fruit from any of the trees in the garden?" This is Genesis
3:1. I want you to hear this, because Satan will use the exact same tactics over and over and over again with us. He is encouraging them to question God. He's planting doubt in their minds about God's goodness. He's twisting what God said. He does the exact same thing with us. So pay attention. The woman says, "Of course we can eat fruit from the trees in the garden." She said, "It's only the fruit from the tree in the middle of the garden we are not allowed to eat. [And listen
to this:] God said, 'You must not eat it or even touch it; if you do, you will die'" (Ge 3:2-3).
Kyli Rose:So we see Eve respond, and then you see the enemy respond back. Satan says,"You won't die" (Ge 3:4). That is actually the lie that begins all other lies. And then he keeps going, "God knows that your eyes will be opened...and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil." We see that
in Genesis 3:5. So let's parse that out a little bit. Does God know that their eyes will be opened? Yes. And will they know both good and evil? Yes, they will. But will they be like God?
ReGina Johnston:The enemy already knew. He had already tried, and look what happened to him.
Kyli Rose:No, they weren't like God in that moment, because they chose to step out of His perfect design. We already talked about
what that was:sons and daughters in perfect communion with a perfect God who knows all and sees all. Whenever they made that choice, they became dead in their sin, not like a God who is perfect and without sin. There is no evil in Him at all, so they could not be like God. In that moment, sin separated us from a perfect and holy God. Genesis 3:6, "The woman was convinced. She saw that the tree was beautiful and its fruit looked delicious, and she wanted the wisdom that it would give her." We see in that moment, whenever the enemy put the question, he put the lie on the table. What he was really doing was planting the idea that God was holding out on them when God had actually given them everything. Those boundaries were placed out of love, out of protection, out of His infinite wisdom. In that moment, they bought into the lie thinking they could be like God. That is the moment we see everything change.
ReGina Johnston:Their eyes were opened. But then they have one of those "and suddenly" moments. Genesis 3:7 says, "They suddenly felt shame at their nakedness." They tried to cover themselves. They hid from God. They began to blame one another. They blamed the snake. They blamed God. They were like, "Just don't blame me. I didn't do it." And God pronounced a sentence, the devastating, life-altering consequences for disobedience to God. Sometimes, I don't think we realize the consequence for disobedience to God, and I'm sure, it broke God's heart. It broke His heart. And since then, everything, and everyone has walked in less than. So just bullet pointing what happened in
that moment:The serpent is cursed; the woman would experience pain in childbirth; she'll desire to control her husband but he will rule over her, no more perfect co-ruling; the ground is cursed because of the man and the man will struggle to scratch a living from the it; there'll be thorns and thistles; and they will die. Death has entered in so now there comes a time where we die. But the most devastating thing of all is that they're banished from God's presence until the rescue takes place. And that brings us to our study today in Galatians.
Jina McAfee:We're going to dive right into that Scripture in
Galatians 4:4-5. This is what it says, "When the right time came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, subject to the law. God sent Him to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that He could adopt us as His very own children." God had this plan for us. As soon as sin entered, He already had a plan. Jesus was His plan. But there was a timing of God, and at the right time, He sent His Son. In verses 6-7, we read, "And because we are His children, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, prompting us to call out, 'Abba, Father.'[That's, Papa] Now you are no longer a slave, but God's own child. And since you are His child, God has made you His heir." So with Jesus' First Coming, we have the gospel message. We started this study with "No Other Gospel." Jesus comes to earth. He's born as a baby, completely human, completely God. He lives a sinless life. He dies to take our sins. He's the one sacrifice for everyone. He's resurrected, so that we also can be resurrected. We are no longer a slave, but God's own child. Our original creation purpose is
restored. Psalm 18:19 says, "He rescued me because He delights in me." So I am His daughter, His very own child. I love that He delights in me. So the tension is this: we are living as God's children right now, but we're living in a world where sin abounds, where the enemy is running wild. He works 24/7. His job is to kill, steal and destroy. So Satan does have a plan. His plan is basically to destroy God's plan, right? That's what his plan is. And he doesn't want us to live in more. He wants us to stay slaves. But one day our restoration will be complete, along with all of creation. Evil will be annihilated. One day, evil will not be allowed to live with good.
Kyli Rose:You still feel the effects of that choice to sin and the consequences of sin. You're surrounded by pain and this constant news cycle you get on your phone. It's so much all the time. I think, "What is the benefit of a believer?" We're going to be talking about choice so what's the benefit of choosing God? One of the benefits is we get the hope that there is so much more than just this life, the hope that the end is our future.
Jina McAfee:And we just have to adjust our thinking with the truth. Even though we might feel that shame, we think, "Oh, God, You did not give me shame, that's not from You." Then we have to cast down that thought, combat it all the time.
Kyli Rose:I think the promise that this world is not our home, and it doesn't end here helps in the day to day, just being inundated with the hard, inundated with the broken. We
see in Revelation 21:3, "I heard a loud shout from the throne saying, 'Look, God's home is now among His people! He will live with them, and they will be His people. God Himself will be with them.'" So that broken relationship that happened in Genesis 3, that's restored through Jesus, but then we'll see the fullness of it when there is absolutely nothing between us, nothing. I can't even imagine, nothing between me and Him. You know, nothing at all. It says that God will bring us full circle. What started in the garden will end in a garden. The beginning will be become our end, the beginning before sin, before shame, before blaming and hiding, before being sent from God's presence. We're going to get to enjoy and experience that again. But we're not there yet. We've exited the garden, and we don't get to experience the fullness of that garden experience that Revelation 21 talks about. Right now, we're just living in the middle, in the messy middle, and so in the middle we have a choice. We serve a God who loves us so much and He gives us the dignity of choosing Him. He doesn't force us. He loves us so much that He gives us the option to choose Him back. And so what does this choice look like? It actually looks like two ways of living. There is no gray. There's no third option. There's two choices. In Galatians 4:21-23, Paul is speaking to the Galatians. He says, "Tell me now, you who have become so enamored with the law: Have you paid close attention to that law? Abraham, remember had two sons, one by the slave woman and one by the free woman. The son of the slave woman was born by human plotting, the son of the free woman was born by God's promise. This illustrates the very thing we are dealing with now. The two births represent two ways of being in relationship with God." So these two births actually represent the two choices that we have in the middle.
ReGina Johnston:So we're going to look a little closer at what they were slaves to, and what we are tempted to be slaves to, and what that slavery looks like in our modern day world. So slaves to the world system. They were and we can be slaves to the
world system. Galatians 4:3 says, "Before Christ came, we were like children; we were slaves to the basic spiritual principles of this world." Don't think for one moment that the world doesn't have spiritual principles. It does. The world is not unspiritual. Who is setting their principles? Who is setting the culture? What's the measure for how we're going to operate? There is this system in the world that is contrary to God's system in many ways. But we live in it. So there is this temptation to live by it. So we can be slaves to the law. I'm reading a book called Over Ruled, and it's written by one of our Supreme Court justices. It talks about how so much law has been added in his lifetime, that it's more than doubled. It's a heavy weight of law, and here they were. It says in
Galatians 4:5, "God sent Jesus to buy freedom for us who were slaves to the law, so that He could adopt us as His very own children." Interesting to me is this book talks about how the law was never meant to be a heavy weight. It was meant to create boundaries for people to live safely with one another, in other words, to create boundaries for freedom. That's what it was meant to do. It's the same with this law, but we turned it into something that we were enslaved to.
Kyli Rose:And we take the relationship aspect right out of it.
ReGina Johnston:And we still do.
Kyli Rose:I would rather follow the rules.
ReGina Johnston:Give me a checklist.
Jina McAfee:So we're looking at what we're enslaved to today, in our present day. What are some things that we're enslaved to today? We know money is one of them, right? What else?
ReGina Johnston:Material goods
Kyli Rose:I think pleasure. We are lovers of self, and so anything that that benefits me. It's so in opposition with picking up my cross and dying to myself daily. We're talking about that worldly principle that says, "If they're hard, cut them off. If it doesn't serve you, get it out of your life." Self care. You are the center of the universe, and you need to make sure that nothing would inconvenience you. We like convenience and comfort.
Jina McAfee:Education is one. I've seen many people who have that as their priority, some their whole lives. The Bible says that knowledge just puffs up. It's not wisdom. It's just knowledge for knowledge sake. It's not that we don't want to get knowledge. We want knowledge of God. We want to know Him. There are lots of idols that we're enslaved to today.
Galatians 4:8 says this, "Before you Gentiles knew God, you were slaves to so-called gods that do not even exist." There's another Scripture that stands out. That's Matthew 6:24. It says,"No one can serve two masters. For you will hate one and love the other; you will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and be enslaved to money." It's not that money is your master, but you can be enslaved to it. You can't love it; you can't love it more than God. I know Kyli mentioned that we can be slaves to self. Another is slaves to sin. There are pleasures that will kill you. And some people are so enslaved to them. It's like when they participate in that, they feel alive or good but only for a time. They know it's death, but they just keep going back to that one place because they don't know. For that fleeting moment. And it's killing them, step by step, bit by bit. Who wants to be enslaved anyway?
Kyli Rose:I think practically, I call them audits. Like, do a thought audit. What do I think about and what do I spend my money on? What do I spend my time and my money on? And you can identify an idol very quickly.
Jina McAfee:Are you concerned with how many posts you're getting?
ReGina Johnston:The Bible says,"Where your treasure is, that's where your heart is." You can just check where you're spending your money and your time.
Kyli Rose:Think about what you're thinking about.
Jina McAfee:I think today people spend more time on social media than they do in the Word or in actual one-on-one friendship times.
ReGina Johnston:Escapism. We're really into escapism these days. The reality of life is just depressing.
Kyli Rose:I can do that. It's something you have to keep a really tight leash on. He gives us a better way but it's not always the easiest way. Better and easy are not synonymous with one another. And I think we we lean into easy and we forfeit...
ReGina Johnston:Well it's easier.
Jina McAfee:And you don't really know what you're missing until you know the living God and how good He is.
Kyli Rose:We knew freedom in the garden. We will know full freedom again in the garden when this whole thing wraps up. But we actually get to experience freedom in the middle too. Oh my goodness, He's so kind that He gave us His Holy Spirit, His presence, here on Earth. And with that deposit of the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit actually is a deposit which says that He is coming back, it's like a promise that He is coming back for you, and with that deposit, we have the option to live free here on earth as well. We see in John 10:10, Jesus says, "The thief's purpose is to steal, kill and destroy, but My purpose is to give them a life that's rich and satisfying." Joshua said that you have to choose. "Choose this day whom
you will serve" (Joshua 24:15). So with us living in this messy middle, living in the already and the not yet, we have to choose. How are we going to live? Are we going to choose freedom? Essentially, you get to choose if you're going to live free or if you're going to live as a slave to the all the different things that we listed. One practical way to live free is to detach from our love of the world. Do not love the
world! 1 John 2:15-17 says,"Don't love the world's ways. Don't love the world's goods. Love of the world squeezes out love for the Father. Practically everything that goes on in the world--wanting your own way, wanting everything for yourself, wanting to appear important--has nothing to do with the Father. It just isolates you from Him. The world and all of its wanting and its wanting and its wanting is on the way out. But whoever does what God wants is set up for eternity." That's a lot of wanting.
ReGina Johnston:That paints a picture of us so well. We are continually searching for the thing that will satisfy and always coming up short unless we find Jesus.
Kyli Rose:And I think it's so pertinent. We started at the beginning, and that's so important, because it shows us that we are still wrestling with those same two questions that God answered at the very beginning. Who am I and what in the world was I created to do? And if I don't know the answer to one or both of those questions, I will spend a lifetime looking and wanting and wanting and wanting. Like, tell me who I am, tell me that I have purpose, tell me that I have worth, tell me that I have value. And I'll go and get that through relationships. I'll go get that through romantic relationships or achievements. You see how God actually already took care of those two questions. I love that we started in the garden because those two questions were answered. Because He is the creator of us, we cannot find the answer to those two things outside of Him. We will spin our wheels for an entire lifetime trying.
Jina McAfee:We watch people doing that, right? They have those same two questions. Because God put eternity inside of us. There's this want, this need, to have a purpose. And He gave us a great purpose. And when we don't find it, we just know nothing's right.
ReGina Johnston:And not just to have a purpose, but to be fulfilled in that purpose. You can find purpose in the things that you do, but then feel so empty.
Jina McAfee:I mean, they're just temporary. It's like,"Well, I did that now, so why do I still not feel fulfilled?"
ReGina Johnston:Oftentimes that wanting and wanting and wanting is driving us to do things that are without that fulfillment. So just like the Scripture says, it leaves us with an even deeper place to fill.
Kyli Rose:Scripture says that we have the option to live an abundant life. You get to live life, and you get to live it abundantly, which is not striving, not scraping by. It is fullness, and it is freedom. Paul is saying here that if you want that kind of life, you cannot love the world. You cannot love the world and love God. You have to choose. How do we do that? You feast on the things of God. Whatever you are constantly feasting on and consuming is what you will crave. So ask yourself, What am I constantly consuming on a regular basis? What am I looking at? What am I listening to? Who am I spending time with? How do I start my day? How do I end my day? All those things matter. If it is consistently more worldly than it is godly, it will squeeze out that full and abundant life that we were designed to live from the beginning.
ReGina Johnston:We looked at things that we can be enslaved to, but oftentimes that comes from the inside. So we need to recognize what enslaves us, what's coming from the inside that perpetuates that sense of being enslaved to something. I know pride is the oldest sin. We talked about that earlier. That's how Satan fell. He wanted to be like God. He still does. He wants to be like God. He wants everything God has. He used that same thing to tempt Adam and Eve, and that's how he tempts us, too, with pride. Sometimes we overlook this, but insecurity is often pride-driven as well. When we're insecure we're always checking our own self. How are we in the middle of this? How did you perceive me? Did I do okay? It's this sense of always looking at ourselves in the mirror. How miserable can that be? And we are the reason for everything. We're trying to figure out how everything can be about how we look in the middle of doing it. It's just miserable, actually. And you'll never step into your purpose if you're letting that sense of insecurity rule or fear. Pride is so connected to fear, really. Do you only do what you can easily do on your own? Do you let fear basically encompass you in such a way that it disables you?
Jina McAfee:Like you're so afraid to say "yes," because you don't know if you can do it on your own.
ReGina Johnston:It's not that we won't fear. I know the Bible often says, "Do not fear." But we're human. We're going to fear. It's that we do not fear in such a way that we are not able to move forward in faith. Do not fear more than you faith, basically. Don't let fear lead you. I may feel it, but I won't make decisions based upon my feeling. So here's a verse to stand on when you are struggling with fear. "He has not given us a spirit of fear, but one of power and love and a sound mind"
(2 Timothy 1:7). That's something we can speak to ourselves repeatedly when that battle arises and we feel afraid. Now, what are you going to do with it?
Jina McAfee:Just speak strength and truth to yourself. Something else that can enslave us is greed, just that old basic wanting what other people have. Thehe 10 Commandments speak to some of these basic issues. Feeling like you're less than, focusing on what you don't have rather than what you do have, making stuff more important than relationship, thinking stuff gives you value. How could you have more value than being a daughter of the Most High God? This really goes along with comparison. It's so easy in our flesh to compare ourselves with one another. We do that even in the church. We'll think, "Oh, look at what what they just said; it was so amazing." We compare ourselves when God has gifted us differently. We are different on purpose and He uses us in different ways. He brings about His purpose in different ways through each of us. So we have to lay that aside. Another one is unforgiveness. I saw this so clearly in Scripture when the disciples ask Jesus how to pray, and He gave them this model of prayer. We call it the Lord's prayer. It's found in Matthew 6. At the end of that prayer, Jesus said, "If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. [This is our whole basis of life, eternal life with Him.] But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins" (Mt 6:14-15). The word is "refuse." That means choice. You are choosing to forgive or you are refusing to forgive. If you refuse to forgive, your Father will not forgive your sins. At first, I didn't get that unforgiveness kills you. It can rule you. Just like Kyli said earlier, think about what you think about. Is it consuming your thoughts? The person you're not forgiving may not even think about it at all. They might be totally free. We don't want to do that. Another is living beyond our means. We did that one time. We bought a car we could not afford, and I am telling you, I felt like I was in prison with that car. Our kids were little. We had one income. It affected every decision we made. We tried to sell it right after we got it, because we realized that it was killing us, but it wasn't worth what we paid for it. We were stuck. But we never did that again. We learned our lesson. You can be enslaved to living beyond your means. Don't do that to yourself.
Kyli Rose:Another thing that can potentially enslave us is having a wrong view of God. I don't think we can ever fully know Him right now, because He's so infinite. But I think oftentimes we have questions and we have doubts, and we are taking those questions and doubts everywhere else but the Word itself. Even if we are spending some time in the Word, we may not be actively learning and trying to understand how to study it. You can know Him lots of ways, but He gives us His Word specifically. I'd say it's the primary way to know Him. The God of the universe actually wrote down what His heart is, and you have access to it in multiple languages and multiple translations. And statistically, we know that we are not spending time in the Word. We cannot know God, apart from it. We can't. Sometimes we take on cultural ideas of who God is. That's a very dangerous thing to do. We can have a wrong view of God believing a lie. Adam and Eve walked in the garden with Him, and they were still deceived. How much more do we need to be in the Word, knowing Him, so that we're not deceived, so that we don't buy into a lie. Is He holding out on me? I'm experiencing something really hard. Maybe God isn't good. I wanted this. I didn't get it. Maybe He is not provision. We're always tempted to change our theology of who God is based off of what we're feeling and what we're experiencing. So we've got to be tethered to something that is not always in flux, like our feelings and our emotions and our circumstances. The Word will keep us anchored. It will keep us tethered. We can very easily have a wrong view of God, just like Adam and Eve did in the garden, if we are not actively spending time in His Word, spending time with Him, and spending time within the community that He gives us. And then we want to make sure that we are taking our thoughts captive. You're going to feel things and you should. He gave you those feelings. What do you do with them? Do we graduate them and let them become behavior patterns and thought processes? Or do we take that thing and hold it up against the Word of God? Like this is what I'm feeling. Does it line up? Is this His character? Is it true about Him? I'm feeling like I'm alone, but that's not what the Word says. The Word says that He never leaves me or forsakes me. I feel like I don't have enough. Well, that's not what the Word says. It says that He owns the cattle on a thousand hills, and in Him, I lack nothing, no good thing. So we're constantly taking those feelings and holding them up against the truth of who God is. If we will do that, we won't have this broken view of God. And whenever our lives get hard, which they will, we're not going to grumble, and we're not going to walk away from our faith, and we're not going to deconstruct our faith and then reconstruct something that is so so far from what it should be.
Jina McAfee:We have to realize we're not going to always understand the Why, but we can know the Who. We can know who our God is. And we just have to say, "Okay, I don't know why, but I know God is good.
Kyli Rose: 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 says, "We're human, but we don't wage war as humans do. We use God's mighty weapons, not worldly weapons, to knock down the strongholds of human reasoning and destroy false arguments. [Where does that take place? In our minds.] We destroy every proud obstacle that keeps people [that keeps us] from knowing God. We capture our rebellious thoughts and we teach them to obey Christ." I love that I teach my thoughts. Whenever I have a weird, wonky thought, I say, "That is not who I am." I have a jealous thought. That's not who I am. You are forcing your mind to align with the Word of God, and you're forcing your feelings to get in line with it too.
Jina McAfee:And come to peace, really. It's life.
ReGina Johnston:So we've been talking about the tension of living in the already, but not yet. Kyli's calling it the messy middle, this sin-ridden Satan-accusing world that we live in, where we experience death and decay, and we still sin ourselves, and we still hurt one another with our actions and with our words. We live in this daily battle with the enemy of our souls, and at the same time, we're trying to submit to God and let Him guide us and direct us. So there is a tension in all of that. It's just not the easiest thing to do. We need to talk a little bit about the tension.
Jina McAfee:Paul speaks about this tension in Romans 7. I remember the first time I read this, and I thought, oh, that's exactly it. In verse 21, he says, "The moment I decide to do good, sin is there to trip me up." In verse 24b, he says, "Is there no one who can do anything for me?" Verse 25a states, "The answer, thank God, is that Jesus Christ can and does." He doesn't leave us to do this thing alone. Have you experienced this? I have. I've seen that happen. Then we go to Romans 8:2. It says, "A new power is in operation, the Spirit of life in Christ." A new power. Resurrection power. And I love
this, Romans 8:9-11 in the Message version says this, "If God Himself has taken up residence in your life, [like He lives in you] you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of Him....For you who welcome Him, even though you still experience all the limitations of sin--[So that's what we're talking about. In this 'not yet' that we're living in, we still experience limitations of sin.] you yourself experience life on God's terms.....When God lives and breathes in you (and He does, as surely as He did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life. With His Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ's!" I love that He lives in us. He surely lives in us. This is the truth. This is where we have to live.
Kyli Rose:Another scripture, Romans 8:2 says, "The law of the Spirit of Life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death." What that tells us is, whenever you said "yes" to Jesus, you were transferred from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. In the messy middle, sometimes we feel like there might be a middle zone. There's not. You were transferred. It happened in that moment because of what He did on the cross and because He overcame death, hell and the grave. Whenever we say "yes," we get Him in that moment. We get the Holy Spirit in that moment. But you are now a student of the School of Sanctification. Congratulations! It's an instantaneous thing that happens. You're now baptized in Christ. He lives in you. And then you begin this process of looking more and more like Jesus. Some of us might feel like we're blowing it over and over and over again, and that can actually generate a lot of fear. Some of you might even be worrying that your salvation is this day-to-day thing that you're trying to do. It doesn't work that way. So you can just rest, rest in knowing something really cool happened that day, and now, because you are empowered by the Holy Spirit, you are taking small steps in the same direction every single day. I think we want our lives to look like this upward trend where I'm getting better and better and better, and each day is better than the previous day. But a lot of times our lives will look like squiggly lines, like there will be some lefts and some rights and some ups and some downs. But I think the goal of our lives is to be taking these small steps towards Jesus, that we're just slowly moving in the same direction over the course of our lifetime, until one day we get to stand before Him, right in front of Him. And so there's progress. There is growth. And He promises that He'll take us from glory to glory, and whenever we get to see Him face to face, we'll be like Him in full. The choice here is: Will we live a Spirit-empowered life? Will we allow the Holy Spirit to sanctify us? What does sanctify mean? Will we allow the Holy Spirit to make us look like Jesus? That means we might have to say "no" to some things. We'll say "yes" to other things. We'll spend time with Him. 1 John 1:27 says, "You have received the Holy Spirit, and He lives within you, so you don't need anyone to teach you what is true. For the Spirit teaches you everything that you need to know, and what He teaches is true--it's not a lie. So just as He has taught you, remain in fellowship with Christ." Galatians says that you are children of the promise. That's who you are. We already talked about our position in Christ, and that's it. We are children of the promise, empowered by the Holy Spirit, moving towards Jesus day in and day out.
ReGina Johnston:So we need to declare that over each other and over people who are listening, who have received Jesus, to declare that you are children of the promise. So, Jina, will you pray us out?
Jina McAfee:Lord, we hear Your truth and we declare that we are going to walk in that truth. We are children of the promise. So I just ask You to make that revelation clear and real. Lord, as we're in this life, in the middle, in the already, already children, but not yet in a world without evil, in a world that's not trying to pull us away from God, Lord, that we will make that decision, that we will come towards You. Lord, that we will take everything You have for us. That we will choose abundant life. Lord, that more and more and more we'll see how we are children of the promise. We are not slaves. Sometimes we may just need to declare it, but Lord, remind us. Remind us by your Holy Spirit. And, Lord, You fight for us. Lord, You fight for us. So, Lord, let us lean in. Let us be in Your Word. Let us hear what You have to say. Let us say, lead us and guide us, Lord. Let us say, have Your way, Lord, God. And Lord, thank You for the hope, the hope of life eternal that we have in You. I pray that everyone listening here today would know You as Father. It's in Jesus' mighty name that we pray. Amen.