Paul wrote the Corinthians in his first epistle, verses 9-11, “9 Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, 10 Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. 11 And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.”  I want to draw your attention to five words—”such were some of you.”  The point I want us to see is that until we were washed, sanctified, and justified, we were as bad as anyone that we think are particularly bad.  We’re against sin.  But not because we are some kind of uniquely righteous people.  We are not “better than thou.”  We are “as bad as.”  “Such were some of you.”  All of us were in need of that washing, that justifying, provided freely by Christ.  That ought to fuel us to please the Lord out of a sense of debt, a sense of humility, and a sense of boughten-ness.  That last word isn’t a word, but we’ve been “bought with a price,” that later Paul writes in the same chapter.  And then He follows that we should therefore glorify God in our bodies, which are God’s.

One thought that will help you through certain difficulties especially is that of something or Someone always being bigger than what you are.  When God is magnified, you and your problems seem smaller.  The whole church is bigger than you are.  The cause of and for God is bigger than you are.  When you enlarge yourself, you’re going to have trouble.  It starts with a thought process—God being honored in your mind.  Like John the Baptist said, “He must increase and I must decrease.”  What happens when you become bigger is that you really do take charge.  You expect God to do things that He didn’t promise you that He would do.  You want others to fulfill for you things that you are and were responsible to do.  The world begins revolving around you and your wants or needs.  Of course, this is pride, but it is a sure path to bitterness as well.  You hold others to a much higher standard than you hold yourself.  God and others become the excuse for why things haven’t turned out the way that you wanted for yourself.  In the end, God resists you and this way of thinking, because God resists the proud.  We should be humbled by all the goodness that God has shown us, especially His mercy in light of the sure justice that we deserve.  That will help you seem smaller and less important.  The world will revolve less around you and more around God and others.

We are not ascetics who are trying to prove ourselves to God.  We aren’t depriving ourselves of things to get a pat on the head.  Our salvation is secure.  God is a good God, a loving God, Who wants to reward those who seek Him.  We aren’t trying to avoid a smack-down.   No, we should already be in Hell if we got what we deserved.  We certainly haven’t deserved all the good things we already have.  I’m not going to enumerate them right now, but you could take some time to think about it and thank God.  Go through the list in your mind and say thanks for each one.  It’s worth it.  We get our confidence from the grace of God.  Jesus died for us.  He paid the penalty for us.  He sacrificed Himself for us.  He shed His blood for us.  He redeemed us.  We have a position in Christ, a permanent standing in His grace.  We aren’t striving to get anywhere.  We have every spiritual blessing.  We not only have all things that pertain to life and godliness, but we are also partakers of the Divine nature.  So we serve God out of that position we have in Christ.  That gives us joy.  It gives us motivation.  We love Him.  He has done so much for us.  No one has done more.  If I stay separate from the profane, it’s to honor Him.  If I spend more time in His Word or preach to more people, it’s not to gain a standing but because of Who He is and what I already have.  It isn’t a guilt trip.

Jesus said in Matthew 5:14-16, “14 Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. 15 Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house. 16 Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven.”  He also said “preach the gospel to every creature” (Mk 16:15), so we should try to cover every person with some kind of systematic evangelism.  But that doesn’t mean that we ignore  those around whom we are the most.  When we are going about our regular duties and responsibilities and relationships, we should not hide our light under a bushel, that is, we shouldn’t extinguish our light in our day-by-day Christian lives.  A big factor in someone getting saved is that he is interested.  A larger number of interested will likely be among those people who you know the best.  Let’s think about they are by using the acronym, F-R-A-N—your Friends, Relatives, Associates, and Neighbors, your Frans.  Someone has called this Frangelism.  Frangelism is evangelism, but it is different than door-to-door.  It’s not necessarily easier, but it should not be left out.  We should start thinking about the eternal destiny of our Frans.  We should start praying about opportunities and think about how we could make an eternal difference to them.

Leaders of churches today face a particular conflict.  They want to grow in numbers, but the kind of growth taught in scripture isn’t compatible with the type of life that church members want to live.  Church leaders have developed programs that enable their members to participate in a way that requires little to no faith on their part.  The Christian life taught in the Bible is really very simple.  You stay in fellowship with God through personal devotion, prayer and Bible study, and corporate worship, preaching, public prayer, tangible giving, and congregational singing.  You serve God in making disciples, in part through evangelism.  So you read your Bible, pray, go to church, and preach the gospel to the lost.  But those are things that people don’t want to do, especially the latter.  So churches develop programs in which people won’t have to do those things.  The programs have replaced some of the basic obedience in the Christian life.  Rather than develop stronger Christians, it props up people with either little or no faith.  Many professing Christians today are looking for ways to get out of serving, so that they have more time for themselves.  These programs make this possible.  You put in your little chunk of time, then your done and free to do what you want to do.  This is not how God intended it to be.

What is real freedom?  I ask that question, taking into consideration what Jesus said in John 8:32: “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”  Get that  He said that the truth shall make you free.  I emphasize this because people don’t relate the truth to freedom.  People think that they are free when they do what they want to do, which is self-deceit, believing a lie.  We are going to sin when we do what we want.  We think we’re free because we’re getting what we want, but what we want is actually what is enslaving us.  We can’t do what we ought without the truth.  Scripture, which is the truth, liberates from Satan’s bondage of falsehood (1 Jn 5:18), condemnation (Rom 8:1), judgment (John 3:18), spiritual ignorance (John 8:12), spiritual death (John 8:51), and most important, sin (Rom 6:18, 21).  You can do what the Lord wants you to do, which is what you were created to do, when you receive the truth.  The truth brings saving faith without which it is impossible to please God.  So without the truth, we are mired in a life that can’t be a genuine success.  The freedom that the world offers really is a freedom to run down a dead-end road.  It is the freedom to swim around in a net that is slowly (and sometime very quickly) tightening around us.  It might seem like our choice, but it isn’t.  It is the choice of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The end times mark a one world government and a one world religion that God destroys.  We don’t want a one world government and a one world religion, because those are against God, rebelling against Him.  However, we do want them because they mean that the time of God’s kingdom has come.  There are several of these types of, humanly-speaking, seemingly contradictory situations.  We don’t want to be chastised and yet we are thankful for chastisement.  We don’t want to go through trials but yet we know that trials will work endurance and strength and growth into our lives.  So through evangelism and being the influence on government that we can, we are attempting to postpone the inevitable, a one world government and religion.  We don’t want to have a fatalistic view of the end times.  We don’t want to assume that we are living at that moment right before the Antichrist and False Prophet come on the scene, but we also need to be prepared for the possibility.  These thoughts don’t actually contradict.  They provide a pull or a tension that gives us the right balance in our lives.  We try to postpone end time events at the same time trusting the Lord with the future.  We are against the things that lead to those times and yet we point to those events as signs of the times.  The godly will suffer persecution but we want a nation that lives peaceably with Christians.

The words “service” and “worship” are closely related in Scripture. For instance, at the end of Romans 12:1 it mentions that presenting your bodies a living sacrifice is your reasonable “service.” The word “service” is the Greek word latreia, which speaks of the work done in the temple by the Levites or priests. It was the service of the sacrificial system. The Levites and priests were serving God, offering Him what He wanted according to Scripture. We know from Ephesians 4:1 that the believer, upon conversion, has received a new vocation from God. In Romans 6 we know that the before salvation, a person served himself, yielding his body as an instrument of unrighteousness. After someone is saved, he can, because sin no longer has dominion over him, yield his body as an instrument of righteousness. Romans 7 says that the believer can “do good,” and we know from Philippians 2:13 that it is because God works in Him to do good. So what is service to God for a believer? Everything that He does. That’s the answer. Surely prayer, tithing, preaching, and praising are service to God, and they’ve got to be done. He wants those. But even in the mundane, we can serve God. Ladies at potluck, someone cooking for men’s prayer time, mowing the lawn, fixing the van—these all can and should be service to God. Praise God they can be service to Him.

Let’s just say that someone in church, a church, or a religion somehow mistreated you. In so doing, let’s just say that the person who has mistreated you has now misrepresented what you think about Who God is supposed to be. That could be bad, especially if what you think is the same thing that the Bible says about God. Even if the person has offended the truth about God, which is what you believe has occurred, that doesn’t change Who God is. But then there is the whole issue of when you misrepresent God. And perhaps you might be misrepresenting God in the way that you deal with a person who you think misrepresented God. All of this explains why it is that we shouldn’t allow how someone else acts to determine how we live. We should live based upon the Bible. Someone else may not do that. However, if they don’t, what you should try to do is help that person. There’s no way that another person should keep you from living for God just because he hasn’t lived for God. And why would someone turn away from living for the Lord because he is offended that someone didn’t live for the Lord? That is the height of hypocrisy. And it is a lie. It is a total cop-out. People who want to live for the Lord, who will deny themselves and follow Christ, can do that by the grace of God. They don’t do it because they don’t want to do it. No other reason.

Toward the end of Matthew 16, Jesus told the disciples that He would go to Jerusalem, suffer, die, and then be raised from the dead on the third day. Peter must have zoned out on the resurrection part and heard only the suffering and death portion, so he went off on Jesus, rebuking him for this plan. That’s when Jesus turned to Peter and said, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” Ouch! Those were rough words. But then Jesus explains how bad they were. You see, Jesus was on earth, not to do His own will, but to do the will of God the Father. And suffering and dying were the will of the Father. Jesus savored the things of God. Peter was not savoring the things of God. And that is a characteristic of unbelievers. They savor the things of men instead of those of God. Their eternal destiny is at stake because of that. Jesus goes on to explain. They must deny self if they would follow Him. They must lose their own life if they will have life. They must give up their own temporal, horizontal life, life on earth, if they would have spiritual life, eternal life with Him. People who savor the things of men are hanging on to their own lives. They keep their lives for themselves. They don’t want suffering and death for God. They don’t like the cross. They want their own ambitions and gratification of their flesh. They might get that, but what would it profit if someone gained even the whole world, but lost his own soul. Even the whole world would not be worth someone’s soul. A choice of the things of God means that we savor the things that are God’s and not the things of ourselves. That’s believing in Him.