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[0:00] You're listening to a sermon recorded at Providence Community Church, Truth and Beauty in Community. If you are in the Kansas City area, please consider joining us in person next Sunday.

[0:12] We meet in Lenexa, Kansas at 10 a.m. every Lord's Day. Until then, we pray that as you open your Bibles, the Lord will open your heart to receive His Word.

[0:25] Verse 14, Exodus 20, verse 14. This week, I'll explain why, but I was thinking about Faraday cages.

[0:37] Einstein had the picture of three different scientists on his study wall. He had Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, and James Maxwell on his wall.

[0:52] Faraday is probably best known for being one of the best experimental scientists of all time. He has fundamentally sort of mapped out the world we live in now.

[1:03] His fingerprints are on all sorts of things that we experience today. But a Faraday cage, in case you haven't heard of that before, is just an object or a thing that he developed, essentially, to protect an object from electromagnetic fields.

[1:22] Now, I'll get into why I was thinking about Faraday cages when I was thinking about adultery here in a minute. But just a little bonus content for you. It's interesting to note that all of the scientists that were on Einstein's wall were all self-professing Christians.

[1:39] All three of them were. In fact, Faraday has one of the best deathbed confessions. That's very short and simple.

[1:51] But as he was on his deathbed, someone said to this renowned scientist, What are your speculations now? And Faraday responded, Speculations?

[2:05] I have none. No speculations now. I know whom I have believed, and my soul rests on certainties.

[2:18] What assurance. Not entirely to do with anything today, but I just thought that was encouraging. The reason why I was thinking about Faraday cages was because I began to realize, as I worked on this sermon about adultery, or about our text, Exodus 2014, You Shall Not Commit Adultery, I began to realize just how much misinformation on the subject of sexuality is buzzing around us at all times.

[2:52] I'm really concerned, I think, today, the main task is simply to build some kind of wall of biblical protection around your heart and minds so that they would be guarded in Christ Jesus against all of the lies buzzing around, buzzing around you and me every single day.

[3:13] Back in 1943, an American academic named Walter Langer was tasked with a pretty interesting and historic assignment. They asked him to write a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler.

[3:29] Incidentally, in this psychological profile, he said that the most likely outcome for a man like Adolf Hitler is suicide. So he nailed that part. But in that document, where he's sort of outlining the psychology of Hitler, this is, he writes a phrase that has become somewhat well-known in popular culture, and that phrase is, people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one, and if you repeat it frequently enough, people will sooner or later believe it.

[4:01] That has been, you know, condensed over time into something like, if you tell a lie frequently enough, people will eventually believe it. And that's where we are on the subject of human sexuality.

[4:15] The world is full of big, bold lies about sex. The truth is, friends, we really are living in a psyop. There is propaganda buzzing all around us, and that's why I started thinking about old Michael Faraday and his cage.

[4:34] I thought, how can we, as a people, protect ourselves from this incredible propaganda campaign that has been going on for a very long time about the issue of sexuality?

[4:47] So that's what we're going to do today. And as a fair warning, I remembered a verse as I was thinking through all this, and as a fair warning to you, if you were to decide to build a Faraday cage around your sexuality, I promise you this, the world will call it a tinfoil hat.

[5:04] There's a verse for that. There's a verse for when you actually decide to be careful with this great human capacity, the world will think you're stupid, pessimistic, and oppressed.

[5:18] 1 Peter 4.4 predicts this. With respect to this, Peter writes, they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you, but they will give an account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.

[5:35] It's just one of these things where in a world of insanity, the sane person looks crazy. And what we're really pursuing today in this message is just some sense of sanity around the issue of sex.

[5:48] Just understanding that we are in fact in this massive psyop, and that we really do need to straighten things out a bit. So the point of this message is not really to hammer any one person in any particular way.

[6:01] The main purpose is just to have one of these kinds of messages where the lies are exposed as lies, and the truth is presented as truth.

[6:12] People forget that a function of preaching sometimes isn't to make anyone in a congregation feel bad, but rather just to make someone in the congregation be safe. We hear that phrase that we use often to refer to our own thought life that comes from 2 Corinthians.

[6:29] We take every thought captive to obey Christ. But that passage, while it does work for your personal thought life, isn't about that. It's actually about the preaching ministry of Paul.

[6:40] Let me read the text to you. 2 Corinthians 10, 4-5. For the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but have divine power to destroy strongholds.

[6:51] We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God and take every thought captive to obey Christ. Here, we're not talking about individuals getting a handle on their thought life, although the verse works for that.

[7:07] We're talking about a style of ministry that stands up to the lies being told to the people of God and says, I'm storming that castle and I'm going to take some of those thoughts captive and I'm going to make them obey Jesus.

[7:20] And that's an important aspect of a pulpit ministry. So that's what we're going to do today. We're just going to look at some of the lies that we're being told by the world and just set them straight with truth.

[7:33] First thing I want you to see this morning is that we have been told a story in which all of the heroes presented to us are really villains and many of the villains presented to us are really heroes.

[7:47] We've been presented a story that has been morally inverted so that many of the heroes presented to us are actually some of the darkest and most terrible people and many of the villains presented to us on this subject are actually the people who are the heroes.

[8:05] This week I was scanning through a book called Hoodwinked, How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture. And the book is essentially about all of the ways that pseudo-intellectual movements have basically perpetuated con jobs on the West in all sorts of different areas.

[8:25] The summary of the book goes like this. In the worldwide culture war, our progressive friends honor no conventions. Unchecked by God or tradition, largely unedited by their peers in the academy or the media, they fall back promiscuously on the one weapon that their opponents are loathe to use, fraud.

[8:49] As weapons go, however, it is no match for the truth. At the end of the day, one prays it is the latter that goes marching on. So the idea of this book is just we are being lied to about lots of things and we're being lied to at a fundamental level.

[9:06] So this is just a message that's saying, guys, it's worse than you think. You really are being told a bill of lies. This idea that we are being actively lied to by our superiors comes straight from God's word.

[9:24] Jesus says to the Pharisees in John 8, 44, you are of the father, the devil, your father, the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in the truth because there is no truth in him.

[9:39] When he lies, he speaks out of his own character for he is a liar and the father of lies. So what we're doing today is also a bit of spiritual warfare. We're attacking a particular set of strongholds that have to do with human sexuality and we're setting them straight.

[9:56] Now what I said about this idea is like we're being sold a story in which the people presented to us as heroes are actually villains and I want you to see that really when it comes to the area of sexuality, you are presented with role models that are dark and evil presented as free and loving.

[10:20] In that book, the book about the intellectual scams, he has a whole chapter on a sexual revolution and he goes from Margaret Sanger to Margaret Mead and you see all of these kind of front end of the feminist movement perpetuating just extraordinarily damaging lies that still affect our world to this day.

[10:47] Margaret Mead, by the way, a piece of work. Just an absolute scandalous, fraudulent, that's the only thing. When you start looking at their writings, you start just applying basic academic standards, you'll find fraud everywhere.

[11:03] And so it was with Mead. You know, this all got me thinking as I read this chapter, like, you know, back in the Salem witch trials, you know, people made the mistake of calling women witches that were not witches.

[11:17] And reading about Margaret Mead made me realize we sometimes make the opposite mistake. But he terminates on a guy named Alfred Kinsey. Alfred Kinsey is presented to us to this day as a hero.

[11:33] The same actor who played Jesus in the Narnia movies did a movie in which he was Kinsey and starred as a hero, Liam Neeson. He's presented to us as the man at the headwaters of all sexual progress and the throwing off of oppression and repression and so on and so forth.

[11:53] His essential idea was that there is no sex act which is unnatural. As long as you can do it, it's natural. That was his sort of operative worldview.

[12:07] And I'm telling you, I'm trying to persuade you that this has had more of an effect on you than you realize. His main sort of motive for what I would call his ministry was to overthrow the Christian ethic of sexuality.

[12:24] sexuality. And that, my friends, is the reason he's championed. Make no mistake about it. He was indeed a fraud at every possible level and was indeed an avid champion of and participant in pedophilia amongst many other things.

[12:41] And he is presented today by the culture as a hero. Friends, so many of these people that are presented to us as champions of rights or the overthrowers of repression are actually single-handedly responsible for as much suffering as any one individual could be.

[13:03] So some of the people that are presented to you as heroes are actually terrible villains. and some of the people presented to you as villains are actually heroes.

[13:16] Kinsey made so much hay on a movement that had already begun prior to him and that was this movement to cast Protestants in particular and Puritans in particular as prudes.

[13:30] H.L. Mencken, the famous atheist, said, Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy. That's what people thought of Puritanism when Kinsey started kicking around.

[13:44] Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy. Mencken's a truly funny man. That's a great quote. It's just wrong. You see, this is going to sound academic.

[14:00] I promise you there will be a personal payoff in the way you think about things in a moment. But well before any of us were born, true heroes of the faith who had much to instruct us on this issue in particular were taken out by the enemy via slander and painted as prudes and people interested in destroying your happiness.

[14:23] It was said that some of the heroes presented to us in the story of the world are actually deep, dark villains and also some of the villains presented to us are actually heroes. C.S. Lewis was attempting his best to handle some of this.

[14:38] He would write frequently about the Puritans in one way or another and he, an expert on 16th century literature, would know what he was talking about. He said this, relief and buoyancy are the characteristic notes of Protestant Christianity.

[14:54] It follows that nearly every association which now clings to the word Puritan has to be eliminated when we are thinking about the early Protestants. whatever they were, they were not sour, gloomy, or severe, nor did their enemies bring any such charge against them.

[15:12] Protestants were not ascetics but sensualists. Protestant enemies, namely Catholicism, thought of the Protestants as too sensual. Lewis writes elsewhere, on many questions, and specifically in their view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party.

[15:33] Now why am I telling you this? I'm telling you this because I want you to recognize a larger pattern, a pattern that goes all the way back to the garden, and that is when the one who is acting in your best interest is cast as the one who's trying to keep you from something good, and the one who is acting for your destruction is cast as your liberator.

[15:58] This is just a pattern we see time and time again, and you will see this in your own life. At some level or another, you will be convinced in the quiet moments of your life, whether it's on the sexual front or some other, that God is holding out on you.

[16:15] Friends, that story always ends in death. So that's one thing, and it's one lie to clear up. You're living in a psyop, and part of that psyop is to paint some people who are really terrible as good and some people who are really good as terrible, and all of that sort of goes back to the garden in which the devil did the very same thing related to God.

[16:40] But here is, I think, even more important, and that is what I would call a worldview divide that I want you to understand. I want you to understand this, I want you to see it instinctively, I don't think I can overstate how important this particular point is.

[17:01] If you want to have sexual sanity, or sanity on any issue, you have to think in a pre-lapsarian way. Like, what's pre-lapsarian? How was the world before the fall?

[17:14] That's what that means. Why do you have to think that way? First of all, Jesus teaches us to think that way. He says, in the beginning it was this way, in the beginning it was that way. There's a reason why there's been an attack on Genesis in particular, because if you can think clearly about how the world was before sin, you suddenly have a model for what your life should look like.

[17:33] I want to show you sort of the two competing worldviews around just so the two competing worldviews, I will use the phrase Christianity, and I will use materialism as my other phrase.

[17:45] What I mean by materialism is not loving stuff. I'm using it as a worldview label. Materialism is someone who believes there is only stuff. They don't believe in any transcendent spirituality and so forth.

[17:59] These would be your atheists, your Darwinian materialists, and so forth. So what I'm going to do, these are two competing worldviews on this subject, and I think it's important that you understand where they're both coming from.

[18:11] I suggest you ask this fundamental question of both worldviews. Christians, which came first, lust or love? Darwinian materialists, which came first, lust or love?

[18:27] Why am I asking that question? I'm asking what is the most natural state for a human being? What were we created for? Now, you ask the Darwinian, and they will say that lust is undeniably more natural than love.

[18:46] We are, after all, animals. Let's do it like they do it on the Discovery Channel. right? The Darwinian sees lust as fundamental.

[18:59] It doesn't really have a clean explanation for what love is, because as materialists, everything is just chemicals, right? So this is very important that you understand.

[19:11] Someone says that your life will not go well if you hang out with scoffers, if you hang out with the wicked. this is important. Fundamental to the materialist worldview is that lust is the more natural of the two things.

[19:32] And that really, lust is what has advanced the species from slug to scientist, I guess. Indiscriminate seed sowing based purely on the reaction of various chemicals and hormones.

[19:50] What is most fundamental for Darwinian? Lust. It is the most real thing. Love, for them, is like, I don't quite know what it is, and I don't quite know how you would talk about it, but if it's real, it's the rarer of the two.

[20:11] Love is something that might possibly happen, but first you have to go through dozens of lusty relationships, and then maybe you'll hit on love, whatever love is.

[20:22] On the other hand, Christianity, thinking prelapsarian, how is life before the fall, Christianity says, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Man's natural state is a romantic poet who falls asleep, dies a mini death, so that he can lay down his life to purchase a bride whom then he can wake up and see and say this is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.

[20:54] Fundamentally, if you're wanting to understand the sexual lies being told to you, you need to understand that as a Darwinian, and all the worldviews that stem from that, by the way, paganism thinks this way too, lust comes first, it is the most natural, love is weird.

[21:12] For the Christian, we would say, of course, we believe in lust, we believe it's a thing, but we were not made for it. We were made for love.

[21:23] We were made for romantic, covenantal, steadfast, faithful, I love my wife, I love my husband, love. That is most fundamentally natural in the Christian story.

[21:38] love. Yes, we are fallen. Yes, sin has entered the world, but we see lust as an unwelcomed intruder into a story that well predated the existence of lust.

[21:55] We see love as the starting point. Every other sexual arrangement, hookup culture, self-pleasure, polygamy, we would say is fundamentally anti-human because we know how our story begins.

[22:12] Begins with a man and a woman in a one-flesh relationship. Everything else comes after that is a consequence of sin entering the world.

[22:24] So this is big. We as Christians believe that love is fundamental, that you as a human being were made to experience love.

[22:35] And that lust is an uninvited intruder that actually threatens your basic humanity. So when Paul in 1 Corinthians 6 says things like this, the body was not made for sexual immorality, or flee from sexual immorality, for every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body, what he is saying there is what I'm saying.

[23:04] You were made for a monogamous, covenantal, full commitment, full passing relationship with another person of the opposite sex.

[23:17] You were made for love, not for lust. And all the Darwinian messaging you're hearing every single day is telling you exactly the opposite. and I want you to know that.

[23:31] I want you to know what the truth is, but I also want you to know how much you're being lied to. Now, this is all evidence, not only in scripture, but in the created world as well.

[23:43] If you pay attention to what's happening in the world of human sexuality, you can conclude that not only is this true because God says it's true, but you can conclude that indeed this is actually the way the world was designed.

[23:59] Francis Bacon, I guess this is Christian scientist day, Francis Bacon, another scientist who was a Christian, said this, God has, in fact, written two books, not just one. Of course, we are all familiar with the first book he wrote, namely scripture, but he has written a second book called Creation.

[24:17] And the reason why I've got so many scientists on my brain right now is I was just reading a John Lennox book, and John Lennox, love him to death, and the great thing about John Lennox books is he does his own audible books, and he has the best old Irish guy accent ever, so listen to John Lennox books, don't read them.

[24:34] And as he is talking about these two books of Creation, Lennox, in his just very humble, assertive way, says we need to get better at reading both books, right?

[24:45] Like that's every one of us, we need to get better at reading both books. Well, if we read the book of Creation, I believe we will still see what I have asserted already, that we were not made for all of this sexual craziness.

[24:59] We were made for covenantal relationships with one other person. And I'm just going to go through just some evidences I won't expand on. The reality of sexually transmitted!

[25:11] diseases, which we see existed even in Bible times, Paul references for instance in Romans 1, that those who committed sexual immorality received in themselves their due reward. The reality of sexually transmitted diseases is an evidence for the strangeness, fundamentally, of sexual promiscuity.

[25:29] Many of you probably know that human sexuality is not a one organ activity.

[25:40] It's a whole body, soul, mind thing. And I think many of you probably know that there's actually tons of research that shows that oxytocin is an essential hormone, especially for women, to create feelings of bonding and associatedness, connection.

[26:00] And sexual promiscuity destroys that. So that whether it's through self-pleasure or through hookup culture or whatever, we're sowing seeds in our population where people have very difficult times feeling connected to one another because some of the fundamental hormones and chemicals necessary to create those bonds that God and his good purposes created are being hijacked and played around with so that people are actually finding themselves even after coming to their senses and saying, I don't want to live this way anymore.

[26:39] They're finding it hard to feel connected to the person they've chosen. They've just wreaked havoc on their fundamentals that God built in them chemically. And then of course we see just by the state of nature that a human being, a baby, takes a very long time to develop and that their brain takes a long time to develop.

[26:58] And we're seeing just evidence after evidence after evidence that these little beings need a stable life with a mom and a dad for a long period of time. And so what we can say, whether we look at scripture or we look at this other book called Nature, what we can just say is this, you were made for love.

[27:15] As a human being, you were made for love. You were not made for lust. People are going to tell you the opposite or they're going to tell you stories that are rooted in the opposite idea. This is not true. Listen to me.

[27:26] You were made for love. You were not made for lust. You were made specifically for covenantal love. What is covenantal love?

[27:37] It is love that has 100% commitment and 100% passion. That's the standard. There is no necessary division between those.

[27:49] That's another law you're told, that you can have commitment or passion but not both. False. You were made to experience covenantal love.

[28:00] And we can trace that idea all the way up to God himself who is both fully committed to us in Christ and also fully in love with us in Christ. There is no discordance there at all.

[28:12] You and I were made to be loved that way and we were made to participate in relationships like that. we are fundamentally at the hormonal level, at the mental level, at the spiritual level, we are fundamentally a lot like tape.

[28:31] Stick it one spot, leave it alone, you're good. You keep doing this. Pull it off, apply it, pull it off, apply it, pull it off, apply it.

[28:43] You were not made that way, friends. We were made for a covenantal love and for many of us, we are also sinners, sexual sinners, sexually wounded people, people who were wounded by our own hand or by the hand of someone else.

[29:07] We are wounded people on this area and I just want to tell you something that's like undeniably true and that is that for 2,000 years, Christianity has specialized in applying the steadfast love of God to wounded people specifically in the area of sex.

[29:27] We see this emerge in John chapter 4 where Jesus sits with the Samaritan woman at the well and addresses her whole lifestyle of tape on and off.

[29:40] Christianity for 2,000 years, it is built for this, my friends. It is built for salving and calming and healing the sexually wounded person with the steadfast love of the Lord.

[29:55] So whether you've done it to yourself or someone else has done it to you or there's a combination of both, you need to understand something. Christianity excels at repairing this particular kind of damage.

[30:08] church. We see that in the ministry of Paul. In 1 Corinthians 6, he says this to the people in Corinth who would have been engrossed with all the lies we're talking about.

[30:22] He says, Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

[30:45] Look at verse 11. And such were some of you. Every local church, just about worth its salt, will have as part of its membership, people who believed these lies and broke themselves upon the rock of reality.

[31:10] And we have very good news for some of those people. Paul says, And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

[31:29] God has healed countless sexual sinners and He can heal you. He can pull you out of the psyop, He can purge you of the propaganda, because He paid the price to redeem you fully and completely.

[31:45] I do enjoy, I must admit, I do enjoy being a bit of a troll to the world's lies. I kind of enjoy telling you, showing you that the emperor has no clothes.

[31:56] Like, it's fun for me. And I enjoy that. So let me do that one more time off script, because I've told you some of the world's lies, but here's the one that really gets most people, and that is you can't change.

[32:12] False. false. And such were some of you. But you were washed. You were sanctified.

[32:25] You were justified in the name of Jesus Christ. So all the world's lies, let me point out the one that you definitely need to not believe. People don't change.

[32:36] Absolutely false. Again, another lie that leads to death. You can change. change. Jesus paid the price for you to change. You can absolutely change.

[32:47] And there are many people whom God has healed. So I want to show you a picture, and I, you know, I'm not, like, good at making art, so I had to use AI.

[32:59] It didn't turn out exactly like I wanted it to, but I want to show you a picture and give you an illustration. So what I'm going for here, and I think maybe you kind of have pulled it off, is, first of all, there's a man there, I wanted that.

[33:14] What I was really going for here was I wanted you to see fruit at two layers. Okay, so I had to figure out how to do that. I basically kind of half got there, but I want you to see you've got berries on the ground and then you've got apples or whatever in the tree.

[33:34] Here's why I want you to see this picture. this man, let's just pretend, I know the picture didn't turn out quite right, but that he can't reach the stuff up there. He can't reach the apples. He can reach the berries, he can't reach the apples.

[33:46] Okay, that's work with me here. The berries are slightly poisonous, but not enough to kill him, and they will fill him up, and he can reach them.

[33:59] The apples, he can't reach. if you want to understand the story for why you sin sexually, this picture, I think, represents some of the basics.

[34:13] The apples are covenantal love. They're the fruit you get from getting married, from feeding your marriage, from doing all the maintenance on the relationship, from working it the right way, and it's all time delayed, and it takes a lot of effort, and it's not just immediately accessible.

[34:36] But it's what will give you, it's good, and you can eat as much of it as you want. But you've got to work the garden, you know, you've got to work the orchard. Okay, so there are those, but they're not easy.

[34:52] In fact, sometimes, for various reasons, they're just not reachable, and you just have to wait on the Lord. Meanwhile, there are these berries.

[35:04] You kind of know this is not ideal. But you're hungry, and worse than that, you have low faith, and you're lazy. And so you stoop down another day, really beneath your own dignity as a human being creating the image of God, by the way, and you scrounge for some more berries.

[35:27] to satisfy the appetite for another day, whatever. And you are slowly poisoning yourself, and you probably recognize that to some degree. Again, you were not created to eat these berries.

[35:42] You weren't. But we are impatient, and we're broken, and we don't trust God. And so in all sorts of areas of our lives, not just sex, this is kind of the story.

[35:52] when God says, why do you buy these things that don't satisfy? Why do you spend money on these things that don't satisfy, when I will give you the things that do satisfy, free and without charge?

[36:05] The answer to that is because we don't trust God, and we're not good at waiting on him, and we just don't have faith. If you want to understand, if you're stuck in some sin related to sexuality, if you want to understand what's going on, friends, this is what's going on.

[36:23] This is your story. And what you need is God to just step in and just say, hey, you can trust me. And to get there, you need accountability and community.

[36:35] One of the things you need is you need someone else's faith to bridge the gap where you don't have it. And because you've sinned in this way, you have poisoned yourself, you've diminished your own capacity to do hard things.

[36:47] You've trained yourself to be lazier than you should be. You've trained yourself to give up quicker than you should. You've just trained yourself in all the wrong directions. And the way you break out of this is you believe the gospel of Jesus Christ when he says, I will help you.

[37:01] And you just do the things that Christians do. You read your Bible, you pray, you confess your sins to other people. people, get off of this berry diet before it kills you.

[37:14] It's already weakened you considerably. You just don't know that. You will know that when you stop eating berries. You'll be like, man, those things were really messing with me.

[37:26] Christ didn't, this is the other lie I think is important. Christ did not only die to give you forgiveness, you know that, right? He died to make you free. Not just to forgive you when you fail, but to make you free, like to get you off of the subsistence and self- poisoning diet of lust.

[37:45] That's what Ephesians 2 says. You were dead in the trespasses of sin in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air.

[37:57] It's just all this mindless, thoughtless engagement. The spirit that is now working the sons of disobedience amongst whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh.

[38:09] This is why you shouldn't be ashamed to confess this. So anybody that has good theology will understand, well, we all once lived this way. We all once lived in the passions of our flesh, some way or another. Carrying out the desires of the body and the mind and were by nature children of wrath like the rest of mankind.

[38:26] What is it going to take to change this for you? But God, that's the only hope. But God, being rich in mercy because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ.

[38:41] By grace you have been saved and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. So that in the coming ages, in the coming ages, Christ might show his immeasurable riches in grace.

[38:56] For by grace you've been saved through faith. And this is not of your own doing, it's the gift of God, not a result of works that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.

[39:12] Friends, there's a whole other life available to each one of us. A life paid for by the very blood of the God of the universe. It offers not only forgiveness, but ultimately freedom.

[39:30] As we transition to this table, I just want you to remember that that was all made possible to you because Jesus Christ offered himself in complete submission to God all the way to death, even death on a cross.

[39:47] And so I want to end by inviting you to this table of life, this demonstration that God will help you. I want to end by reading two passages very short from Isaiah.

[40:03] Isaiah 1. Hear this, O berry eater. Come now, let us reason together, saith the Lord.

[40:16] Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they be red like crimson, they shall be wool.

[40:30] Isaiah 55, verse 2. Why do you spend money? Why do you spend your life? For that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy?

[40:45] Listen diligently to me and eat what is good and delight yourself in rich food. Incline your ear and come to me.

[40:56] Hear that your soul may live. And here's that covenant. And I will make with you an everlasting covenant. My steadfast, sure love for David.