Which Side? - Garrett Worner - 3TC Podcast - 9/29/2024

In this episode, Pastor Garrett Worner shares a compelling message centered around the story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal from 1 Kings 18. Through personal testimony and biblical insights, the sermon explores the challenges of standing firm in faith amidst worldly pressures and false teachings. It highlights three key points: the courage to stand for truth, the importance of valuing God’s opinion over popularity, and the limitless power of the one true God. 

Transcript

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Welcome to the three timbers podcast. We hope this will encourage and uplift you today. We're glad that you're with us this morning, and before we hear God's word, know that the Spirit will speak to us when we invite this spirit in to say, Lord, reveal to me what your Word says, not just what was said, But Lord, what is your word teaching me today? So as I pray this, I would encourage you to pray that God would speak to you this morning through the power of the Holy Spirit, revealing what this text is calling us to. So let's pray, Father, we thank you so much, Lord, that you are here, that you are real, you are alive. You live within us, Lord, through the power of the Spirit and so, Lord, I pray that Your Holy Spirit would illuminate this text to each of us in the way that we need to understand it. Lord, how it would speak right to our hearts to comfort those who need comforting and to convict those who need convicting. Father, you know that I do not have any ability, Lord, to bring forth your word on my own. So Lord, I pray that you would get my sinful heart out of the way. I pray Lord, that your spirit would speak through me and despite me. Lord, I pray that we would be so moved that we'd be not just hearers of the word, but we'd be doers that we wouldn't come to sit through an exercise of just hearing someone talk, but we would know this is your holy word, Lord, that you spoke through divinely inspired human efforts, but Lord, it was your spirit that penned every word. This is from you, and it is sacred. It's not just somebody getting up Lord, but it is sacred The One Who created the heavens and the earth and the universe, you have something for us to hear today. So Lord, I pray that you would allow us to hear it, Lord, and we would be receptive. And we ask this in the name of Jesus, amen. Now I know that we are a smart group. Not only are we a good looking group, let's just start there. We are good looking. Okay, we are a smart group. So I have a very high level, kind of Mensa level quiz that I wanted to ask you guys to try to work through. So I'm going to give you a list of a bunch of songs, and I'm going to give you a list of a bunch of movies, and you have to tell me what the common theme is. Now I'm they may be mixed up a little bit, so they may not be as obvious, but I know that this group just looking at you. I know you guys have this so here and at the end, all will all announce it together. Okay, so here we go, From Russia With luck, the laugh bug lice, actually, for the laughter of the game, can't buy me lunch. Okay, let's move on to some songs. Crazy lemons, all you need is lentils. I will always like you. Endless lines and lead shack. Now that's a lot. So on three, I want you to tell me what is the theme, what is the thing that is missing? Ready? 123, love, see, you guys got it. I knew you would get it right. Love. All of those movies have the word love in them. All of those songs have the word love in them. We love love. We love to sing about love. We love to read about love. We love to watch movies and books and stories. We love love. In fact, we throw that word around. Oh, I love your outfit. Oh, I love your hair, though I don't get that one very much. Oh, I love that coffee. Oh, I love that game, right? We love to talk about love, but here's my question, do you know that God loves you? Do you know how to love God? And are we really loving one another. See, that's what we want to talk about today again, as we continue to talk about experiencing God. Have you experienced God's love? And has God experienced you loving him? And have other people experienced you? Experienced you loving them like God loves you, so we're going to be today in Matthew's gospel. I want to encourage you. We're going to be in Matthew chapter 22 Matthew 22 again, we want to encourage you to read your Bible, so please bring it to church or bring up the Bible app on your phone. But we're going to be in Matthew 22 verses 34 through 40. Matthew chapter 20. Matthew chapter 22 starting at verse 34 this is the word of the Lord, hearing that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees. The Pharisees got together. One of them, an expert in the law, tested him with this question. Teacher who. Which is the greatest commandment in the law? Jesus replied, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets Hang On these two commandments. One of the things that I'm becoming more aware of is I get older, is I am threatened by things I don't understand, and mainly technology. There's so much I'm going to hit the wrong button and I'm going to launch missiles or something is going to happen. And we tend to be like that is people, we are threatened by things we don't understand. If you don't understand something, well, I don't like it, it's no good. So why even use it? And the same can be said for people. When we don't understand someone, we can be threatened by them. And what we see in this text here is that the religious elite of this day, they were threatened by Jesus. They did not understand Jesus. They did not believe that Jesus was who He said He was. They were threatened the impact that Jesus was having on people and on the community. So because they were threatened, they said, We need to plot to get rid of him, and we have the best way to do it that we will try to play the game called Gotcha. This is the game where you try to trap somebody in their words, and you go, gotcha. And so they thought they would play this game with Jesus. So the first thing that they talked about, when you go back a little bit in this chapter, is they said, Hey, teacher, Rabbi, they really buttered him up. And they said, Should we be paying taxes to Caesar? Because they thought, well, we're going to get him right here, because if he says no, well then he's not being loyal to Caesar. And so Jesus said, render unto Caesar. What is Caesar's and render unto God. What is God's meaning? Pay your taxes, but give God all that he is. Called us to give him. So they couldn't get him there. So they said, Alright, let's try again. They they said this story. They said, hey, there was a woman and she was married, and then her husband died, and then she got remarried, and then that husband died. And so when somebody has a spouse that dies, and they get remarried, when everybody dies, who will she be married to at the resurrection? They thought, Oh, we got him now. And then Jesus says, There will neither be marriage, nor will people be given in marriage at the resurrection. So now they're over two, and now they say, we're going to call him the big guns. We're going to call the Pharisees. We're going to call a teacher of the law, an expert of the law. This would be somebody who really knew the Old Testament, scriptures. And so they sent this person to Jesus, and they again, they butter him up. Hey pastor, hey rabbi. Man, you're such an honorable guy. You're amazing. So here's our question, what is the greatest commandment of them all? And they thought, well, they got em. They got em here on this one, what is the greatest of the commandments? And what you have to understand is that the Pharisees and the Sadducees and and all of them, they they're always trying to split hairs. They're always trying to weigh they said, well, which commandments are more weighty than the other? Some are are heavy and some are light and and what, which ones are you have to really obey, and we do the same thing, right? We love to rank sin. Well, this sin, that's a really bad one. This isn't that bad of a sin. I mean, you, I mean, it's okay if you do these, but don't do this one, because that's the one that God really dislikes. There is no ranking of sin. As much as we like to rank sin and we love to rank other people's sins. There's no ranking of sin, and there's no ranking of commandments. Well, this is a really important commandment, but this not so much. Sin is sin to God, and the commandments are the commandments to God. We're called to obey them. And so Jesus says, I'm going to make this really, really simple on you. When he was asked the question, what is the greatest commandment? He says, Love the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. I mean, essentially, what he says is, love God, love others. We just talked about through all of that MENSA test that you just took, right what was missing love? And I want you to notice the order love God. We need to love God first, but in order for us to love God first, we need to accept the fact that God loves you, and we don't always accept that. And when Jesus said to love God and love others, what he was quoting was something called the Shema in Hebrew, and that means to hear and as a compilation of multiple texts that talk about how we're called to love. So I want to read that to you here. It's Deuteronomy six, verses four through nine. Again, the word Shema means here. So here we start in verse four. Here. It O Israel, the LORD our God. The Lord is One love, the Lord your God, with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength, these commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts and press them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down, when you get up, tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads, write them on the door frames of your houses and your gates. What you have to understand is the religious people. They would know this text. They would recite this text twice a day. They would write this text down. They would have this text memorized. In fact, they would write on little cards, and they would put it on something called phylacteries. And think about that, when somebody graduates and they move the tassel, that's essentially what it was. And everybody could see that they had that on their phylacteries. Oh, they know what's about loving God, and it's about loving other people. And this was something that what everybody would have known at that point, but they weren't experiencing God's love. They didn't really believe that God loved them for them. They believed that the only way God would love them is if they obeyed everything perfectly, if they did everything perfectly, that that is the only way that God would love them. And sometimes we can feel like that. Sometimes we feel that the only way that God could love us is if we are perfect, if we do everything right every day in every moment of every second, well then God will love me. Sometimes we even have days where we think, wow, I think God really loved me today because I did everything right. You didn't. I didn't, and we won't what we need to remember is what it says in Romans, five, eight. It says this, But God demonstrates His own love for us in this while we were sinners, Christ died for us. And I want you to think about this before you started going to church, before you started praying, before you started reading the Bible, before you realized who God was and who you are, before any of that happened. God loved you when you and I were living a life just for us, when you and I were so selfish and self absorbed and didn't care about what God thought and only did what we wanted, and only one things that made us happy. We didn't care who we heard or what we did, God died for us. So God has loved you and I long before we even acknowledged that God was real. But sometimes that's still not enough to convince us that God loves us. We have given into the lies of the evil one about why God can't love you. Sometimes we just think we're unworthy of God's love. We have been convinced by ourselves, by others, by the world, that somehow you are unworthy of God's love. You didn't do enough, you didn't do it right, you didn't do it long enough that somehow God doesn't love you, and therefore it negates Romans five eight, that God loved you even when you were a sinner. But we have been convinced that somehow we are unworthy of God's love. Sometimes we believe we're unworthy of God's love because we're a sinner, that somehow there are people around us who are not sinning. And we all lift people up, whether it's Billy Graham or whoever you want to lift up is oh, they just always do what's right. Everything is perfect in their life. Everybody is a sinner. Romans, 323, For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Who of us has not looked in the mirror and thought i i fell short today, but we can be convinced because we're a sinner, God doesn't love us. Sometimes we think God can't love us because we're a failure, because we've lost a job, because a marriage has ended, because we're not in relationship with one of our children or grandchildren, because we're on hard times financially because of this, because of that, everybody fails. We've all failed publicly, privately, we all fail. And somehow we think because we have failed, we are a failure, and therefore God can't love us, but God loves you and me even when we fail. And sometimes we forget that God loves us even when we make the same mistake over and over and over again. Do you ever get so mad because you keep doing the wrong thing, and you know it's wrong, but you keep doing it, you keep saying it, you keep you keep acting in a way. It's like, I know I shouldn't have responded that way, but I did you say, well, there's no way that God could love me, because I keep making the same mistake, and that's just not true. See, we cannot love God with all our heart, soul and mind. We cannot love others until we accept the fact that God loves us. But we have become so convinced that God couldn't love us that we almost try to block out God's love from our life. And sometimes we don't even realize that we are self sabotaging our lives. So God can't love us. That if I can get there first and say, Well, see, God, you'll never love me. But here's the dirty little secret that I want to make sure you aware. No matter how much you try to block God out, no matter how much you consciously or unconsciously try to self sabotage, God still loves you. God still loves you. And maybe this is, maybe this is ringing true for somebody right now. Maybe you're going through something and you say, God, I've been so unfaithful and And, Lord, I haven't handled everything right. I've been kind of got some stinking thinking and all these other things. You think, Well, there's no way you love me. I'm telling you, no matter how hard we can try, God is always going to love us, always. And here's the other thing that, honestly, I know I struggle with a lot, you can really, really love God and mess up. You can say, I love God and you can mess up in like a Gold Medal Award winning way. And I know this is true because of what Paul says in Romans seven. He says, I do not understand what I do for what I want to do. I do not do, but what I hate I do. I mean, Has anybody here ever felt like that? Okay, if you're not putting your hand up, you're lying right now, we all have, we all say, Why do I keep doing that or saying that? But God still loves you, and the reason, and one of the things that I really learned from this text was Paul says, I'm not perfect. I'm going to make mistakes. But Paul knew that God still loved him, and Paul loved God enough that he wanted to say, it bothers me, Lord, that I'm not loving you with all my heart, with all my soul and with all my strength. We look at this command, love God, love others, as two commands, but it's really one, because you can't love God and not love others. You can't be obedient to one part of this command and not obedient to the second. If you really, truly know that God loves you and you love God, how can you not love others? But sometimes we don't love God because we don't believe God loves us. Sometimes we don't love others because we don't love God. And so what Jesus is saying here is that we need to love God with all our heart, with all our soul, and with all our with all our mind. So what does that mean? Well, think about it like this, your heart is where your thoughts and your words come from. Kind of before you even say it, it's, it's kind of in your heart. We need to make sure that that we understand that our soul is where, kind of our emotional activity originates, that response that we have to whatever situation happens, it starts with our soul and our mind is not just intellectual, but it's kind of our our disposition. It's kind of where we have is an attitude, and so what it really is, it's all of us. We're called to love God with all our faculties, every part of your life is said to be used to love God. So God is saying, Give me everything. Love Me with all you have. Love Me with all that you are. Because when we truly love God, it is a portal to obedience. And the way that we love God is not through sacrifices. It's through obedience when we actually obey what God is saying, when we accept that he loves us. The way that we love God is we are obedient to God, that we know his commands, and we obey His commands. What we tend to do is we depend to compartmentalize our love for God. I remember when I was just going to church, not even a pastor yet, and I was a part of a very big church in Orlando, and so a lot of people came, and a lot of very successful business people came, and on Sundays, man, they really loved God. They would saying they were positive. They would praise everything. But on Monday, they were a shark. Their faith did not leave the church grounds. I'm religious. At church, they would say, I'm a business person. The rest of the time, we sometimes try to compartmentalize loving God. I love God. On Sunday morning, whoo, praise God. I love God at youth group. I love God on Wednesday nights. I love God at branches. I love God at parties. Whoo, but I got a job to do. If we're going to love God with all that we have, then we have to love God everywhere that we are. See. God's not going to accept empty rituals or religious activity. He says, I want you to love me with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, with everything that you can possibly have. So the question is, how do we do that? Because Jesus says, If you love me, obey my commands. So how do we do that? Well, the first thing we can do is we can meditate on God's word, not just. It not just here, but meditate on His Word. Meditate on his glory. Do you ever think about the glory of God? For me, I see it a lot in nature. When you see a beautiful sunrise or a sunset, as great as technology is and as much as technology can create, it can't be what God does you ever just meditate on the glory of God. Think about that. Do you trust in His divine power? I try to trust in my power. It doesn't go well, but you trust in the divine power of God that God will provide. Last week, if you were here, Stephanie had kind of mentioned in one of her prayer requests that that her ministry, her mission. You know, they needed resources, and how is it going to happen? Then she went to the mailbox, and God provided the resources that were needed for her ministry. So do we trust in the divine power of God? Do we seek to have fellowship with Him? This is a way that we seek to have fellowship. But are you seeking fellowship with God every day? Every day? Do you say, Lord, I want to spend time with you. I want to spend time in prayer. I want to spend time in your word. I just want to spend time talking to you, Lord, I want to seek that fellowship with you that is a way of being obedient to God. How about loving God's law, loving the Word of God. How can we love the Word of God when we don't read the Word of God? Right to love God's word is to be in God's Word, to let God's word be in our heart. How about loving what God loves? Do we know what God loves, and do we love what God loves? And how about loving whom God loves. We're called to love people. That's what this is about. You know, we we have a tendency, as Christians, as Christ followers, as the church, to think that the resurrection was just about Jesus rising from the dead for our sins. And that's true, but I want you to look at it in a different way. Jesus died for our hatred and lack of love for God. We may not have thought about it, but until we started following Jesus, we kind of hated God, and we didn't love God, but Jesus died and rose so that not only would we forgiven, but that we could have a future friendship with God, so that we could love God. Listen to what it says in Romans, five, five, it says this, And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who's been given to us. So the love that we have to give God is not even from us. It is from God. God has loved us, but the Spirit of God in us that we can love him back. So we can experience God. So the way that we experience God's love is from God Himself. But there's a second way in which we can experience God's love other than loving God, and that's to love other people. God has called us to love other people. So I want to say it like this, experience precedes expression. What does that mean? We must first experience God's love before we can express God's love. And experiencing God's love means that you accept that God loves you for you. God loves the hot mess that you and I are, that we have to accept that God loves. We have to experience God loving us, and then we have to experience what it is to love God, right, which is being obedient. And then we can express God's love you and I know wonderful, amazing people who are kind and considerate and who are loving, and we appreciate that, but they've never experienced God's love, so that the love that they can give, as nice as it is, is limited. They can only express a human form of love, but we can have the ability to express a Godly love to other people when we first experience God's love. And sometimes the question comes up a lot in our culture, it's hard to love some people. It's really, really difficult to love people. So why should I love somebody who lives different than me, who thinks different than me, who is different than me in every way, who does and thinks in a way that I find absolutely wrong, because every person is an image bearer of God, every person, even the people that you don't like, even the people that don't like you, even the people that that live and think in a manner that you find abhorrent, they are an image bearer of God, and they are called to be loved by us with a Godly love. And what is a Godly love? It is forgiving, it is patient, it is kind, it is compassionate. So we are called to love all image bearers. And when you. When you think about it, we talked about it in those songs and in those movies. If you had to summarize life, and you had to summarize being a Christ follower in one word, wouldn't it be love? Isn't that the Hallmark that we should be known for as Christ followers to a world that is experiencing no love? Listen how it said here in Matthew You have heard it said, Love your neighbors, hate your enemy, but I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you that you may be children of your Father in heaven, he causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good. He sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing this. It's easy to love people who think like you, who live like you, who do the things that you do. But can we? Can you? Can I love people who are different than us? See, if we want to experience God's love, we accept that God loves us. We love God through obedience, and then we also love other people. That's how we experience God's love. So in a lot of ways, as much as those movies and those songs talk about love, a lot of ways that's a romantic love. We're talking about love is a choice. It's a choice like it's a choice what to wear or what to we have to choose to love other people. It says this In First John, dear friends, let us love one another. For love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. How can we say we love God when we don't believe that God loves us because we're beyond loving? How can we say we love God when we choose not to love certain people, then we don't know God, and we're not experiencing God. So to me, when Jesus answer says, This is the greatest commandment to love God with all your heart, soul and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself, the reason why I think that this is the greatest commandment for me is, what else could the response be to finding out that God loves you, then loving God with everything you have and loving other people. How can that not be our only response? When you and I wake up every day, we look in the mirror and say, man, God loves what I'm seeing in the mirror. I may not love it, but God loves me all my warts and pimples and mess that I am. God loves me. The only response isn't just thank you, it's Lord, I want to love you by being obedient to you, and I want to love other people. And Jesus kind of says here at the end, essentially that love is the linchpin. Love is the linchpin that everything else hangs on, that if we do not have the love of God in us, and if we do not have the love of the God coming from us, then everything else collapses. Easier said than done, I know. But if we want to experience not just read about the love of God, not just sing about the love of God. We truly want to experience the love of God. Know this God loves you, just as you are, warts and all, you can love God by being obedient to His commands and love other people because they are image bearers of God. Our love is supposed to be vertical and horizontal at the same time. I'll leave you with this as our worship team come back comes back up, we love because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God yet hates our brother or sister is a liar. For whoever does not love their brother and sister, whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen, and he has given us this command, anyone who loves God must also love their brother and sister. Let's pray, Father, we thank You that Lord, You love us. You love us in a way that we can't even comprehend. You love us, Lord when we make the same mistake over and over again, you love us. Lord, when we walk away, you love us. Lord, when we're angry, you love us. Lord when we're disobedient. So Lord, I pray that we would accept your love and Lord, I pray that we would love you through obedience and sometimes, Lord, obedience begins with just understanding what we're being obedient to, and Lord, I pray that we would love one another. Lord the big C church and this church, Lord would be known man. They love God, and they love other people. And Lord, I pray right now I just feel like maybe there's somebody here today that Lord doesn't feel they're worthy of your love. Maybe they've got some things, Lord, that they're struggling with. Or have struggled with but Lord I pray right here, right now, that they would be freed from that Lord, they would know you love them. You love them. So Lord I pray as we sing, we sing knowing that we are loved, we sing knowing that we can love you and love each other. The name of Jesus, amen. Thank you for joining us. For more information about three timbers, church, ministries and services. Visit three timbers.org. We would love for you to join us in person. You.