June 27, 2021 Galatians 5:1, 13-25 “You Have to Ask!”

25 Jun June 27, 2021 Galatians 5:1, 13-25 “You Have to Ask!”

June 27, 2021   Galatians 5:1, 13-25       “You Have to Ask!”

In this country we banter the word freedom around so much that it really doesn’t have much meaning.  Let me give you a few examples.  You say that you can go to this place and they will give you a free hot dog and beverage.  But we all know that it’s not free.  The cost will be absorbed in the car or groceries or whatever is being sold.  You say that you are free to do whatever you want.  From what I have gathered, you have to have permission to fish, drive, hunt and many other things that require some sort of license or permit.  You can’t even get married without permission.  You say you are free to become whatever you want.  Last time I checked we can only have one president at a time.  We cannot all be president.  This list could go on and on but I think it would be pointless because we all know that we aren’t nearly as free as we like to say.  As far as I can tell, our freedoms in this country are disappearing very rapidly.  We have to be very careful in the next few years or we may end up as another communist country doomed to failure.  Socialism, communism have never worked and they never will.  What we really need is a sure-fire way to have freedom and keep freedom.  Well, guess what?  I think I know a solution and it begins with Jesus Christ.  Today we are going to look at a much-read piece of Scripture and hopefully find out what our freedom is all about.

Here is a story from Ed Vasicek about how to capture wild pigs.  You first go into the woods and put some corn on the ground.  Soon the pigs find it and begin to come every day to eat the free corn. When they are used to coming every day, you put a fence down one side of the place where they are used to coming. When they get used to the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence. They get used to that and start to eat again. You continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side.

The pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, you slam the gate on them and catch the whole herd. Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence, but they are already captive. Soon they go back to eating the free corn. They are so used to it that they have forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.  Satan uses this tactic on us all the time.  He slowly takes away our freedom thus our effectiveness for Jesus.  Many of us are trapped like this as are churches like the United Methodist Church which should be renamed the United Methodist Country Club because they have ceased to be a church.  But that is a whole other topic.

The first thing I would like to talk about today is freedom.  Now most of us live in the United States where we get to experience some freedoms.  As I previously stated, we aren’t quite as free as we think.  A good rule of thumb for your freedom is this.  Your freedom ends where my nose begins.  As long as you are not hurting or bothering your neighbor, you can be free to some extent.  And believe it or not, this is exactly what Paul is talking about here.

Jesus Christ set us free and it has nothing to do with the Romans of that era or England in our Revolutionary War period or bowing down to the United States government in our modern era.  Jesus is talking about setting us free from our selves and our sin.  Sin holds you in bondage more than anything else in the world.  Just think about some of the habits you have that aren’t so good.  Drinking too much coffee or eating too much or just being lazy.  These are things that take your freedom away and you don’t even realize it.  When you are free in Jesus Christ, then you can do anything that you want to do.  There are no restrictions.  However, when you have Jesus living inside of you as your Lord and Savior, then you don’t want to do things that are bad.  You want to do good.  Jesus has set you free from being a slave to sin and bad things to being a slave to Jesus and this is a very good thing!

Therefore, do not indulge in your sinful nature but rather serve each other in love.  Do you see how simple this is?  A couple of weeks ago we showed how suffering can lead you to absolute hope in Jesus Christ.  Well, here we are again.  You start out as a person devoted to sin because of your sinful nature.  Then you come to know Jesus and He shows you a new way which is much better than anything that sin can bring you.

You understand that we start out thinking we are free in our sinful nature.  But we really aren’t.  We are slaves to our sin.  An alcoholic or drug addict will tell you that they can quit any time but they can’t.  The same is true with the habitual liar, the person jealous of everything or the person who goes into fits of rage.  They cannot stop because they are addicted to their sinful nature.  Well, praise the Lord, Jesus is there to help people out of this sinful life.  Hopefully, we can all understand that the nature we were born into is not a very good situation.  It will lead you straight to hell.  That, my friends, is very bad.

So, Jesus comes along and you are finally able to put that old sinful nature aside but you find that it is hard to keep it aside.  Now comes another hard part of this.  You are to follow the Spirit in all you do.  This begins with a prayer life.  I bring this up all the time because I want you to have a better life.  A better life is only a prayer away.  But you have to keep on praying.  It also lies in the pages of the Bible that you should be reading every day.  There is no way you can keep Satan out of your life unless you read your Bibles and pray.  If you don’t, you run the risk of sliding back into that old way of life.  You also need to be connected to a worship service on a regular basis.  An internet service like this is ok but being at a live service is much better.  You need to be associating with people of faith who will help you in your faith walk.  Now I know that it’s hard to find a church where they actually preach the Word of God.  One easy way to tell is how it makes you feel.  Many if not most, main line churches are only preaching to get you to join.  Many churches preach things that are absolutely against the Word of God.  Do a little research before you commit to one place.  The devil is out there ready to devour you if you aren’t careful.

What Paul is telling us here is that there are two main forces working here.  Jesus Christ and Satan.  They do not mix at all.  You cannot have a little of this and a little of that and be happy and satisfied.  As a matter of fact, you will find that Satan never satisfies.  If you are following Satan, you will never have enough money.  You will never have enough power as can be seen by all the crooks in Washington.  So, if you know someone or maybe it’s you who is never satisfied with what you are doing, then you probably know someone who is a follower of Satan.  However, with Jesus, you become satisfied.  Oh, you might still want this or that but it ceases to become the main driving force of your life.  Jesus becomes the main driving force and Jesus is all good.  You cannot go wrong with Jesus.  Being a slave to Jesus is super good!

Now Paul comes to a very dire warning.  He tells us that the acts of a sinful nature are obvious.  And I also know that there are many other things on this list that aren’t mentioned but we will just go with Scripture.  Acts of a sinful nature are sexual immorality, impurity and debauchery.  To know what he means here, you have to go back into the Old Testament book of Leviticus.  This was their Bible when this was written.  It tells us in Leviticus not to have sex outside of marriage, not to have sex with our family, not to have sex with animals and not to have sex with those of the same sex.  These things are all immoral, impure and they are debauchery.  These are the things that we are to stay away from if you want to have a good life.

But there are many more acts of a sinful nature.  There is idolatry, witchcraft, hate, promoting discord, jealousy, rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, orgies and the like.  He adds ‘the like’ here because he knows that there are many, many more acts that are sinful, to say the least.  Why does he bother to list these things here when we all know that they are wrong anyway?  He is trying to make a very important point in that any one of these acts of sin can and will keep you from heaven.

And that is the end game for all.  Everyone wants to get to heaven whether they admit it or not.  Whether or not you want to believe this or not, it is absolutely true.  There is a place called heaven and it is so good that you cannot even begin to imagine what it is like.  There will be no harp playing or laying on clouds in heaven.  That is all myth.  Instead, you will be busy as God has work for you.  But unlike here on earth, the work in heaven is exactly what you want to do.  There is no sadness in heaven so your work will be more satisfying than anything you have ever experienced.  You will also be far happier than you have ever been before by a long-way.  So just imagine the most perfect place that you can and then multiply that goodness by a million or a billion times and you just begin to get the idea of how good heaven is.

Of course, on the other side of the coin, hell is far, far worse than we can imagine.  If you are guilty of any of the sins we just mentioned and have never confessed and repented, then this is your destination.  The choice is yours.  Jesus has never and never will put anyone in the bad place.  You do that yourself with your free will.  You can either choose to follow Jesus or follow Satan.  The choice is yours and it is very simple.

Now before we finish, I would like to add one more thing on the good side to help you choose Jesus or to help you tell others to choose Jesus.  Paul goes on to tell us about one of the most famous pieces in the Bible.  He tells us of the fruit of the Spirit.  The first thing to notice about this is that it is singular and not plural.  I think that the intent here is that these are all one, working together for the betterment of us followers.  I’m not going to spend a lot of time on these because we just talked about them a couple of weeks ago and I also mention them quite often.

This is one of the places where a non-believer will not understand.  They can read the words here but to them it is just words.  A believer will understand what I’m about to say.  You can have any of these fruits no matter who you are.  But you will only get a small fraction of them if you are not a Christian.  This is Satan working again.  He will make you think you are doing just fine but you are not.  Christians, through the work of the Holy Spirit, can have a love deeper and better than they ever thought possible. The same can be said of joy.  One time I watched a so-called news cast of some victory that the homosexual people had just won.  It was a big victory but you couldn’t see one smiling face.  There was no joy.  We see the same thing in our latest riots and marches.  The same can be of just about any similar situation.  There is really very little joy in this world.

There are many, many people who lack inner peace.  This can only be found in Jesus.  The same can be said about patience.  Then we come to kindness.  Satan loves to fool us here.  Who doesn’t love a kind person?  They usually have inner peace and gentleness also.  There are kind non-Christians out there but you can always tell that something is off about them.  What is off is that they don’t know Jesus, the real author of kindness.  I could keep going with all of these.  I could have a sermon on each one but I think you get the point.

Jesus Christ went to the cross and died for your sins.  Not just some of them but all of them.  This means that He died so that you didn’t have to have your sinful nature anymore.  That old self is gone when you first come to Jesus.  So, confess your sins now and ask Jesus to be the Lord and Savior of your life.  Then Jesus will put these fruits upon you if you just ask.  This is the trick to many of the wondrous options Jesus has for you.  You have to ask.  This is important.

The only and best way that I know to do this is to pray.  This is why I try to stress a prayer life just about every time I speak.  It is so important that you have contact with Jesus.  He wants to hear from you.  He wants to talk to you.  He wants you to experience all the wonderful emotions that come with the fruits of the Spirit.  He wants all of this and more for you.  But you have to ask.  Then keep on asking until something happens.  That something will be something great.

Today we have talked about freedom and what that entails along with a dire warning.  Please heed what Jesus has to say.  And don’t ever forget that Jesus loves you more than you will ever know in this world.  Grab a hold of this love and hang on for the greatest ride that there can ever be, a ride with Jesus.  And thank you Jesus for first loving us.  Let’s pray.