A Pledge of Planned Obedience

So a couple weeks ago, uh, I think seven or eight of us went to the uh gospel coalition pastors conference down in Louisville.

And while I was there, I ran into one of Brandy's uh old pastors.

Brandy's my wife over here, and uh one of her pastors in DC.

And uh he introduced me to the guy traveling with him as the man who stole Brandy Golden from their church.

So uh kind of tongue in cheek.

But then he went on to kind of chuckle about the fact that uh when we were dating, we'd been dating maybe 10 months, he had he'd called me up out of the blue.

I remember I was driving home from work and I pulled into the the driveway at the house and he called me and he just wanted to catch up into like an older brother would or a pastor, wanted to see where I was exactly going with the relationship.

And thankfully, I had just bought the engagement ring for Brandy.

She's wearing it today.

She said yes.

And uh and so I was able to assure him that I meant business in the relationship and I wasn't just uh playing with her heart.

But I really couldn't ask him for, I couldn't really blame him for asking me uh kind of where I was going with the lady, how how serious I was about this.

Um, because it's really a common phenomenon when a young man is attracted to a girl, he starts going out with her, um, maybe even gets to the point where they say the love word and this kind of thing.

But then as months turn into sometimes years, it's obvious that he's not taking the concrete steps forward to make her his wife, if she'll say yes.

He has lots of confession, but he doesn't bring himself to a real commitment.

He has professions of love, but he has not made real plans.

As we come to Nehemiah chapter 10, we've just heard last sermon or last Sunday, Pastor Ramez was preaching to us from Nehemiah chapter 9, where they had this big, long, lengthy confession.

Nehemiah 10 · chapter mention Nehemiah 9 · chapter mention

Today in chapter 10, you're gonna see how they transition from mere confession to committed obedience.

And so if you want to open your Bible there to Nehemiah chapter 10, the people there, and we're gonna title the message, they're making a pledge of planned obedience, a pledge of planned obedience.

Nehemiah 10 · chapter mention

It's really instructive for us that they went beyond mere confession.

As we read in verse 38 of chapter 9, we're gonna, this is sort of the transition verse between the two chapters.

And so we'll read Nehemiah 9:38.

Nehemiah 9:38

Because of all these sins we've committed, because of all this, we make a firm covenant in writing.

On the sealed documents are the names of our princes, our Levites, and our priests.

And so we have here the main idea of the entire passage is that the people make a pledge of planned obedience.

They've just confessed, and now they're saying they're gonna do something about what they just confessed.

In your Bible there, you may see that most of chapter, well, about half of chapter 10 is just made up of names.

The first half of chapter 10, just a list of names.

And before we just sort of breeze over that, I want to think just a moment, why it was so important that the writer of Nehemiah included all these names.

We've already seen, I think, two or three other lists in the book of Nehemiah leading up to this point where there's lots and lots of names.

And we haven't had the time to develop those or in, and mostly we don't even know what who the people are in that are named.

But here in chapter 10, the names of these people are the names of nobles that represented sort of like state representatives that represented areas and regions, and so these are sort of standing in behalf of God's people, which were about 50,000 people at the time in Jerusalem, and they were pledging to God on behalf of the nation to repent of all the sins that they had just confessed.

They wanted to go on record.

They were serious about actually dealing with what they had confessed and not merely just confessing.

And we all know there's quite a difference between window shopping and making a down payment.

When you were buying a house, you probably had Zillow on your phone, you were scrolling through all these houses and you were looking at this and flipping the pictures.

Very different than when you actually sign the dotted line and date it for down payment.

That's what they're doing here.

They're moving beyond confession to repentance.

Now drop down past all the names to Nehemiah chapter 10, verse 28, to the meat of the text.

Nehemiah 10:28

Listen to how they do this.

Nehemiah 10, 28.

The rest of the people, the priests, the Levites, the gatekeepers, the singers, the temple servants, and all who have separated themselves from the peoples of the land to the law of God, and their wives, their sons, their daughters, and all who have knowledge and understanding, join with their brothers the nobles.

These nobles are the ones whose signing, they're the ones who are listed.

So all the people are joining with their nobles, and they enter into a curse and an oath to walk in God's law that was given by Moses, the servant of God, and to observe to do all the commandments of the Lord our Lord, and his rules and his statutes.

They were renewing the covenant with God that Israel had broken.

If you have any understanding of sort of the layout of the Old Testament, this is happening uh closer to the end of the Old Testament.

Um, not necessarily uh because of the ways the books are arranged.

Nehemiah's right in the middle, but the events are actually occurring at the very end of the Old Testament when the people of God were restored back to the land.

Six, seven, eight hundred years prior, Moses, the man of God, the prophet, had been the mediator of a covenant from Jehovah God to a small nation called Israel.

God had entered into a covenant with Israel, and biblical uh scholars and such call that the old covenant because it was something that has done away with and is passed away, and it's something that the Israelites broke.

As a result of them breaking God's covenant, God uh sent them judgment.

And so here they are invoking a curse and entering into an oath to walk in God's law.

They're renewing the same covenant God had already made hundreds of years before.

Now, unless you're sitting there thinking that this reference to a curse is some kind of reference to like an ancient occultism, you know, there's that the room is dark and there's candles and there's black cats and they're they're entering into curses.

No, actually, what they're doing is they're citing the occurrence of God giving Israel a list of blessings and a list of curses.

Blessings if they obey the covenant and the stipulations of the covenant He made with them, and curses if they turn from God.

We are all fairly familiar with marriage covenants, right?

You have two people, you have a man and a woman who pledge their lives together.

And what do we do at weddings?

We make vows.

These vows are stipulations of a covenant.

Man, wife, making a covenant with each other, and it's not just a general covenant, it is a specific covenant made up of specific vows that they vow to keep towards each other.

And then, of course, not only are there parties and are there stipulations, but there are the benefits of the covenant.

And that's getting married and living with your best friend.

And some of you were fighting on the way to church, and you're thinking, best friend, what are you talking about?

When in our covenant with God, Israel had entered into a covenant of God, or really God had entered into a covenant with Israel, and the stipulations were spelled out in what we call the law of Moses.

Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus numbers, Deuteronomy tells the story of Israel, how they got there, and then Leviticus numbers in Deuteronomy really possess contain all the all the um the commands and the stipulations of this covenant.

Well, as you know, Israel turned to idolatry over and over and over again, and God was so long-suffering that they were doing things like adopting the idols of the land.

They started sacrificing their firstborn children to the pagan god Moloch.

Some crazy things going on.

And so God eventually, after these, I think there were seven cycles of sins in the judges, and then under the kings, you had these wicked kings that just one after the other were worse and worse than the one before.

God eventually brought upon them the ultimate curse listed in the book of Deuteronomy, chapter 28, where they would be invaded by a foreign power and taken as exiles and slaves to a foreign land.

Deuteronomy 28 · chapter mention

The book of Nehemiah happens a couple, like 150 years after that, when uh delegations of refugees had come back to Jerusalem after having been in a foreign land.

So these people, as they confess to God, they're not just confessing, you know, maybe to um to make their conscience feel a little better.

They're not confessing because it's just their their uh official religion.

They are confessing sins, pleading with God to renew the covenant relationship they had with him in the old days when he protected them, so that God would enter into covenant with them and deliver them from slavery to foreign powers.

Because even to this day, not this day, but this day, they were still paying tribute to foreign kings.

They were slaves in land they used to own.

And so they are very passionate about not just confessing their sins, but in committed obedience and repentance so that God will enter into covenant with them.

Now, in our text, there are three specific categories of repentance and obedience they're gonna spell out.

They don't just tell God, okay, we've made some big mistakes and we're gonna do better.

They get very specific.

There are three categories.

The first is the category of intermarriage, secondly, the Sabbath laws, and thirdly, the tithing laws.

We see in verse 30 of chapter 10 their pledge to not intermarry.

We will not give our daughters to the peoples of the land or take their daughters for our sons.

In the olden days, it was common for people to enter into alliances through their children.

So if, you know, there was safety in numbers, there was safety that they could form cities and civilizations, and so it was very common to use sort of your daughter or your son and give into these marriages.

Well, God had specifically forbidden that they enter into covenant marriage by giving their children in marriage with pagan, non-Jehovah worshiping people.

Because what happens whenever you you marry someone who doesn't follow the same Lord you do?

They have a different God.

They have a different way of life, they have a different code of ethics, they're going to train the kids differently.

What happened for Israel was that they began adopting the pagan gods of the land.

Hey, I'll keep Jehovah, and we can also worship Asherah or Moloch or the sun god Ra or whatever.

And so they were starting to become idolaters, and that's what they had done.

They did numerous times throughout the Old Testament.

Here they say, we are not going to do this.

This is not the forbidding of interracial marriage like we think of in the civil rights era and how people were against uh the different um ethnic groups marrying.

This is talking about religious differences.

Those pagan, non-Jehovah worshiping peoples of the land.

They say we're not going to do that anymore.

Verse 31, the Sabbath laws.

They say in verse 31, and if the peoples of the land bring in goods or any grain on a Sabbath to sell, we will not buy from them on the Sabbath or on a holy day.

And we will forego the crops of the seventh year and the exaction of every debt.

Here they pledge to keep the Sabbath years.

Now the thing is that we're pretty familiar with what a Sabbath is, right?

Sabbath literally means seventh.

And there was a Sabbath day instituted in Israel.

God says you're supposed to work six days and you rest on the seventh day, and they had it very detailed what you could do and what you couldn't do on the Sabbath.

In fact, one guy went out and said, Whatever, I've got yard work to do.

Started picking up sticks on the Sabbath, and he ended up getting stoned.

Not with drugs, but with rocks.

They took it very seriously.

And the interesting thing was, God took it really seriously.

When God gave laws, they weren't mere suggestions.

They were laws under the penalty of death.

And so there was a Sabbath rest day, but there was also a Sabbath rest year.

Every seventh year, the Jews had a seven-year cycle of growing crops.

Six years you would plant your corn and your wheat or whatever else.

On the seventh year, you let the land rest.

Well, the Israelites had stopped letting the land rest.

From the end of David's reign all the way till the exile was about 490, close to 500 years, which if you do the math, is 70 cycles of seven years that they didn't let their land rest.

And this is why Jeremiah tells us that God required them to stay in Babylon for 70 years of captivity, because they had thrown off for 490 years 70 cycles of letting the land rest.

In fact, we're told in 2 Chronicles 36 that the 70-year exile was to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah until the land had enjoyed its Sabbaths.

All the days that it lay desolate, it kept Sabbath to fulfill seventy years.

Now to me, the lesson, when I read that myself, I thought, the lesson is we can't cheat God.

We're not going to get away with thinking we can cut the corners and it's not going to come back to haunt us.

Whether it's with, I mean, even with instituting a rest day in the week, even health implications of just working seven days a week, never rest, never rest.

You break down.

Certainly spiritually, we have to work in rest into our lives, spiritual rest, where we pause, get quiet, turn off the distractions, send the kids to this, someone else, send them to the grandparents or something.

And you get alone with God.

And you, this is necessary for human existence.

And we see, of course, in Israel's, uh, in Israel's experience, God made it a matter of law.

But for us, I think the principle still applies, though not necessarily lived out the same way it was for them.

I tell Brandy every seventh week I don't have to cut the lawn.

I'm just saying.

Not really.

Thirdly, the tithing laws in verse 32, they commit to.

They say, we also take on ourselves the obligation to give yearly a third part of a shekel for the service of the house of our God.

They committed themselves to sustaining the upkeep of the house of God, which was the temple in Jerusalem, and of all the people that lived on, that were full-time uh priests and those who sacrificed and represented Israel and prayed for Israel and all those things, they said they would support that and not let it fall to the ground.

Now we're only going to read verse 32 about this the tithing laws.

But they go on for seven more really long verses and very detailed verses to specify exactly how they were gonna obey God in this area that they had just confessed.

The same area that had brought judgment upon Israel a hundred years before or whatever, they were now going to plan out how they were going to repent and change and obey.

For example, they're gonna tell us, go on and tell us how much they're gonna give.

They define it as a tenth part.

They're gonna get specific about what they're going to tithe on.

It's gonna be the crops, the first fruit of their crops, of their cattle, of their olive oil, of their money.

They're ever gonna get specific about how they're gonna bring this to pass.

Logistics, it's almost like a business plan going on here.

It's every detail of how they're gonna do it.

And of course, if they had said, God, we're we're gonna we're gonna tithe and we're gonna do that perfectly, but then they don't articulate exactly how they're gonna do it, it would leave us to wonder if they're actually gonna follow through.

The fact that they get very detailed shows us they meant business.

It's commonly said that the devil's in the details.

You ever heard that phrase?

And maybe if you're an attorney, that's probably the case.

Uh the devil's in the small print.

Uh like at the end of the commercial, someone's talking all slow and cool and everything, and then like then they have these like distracting images, and someone in the background is like, not to be taken, but blah, blah, blah, you know, possible death at any time.

And you kind of like, oh, I need to get some of that.

Cool.

The devil's in the details.

Uh, in my experience, the devil lives more often in the generalities.

The devil loves it whenever we as Christians confess sin in general.

When we when we confess that we're going to obey God in general, but we never get specific enough to actually repent or obey in any particular area of righteousness.

And I think this is part of our story.

Our story is this that we confess wrong, but don't commit to repentance.

Those aren't the same things.

We confess wrong, but we do not commit to repentance too often.

You may have talked to someone before, or maybe you've been the person.

We'll just talk about it in a third party now for the moment.

Talk to someone who may have confessed to you, you know, I just I've been really lax in spending time in the Word.

I haven't been praying with my family or for my family.

I've been getting up just in time to throw some clothes on and go to work, and I'm all flustered, and I haven't spending time with God, and I need to do better.

Or maybe they're confessing, they've been yelling at the kids again, or or uh being angry at their spouse, or been engaging in lustful activity in their free time.

But then as soon as they do that, they just move on to some other subject and it's like end of story.

And you know intuitively and probably from experience that tomorrow morning, no matter how sincere they were on Tuesday, on Wednesday morning, they're gonna do exactly what they've been training themselves to do for the last eight years.

And that's hit the snooze four times, oversleep, wake up, throw their clothes on, and go to work just like they were confessing the day before.

They're gonna fly off the handle again at their spouse and their kids.

They're gonna fail to pray with their wife and their family.

They're gonna scroll through lust-inciting videos on their smartphone.

Why?

Because they've only confessed, they haven't committed to a planned obedience.

So let me ask a question.

We as Christians are all about confession, right?

And sometimes it's hard to do.

That's the first step of repentance, it's confession.

To just say the words out loud to God what you've done wrong.

But the question is, what do we do after we confess?

Now, some of you are really astute, you know, students of the scriptures, and you know what you're supposed to do after you confess.

You're supposed to accept the forgiveness of God for your sins, right?

You plead the blood of Jesus.

You say, God, I've sinned in this area, and now I thank you that you sent Jesus to live the perfect life I couldn't have lived, and then to go to the cross in my place so that his righteousness is counted towards me and my sins are counted towards him, and then you accept me for his sake, and we recite the gospel to ourselves, and then we start feeling a little better.

We start sensing the joy and the release and the peace that comes from confessing our sins.

But what do we do after that?

I'm afraid that way too often what we do next, and perhaps all we know to do, is to simply go about the rest of our day.

At best, resolving to do better next time.

But that isn't planning for repentance.

That isn't planning for obedience.

It's wishful thinking.

Jesus came on the scene in the New Testament in Matthew chapter 4 and verse 17 saying this: From that time Jesus began to preach, saying, Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is here, is at hand.

Matthew 4 · chapter mention

In other words, there's a new king in town.

The old king of your flesh and of living for the praise of men, or living to gratify your own desires, or planning your own future without any reference to who God is and what he wants of you.

There's a new king in town, out with the old life, in with the new.

Bow the knee to the king or face the sword.

Jesus isn't just a counselor, he is the mighty counselor.

He's a king.

He's a king that does it all, including judge the wicked.

Repentance is what citizens of God's kingdom are called to do.

But for us, it's so easy for us to get stuck in Nehemiah chapter 9.

Nehemiah 9 · chapter mention

Right?

Have you ever been there?

When you relate to your sin, we get stuck confessing our sins.

Maybe even filling the air with our words of remorse.

Maybe it's to get our spouse off our back.

Maybe it's to ease a guilty conscience.

Maybe it's so we don't lose our job.

And we fill the air with words of remorse, even agreeing with God about what we did wrong.

But we don't pause long enough and prayerfully enough to think and to pray and to make plans to actually repent of what we just confessed.

In his really helpful book, a man named Joe Rigney, his book called More Than a Battle, he walks the reader through a gospel-centered repentance strategy for pornography addiction.

And he talks about how complex the reason the book is called More Than a Battle is because he says the fight against pornography is not just a battle that you fight.

He gives three layers to the complexity of that struggle.

And if you treat it only like a battle, you're not gonna be very successful.

If you treat it only like something stemming from scars from your past and only that, you're not gonna be very successful.

Umly a discipline issue, not gonna be successful.

And he goes through the complexities of true repentance in that regard.

But then talking more generally about confession and repentance, he says this, and I wanted to share it with you.

He said, when we repent of sins, the first danger is that of legalism.

The danger of bare commands that seek to create godly conduct with no reference to gospel realities.

This is when we seek to earn God's favor by our performance and to do it in our own strength.

That's what we call legalism.

Not very effective.

It can be effective for some.

Some people just kind of grit their teeth and become a better person, but they haven't lived out the past.

Of the gospel through the Spirit.

And they've probably just turned into little Pharisees or self-righteous people because the gospel sanctifies us through humility.

The second danger is one that maybe we're not quite as aware of.

The second danger is the bare repetition of the gospel, which he says is not the same as wisely bringing the weight of the good news to bear on a particular sin in such a way that the specifics of the gospel connect with the specifics of the sin by the power of the Holy Spirit.

A bare repetition of the gospel.

With no specific application of the gospel to specific sin.

We're all familiar with the proverbial boy who has a test the next day, and so he takes his textbook and he sticks it under his pillow and he sleeps for the night, hoping that while he's sleeping, by some miracle of osmosis, the contents of the textbook are going to wave their way through the pillow into the brain, and he's going to have the answers to the test.

We ourselves, and Joe Rigney is one who used that example, who treat the gospel like that sometimes, where we think that merely repeating it or just believing that yes, Jesus came and he lived a perfect life and he died and rose again, that just saying that and professing it and confessing it, that in and of itself is enough to defeat our sin.

He goes on to talk about how we need to apply the gospel at the heart level to specific conscious and subconscious beliefs, assumptions, desires, self-justifications that are often hiding in plain sight until being exposed in the light of the gospel.

The major takeaway is that true repentance, real healing in areas of our lives that keep tripping us up, takes some time.

There's no easy one, two steps, say these words, repeat this prayer kind of process for true repentance.

It takes the wise, consistent application of scripture.

It takes prayer.

It often takes community that is bringing others into it, so we're not just living in silence or in the sort of hiding in the dark, trying to fix it ourselves.

Sometimes it requires biblical counseling.

Often it uses the, it requires the use of solid biblically based resources, and there's tons of them out there we can recommend.

But it always involves personal sacrifice.

You can't repent of your sins, and I can't repent of my sins unscathed.

Sometimes it costs us everything.

Yesterday I thought I was done with my sermon, and uh this morning I got out of bed and I found an article in my inbox on how a certain group of pastors in the uh DC area how they deal in their churches with a member of their church who is who is involved in uh repeated uh sexual sin, whether that's adultery or whether it's pornography, and they confess it, they seem to repent of it, but then it's happening again.

Maybe they're even in leadership.

And the question of the entire article was how do you wisely go through helping someone get out?

I thought it was pretty providential because I had talked about some of that.

I'd been reading the other book by Joe Rigney, and here the morning of the sermon, I get to see some more of it.

And so I wanted to include a quote that he talks about what it looks like when someone who's been tripped up in sin, when they get serious about actually repenting and not merely confessing their sins.

He says this true repentance will be marked by clear, often drastic steps to bear fruit in keeping with repentance.

Quoting John the Baptist in Matthew 3.

He likes to ask about a person that they're evaluating, is there a metaphorical trail of blood following the man as he cuts off whatever he must in order to obey Jesus?

That gripped me.

Because he's playing on the parable of Jesus there in Matthew chapter 5.

Matthew 5 · chapter mention

Not the parable, but the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus says it's better for someone if their eye offends them, causes them to stumble, cause them to sin.

It's literally better to take a kitchen spoon and pluck your eye out.

So you can go to heaven with one eye as opposed to go to hell with two.

Jesus said that.

If your hand is what's causing you to, and he's speaking about members of the body, and he's speaking probably in hyperbole because none of the apostles, all of the apostles sinned, and to my knowledge, none of them had their eyes plucked out.

He was using this as a spiritual analogy.

It's better to cut off your hand and to enter into glory with one hand than to have two in hell.

What's the actual principle he's trying to underline?

That we need to get radical in our repentance.

He goes on further to say, is this man willing to delete beloved apps or social media accounts?

Will he downgrade to a non-smartphone?

Will he get rid of his television if need be?

Or internet in his home?

Will he quit his job or change careers to avoid temptation?

See, the fact is, so often we'll only go so far in our pursuit of repentance.

And when it starts hurting, when it starts costing us, we rot it off.

I guess I'm not going to change.

It's going to require me to give my smartphone.

I think Jesus, if he were here, he would tell us all listen, it's better to enter into heaven without a smartphone than into hell with one in your back pocket.

In other words, will we plan for obedience?

And not just keep all of our toys and all of our same habits within arm's reach and then hope that better we'll do better next time, but will we plan for obedience?

Paul says in Romans 13, make no provision for the flesh to satisfy its desires.

Now here we are this morning, and so far that's kind of a heavy message, kind of kind of a downer.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of this bad news.

But what is the basis of our confidence that there actually is a way forward?

That you and I aren't mere slaves to our passions, slaves to our childhood in ways that maybe we were sinned against, slaves to things we were exposed to, slaves to compromises we've made in the past and now we're just left with extra difficult challenges.

I'm thankful to say we can have confidence that we can actually overcome our specific sins through the gospel of Jesus.

And here's our gospel conviction.

Jesus sealed a new covenant by his blood, ensuring we repent.

Jesus sealed a new covenant by his blood, ensuring we repent.

This is amazing news.

Because in the Old Testament, as we'd already said, God had entered into a covenant, which is a wonderful thing.

If God enters into a covenant with you, that's amazing.

Because when God enters into a covenant, he always keeps his end of the deal.

And for God to be your God, for him to be your shepherd, you won't lack anything.

He's there to protect you, he's there to provide for you, he's there to shepherd you along.

There's nothing better place to be than in the arms of God in covenant with him.

But Israel, in their covenant with God, repeatedly broke that law, broke the laws until eventually, God even uses at one point the language of divorce.

He had to, as it were, divorce his chronically and repeatedly serial, adulterous wife, Israel.

The Old Testament sort of languishes under the weight of the broken covenant.

Every prophet coming to condemn sin and call people back to covenant faithfulness.

But then the prophets also don't just decry the sin they see, they prophesy about the coming of a new covenant.

A covenant that's going to be forged by God with a special chosen people.

And in that covenant, the amazing thing is not only does God enter into covenant with people, but God through his Son Jesus, the Messiah, would end up keeping all of the covenant stipulations, requirements, and obligations that normally would be applied to the people, that Jesus keeps them in our place.

So that when God looks upon us, he doesn't see covenant breakers, he sees the covenant perfectly upheld by us because we're represented in Christ his Son.

That's why God so loved the world, he sent his own son in giving himself for us, all who trust in him enter into this covenant that is unbreakable and unshakable.

It's amazing that just as the Jews had invoked a curse upon themselves lest they break that covenant, that's exactly the same language of Jesus on the cross.

He became a curse for us.

He took the cup of God's wrath and he raised it up and he drank even to the dregs of it, satisfying God's wrath that was due us, extinguishing the curse that was ours to bear.

Now it's tempting at this point, is it not?

To think, well, wait, okay.

Let me wrap my mind.

If the old test the old testament required them to keep all these laws, but now there's a new covenant in which Jesus keeps the law perfectly for us, then that means we get forgiveness and we get to do whatever we want.

We don't have to obey God.

Maybe we can do some stuff.

We can maybe go to church and we can try to be a decent person, and who wants to be a jerk, right?

But we don't actually have to treat our sins seriously like Israel did.

That would be a mistake.

It would be a false gospel.

Why?

Here's why.

Because the new covenant through Jesus Christ and what God obligates Himself to do for us doesn't merely promise us repentance and forgiveness, it promises us transformation.

The new covenant God enters into with all those represented in Christ promises not only forgiveness but transformation.

That is the best news I can share with you today.

Because some of us come in here today and all we want to hear about is for is forgiveness.

Your conscience, because you've been living in sin, you've been hiding your sin, that sort of thing, and let's say I'm doing the same thing.

I just want to hear forgiveness.

Just tell me I'm forgiven.

Tell me Jesus has washed my sins away, and then next week I'm gonna go do the same things I've been doing all along.

That's not the message of the gospel.

That's a half-gospel.

The whole message of the gospel is forgiveness in Jesus and the promise of transformation through the Spirit.

And here's where I'm gonna get this.

There's numerous passages in the Bible.

Let's look at just one in Ezekiel chapter 36.

Ezekiel 36 · chapter mention

Ezekiel 36, one of the prophets in the Old Testament anticipated the new covenant, and here's what he said.

I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you, and I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.

That is a living heart instead of a rock.

And I will put my spirit within you and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules.

That last sentence I want you to notice.

Part of this new covenant is the causation of the people in the covenant to walk in God's statutes and be careful to obey God's rules.

This is not a promise of the old covenant.

This is the covenant Jesus sealed by his very own blood.

So we are we are called today as we come together as the people of God to worship him, not simply to bask in our forgiveness, but to bask in our forgiveness and then to rise and pursue newness of life, just as Jesus was laid in the heart of the earth and raised to newness of life three days later.

We certainly falter and we fail on this side of eternity.

Don't we?

There's plenty of evidence of that in my life.

Faltering and failing on this side of eternity.

But because Jesus Christ purchased that new covenant that includes the promise for God to cause us to walk in his ways, I know that God is at work in me, bringing me to repentance.

And so whenever I join them, the work of sanctification, that big fancy theological word of becoming more like Jesus, whenever we participate in the work of sanctification, we know we're not just carrying all our own weight, we're not pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.

We are standing on the everlasting arms of God, who's promised to help us to do that, and who's promised to make us do that.

1 Peter chapter 1, verse 18 says, Knowing this, you were redeemed from futile ways.

1 Peter 1:18

Not just redeemed from hell, but redeemed from your old way of life.

By what?

By the precious blood of Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 2, 24.

Jesus Himself bore our sins in his body on the tree so that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.

Sometimes we only believe a half gospel.

Sometimes we only think a half gospel.

We're always focused on saving ourselves from guilt or the thought that maybe we'll go to hell because we're sinning willfully.

The full gospel is that God has committed just as much to our transformation as he is to our forgiveness.

This is why Martin Luther famously nailed 95 theses to the castle doors in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517.

And the very first of those 95 doctrinal uh affirmations was this.

When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said repent, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

You see, Martin Luther was living in a day in which it was it was common among um medieval Catholicism for people to live in deplorable moral conditions, but then they would go to the local temple or the local uh um uh uh cathedral.

I'm thinking of every religion except Christianity, synagogue, mosque, I guess.

They would go to the local cathedral, and as long as they brought some money maybe once a year and put it in the coffer, they were told and they were assured a place in heaven.

They were assured the forgiveness of sins, even if they went home and beat their wife.

And Martin Luther correcting that says when Jesus said repent, he wasn't just talking about a one-time thing, and he certainly wasn't talking about dropping some money in a plate that stands in the place of repentance.

God wills the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

Jesus has sealed the new covenant by his blood.

Whereas in the Old Testament, when God would enter into a covenant with people, usually it involved the blood of animals.

You would kill the kill the uh the lamb, or you would kill the bullock, and you would offer that to God to ratify that covenant.

But God didn't send more animals, he sent his own son to shed his blood and to ratify that eternal and unbreakable covenant.

And Jesus, which means that our repentance and our growth in Jesus Christ and our defeat and victory over specific sins in our lives is a blood-bought promise of God.

Our gospel vision this morning is that we planned for obedience.

Now, maybe I'm preaching to the choir.

Maybe this is something you're like, yeah, this is this is like Christianity 101, I know this.

Or maybe you're like, you know what, I haven't thought of it like that.

That we should actually plan for obedience.

Certainly if you were at work and your boss came to you and he said, Um, we were doing some reviews of your reports and your work, whatever, it's showing that you're way off the numbers that are you're supposed to be producing.

And I tell you what, we're gonna give you another month, but by the end of this quarter, if if you haven't changed things, like we're gonna release you and we're gonna replace you.

And then we're gonna make you replace train that replacement.

It's it's obvious that you would probably get yourself in gear and start making some plans.

Okay, well, what am I doing?

Okay, so here's here's my deadline, here are the numbers, here's what I'm off.

I'm gonna make a plan for how I'm gonna make this happen.

Or in marriage, maybe there's some some uh some issue in your marriage that your spouse is like, I can't I can't do this.

We've been doing this for so long, you've been promising, you've been, and we can't do this.

And and here's a date.

People do that, right?

Maybe some of you spouses have given each other ultimatums like that.

If you love your spouse and you're wanting to stay in that marriage, you're gonna make some plans.

Like, okay, well, this is what they want.

I mean, this is what they really want.

I'm gonna figure out how I'm gonna do that, make that happen.

But somehow in our relationship with God, we think if we're making plans, that doesn't sound very spiritual.

If we actually plan out obedience to God, if we actually invest in something we might call discipline, then that's not spiritual.

That's lawless, that's lawfulness, that's legalism, that's that's the flesh.

But Jerry Bridges, who's written numerously on uh on holiness and godliness and these sorts of things, Jerry Bridges, in his classic book, The Pursuit of Holiness, he describes our desperate need for, here's the ugly word, discipline in our lives.

But the refreshing thing was he didn't define discipline as trying really hard.

He didn't define discipline as uh willpower.

He defined it like this discipline is structured, planned training that involves the process of the specific application of scripture to specific life situations.

If I were to come to you and say, hey, we're gonna go to the gym, and I'm gonna put 405 on that bar, and maybe you can lift uh, you know, 175.

But I'm gonna put 405 on there and I'm gonna lift it off and I'm gonna drop it.

And you better, you better hold your.

That's how we think of discipline sometimes, right?

And you think, this, this, this, this addiction that I have, this difficult sin, I've been, I feel like it's just crushing me.

And God's asking me to do something I can't do.

Jerry Bridges is telling you that in the Christian life, the point isn't that you're able to walk into the gym and lift four or five off your chest and repent of that sin.

But that discipline is going to the gym every other day and lifting 175, and then the next day, next you lift in 180, and then 185.

And as your muscles develop, as character develops, as you start naturally living out of your character before God, this discipline is turning into sanctification.

And what could be more spiritual than growing in character and in likeness of Jesus Christ?

So we often think about repentance as if it's supposed to be this immediate thing, we're supposed to be over it, and then we're left crushed under the weight of what we feel like is impossible.

This is how the Apostle Paul talked.

In Ephesians chapter 4, he gave us six, at least six ways that we're supposed to apply the glorious truths of the gospel to our specific situations.

Ephesians 4 · chapter mention

If we had time, we would go to Ephesians 4, 22 through 32, 10 or 11 verses there, where he gives at least six ways in which we can do this.

But I'll just list them out quickly.

Paul expects us to replace deceitful desires by filling ourselves with godly desires that come from renewing our mind with the Word of God.

He expects us to replace lying with intentionally speaking the truth.

And this may be a struggle for you.

Maybe you you tend to exaggerate, you tend to lie, you tend to want to paint yourself in the, you know, you're the hero of every story.

Maybe you're insecure with some aspect of your life, and so you have to sort of one-up people to, in some form of lying.

You're not speaking truth, you're making things better than they actually are.

You can make plans to not just stop lying, but to, it's like going to the gym every day.

When you're driving to work, you're reciting five Bible verses the whole way to work.

That's not a crazy idea, right?

But talking about speaking the truth, talking about how God is the one who's your judge, how the other people's opinions of you don't matter like like God's opinion of you does.

That your identity is rooted in Christ and not in not in what you can sort of shore yourself up with false narratives.

And of course, I'm just kind of speaking off the cuff here about that.

But there's there's ways you can strategize about overcoming the sin of lying in our lives.

He expects us to replace unrighteous and impatient anger that gives place to the devil with a righteous indignation.

He says simultaneously, be angry and do not sin.

Don't let the devil give him a foothold into your life.

So there's a righteous anger and an unrighteous anger in Ephesians 4, and it makes sense that the righteous anger is to be directed at the unrighteous anger.

You should get angry and indignant at the fact that you lost your temper, not indignant at the people you lost your temper at.

Paul expects us to replace words that tear down with words that build up.

A rule of thumb that um I love is because I can tend to be a person who likes to optimize everything around the house.

And so if Brandy pushes it, puts the trash bags in this way, actually, she never does, I do that.

I'm the trash guy.

Proudly the trash guy.

If Brandy's washing the dishes or something, and I do that too, but she's not in here, that's why I can say that.

Um there's probably a better way, right?

I noticed that she she puts the she puts the the towel over here instead of over here, and it's like an extra wasted.

I can literally be critical about stupid things because in my mind, there's a better way to do it.

I do it with myself too.

And she can remind me very well in her southern way that I'm being critical of her and I need to keep my opinions to myself.

And so I need to train myself in not just, okay, don't be critical.

And that's not the goal.

The goal is to build my wife up, to thank her for washing the dishes, right?

To express gratitude when we're over dinner, to not be talking about all the bad news from work, but to be speaking to hearing what's going on in her heart, to be encouraging her, to be thanking her for the ways that she's serving me and the children around the house, for the ways she's serving other women in her life, to be building, they say, nine to nine to one, positive affirmation to criticism.

And more often it's more like one-to-one for many of us.

So he wants to replace words that tear down with words that build up.

And I'll close with this.

In other words, the Apostle Paul is calling us to be a people who go beyond mere confession.

Now, for some of you, this may mean setting a date to be baptized on the calendar.

You've been putting it off.

You've been talking about it.

Yeah, I'll get around there.

Or maybe my baptism as an infant is enough.

Maybe you need to set a date on the calendar when you're going to follow Jesus in baptism.

When you're going to become a covenant member of a local church, a church like Sacred Mission Church.

If not here, then somewhere else.

For some of you, this might mean setting up automatic contributions online, like we offer is available for us at Sacred Mission Church or wherever church you're attending and a member of, so that you can make generosity and this discipline of generosity a regular part of your life and not just an occasional spontaneous thing you do.

Something that you're leaving an impact in the kingdom of Christ by supporting the frontline workers in the ministry, so that we can do kind of things what we're doing this morning.

For some of you, this might even mean in the next day or two downgrading from a smartphone to a dumb phone, which could be the smartest thing you may ever do.

So that you don't have instant and untraceable access at all times, on breaks at work or after workouts at the gym or wherever, to pornography that is destroying your heart and your relationships.

For all of us, no matter what our temptation, it means moving beyond mere confession to strategically, actively, painstakingly pledging ourselves to a plan to obedience so that we can bring every aspect of our complex lives into obedience to Jesus Christ.

Let's pray.