Cleaning Day

Okay, today we're gonna be studying the Gospel of John, like we've been.

We're in chapter two, the second half of the chapter.

Uh, and today's sermon is called Cleaning Day.

Ha ha.

Because we just had Cleaning Day yesterday, and today we're talking about Jesus cleansing the temple.

And I got to thank my son John for that title because he came up for it.

Yeah, there you go.

Good job, John.

He's good for titles for me.

He helps me out with that.

All right, Father, we ask you would speak to us through your word.

We humble ourselves.

We ask that you would transform the way that we think and our expectations that we have.

In Jesus' name I pray.

Amen.

All right.

So Jesus is sometimes not what you expect him to be.

And so a lot of us have heard this story about Jesus getting angry and flipping tables and cussing everybody out.

And well, that's not in the Bible.

But we've we've heard this story and it doesn't make sense to us, right?

Because we pictured Jesus as the meek and mild lamb of God who doesn't say a single thing and never confronts anybody and never is aggressive and never is really passionate about anything.

But Jesus was extremely, he was a man, he was extremely passionate about many things.

And this story is gonna help us understand what he's passionate about and what he's um not passionate about.

We're gonna we're gonna see some lines drawn here.

Okay, because a lot of people think, okay, Jesus is passionate about getting the stuff out of my life that needs to get out of my life.

So when he's tossing tables, he's mad at me.

He's gonna come toss the tables in my life.

Have you guys ever had that maybe fear?

Maybe because your parents would come into your room and this isn't clean and that's not clean, and they would treat you.

It was scary.

It was scary.

And so we get this idea that that's and then we see this story, and then it's like, what is the character of Jesus?

Because now I'm a little bit intimidated, now I'm a little bit scared, now I'm I'm not sure what this is all about.

But we have to let Jesus speak for himself.

We got to let the word tell us exactly what's going on here because Jesus is not, this story is not about Jesus coming and flipping tables in your life to discipline you.

Now, God can discipline you, he does discipline you, but that's not what this story is about at all.

It's not.

But let's find out what it is about.

So let's read John chapter 2, verse 13.

John 2:13

Now the Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.

So the Passover, you guys heard of Passover, right?

It's a celebration that they had.

Well, in Exodus 12, we we have the Passover, and it's this beautiful picture of the gospel of Jesus.

The the whole, I mean, it was two and a half, three thousand years before Jesus was born, but it was already God knew what was gonna happen, and the entire thing was a picture of Jesus.

It's it's the people are delivered from the angel of death by faith alone in the Lamb of God that was slaughtered for them, and the blood was put on their door posts.

Okay, so can you guys hear me?

Is it are we good?

Okay.

So the the tenth plague, you know, you had the 10 plagues in Egypt.

The tenth plague was this destroying angel.

God says he's gonna send into this angel, he's gonna kill the firstborn of all people, right?

Good, bad, doesn't matter.

All people, but uh, but not if you slay the lamb and put its blood on your doorpost.

You were protected, not because you're good, not because of your race, not because of anything you do.

If if you're in a home that has the blood of the lamb on it, you're good, you're safe, you're safe from the destroying angel.

And so God was sending these these ten plagues, remember, to set the people free.

Amen.

Because they were slaves, right?

You this is really important to understand why this whole thing that we're talking about today of cleansing the temple happened.

They were slaves in Egypt.

And this death angel was the death that that all people deserve, okay?

It's symbolic of the punishment of sin.

God's people even were gonna die uh without the Passover lamb.

So if one of the families, like, I'm not gonna kill this Passover lamb, I'm not gonna listen to what God says, they they would die.

They their firstborn would die.

Why?

Because the wages of sin is death.

And who has sinned?

Well, Egyptians had sinned, Israelites have sinned, Muslims have sinned, Christians have sinned, Americans have sinned, white people have sinned, black people have sinned, all people have sinned.

So all people are under this judgment.

And God is just.

He has to be a just God.

He's the perfect just perfect God.

He is the God of justice.

And we know that he can't be because he couldn't let, let's pretend, oh, Hitler.

You guys know that guy, right?

What if God said, oh, boys will be boys?

Let's let Hitler into heaven.

Would anybody want to follow that God?

Would you be able to trust that God?

No, of course not.

Well, the bummer thing is that his standard of what is good and holy is so perfect that not just Hitler fails, but everybody fails.

And that's what it means that God is a God of justice.

It's a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

And we should all fear God's justice until the gospel comes.

Because the gospel sets us free of all shame, guilt, sin, and fear.

And now we don't have to fear God's justice, but we can rejoice in it because God looks at us and says, You are justified in my son.

You're justified because you've placed all your faith in Jesus.

And so when God looks at you, he does not see any that you've done.

All that you've done that's bad has been paid for, and you have now been given the righteousness of Christ, and it is yours.

And so God pronounces you righteous.

Not because of yourself, but that's the gospel that we all believe in.

And he does this because sin must be punished.

God cannot and he will never just spare anybody, not angels, not men, not even his own son.

Look at 2 Corinthians 5, 21.

You can pull up the notes and check it out later or just uh write it down.

But it says, For he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.

Jesus knew no sin, but God made him sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

And that's just a beautiful way to say that's the gospel.

That's what we mean when we say the gospel.

It's the sacrifice of Jesus.

It's it's called the glorious exchange.

It's an exchanged life.

God is giving us his grace in exchange for faith.

We offer him our faith, and he gives us grace.

He takes all our sin, puts it on Christ, takes his righteousness, gives it to us, and it's all done free and given to us all accessed by faith.

Romans chapter 8, verse 32 says, He who did not spare his own son, but delivered him up for us all.

Romans 8:32

How shall he not with him also freely give us all things?

Do you see the character of your father in that?

He did not spare his own son, but delivered him up to be killed.

And this he says, Come to me with all your needs, and I promise you I will give you what you call upon me for.

That's the gospel.

The grace of Jesus, because of the sacrifice of Jesus, you notice words like give, he gives, he wants to give us.

He doesn't want us to work for it, he wants to give it.

And it's always free.

There's no price attached to his grace.

There's no price.

What do I have to sacrifice to get in God's good graces?

That's a stupid question.

Because the answer is you can never, you could never give enough.

You could never pay the price.

But God says it doesn't matter because I'm gonna give it to you, all of it, for free.

So this Passover is talking about the punishment of sin that always leads to death.

He says, the soul that sins shall die in the Old Testament, and the Lord will by no means pardon the guilty.

So justice must be satisfied, satisfied, or God ceases to be God, because the God of the universe must judge.

So what's the solution?

Grace.

God gives grace as a solution without giving up justice.

So God can still be just and say, I'm gonna punish sin, but he doesn't, there's no nothing in the rules against I can punish a substitute for you.

And that's what Jesus is for us.

He's the Lamb of God that was slain for us.

The solution is substitution.

The solution is substitution.

God provides a lamb for his people to take the place of the people, and it's called redemption.

He's redeeming them, buying them back.

So they don't need to die themselves, but the substitute, a pure, holy, perfect substitute, is killed for them.

It's supposed to be I don't know what that was.

Okay.

So Jesus is our Passover lamb.

So Jesus going to this Passover celebration, this party, but I want you guys to understand that he's your Passover lamb.

Look at 1 Corinthians 5, 7.

For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.

That's what the Bible says.

So this Passover is not just symbolic about what our lives are, but it's the actual real thing.

Jesus is the real Passover that all other Passovers pointed to.

All the previous Passovers were a shadow of the real thing, which was Jesus dying on the cross thousands of years later, but that's the real thing.

Do we need to plug something in?

All right, good deal.

Everyone look at Luke.

He loves being looked at and talked about.

Thank you, Luke.

Um so but let's back up because the day Jesus walks into the Passover celebration, right?

He's walking in.

Nobody knows anything about the gospel yet.

He's just brand new on the scene.

Um, what is the reality of the Passover at this time?

So they've been celebrating Passover every year, except for a few hundred that they forgot, but we'll talk about that another time.

Every year they've been celebrating this Passover for two and a half thousand years.

So, what did it actually look like on this day that Jesus walked in?

Well, look at verse 14.

He found in the temple those who sold oxen and sheep and doves and money changers doing business.

Okay, so if you didn't understand that, by the time Jesus was coming on the scene, the temple system had become heavily managed by authorities and money.

It got perverted.

Over time, several problems kind of built up and things got really messed up.

First, religion turned into business or commerce.

Religion turned into business.

People needed to sacrifice animals, so every year the law commanded that they uh a family would take, bring an uh uh a lamb and and have it be sacrifices.

So, but it was it was too much for all the families in Israel to each, you know, bring their own lamb, even though they probably could have.

But the temple authorities were like, no, no, no, no, no.

Everyone just chill out.

We will raise all the lambs for you, and we'll just keep them here.

So when you come here, you just pay us money for a lamb, and we'll give you one of the pre-selected lambs.

But here's the problem: what if I was like, no, I want to bring a lamb that I've raised, something that means something to me.

I want to sacrifice something important to the Lord, to of my life to the Lord.

They would say, No, you are a dirty, rotten scumbag.

And they're like, What?

No, your lambs are not worthy of God.

Only our lambs.

We've we we have special lambs.

They're all named fluffy.

They're all perfectly white.

Well, mine's perfectly white too.

And they would look and they would they would check them out and be like, nope, spot here.

And there's no spot, but they they just made it up.

And then what they did also, they made you use a special coin to buy their special lambs.

So your your money's no good here, they would say.

All the money that was normally used in the country, you would bring it to the temple and they'd be like, Sorry, your money is stupid because it has the the image of an idol on it.

It was, you know, the the Greek money or the Roman money of the day.

And and and they're like, You can't, we can't.

So, but good for you, lucky for you, we have these special temple coins.

And so give us a hundred of your coins, and we'll give you one of our coins.

Well, I could buy 10 lambs for a hundred of these coins.

Why are you what's what's going on here?

They were ripping them off, they were charging them an exchange rate that was exorbitant or exorbitant.

Exorbitant?

Don't worry about it.

So, money and finances all turned this thing for the normal people into a burden.

So, what was supposed to be a blessing and a celebration and remembering God's grace to all the people, when the people rolled up in there, they hated it.

It was bitterness to them, it was a pain.

So that's the main thing that was going on.

Worship, number two, the the big thing, another big thing that worship was supposed to be the centerpiece of this.

People were supposed to be worshiping God, it got crowded out by logistics.

There, this temple where they have the temple and where all these businesses are set up was called the court of the Gentiles.

Who was supposed to be in the court of the Gentiles?

The Gentiles.

But there was no room for the Gentiles, and the Jews didn't care if they were there anyway, but God did care.

God wanted his temple to be open to Gentiles, but they didn't care at all.

So they made what was supposed to be a place for the Gentiles to worship.

They made it, ah, we're just doing business here.

Get out of here.

You're crowding out my my lambs.

So they're, you know, they got obsessed with we gotta do things the right way, we gotta do things according to the rules, and in and so they missed the real point, which was worship in all this.

So they thought we worship God by following the rules.

Does that sound familiar to anybody?

Man.

And all of those rules were a distraction from God.

None of that stuff was supposed to be in the temple.

Legalism, legalistic performance-based religion is always a distraction from a real relationship with God.

I want you to remember that.

If you're thinking, if you're stressed about your own performance, you're not resting in the finished work of Jesus Christ.

And that's where God wants you to be.

That's where you can worship Him, is when you're like, I am free, I am free.

Praise God Almighty, I am free.

All right.

The third thing is there's this massive power and control struggle happening there.

So this system could function in a way that served the people in charge more than the worshippers, and so it messed up them being able to see God's heart.

The people in control of the church, you could say, were selfish and materialistic.

They were just focused on money and power.

It's just really dumb.

So the religious world, that's with the world that Jesus walks into this day.

He it's it's Jerusalem and it's Israel, and they were so far from God's heart by this time that it was almost, if you walked in there, it'd be almost unrecognizable.

What God initiated and designed, this didn't look anything like it.

And that's why John the Baptizer showed up and he said, You all suck at following God.

If you really want to follow God, I need you to repent and be baptized, be transformed and get the heart back, because you're terrible at really knowing God.

And that's why John the Baptizer came and it was such a big deal what he was saying.

And who came and didn't listen to him, you remember?

The Pharisees, the people in charge with the power and the authority.

They were the ones like, ah, I don't like this guy.

Why?

Because he was a threat to their power and their control.

All right, now this is where it gets exciting.

You good?

You good?

Alright, buddy.

Hey.

Alright, check this out.

Then Jesus, he made a whip of cords like the meek and mild Jesus.

And he drove out of the temple with the sheep and the oxen and poured out the changes of money and overturned the tables.

This gives a whole new meaning to what would Jesus do?

So when you wear that bracelet, just remember flipping tables is absolutely within the realm of possibilities.

But what is the big picture here?

Jesus is acting like he is the authority of the house of God.

He's saying, This is my house.

This is my father's house.

I am in charge here.

So he makes a whip.

He gets to determine what goes on.

He already told Israel how to make a court of the Gentiles, like I said, so that all the people of the world could come and worship God and know God.

But these people didn't care.

They used it as their own money-making market, right?

So Jesus makes a whip and he makes a scene.

And where does it say Jesus was afraid?

He's not afraid at all.

He has no fear.

He also has no self-motives.

You're like, oh, I love this story because I'm going to start whipping people into shape.

Okay, that's that's the thing that we don't see here.

Jesus is not, nothing about this is about himself.

He doesn't get anything out of this.

He's there for the glory of his father.

That's all he cares about.

That's all he's interested in, is that his father's house would be what it's designed to be.

So he has no selfish motives, only a passion for God to be worshipped and for people to have access to God.

That's what he's here for.

That's what he cares about, is people connecting with God.

Is he angry?

Maybe.

Yeah, probably.

He's got, but it's a righteous anger, right?

He's passionate about God being represented accurately.

Okay.

He hates lies.

And what is going on here is God is being lied about.

Does God care what kind of money you buy a sheep with?

No.

Jesus loves his father.

And that's the foundation of all this.

When when the the temple becomes a marketplace, it communicates God is only accessible through systems and transactions.

And Jesus is exposing all of that as a big fat lie.

He's like, no, truth, the truth matters, and this is the truth.

So why does Jesus make a whip?

You guys know already.

Remember, this is Passover.

So I want you to think about what was Passover celebrating.

What were they being set free from?

Slavery.

Right?

So Jesus makes a whip because a whip is symbolic of the treatment that they received as slaves when they were slaves in Egypt.

So the connection with slavery is obvious.

What the reason Jesus makes a whip is because they were slaves back then.

They were Jesus is showing them you have become slaves again.

You are now slaves of rules.

God bless you.

You become Slaves to your own religion.

You're not slaves to Egypt.

God has already set you free from Egypt.

Remember the whips you you felt back then?

Now you've put yourself back in bondage to a system of law and sacrifices that they trust in instead of trusting in the living God.

Okay, but then you have this argument and you're like, wait a second.

God gave them the law and God gave them the sacrifices.

Yeah, but God never said that that's how you get saved.

And God never said that that's how you have a relationship with God.

In fact, way before the law and the sacrifices, God talked to Abraham and he's like, listen, I want you to believe in me.

And Abraham's like, check, I believe in you.

And God's like, Great, because you have faith in me, you are given righteousness and you're saved.

And everyone who in your line who also believes, everyone in the world who believes, will be given the same righteousness that you just got.

And so we get to the New Testament, and Paul's like, guess what?

You become a child of Abraham the moment you believe.

And that's what the gospel is.

And so even in Israel, there were people who believed in the Messiah, believed in God the same way that Abraham did, and there were people in Israel that didn't.

And what did they trust in when they didn't believe in the Messiah?

They trusted in their rules and their sacrifices.

Now the people who trusted God also kept the rules and the sacrifices, but they didn't trust in the rules and the sacrifices.

They trusted in the God who gave them the rules and the sacrifices to teach them about his holiness.

Does that all make sense?

Alright, good.

So he makes a whip.

The leaders were not trusting.

They were um, but here comes Jesus.

He's got no fear, he's got passion blazing in his eyes, a whip in his hands, and he's setting even the sheep and the doves free, showing that Jesus is going to set all his people free.

That's his goal.

He cares about the sheep and the doves, every single person.

And then he poured out the money of all these false, you know, uh representatives.

He poured out all their false riches because he's gonna provide true riches through his grace.

Why?

He's like these this uh materialistic passion that you have, get it out of here.

Why?

Because I'm gonna give you the real thing that you are longing for.

In 2 Corinthians 8 9, it says, You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, that you through his poverty might become rich.

Tell me, is that talking about being physically rich, materialistically rich?

No, he's talking about his spiritual life.

The riches that we long for is to be satisfied, to be loved, to be accepted, and God is giving us that through Jesus Christ.

So church is about receiving blessings from God, not earning or working for blessings.

Let me say that again.

For all of you that have been hurt by church or misunderstood the purpose of church, we come to church to receive from God.

We are not interested in taking from you.

We're never interested in that.

No church should be.

Now, there are false teachers who say you need to earn God's blessings.

If you give this much, God will give you this much.

And they trick you and they lie to you, and it's exactly what makes God angry.

It makes God angry to trick people and say, if you just pay me a little bit, I'll give you some blessings.

I'll give you some blessings.

If someone has told you that's what God's like, they're a liar.

And Jesus will flip a table in that situation.

He will.

Because he's very passionate about this.

God is the giver.

It says in the Bible that the greater always blesses the lesser.

God says, I'm not interested in you, I don't need you to give to me.

You're like, then should I never give?

Should I never be generous?

Should I just be selfish my whole life?

No, because as you receive God's love, receive God's blessings, you get his heart.

And God is generous.

And so the transformation that happens in our heart is that we start generously giving to all kinds of things.

We give to God in his works, we give to people, we're generous.

Why?

Because you're like Jesus, because you received his blessing.

So don't ever give money to a church to get a blessing.

Promise me you're not gonna do that.

Don't ever give to get a blessing.

That is the old legal way.

The new way is grace, where we receive first, then Jesus gives us his grace, and then we respond generously because the love he's given us.

In John 2 16, back to our text, he says, and he said to those who sold dove, take these things away, do not make my father's house a house of merchandise.

So the image of his father was being distorted, and Jesus can't stand it.

It's supposed to be clear who God is and what by what his house looks like.

You can find a lot about someone by the condition of their home, right?

Not how fancy it is, but the nature of it.

Is there love and joy and peace when you walk into that home?

Or is it strife and selfishness and sin abounding in that home?

You can learn a lot about somebody.

God's house is his reputation, and Jesus is gonna restore that reputation.

So I want you to fast forward.

Um, you are now God's house.

This bar is not God's house.

All the churches in Texas are not God's house.

They're not.

We call them houses of God.

They're not.

That is not true.

We are the house of God, not the temple in Jerusalem, not the churches today.

And I'm gonna prove it to you.

Look at Ephesians 2, 19.

You therefore are no longer strangers and foreigners, but fellow citizens and with the saints and members of the household of God.

So we're members of his household, having been built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief cornerstone, in whom the whole building being fit together grows into a holy temple in the Lord, in whom you also are being built together for a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.

So now we are the representative of God to this world, just like the temple was in Israel to the whole world, it represented God, it was supposed to.

Now it's every one of your bodies.

Your body is the temple.

And Jesus cares just as much about the vibe that you're giving out as he did about the temple in his day and what it was communicating.

You are God's temple.

And yes, Jesus can walk in and has the authority to break out a whip and be like, hey, do you remember what you were a slave of?

Do you remember?

Do you remember when you used to try to earn my grace?

You remember you used to try to earn my acceptance?

Do you remember that?

And if you've had that conversation with God, you know how convincing Jesus can be through the Holy Spirit's conviction in your heart.

And Jesus absolutely has the right to walk into our life and say, This is my home.

Your life is my home.

I'm not forcing you, but I am gonna remind you of what you came out of, and that you are not a slave to those things anymore.

You're not a slave.

Have you ever fallen into sin?

Maybe you just never even stopped doing a sin, even though you were set free.

And when you finally bring it back to God and you turn away from it, you remember that it's not really what you ever wanted to do in the first place.

You're like, why was I doing this?

It's so I was so dumb.

You can feel like that shame, right?

Why do we get that feeling?

Because you are his temple.

You are his.

And this is your identity in Christ.

Identity is the big key word.

In first Peter chapter 2, verse 5, it says, You also as living stones are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

1 Peter 2:5

So God says, What's going on in you is you're you're growing as his home, as his house, as his family, but the thing He do He is doing is He is living in you and transforming you.

And so your identity is now that you are His home, which means you He gets to represent Himself through you, which means you are holy, you are acceptable to God, and you represent that to the whole world.

Except when you don't When you choose to be like, ah, this is my identity, that is the sin I'm I I I won't let go or I'm struggling with.

When you believe that's your identity, your house is in disorder.

And Jesus will come and he'll confront you.

And he'll say, Hey, do you remember what you used to be a slave of?

Is that really what you want to go back to?

Because that's not who you are anymore.

And in fact, I have set you free.

John 2.17, back to our text.

He says, Then his disciples remember what was written, zeal for your house has eaten me up.

So his disciples seeing Jesus go crazy here, they remember Psalm 69, verse 9, which says, Passion for your house has consumed me, and the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.

Psalms 69:9

Jesus is so passionate about this.

And what does this mean?

For us today, we cannot live in sin.

We cannot choose to live as though we're not the house of the living God.

We can't do that.

It's hypocritical for us to do that.

We are the temple of the Holy Spirit.

Our lives become the reason that people are drawn to God or hate God.

That's hypocrisy.

And Jesus loves his father, and his grand plan is to make all of us his temple.

He didn't like the arrangement of having one temple in Jerusalem and everyone going there because people messed it up.

But he says, I have a plan.

I can transform you into the temple of God.

And that's the gospel.

And that's what Jesus is so passionate about.

Okay, so that's the story of what Jesus flipping the tables.

Now look at how the religious leaders respond to him in verse 18.

So the Jews answered and said to him, What sign do you show us since you do these things?

A fair question, right?

Jesus answered and said to them, Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.

Ooh.

Then the Jews said, It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and you will raise it up in three days.

But he was speaking of the temple of his body.

Therefore, when he had risen from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this to them, and they believed the scripture and the word which Jesus had said.

So the proof, the proof that Jesus offers these hypocritical and selfish leaders is that he would rise from the dead, and by rising from the dead, he would basically destroy this entire temple system, build a new temple system where people are his temple, and he'll do it in three days.

Bringing a new life experience.

And guess what?

If you try to go to Israel today, there's no temple.

There hasn't been since 70 AD.

There's no sacrifices happening.

Why?

Because the sacrifice has already come.

It's already happened.

He's going to accomplish this as he hangs on the cross being the final sacrifice.

All sacrifices ended, all work is done.

What happens when he died?

The moment he died, the veil in the temple, between the whole most holy place in the temple, was ripped from top to bottom.

And this veil was dozens of feet high and 18 inches thick.

No human being, I mean, it was God literally ripped it from this.

It was a miraculous thing that they observed happened the moment Jesus breathed his last breath.

Teaching us that all sacrifice was ended, the way into God's presence was now opened.

There was no more separation between God and man.

In fact, the whole temple can just come down now because I have made a new way, Jesus says.

We will have unlimited access to God through Jesus Christ.

That's what this all means.

And Jesus is excited to tear down this entire system.

Then Jesus confidently says, I will raise it up.

Did you catch that?

Jesus says, I will raise up myself.

And you might think, well, didn't God the Father raise Jesus?

And you're absolutely right.

So two times in the Bible, it says that the Father raised Jesus.

Two times Jesus says, I raise myself, and two times the Holy Spirit says that the Spirit raised Jesus.

Very interesting, right?

Almost like the three are one.

All three, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit, all one.

They came to do one thing, which is raise Jesus from the dead, which really is giving us new life.

Because the life that raised Jesus from the dead is the exact same life and power that he shares with us who believe.

He says, That's what this is all about.

And Jesus claims that he can do this.

He hasn't died.

So he's promising, I can do the one thing nobody else in the entire world can do.

I will rise from the dead.

This is three years before he did it.

Okay?

So this is where all atheists and agnostics have a huge problem.

Okay?

Because if Jesus claims to be God, there's only three possibilities.

He either is a liar, he's a lunatic, or he is God and the Lord.

Those are the only three possibilities.

Because he claimed to be those things.

So he's either straight up lying, or he's just crazy, doesn't know what he's talking about, or he is telling the truth.

Now he says, I'm gonna give you the proof, I'm gonna prove it to you.

People are like, oh, being a Christian is just blind faith, baldur dash.

That is not true.

We have proof, and Jesus says, I'll give you the proof.

The one thing no person can do is come back from the dead, I'll do it.

And this isn't the only time he said it.

He said it multiple times.

I will come back from the dead, I'm gonna rise from the dead, then you'll believe, then you'll know, I'll prove it to you, I'll prove it to you.

It's the proof, and it happened.

That's the one rule that no one can break.

And so if Jesus broke that rule that no one can break, that means he's God, and that means we have to listen to everything he says, that he is the Lord of the universe.

Verse chapter uh Colossians 3, 1, we'll end with this verse.

It says, If then you were raised with Christ, seek the things which are above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.

So because we were raised with Christ, we should act just like Jesus act when he resurrected.

Well, what was that?

Well, he left the tomb, he left death.

You can do the same thing.

You don't have to live your old life anymore, you don't have to be involved in those old things that you used to be involved with.

And that's a really big deal.

And we're gonna end it right there and just say if you're going back to how your life used to be, or to satisfy yourself with other things that you know are not God's will, just receive his life.

Confess that to the Lord and say, Jesus, you are everything that I need, and I'm gonna set my mind on you.

I'll leave you with a quote from C.

T.

Studd, and he was a stud.

As a uh missionary to Africa in the 1940s, 50s, he said, only one life, and twill soon be passed, and only what's done for Christ will last.

So you are God's temple, how you live matters.

Let that sink in as you guys go this week.

Would you all stand with us as we sing a song?

Father, we worship you, we praise you, we ask that you would speak through us, that we we would represent your love and your kindness and your grace this week.

Forgive us for all that we've done and help us to understand who we really are in your spirit.

Help us to turn away from those old dead things and live the newness of life.

Amen.

Is there to prove my savior I can things tomorrow is gone because I know he goes the future and great is then super and then one day thou cross thine, thou find thy no one with pain and gives way to victory thou see the lights of glory and of no healers like in face tomorrow be just how feel is gone because I love here goes the fusion and life is away the living just because I can face too much how feel is gone because I know he knows the future, and life is worth the living just because he the Lord bless you and keep you.

He is alive and he's living inside you.

You are the house that Jesus lives in.

So live your life with passion to glorify your Father and enjoy all that you do.

God bless you.