Are You Saved But Never Turned Loose? | Galatians 1:11–2:10

A few years ago, I sat in a living room with a family and this is the part of the job of being in ministry that most people don't really think about. Before I ever get up to speak at a funeral, I will meet with the family and I will kind of interview them, ask the stories about their loved one that has went on and just tell me about their life and what you love about him and what he loved and what do you want people at this funeral to know about your loved one? And as we're talking, they they shared with me like every family does and they said, he loved his family. That he was a hard worker, and that he adored his grandchildren. Great, great things, all of it true, all of it good, but when I started thinking about it later and I looked at my notes and I want to be careful as I say this because I didn't know this man well.

I'd only met him a few times but I'm confident that he had a relationship with Christ. But as I sat in that room with his people, these these family that knows him the best, god never came up. As they spoke about him and his life, the the name of Christ was never mentioned, not from the family and later as I was at the funeral home preparing to do the service and just kind of mingling around during the receiving of friends and people are telling me how great this man was, how they're going to miss him, and not once was his faith ever ever mentioned by anybody. Not one single person. And that made me think of a of a question and I want to put the question in front of you as we we continue in our series in Galatians.

A question has come to my mind and and here it is. If somebody sat down with your family next week and asked them what mattered the most to you, what would they say? Not what do you hope they would say? Not what they should say. What could they actually say about you?

What would actually come out of their mouths? Off the top of their heads, I love this person. This is what I know the most about them. Would your faith even be mentioned? Would God come up at all?

And here's why I'm asking. We're we're continuing in this series through Galatians, walking through this letter that Paul wrote to the churches of Galatia. And as I was looking ahead to the next passage this week, there's this this verse in the middle of it. And this verse, it's a short verse. It's only seven words long but but it's seven words that they're really a compliment but they might be the most life shaking compliment in all of the New Testament and we're going to get to what those words are in just a few moments.

I want I you to listen for em. Maybe you can pick em out. It's one sentence and and it's what people were saying about a man after his life had been changed by Jesus Christ. So, the question that came up to me and the question that I want you guys to sit with as we go through this, can it be said about me? Would this describe me at all?

You got your Bibles. Open them up to the first chapter of Galatians. We're going to continue in our look at this letter but last week, we did the first 10 verses and maybe you remember that Paul pulled no punches as he began this. He was kind of angry as he was writing to these churches in Galatia. He came out swinging and and as he opened this up rather than giving his typical greeting that he had in most of his letters, he opened it up with, I am shocked by what's happening in the churches.

I am astonished by what you have turned to and you are already listening to these other things. And he told us there is no other gospel. And anyone who's selling you something else, they are lying to you. And we said on this this phrase that's gonna override this whole look through Galatians. Jesus plus nothing equals everything.

And he continues this letter in verse 11. We see this, dear brothers and sisters, I want you to understand that the gospel message I preach is not based on mere human reasoning. I received my message from no human source and no one taught me. Instead, I received it by direct revelation from Jesus Christ. So, he's last week as we looked at those first few verses, he he presents this case and this week, he's proving his point and he's not just proving it with an argument.

He's going to prove it by what god did god did in his own life. He says, the thing I preach to you. This gospel that I've come to you with, the gospel that that the churches are founded on. It didn't come from anybody. Nobody taught it to me.

Jesus himself revealed this to me directly from our lord. Now, that's a pretty big claim. If you've ever sat in a church service and someone stood up front and said, Jesus himself revealed this to me. I hope your guard went up. There's probably some questions there.

Paul knew it was a big claim. So what did he do? He he did what any of us would do if we're trying to to share the truth of the gospel with somebody. He just told this is who I was and what Jesus did for me. Look at how he does this in verse 13.

You know what I was like when I followed the Jewish religion. How I violently persecuted god's church. I did my best to destroy it. I was far ahead of my fellow Jews and my zeal for the traditions of my ancestors. Paul says, you know what I was like.

You know my reputation. You've heard all about what I was doing. It's kind of a weird way to to write to this church that you helped plant because obviously, they knew Paul. They knew who he was. They had heard his story.

Of course, they knew. But he says it anyways because he's about to make an argument and the argument only works if they know who it is, who exactly it is he used to be. He says, I was a violent man. Now, we've heard it said in in churches and I've actually said it my my myself that g that Paul spent his life before becoming a Christian is killing other Christians but there's actually no evidence of Paul physically doing that himself. We do know that he supported it and we do know that he sent people out to do it for him and we know that he stood there as Stephen was stoned and killed and praised what was happening and we know that Paul's mission was to destroy the church.

He hunted it down. He went out like a secret agent to find all the places that the gospel was being sown with the intention of shutting it down. And here's the part that's kind of uncomfortable to think about. He didn't do it because he wasn't a religious man. He did it because of his religion.

He did it because he thought he was serving God. He did it because he thought he was on the right side of everything. He could go home every night and sleep well because he thought he had done something good that day. Then we read in verse 14 and this is a verse we really need to to internalize, to really think about. He says, I was far ahead.

I was far ahead of my fellow Jews outpacing everybody around me. I was doing great. Advancing. I had a zeal for my faith, this zeal for the traditions of my ancestors. And he's not really giving a confession here.

He's showing what his scorecard was. This is how I evaluate faith. Paul is telling you that he knows exactly or knew exactly where he stood. He was in a good spot. He said, I was ahead of everybody.

I was advancing. I knew how I was doing and I I knew how everybody else was doing too and I was passing them up. I was doing better than they were. This is a man who could tell you on any given day exactly how he was doing and the guy sitting next to him was not. And he liked the answer.

It pumped him up, inflated his ego Here here's something we need to understand. Nothing that Paul on his list other than the killing Christians things. That was terrible but the rest of it was not bad. A zeal for his faith, that is a good thing. Knowing scripture, that is a good thing.

Discipline, that's a good thing. But the problem with Paul's was all of this was not about Jesus. It wasn't all about even his god. It was all pointed at himself. Every bit of that zeal was building this case for how good of a religious Jew that Paul was.

Look how far I've come. Look how much I know. Look how seriously I take this and you know what? The truth is, when a life is pointed in that kind of direction, it can be extremely impressive to those who are around. And still go absolutely nowhere.

You know, if we're honest, that's what a lot of us do. We don't call it a scoreboard. We're too nice for that. We don't want to say, oh, I'm doing better than Ty. Sorry, Ty.

But you know where you stand and you you know whether you're doing better than the person sitting next to you or in front of you or behind you. Quietly, we know. Quietly, we keep score. We don't write it down but we all kind of keep it. That's what we talked about last week if you remember.

That scoreboard of our faith. And we talked about those things that are typical in in a a church around here anyways and maybe it's attendance. I I I've been to church every Sunday this month. But you know, Anthony missed two. He's not doing as well as me.

I'm doing my Bible in a year and I've not missed a day yet but Tanner, he's four months behind already. We keep the score I'm serving in this area so and so is not serving anywhere or it might be that you just look and say, at least I've not blown my life up yet. I've got it pretty good How do you know it's a scoreboard and not just being faithful? When you fall behind, when things start to go wrong, where do you go to? If you go to god, then you're being faithful but most of us, we drive it into our self because we have this bad week and rather than going straight to prayer, we go to how do I fix this?

How am I going to get it right next week? It's like we're being graded but the last thing we want to do is go to the teacher who's given the grade so we avoid god and we try to fix it all our self. Paul was winning that game. He wasn't just ahead. He was winning that game.

He says, I was far ahead of my peers and right in the middle of it, right on the mission that he thinks he sent to do, Jesus literally knocks him off his horse. How many of you have ever been knocked off a horse by Jesus? Figuratively, I have too, but most of us haven't actually experienced a physical knocking off of a horse. Paul did And he gets up and he can't even see. He's blinded by all of it.

Literally knocked off his horse right in the middle of what he thought he was called to do. There's something that I want us to know as Paul was going through this, he had a realization. And it's this realization. This is not about me. And it's this idea that I want you to get in your head when god gets the glory, you get the freedom.

You're not bound by proving anything to anyone anymore. It's all about god. When god gets the glory, you get the freedom. Paul, when he's talking about that experience in verse 14, he doesn't know this quite yet. He's talking about his journey to this realization.

This thing that he's been building to his whole life, he's about to find out. It's not the point of your life. And losing that, everything he had lived for was the best thing that ever happened to Paul. Because a man who is pursuing all of that and is ahead and all this stuff, you know what you never get? Rest.

Because the goalpost always move. Once you get to this level, well, that goalpost moves further down the road. You gotta keep going. You gotta keep trying. It's all about getting to the next rung of the ladder.

That's what Paul was doing and look what god does with a man like that. Verse 15, but even before I was born, god chose me and called me by his marvelous grace. Then, it pleased him to reveal his son to me so that I would proclaim the good news about Jesus to the Gentiles. When this happened, I did not rush out to consult with any human being nor did I go up to Jerusalem to consult with those who were apostles before I was. Instead, I went away to Arabia and later, I returned to the city of Damascus.

Now, the the order of this, it actually matters. He says in in verse 15, he says, before I was even born, god had a plan for me. Before I had ever been born, before I had breathed my first breath, god had a plan for me. God was setting me apart. God, before I built this resume, before I had all this zeal, before I had achieved this status, before that Damascus Road moment, god had a plan for me.

He has a plan for you too. Before you were born, god had a plan for you. Everything Paul was building The whole case he was making with his life God had already made his decision before Paul had ever done anything In verse 16, he says, god revealed his son to me and he gave him an assignment, go and preach about my son to the Gentiles. So, here's a man who's just been knocked flat literally off his horse. He has Jesus revealed to him personally, Been handed one of the biggest assignments in the history of the world, the history of the church.

So, what does he do? He immediately goes out and he starts preaching the truth of the gospel. It's not what he did. Yeah, he did tell people his story when he would have the opportunity but he went to Arabia. For three years, in the desert, where nobody knew who he was.

He says it right here. I didn't rush out and confer with anybody. I didn't go to Jerusalem to meet with those who who had been with Jesus. I went away to Arabia. Now, nobody knows exactly what he did out there.

The scripture doesn't tell us what happened during that time. What we do know was during that season of his life, things were kind of quiet. We know it was long. We know nobody was watching. Here's what I see not just in our church but in a lot of churches.

It's not that we don't want to serve god Listen, I know most of you fairly well and I believe whole heartedly that this church wants to serve the lord. I believe you want your life to matter. I believe that you want to be a part of something bigger than yourself. I don't think that we're all sitting here content just doing nothing. We want to be a part of what god is doing in this world.

You want your life to actually count for something in the kingdom and not just part of this world. But here's what I also believe, many of us, we want that assignment like Paul but we don't really want the formation We don't really want that time in Arabia and the desert. We just want the Damascus moment We want god to knock us off the horse and then give us something to do. We want the calling but we don't want to put in the years to be formed to do the calling. And when it doesn't come right away, we start to question whether this god is worth it at all or whether any of this is real at all.

And there are people who've been walking with Jesus for years and years who are still just sitting back waiting. When is this going to get impressive? Still waiting to to have that moment and meanwhile, through all of it, god's trying to build something in us. The whole time. And people were just sitting back and saying, when's the real thing start?

You know, doors get closed. Opportunities we thought were there get shut out and it hurts sometimes but the uncomfortable truth is that a closed door is not necessarily discipline. Sometimes, it's construction. Sometimes, it's when god is going to take that moment of disappointment and he's going to form you into something much greater than you ever thought was going to happen. He sometimes shuts the door just because you're not ready yet and that's not an insult.

That's mercy. Because if we get thrown into the deep end with some sort of ministry or some sort of calling that we're not ready for, you know what happens when it goes well? It becomes about you. We begin to take credit for it. So, let's ask a question honestly Whether it's a platform for you to to serve in the church or whether it's something personal you're asking god for.

If you don't get that, if god doesn't answer that prayer the way you want him to answer it, is he still worth serving? If it goes the opposite way of what you hope for, is he still a god worth giving your life to? We need to be honest with ourself about that. Or is that actually the contingency? I'll follow him if he does this.

Paul went to Arabia. Three years in the desert. Nobody knew who he was. Tells us he went up there before he ever went to Jerusalem That's a man who was willing to disappear A man who had achieved some sort of success in this life was willing to go spend three years being nobody because he understood something that most of us don't. That what god is doing in him is more important than what god is going to do through him.

They're both important but he could not be what god was calling him to be unless he let the lord form him into what he wanted him to be. So, here's the question, what happens to a person who never spends that time being formed? What happens to somebody who gets Jesus but we never let him change anything? He end up sitting in a living room asking a family, what's the most important thing to your loved one? What do you want people to know about him?

And they say he loved his family and he was crazy about his grandkids. And that's it. Not because they don't love him. They would have actually talked about him all day. If we'd had time, they would have told me all kinds of stories but I asked, what is the most important thing in this man's life and Jesus never came up?

I want to be careful. I I I don't want it to sound like I don't believe he was a follower of Christ. I still believe he knew Jesus. I still believe that he has a place with his lord but I also know I stood in a funeral home and people were coming and they were talking about how great this man was and never once mentioned his faith. I thought about that because he was doing well He had a beautiful family and he had the one thing that really mattered but nobody talked about it.

Here's what I believe about him and I think it's true of all of us. He wasn't lost. He just never had been set free. He was still living in this world never turned loose, never experiencing letting god change him through his grace. He he'd been given this opportunity to be set free and he'd never grabbed a hold of it.

He was free the whole time. He just didn't know it. He just didn't live like it. He looked at the things of this world, the family, the job, the reputation, the things the world says you gotta do and he thought that's it. And I'm doing really good.

I gotta be honest. That's the thing I'm most afraid of as a pastor You know, I I don't sit up here every week worried about whether the seats are full I don't even worry about this will sound bad. It's not how I mean it but my biggest worry isn't the people who don't know Jesus. And to be clear, some of you in this room, I know don't just because that's math. A room with this size.

Anytime you have more than a handful of people, there's somebody in the group that doesn't know the lord. I know there's somebody in this room that doesn't know Jesus and that that is so important but that's not what keeps me up. What keeps me up, what makes me wonder, stresses me out just to be honest is that I know we've got a church full of people who've met Jesus, who prayed the prayer, got baptized, who can say with all honesty, I belong to Jesus Christ and whose lives are running on the exact same thing that everybody else's is. Who's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday is no different than someone who doesn't know Jesus Christ. They have the same fears, the same level of success, the same anxieties about their finances, about life, the same need to to have a a good reputation, that same exhaustion that we also quietly suffer.

Nothing about the weekday is different. It's not like you're a lost person. It's a free person who's still sitting in the pen and never went out when the gate was opened. But when god gets the glory, you get the freedom. When it's no longer about you and you come to terms with that you get the freedom but you also need to know the opposite of it.

It goes both ways because if god's not getting the glory, If nobody around you would mention him when they talk about your life, then there is a freedom in this life that you have not experienced yet even if you have that that relationship with your lord. So, let's get specific What would the people you work with say about you at your funeral? What would the people at your lunch table if you're still in school? What would they say about you at your funeral? Not he was a good person.

She was a good woman. Not they were hard workers. Not I know they were religious. Would they be able to point something in your life and say, I don't know how to explain it except god. Maybe somebody would even say, I don't even follow God but something's different with them.

You know, it's entirely possible to be saved and still waste your life. To have that good thing, to have that freedom, never live in it. To be in the church for thirty, forty, fifty years, to be a good man, a good woman, to love your family, to be a good mother, father, family member, have your whole life summarized in a living room and nobody mentioned that you even knew Jesus. That's not a salvation problem. That's I've never been set free problem.

Paul's about to show you the other kind of life on the other side of it because his life got summarized too and when people talked about him, they only had one thing to say about him. Let's look at it. Verse 18. Three years later, I went to Jerusalem to get to know Peter and stayed with him for fifteen days. The only other apostle I met at that time was James, the lord's brother.

We all remember him, right? From our study just a few weeks ago. I declare before god that what I'm writing to you is not a lie. Three years. That's the first thing we see.

Paul goes up to Jerusalem but it's been three years and he goes and he spends two weeks with Peter. He meets James and he's not going to get his credentials. He's not going to get an assignment. He's there to meet the man who the man who walked with Jesus. Then he leaves.

And he says something that I think is kind of strange in in verse 20. He says, I just want you to know, I'm not lying about this. And why does he say that? Because he knows how much he's riding on this. This is the truth he's saying.

I know how important this is. Then, we look at verse 21. After that visit, I went north into the provinces of Syria and Cilicia and still the churches in Christ that are in Judea didn't know me personally. So, he's gone again. He goes to Syria.

He goes to Cilicia and and this detail in there, these churches that he had been persecuting, they didn't know his face. They just knew his reputation. These people in the region who who had lost family members because of this mission that Paul had been on, they didn't know him but they knew who he was. The families that had been broken up, those churches, they had never seen his face. They just had a report.

Here's the report. All they knew was that people were saying the one who used to persecute us is now preaching the very faith he tried to destroy. That's the report. The word comes back to them and the word is this man who wanted us dead. Now, he's preaching the same thing that he wanted us dead over.

That's all they had. A rumor circulating through all these churches and what do they do with it? How dare he? After what he did, how dare he even try to do this? No.

Verse 24. And they praised god because of me. Seven words sums it all up and they praised god because of me. Not that they praise Paul They weren't even impressed with Paul Not that they would look and say, wow. Look how Paul has turned it around.

They praise god because of me and Paul isn't saying this to brag because he knows it's not about him. He's saying it to say, God changed me. He changed people through me and he can do the same thing through you. Go back to verse 14 and look at who he was advancing beyond his peers. He was ahead.

He was leader leading the scoreboard. He was winning it all. He says, look at me. Look how zealous I am. And now here he is.

And the only thing anybody has to say about him, Praise god. That is not life improvement. That is a complete reversal And it had everything to do with god and nothing to do with Paul. The man who spent his whole life building this case for how great he was in the faith. God takes that case and Paul goes from being the point of it all to being the evidence of what god can do in anybody's life.

When god gets the glory you get the freedom Paul figured that out. Here's what I want you to see. It was the best thing that ever happened to him. Not because he lost anything worth keeping. It was the best because of what it cost him to keep it.

A man who was ahead of his peers, you gotta stay ahead. You gotta keep working. A man whose life is building this case for yourself. You gotta keep building the case every single day forever. It never ends.

There is no rest on top of that. But the the day the whole thing stopped being about Paul That's the day Paul got to stop. To say I'm free from all of this and he is all worth it He didn't have to be impressive anymore. He didn't have to be the leader in the scoreboard anymore. He didn't have to outpace anybody.

Nobody was measuring him anymore. He wasn't the point. Do you understand what that does to a man? He can go to to the desert for three years and he doesn't have to worry about if somebody forgets him. He can spend fourteen years in Syria and Cilicia unknown and he doesn't need anybody to notice who he is or what he's doing.

He can be described second hand by people who've never seen his face and it doesn't matter what they think of him. Moves in the chapter two and we're going to go through this part quickly. Chapter two verse one, then fourteen years later, I went back to Jerusalem again this time with Barnabas and Titus came along too. I went there because god revealed to me that I should go. While I was there, I met privately with those who considered to be those considered to be leaders of the church and shared with them the message I had been preaching to the Gentiles.

I wanted to make sure that we were in agreement. For fear that all my efforts have been wasted and I was running the race for nothing. Fourteen years go by and he was like, it's time to go speak to the leaders of the church and he goes to meet with them and one of the main reasons he goes is he wants to make sure this gospel that he's preaching is the gospel that these men who walked with Jesus was preaching. He lays out this gospel to all of them and in the middle of it, he brings his friend, a guy named Titus. Titus was a Greek and that's kind of important because a Greek would be uncircumcised and here he is walking into this room full of Jewish leaders.

He was the ones who last week we talked about the false teachers were saying, you can't be a part of this. And as he goes and he meets with James, he meets with John, he meets with Peter, the pillars of the early church, two things happen. They didn't make Titus get circumcised. This uncircumcised Greek walked into a room full of the Jewish leaders and he walks back out with nobody saying you gotta do this if you're gonna be in Christ. Second, he meets with the leaders, these pillars, these men who had been with Jesus and he talks about the gospel he was preaching and they say, you're good.

Nothing to be added to that. They heard it. They had no corrections and that's it. The men who walked with Jesus looked at the gospel Paul got directly from Jesus and said, yeah, you got it. Go preach it.

And it's the takes us back to the point of all of it. Jesus plus nothing. Paul preached the gospel that was only Jesus. Jesus is all that matters. It's the same thing we said last week.

There was nothing that had to be added to Titus. Nothing had to be added to Paul's gospel. Nothing has to be added to you. You don't have to clean yourself up. You don't have to change anything except this.

I have faith in Jesus. I trust that he is who he says he is. I believe that he died on a cross for me. I believe that I'm a sinner in need of a savior and I trust him. Jesus is everything.

You don't have to do anything on top of it. Here's how it looked for me. In the year 2000, a long time ago for some of y'all, I surrendered to ministry. Sort of. I didn't know what it meant really.

All I knew was god wanted me to do something. I thought he had his his hand on my life but I didn't know what that looked like. So, I started looking for opportunities. Let me tell you what I thought was coming next. I thought I was going to pastor a church.

That's what you do, right? You're called the ministry. You go and you pastor a church. So, I thought it was going to happen soon. So, I interviewed to be a pastor.

And they said, no. That door closed and it closed really quickly and when it closed, I I remember thinking, maybe I'm not ready yet. That was my first thought and the second one was, well, maybe, I know I'm called to ministry but maybe it's not as a pastor. Maybe it's something else. Maybe god wants me to do something totally different.

Maybe I've got the wrong idea. Now, some of you, you've had the exact same thought about something. You had this picture of what god wants you to do and the door was closed. So, You thought maybe that wasn't it. So, for me, I just kind of threw myself into the church.

I started serving everywhere I could serve I didn't disappear. No, I went the opposite direction. I started teaching Sunday school classes. I served in youth ministry for a period of time. I got on leadership teams and we were one of those kind of baptist churches with committees and I was on a bunch of em.

We even had a committee to appoint committees. I mean, it was one of those old school baptist kind of places. There was literally a stretch in there where I was at the church five or six nights every single week doing something. And I would have told you I'm being faithful I mean, you serve where you are You know, there's truth in that. You do need to serve where you are.

If you're not serving in your church, you need to serve. But looking back at it now, I know I was doing it for the wrong reasons I knew god was calling me into ministry but the whole motive behind this is I was just trying to figure out how to be useful when I hadn't been formed yet. And you know what happened? It burned me out. I just couldn't do it anymore.

Because my motives weren't about god. It was about me getting the next rung of the ladder and I just couldn't do it anymore. In that time frame, Christy and I moved to Kodak and it I can make it sound like it was a big move. It wasn't. We came from Fountain City to to Kodak.

It's not that far. We could've stayed at the church we were in easily. It would have been a longer drive but not as long as some of y'all make to get here on Sundays. We could've easily stayed there but we use it as an excuse to go into this large church and hide. We just got buried in the background.

Found a church big enough that nobody's going to know if I miss this week. Nobody's going to ask me to serve. Very few people actually know my name and I'm good with that. It was an excuse Nobody needed me there and that's the way I liked it. You know, I said, nobody wants the desert, nobody wants Arabia.

I didn't either. I wanted god to use me and use me quick and when he didn't, I threw myself into everything trying to find the right answer myself and I broke. I hid and really I quit for two years but you know what? In those ten years that I was doing everything, god was forming me into something different. Even in in my wrong motivations, god was forming me into something different and that man who surrendered the ministry in 2000 was not the same man ten years later.

In 2009, we found, you all heard me talk about Mount Harmony Baptist Church. Somehow, we ended up in that church and in 2010, I finally fully surrendered to full time vocational ministry and had no idea what it looks like. You know, I wanted a opportunity to serve early. I just wanted, this is what you do. I need an opportunity to to be upfront which was weird because I I don't standing in front of people, not my thing but that's what I wanted to do.

And when it didn't go my way, I I quit. Some of you, you're exhausted right now. Some of you think you're exhausted from serving god but you're not. Your exhaustion comes because you're still auditioning. You're still trying to prove who you are and that you belong or that god needs to use you.

So, you serve until you're empty and you burn yourself out and you don't know where to turn. Stop building the case. It's all about Jesus. It's all that matters. Some of you, you're like, that man, I sat in his living room You're not exhausted.

You're just parked. You got everything? All you need? You know Christ bought you? But you've never taken that freedom and let him use you?

And really it's because nobody ever told you that the terms changed. It wasn't about this world anymore. It's all about Jesus. Stop doing what you're doing and just follow him. It's all about him.

Whatever you were before Christ got a hold of you, Paul was much worse. He was a violent man. He wanted to destroy the church and god took the worst resume and he turned it into a reason for people who never met him to worship god. And he'll do it with you too. If you let him because when god gets the glory, you get the freedom and when it's not all about god anymore, it's not all about you anymore.

It's all about god. He gets the praise. Paul got seven words. They weren't about Paul and they praised god because of me. Can that honestly be written in your obituary?

In a few moments, we're going to come to the lord's table together Before we do, I need to make it clear to some in this room. I mentioned, I know there's some in this room who are not followers of Christ. It's just math. And everything I've said this morning, it assumes that you are a follower of Christ. Every bit of it.

That freedom, that glory, it's all about followers of Christ but some of you are not. Some of you would check a box on a form and say, yes, I am but you know you're not. Some of you been in church your whole life but you know you're not surrendered. You're sitting there right now knowing that Jesus is not your lord. You look at the man in Galatians one, Paul, he was violent.

He hunted Christians. He tore apart families and he thought I'm doing god a favor while he's doing it. The worst resume and look what god did with it. But you know, god did not wait on Paul to get himself cleaned up He knocked him off a horse in the middle of the mission to go destroy the church. And if he can do that to Paul, he can do that to you.

You do not have to clean yourself up. The gospel says, if you believe that Jesus is who he says he is. If you call on the name of him, surrender to him as lord and believe that god raised him from the dead, you will be saved but it's not just a belief. It is a surrender. Have you ever surrendered your life to the lord?

Really surrendered. I know it. Every church is full of people every week who think they have and if god is drawing you to himself right now, do not shut it out saying I already done that. Don't quench the spirit. The scripture says, if that is you, confess Jesus as lord right now.

You can do it right now. You're not waiting on me to do it with you. Just do it lord. I know I need a savior. Lord, I know I'm broken.

I know I'm a sinner and I know Jesus died for me and I want him to be my lord. Will you save me? Some of you in this room, you are followers of Christ and we're going to take communion together here in just a moment but if you fall in that first category, This is not for you. Scripture says that partaking of communion is for those who are followers of Jesus Christ. So, as we move into this, if you don't know for sure you're a follower of Jesus, just don't come.

Not pointing fingers, just kind of let everybody else go. Nobody's going to look at you or think twice about it. Scripture also says that for those who are believers, we must come and take of the table together in a way that is worthy. And that means that we come with without any unconfessed sin. So, if you are here this morning and you are a believer in Christ, I want you to take these next few moments.

Prepare yourself to come to the table. Do you have any unconfessed sin in your life? Confess it. If you're harboring any sort of resentment or ill ill will toward another brother or sister in Christ, confess it. Get your heart aligned with the lord and if you are in here this morning and you've never accepted Christ as your savior, you can right now while we're doing this and then just come find me after the service.

You don't have to come up and stand in front of everybody. Just come tell us, tell me or another elder or whoever you came with. This is what god did for me today. So, go ahead, and bow your heads and wherever you find yourself today, prepare yourself to to partake of communion or have a conversation with the lord about where you stand with him.