Covet Covers It with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch, and my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

All right, MetaCurch, how's everybody doing?

Yeah.

Well, I want to welcome you in.

If you're joining us for the first time, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor at Meta.

I'm so glad that you have shown up to one of our two venues.

I want you to know if you're here at our Holotus location, you're in such good hands with Pastor Tony.

If you're here at the Petrenko location, you're in such good hands with Pastor Andre.

Today I am continuing a conversation that we started last week about the Ten Commandments.

Now, today's message will stand on its own.

However, if you want the full context, then you can go to YouTube.com slash metachurch.

You can catch up on last week or on any of our other past series.

Now, last week we looked at a broad overview of the Ten Commandments.

We saw that Jesus wrapped up all ten in one command to love God and to love others.

This week I want to focus in on just one of the Ten Commandments.

The one that honestly, growing up, always confused me the most.

I pretty much understood, even as a good Baptist boy growing up in the church, pretty much understood the meaning of at least nine of the Ten Commandments.

And then we would get to the last one.

And I could not define it.

I didn't know why it was there.

I didn't know what it meant.

I didn't really know how it applied to my life.

And I don't think I am alone.

I'm gonna focus in on that.

And if I'm right, I think that the tenth commandment is actually the key to understanding the other nine.

Let's review the Ten Commandments real quick.

Here's kind of a cheat sheet of them.

Number one, put God first.

Number two, don't make or worship idols.

Number three, respect God's name.

Number four, keep the Sabbath holy.

Number five, honor your parents.

Number six, do not murder.

Number seven, do not commit adultery.

Number eight, do not steal.

Number nine, do not lie.

And then number ten, do not covet.

I know what it means to lie, I know what it means to steal, I know what it means to honor your parents, I know what it means to put God first.

I grew up not really knowing what it meant, do not covet.

I thought it may have something to do with being envious or jealous, and that's certainly a part of it, but it doesn't really scratch the surface on what this commandment offers us.

I believe that if you understand the tenth commandment, which hopefully at the end of our time together today, you will understand the tenth commandment.

By understanding that one and applying it to your life, it will make following the rest of God's commands so much easier.

My message today is covet covers it.

Covet covers it.

Would you pray with me?

Jesus, we love you.

We thank you for your great love for us.

I thank you for a place like MetaCurch where anybody can come and wrestle with life's biggest questions.

God, I thank you for everyone who is here across our locations, anyone who is streaming with us online.

I thank you for everyone from the seasoned believer down to the hardcore skeptic.

And I just ask, Holy Spirit, that you would give us open minds and open hearts and allow you to speak to us and challenge us and that we would seek after you today.

And I believe, like your word says, if we seek you with all of our heart, we will find you.

We give you this time.

We pray it all in Jesus' name.

And if you want to learn what coveting really means, say amen.

Amen.

First, let's look at the full command.

We kind of looked at the cheat sheet of the Big Ten.

Let's look at what the tenth command actually says.

It says, Do not covet your neighbor's wife or desire your neighbor's house, field, male or female slave, ox or donkey, or anything else that belongs to your neighbor.

Now, when you read this in the original biblical languages, what immediately stands out is that the word covet and the word desire both are the same biblical words.

So there in Deuteronomy 5.21, when it says, Do not covet your neighbor's wife or desire, those are the same words.

In the Hebrew, which the Old Testament was written in ancient Hebrew, the Old Testament of the Bible is where you find the Ten Commandments.

This is the word shamad, which means it says, Do not shamad your neighbor's wife, or shamad your neighbor's house, or anything that belongs to him.

It's the same exact word.

Now, another important piece of context for our conversation today is when Jesus was on earth, and in the time of the apostles who wrote the New Testament, they wrote in ancient Greek and they studied the Old Testament primarily out of what is called the Septuagint.

And the Septuagint is the Greek version of the Old Testament.

And so in the Septuagint, in the Greek version of the Ten Commandments, the word for covet is epithetymia.

So you have the Hebrew word shamad, you have the Greek word epithemia, these are the ancient biblical languages for the word covet.

And both of these words mean a strong desire.

That is what covet means.

It means a strong, sometimes even overwhelming desire.

Now, this understanding of the word covet immediately marks the tenth commandment as something completely different than the other nine.

The other nine are all things that focus on what you do externally.

You lie to somebody else, you commit adultery with someone else, you defame someone else, you physically, externally worship other idols.

You either respect and honor your parents or you do not.

These are things that happen outside of yourself, but coveting is something that is internal.

Your desires are not something that happen external to you, they happen inside of you.

One of the things this does for the Ten Commandments is it marks it as very, very unique in the ancient world.

Outside of Christianity and Judaism, there were all kinds of these lists of morals or ethical imperatives put together by all kinds of leaders, religious and secular, in the ancient world.

However, the ancient idea was your moral status was determined by what you did externally.

And so the list would all be external things, and you would be judged not on your inside disposition, but on your outside actions.

The tenth commandment changes that.

And it in essence safeguards against the top nine.

Because if you're saying, well, you know, I'm not really like murdering anyone, I don't have any plans or plots, but you have murderous rage in your heart towards somebody, then all of a sudden you can't say you're following all ten of the commandments.

If it's like, no, no, no, no, listen, like I begrudgingly do what my parents tell me to, but internally I don't really have any respect or honor for them, you're not in line with the fifth commandment.

If it's like, I'm not really lying, you know, but on the inside, I don't really care for this person at all, it gets down to the level of intent.

And because your intent matters, it sets the entirety of the Old Testament apart from not just being a religious list of moral and ethical duties, but it becomes about who you are on the inside.

And Jesus expounds on this when he gets to earth and he preaches things like, You have heard it said, do not murder.

That's one of the Ten Commandments, but I tell you, if you have hatred in your heart towards your brother, you are already guilty of murder before God.

What's that saying?

It's saying that there is something about your desires that matter.

There is something about your internal life.

This really takes the Ten Commandments and it makes it much more robust.

And we get into the New Testament, and James, the brother of Jesus, he fleshes this out for us.

And he lays out a path of what our desires cause and the havoc that they can wreak.

In James 1.14, it says, but each person is tempted when he is drawn away and enticed by his own evil desire.

Now, notice that James says very clearly, it's not desire itself that is the problem.

In the tenth commandment, it is not desire itself that is the problem, it is improper desire, ungodly desires, misplaced desires.

James gives a broad category for all of that and calls it evil desires.

Many of your desires were placed there by God.

You should desire holiness, you should desire intimacy with Christ, you should desire building the kingdom of God, you should desire your spouse, you should desire the flourishing of your children, you should desire good for your fellow human being.

It's not desire itself, it is misplaced, improper, ungodly, evil desires.

James lays out this path of what these improper desires create.

In the next verse, he says, then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin.

That's bad enough, but he goes on and says, and when sin is fully grown, it gives birth to death.

James is laying out the path from temptation all the way to devastation.

And it starts with desire.

Improper desires, evil desires that give birth, lead to sin.

And sin, given enough time, leads to death.

And that can mean a lot of things.

If your temptation and sin keeps you from ever coming into a relationship with Jesus Christ, it could mean eternal death, the kind of death that separates you forever from God and all that is good.

It can mean the death of relationships when your sin corrodes your relationships to the point that they're unmanageable.

It can mean the death of your career when you don't manage yourself correctly and allow sin to take you down roads that ruin the chances you have of the success that you had destined for yourself.

It can mean the death of your finances, the death of your physical health, the death, the death of your emotional and mental health.

There are many kinds of deaths that come from allowing our evil desires to turn to sin and our sin over time to corrupt us into death.

This is where devastation comes into our life in full force.

And sometimes these things lay dormant for a while.

It's not like you have an ungodly desire, and the next day it immediately results in some life-altering sin.

It could, but often they lay dormant.

And the tenth commandment is a protection against improper dormant desires.

It's like, you know, I'm not like actively bowing down and worshiping other gods, but I do kind of desire what other people have.

Dormant desires eventually lead to external sin.

And that external sin may not immediately cause your world to implode.

Maybe you can hide it for a while, and maybe you can get away with it for a while.

And in our culture that is so far removed from God, maybe your sin even seems to advance you for a while.

But given enough time, sin does lead to death.

Our improper desires are coveting.

That is what the Tenth Commandment means.

And because desire is at the root of all sin, and the Ten Commandments are leading us towards a life of holiness and away from a life of sin, it means that covet covers it.

It gets to the root of obeying all that God has asked of us.

For years, scholars have believed this specifically about the five commands that come right before coveting.

So that would be the last six commands.

If you were here last week, we show that there are two categories within the Ten Commandments.

The final six are commands to honor others.

This is honor your parents, do not murder, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not lie, and of course, do not covet.

Scholars for over a thousand years have agreed that getting that one command right, do not covet, will protect you from those other five, and you will live a life that honors other people.

If you think about it, dishonoring your parents is rooted in any number of desires.

Desires for freedom or authority or rebellion, not committing adultery, that is a desire issue.

When you commit adultery, it's about desiring someone else's spouse or someone that is not your spouse.

Stealing starts with a desire for something that you don't have, that you can't afford and want anyway, or that you can afford, but you don't want to spend the money on.

Lying starts with a desire to get away with something or get yourself out of trouble.

All of these are attached to the one command: do not covet.

Coveting, improper desire, is at the root of it, which means if you can deal with the root, then you can deal with the sin.

You can live a life that honors others.

Theologians have agreed that those are connected for over a thousand years.

What I want to suggest is that there's more.

I believe when it comes to the Ten Commandments, that covet covers them all.

You see, the first four commands we learned last week are commands to honor God.

That includes putting God first, do not make or worship any idols, respect God's name, and keep the Sabbath holy.

Now we learned earlier that in Hebrew, do not covet, covet is the Hebrew word shamad.

The very first time that we see an evil shamad, an improper desire in all of Scripture is all the way back in the garden narrative of Genesis.

If you remember the story, God had created Adam and Eve, he had placed them in perfection, he had given them full freedom, full autonomy, full fellowship with himself, and all he asked was for them to obey one command.

There was only one rule.

There was a tree in the center of the garden, and they were not to eat from it.

Now, this is kind of a free lesson out of the book of Genesis, but if there is a temptation that you are trying to avoid, you probably should not walk right up to it.

Bad things will probably happen.

The first problem in the garden narrative was the problem of proximity.

They knew they could not eat from the tree, but Eve ventured towards the tree anyway.

And it is here, at the very beginning of the story, that we see the first desire lead to sin, lead in this case to very literal death.

In Genesis chapter three, it says the woman saw that the tree was good for food and delightful to look at, and that it was desirable for obtaining wisdom.

And so she took some of its fruit and ate it.

And she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate it.

She saw it was desirable, it was shamad.

She coveted what was not hers and what was commanded by God for her not to take.

This is an ungodly desire that led her and led Adam into sin, and because sin entered the world, death entered the world.

Our desires are at the root of every one of our functional problems.

All of our sins, all of the mistakes, all of the ways that we miss the mark on God's design and God's desires for our life.

In this moment, Adam and Eve walked out of their relationship with God, and they would now live in a world plagued by shame and suffering and death.

It isn't just the commands to honor others that are protected by us living out the command to not covet, it is also how we relate to God.

Whether or not we put God first in our lives, we'll come down to whether we desire his glory ultimately or our own glory.

Whether or not we worship God with our time, attention, and affection, or we turn to things of this world to worship, we'll come down to where our desires are leading us.

If we use God's name to lift him up and worship him and make him known and bring him glory, or if we use his name in vain to advance our own interests, we'll come down to how we desire to get ahead in life.

Whether we carve out real intentional time to worship God, similar to Israel's Sabbath, will be an indication of our desire for intimacy with Christ.

I don't believe it's an exaggeration to say that every single commandment has at its root the issue of coveting.

In other words, coveting covers them all.

Now, on one hand, this can be quite frightening.

You know, I'll remind you that we come here to meta church, one movement across multiple locations.

Maybe you're here in Helotus, here at Petrenko, here joining us online.

We come here not to check a box and say, I did the thing and I went to a church and I sat and sang and listened.

We come here to get brutally honest, to open ourselves up, to allow God to work in our lives, because we believe that God actually did create us with intention.

He created us on purpose to live a life with purpose, and so we allow him to do a work inside of us.

And because we bring that level of honesty when we come and gather together, this concept can be quite frightening.

Because if we're really honest, we know there are very real competing desires inside of us.

The Apostle Paul in Romans chapter 7, he goes through this tension, this battle within where you want to do the right thing, but it's very hard to do the right thing.

Romans 7 · chapter mention

You know that this person who like you have this one desire, which is like, I'm gonna punch them, you know.

I've made up my mind, I'm gonna punch them, you know.

If they step one step closer, I'm gonna lay hands and not to pray for them, you know.

Like we have that desire, but then we also know God is calling us to love and to turn the other cheek and to pray for our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us.

We have these warring desires.

It's like we want to follow God's commands and how we are dating and how we're looking for potentially our future spouse, but we have these very strong, very real sexual desires.

We're at war with ourselves.

We want to fuel our body properly, but in just a few days there is an entire Thanksgiving buffet in front of us, you know?

We have competing desires, and so that's kind of frightening because those improper desires that at least at MetaCurch, we're gonna be honest enough to acknowledge we have.

We have these competing improper desires, and we now know that those improper desires are at the root of all sin, and we know that all of our sin is what causes all of the devastation and heartache in our life.

At the same time, I believe we could view this as a very empowering reality that we now know what lies at the root.

Maybe you have felt like the Apostle Paul, who at the climax of Romans 7, he almost cries out, I am a broken man.

I don't do the things that I want to do, and then I do the things that I don't want to do.

How many people have ever felt like that?

You just feel stuck.

You come, you get so inspired to do the things of God, I'm really gonna change, I'm gonna show up to work, and man, I'm gonna be a changed person.

And at 8 a.m., someone is in your parking spot.

It's like off the rails, man.

Whole day ruined.

I'm gonna be that spouse.

Next time we're in an argument, I'm not gonna be selfish, I'm gonna be selfless.

You know, I'm just gonna love, I'm gonna support, and then it's like, oh, they bring up that one thing again, you know.

It's like these competing desires, we get stuck.

What's so empowering is often we're stuck because we don't know what to aim at, what to correct, what to go to war with.

And now we know.

It's not just the sin, it's not just the mistake, it's not just the error.

There's something below it.

It's not just what you're doing externally, it's what's happening internally.

That it starts with your desires.

And it's very hard to defeat an enemy when you don't know what the enemy is.

You should be empowered by the understanding that in the areas that you are stuck, underneath the details, there's a desire.

And if you can go to war with the desire, and if you can get rid of the desire, and if you can submit the desire to God, then getting rid of the desire will free you from the grasp of the details of whatever sins are holding you captive.

See, James gave us this list.

James used the same Greek word that the Tenth Commandment uses, epitheta.

He says, your epithemia, your desires, lead to sin and they lead to death.

I put together some real life examples of what this could look like.

Maybe you'll see yourself reflected in one of these examples.

For some of us, it happens in our career.

Maybe initially you really admired one of your colleagues for their success, but that admiration turned into an improper desire.

You started to long for their position, their prestige, their perks.

That desire festered, it sparked envy as you're Your envy deepens, you start resenting them.

Every move they make, every success they have.

It just makes you more and more bitter.

You rationalize your resentment, convincing yourself that they didn't work as hard as you did.

And so bitterness takes root.

It corrodes your focus on your career, it poisons your interactions with them.

Eventually, sin comes.

You start undermining them subtly, even publicly, sabotaging projects, gossiping about them to others until your bitterness costs both of you, ending in fractured teams in a hostile workplace, maybe even your career itself.

This happens in our families, especially in today's world of social media.

Maybe you follow some influencer families or some influencer couples online.

They seem to have everything.

When the cameras are on, their kids are always smiling, they're on luxurious vacations, they have a spotless home, and you just admire them at first.

It's like that's nice, you know.

Hashtag couple goals or whatever, but that admiration slowly turns into an improper desire.

You start wishing you had what they have.

That desire shifts.

You start comparing, and your life seems like nothing.

Resentment creeps in.

You find yourself snapping at your spouse, frustrated that y'all don't have more.

Bitterness begins to eat away at all your contentment, straining your marriage, filling your home with tension.

Maybe even driven by discontent, you start stretching beyond your financial means, and so now you're living under a burden of debt.

There's financial stress, there's arguments, a crumbling relationship, tension in the home.

All in the pursuit of a social media illusion.

This happens with our wealth and with our resources.

Remember, this is the pattern we're walking through.

Desires leading to sin, leading to death.

Maybe out of college or into the workforce, you got a slow start, and some of the people that you came up with, all of a sudden they had high-paying jobs, they're buying new cars, posting photos from all over the world.

At first you're happy for them, but quickly you turn into a deep desire for their wealth and status.

And that desire becomes anger, it consumes your thoughts.

That anger becomes resentment.

You feel bitter, like you have fallen behind, like life has been unfair.

Maybe even God has been unfair.

And so, to cope, you turn to risky investments or illegal ways of making money, hoping for a quick payout.

You're desperate and you're impatient.

You begin cutting ethical corners, fudging numbers, taking credit for others' ideas.

This bitterness drives into actions that backfire, cost you relationships, cost you your job.

It's a pattern that we see played out, and it usually doesn't happen all in one day.

It happens across time.

These dormant desires eventually rise to the surface and become sin.

And these sins over time rise to the surface and wreak havoc and destruction in our lives.

This even happens in our faith.

Perhaps you've been very faithful.

You've been close to God, you serve consistently, you give consistently, you pray consistently, you read consistently.

And you see other people that you know are less faithful or maybe don't even have faith in God at all.

And somehow they're receiving all the blessings that you've been praying for.

And so now not only has life left you behind, but somehow God has left you behind.

And you decide that maybe God isn't someone that you can completely trust, and you begin distancing yourself, and you distance yourself from your faith community, and you give up on your Bible reading, and you even question your faith altogether.

Desire that leads to sin.

That leads to death.

And it's worth noting at this point in our conversation that we have a very uphill battle when it comes to controlling our desires.

And the uphill battle is that we are long, long, long gone from a Western culture that is infused with the inherent values of a Judeo-Christian worldview.

We're not a Christian culture anymore, and we're not a post-Christian culture anymore.

We are a pre-pagan culture now.

It's not that we have just kind of drifted from the ideas of scripture, we have inverted them within our culture.

And so you come into service, and I'm so glad that you come and you spend an hour with the body of Christ, and you get inspired, and it's like, man, live out the desires that God has placed on your life, and it's like, yes.

And then the other 167 hours of your week, you exist in a culture that is constantly promoting the opposite of God's desires for your life.

Not just to move slightly off course, the opposite of them.

We live in a culture that says, you do you.

Jesus says, you follow me.

We live in a culture that says, listen, follow your heart.

Scripture says the heart of man is deceitful above all else.

No person containment.

These are diametrically opposed ideas.

And what happens is we are marketed to and promoted to and pushed towards improper desire almost every moment of our lives.

And because of that, we become detained by our desires.

To be detained means to be held back or impeded or even imprisoned.

There's a Stoic philosopher who has some incredible writings.

He knew a lot about being detained.

His name is Epictetus.

He was literally a slave in Rome for most of his life until he won his own freedom.

He was always seeking a higher meaning.

He has some incredible writings.

One of his quotes says, He is free, who lives as he wishes to live, who is neither subject to compulsion nor to hindrance nor to force, whose movements to action are not impeded, whose desires, which he wrote in Greek, this is the word epithymia when he wrote it, the same word for do not covet, whose desires attain their purpose, and who does not fall into that which he would avoid.

Whose desires, whose proper desires lead them to a purposeful, meaningful, powerful life, instead of allowing improper desires to lead them to the life they were never created to live.

And so if we as a culture are detained by our desires, how do we find freedom?

How do we live out the tenth commandment and free ourselves to live lives that honor God?

Lives that honor other people, lives lived on purpose and with purpose, lives that do whatever it takes to bring people to Jesus.

Paul has something to say about that in a letter that he wrote to the Galatians.

Every time you're gonna see the word desire, Paul was writing in the Greek and using the word epitheta, the same word for do not covet.

Here's what he said I say then, walk by the spirit, and you will certainly not carry out the desire of the flesh.

Paul is getting ready to set up this epic battle that we've been talking about today, the battle between what our flesh desires, what our sinful nature desires, and what the spirit of God desires for us.

In verse 17, he says, For the flesh desires what is against the spirit, and the spirit desires what is against the flesh.

These are opposed to each other so that you don't do what you want to do.

Remember, desire itself is not bad.

We are called to desire God, to desire the good of our fellow man, to desire holiness.

The problem is when we allow our fallen, sinful nature, what Paul is calling the flesh, to set the desire in our life.

This is when evil desire leads to sin, leads to death.

The death of our relationships, of our finances, of our dreams, of our mental and emotional health.

Paul goes on to lay out a clear list of what the fleshly desires result in, and then he contrasts that with what the spirit's desires result in.

And I want you to pay attention to how many of the works of the flesh are things that we highlight, promote, and prioritize in our current culture.

Galatians 5.19, now the works of the flesh are obvious.

Sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar.

I'm warning you about these things as I warned you before, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Here's the contrast.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

The law is not against such things.

A sharp contrast indeed.

Every one of the works of the flesh is rooted in improper desire.

Every one of the fruit of the spirit is rooted in the desires of God played out in our lives.

And so practically, how do we set ourselves free from the detainment of improper desires?

How do we break the chain from desire to sin to death?

And Paul tells us in the next verse.

Now those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passion and epithetemia with its desires.

If the internal battle in our lives that ultimately determine whether we allow covetousness to spiral us into enslavement to sin is the results of the desires of the flesh, then Paul says we must crucify the flesh.

This is obviously an allusion to the work of Jesus on the cross.

See, on the cross, Jesus is able to offer us two things.

By simply putting your faith in Jesus, it requires no work, it requires no cost, it is a completely free gift.

When you put your hope in Jesus as your only hope for this life and your eternal life, you are freed from the presence of sin in eternity.

That is a promise.

You are given eternal life where you will dwell in perfection with your Heavenly Father.

However, there is the messy in between.

There is the right here, right now, where we're still alive, we're still on earth, we're still plagued by warring desires between the spirit and the flesh.

The second thing that Jesus offered us on the cross is a path towards walking in freedom from the power of sin in our life.

That requires our cooperation.

Here's how Jesus described it to his closest followers.

In Matthew 16, Jesus said to his disciples, If anyone wants to follow after me, let him deny himself, take up his cross, and then follow.

What does it mean to deny yourself?

It means not allowing your sinful desires to run free.

We live in a world that not only puts zero effort into impeding the desires of your flesh, we live in a world that caters to and stokes the desire of your flesh every day.

Jesus said to follow him into a life of purpose and power and significance is to learn self-denial.

It's kind of like uh you remember watching cartoons growing up, and uh, we have these moments every day where we have these warring desires, the desires of God and the desires of our flesh, right?

It's kind of like in the cartoons where all of a sudden there would be an angel on one shoulder, and there would be a devil on the other shoulder, and the angel would be trying to coax them into doing the right thing, to following the righteous path, and the devil was on the other shoulder, and it was, you know, kind of like trying to get them to do the wrong thing and to give in to their selfish ambition and to just do whatever felt good in that moment.

That's kind of the war that's happening, except it is the Holy Spirit of God on one side trying to draw you into the life that God created you to live.

And it's not necessarily even the devil on the other side.

The bad news is on the other side, it's you.

It's like you just going, here's what I want to do in this moment.

Here's what my flesh desires, here's what my sinful nature wants in this moment.

And Jesus is saying, to follow me, you must daily, moment by moment, learn to deny yourself.

If you feel stuck, if you can cry out like the Apostle Paul, man, I just I don't do what I want to do, and the things I want to do, I don't do, and I go to life team and I say I'm gonna do this thing, and then I go up in the real world and I don't really do it, and everybody makes me mad, and I fall right back into this pattern.

I'm sinning all the time, and I want to quit cussing, but I'm cussing all the time.

It's really fun to cuss.

It's a lot easier to say, you know, you than to just say you really made me mad.

You know, it's like there's all these things, self-denial.

Let me say it again.

We live in a world that says you're right.

Whatever you're feeling is right, whatever you're thinking is right, there's no actual truth.

You just have your own truth because you're always right.

And Jesus says, you're usually wrong.

But the good news is, Jesus is always right.

So deny yourself and do Jesus' way, and all of a sudden you will walk into a life more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

Here's the second thing.

Jesus said, deny yourself and take up your cross.

Now, Jesus said this as he was headed to Jerusalem to literally carry a cross, to be nailed to that cross, and to die.

What does it mean?

What does Paul say in Galatians 5, 24?

Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh, have crucified their passions and improper desires, have crucified their covetousness.

It means that the practice of self-denial and walking according to the spirit is going to cost you.

And I've said it so many times, and I will keep saying it from this stage.

Anyone who tries to sell you a gospel that says if you will just follow Jesus, everything will be easy.

Everything will work out, you'll get everything you ever wanted.

It's the easiest path you could ever go on, is not quoting scripture.

They are selling you something you want to hear.

Jesus said, if you want to follow me, you have to deny yourself, and it's like, okay, that's hard, but I can do that.

And take up your cross.

You have to be willing to suffer.

And if you're not willing, then you won't deny yourself.

You'll live out the works of the flesh.

Desire will lead to sin, and sin will lead to devastation in your life.

And if you are willing to deny yourself, if you are willing to suffer for Christ, the promise that everyone who has ever in a season of their life taken up Jesus' challenge on this can tell you is the reward that far and eternally outweighs the cost.

And so as we come to the conclusion of our message, like we do every week, I want to give you a little bit of space for reflection, a little bit of time for application.

So I'm gonna ask across our venues, right where you're at, just to bow your head and to close your eyes.

We come here to get honest and open and allow God to work in our lives.

So let me ask you some questions.

What would it look like for you to begin to deny your improper desires?

I'm gonna venture a guess that for many of you, the ungodly desires that you are consistently giving into are not all that hidden from you.

In fact, I would guess that for many of you, you already have it in mind.

Perhaps there are blind spots in your life, and you can ask the Holy Spirit, what are the improper desires that I'm struggling with?

God is good, He wants you to flourish.

Over time, I believe the Holy Spirit will reveal those things to you.

What would it look like to deny yourself?

What desires have you allowed to reign unchecked in your life?

Even in this moment, you could ask Jesus to help you, to give you the power.

It is an empowering reality to know that these sins that keep you stuck, they are rooted in something deeper.

They are rooted internally, they're rooted in your desires, and you can go to war today with your desires.

You can begin to do the work of self-denial and walking in the ways of Christ.

And by doing so, you can live an unimaginable life.

For some of you, you have yet to take the first step.

The way that we turn our attention away from improper desires is by filling that with desire for God.

Your first step is coming into relationship with God.

And scripture makes it very clear that the way you come into relationship with God is not by work, it is not through your own effort, it is not by attaining a certain moral or ethical status.

The way you come into relationship with God is through faith in Jesus Christ.

God loved you so much that he gave his son Jesus that everyone who puts their faith in him will not die, but will live forever with God.

That is a promise in Scripture.

All it requires is you consciously, in a moment of time, deciding that Jesus is your only hope for this life and for your eternal life.

By putting your faith in who Jesus is and what he has done, you are given eternal life.

Your sins, all of them, past, present, and future, are forgiven.

And you are, scripture says, adopted back into the family of God.

And so if you're here at any of our venues today, I want to give you the opportunity to do that.

So with everyone's eyes closed, if you're here and you are ready to put your faith in Jesus for the first time, I want to ask you for a moment of courage to just lift your hand up in the air, right where you're sitting.

And by raising your hand, you're acknowledging your decision to put your faith in Jesus.

Amen.

I want you to know that God sees and accepts your faith.

We can say that with confidence because of his word, that your sins are forgiven, that you've been given eternal life, a gift that no one and nothing can ever take away from you.

And that you, in this moment, have been adopted back into the family of God forever.

Here's what I want to do for those who raised a hand across our venues, I want to help you acknowledge this moment through a very simple prayer.

I'm gonna ask you to pray this prayer repeating after me, and I'm gonna ask all the believers across our venues to pray this with us as well.

Let's pray like this.

Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I believe you are God that you died for my sins and rose from the grave.

I thank you for loving me and forgiving my sins.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast, you can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps, you can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.