"Understanding the Truth of Freedom” - Pastor Greg Addison - Oct. 29, 2023

Ministering to the heart of Western Arkansas's River Valley for over 165 years, welcome to Chapter and First, the Bible Teaching Ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church.

You'll find sermons and teachings from Pastor Greg, our ministry staff, and guest speakers.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you, choir and praise team.

Jessica and Jacob, man, that it is good to be home to come and worship like that.

It is great to be here.

If you have your Bibles, turn with me to John chapter 8.

John 8 · chapter mention

And I'm going to apologize for using uh notes so much today.

You don't know I normally don't do that, but I am battling a uh sinus infection and all of that.

So if I break out in the sneezing fit or if I cough up a lung, y'all just give me a moment and I'll be all right, okay?

And we'll work our way through that.

I want to talk to you today about understanding the truth of freedom.

And freedom is a word that is near and dear to us because it is a Bible word and a biblical concept, a deeply biblical concept.

Um, in the line in that last song, uh, which explains the gospel as clearly as any preacher could, there is the line in there that comes from Scripture and a picture that is replete through Scripture of breaking the bonds of chain and bonds and chains of sin to make us free.

Free is a word that is used a lot in the culture of our country.

Janet and I spent the last ten days traveling through New England and in what many would call uh one of the cradles of freedom and American democracy.

And so all of the historic sites we went to and all of that remind you of that.

But in the middle of that, you also have a lot of conversations that show that the word freedom has a lot of different concepts attached to it.

Let me illustrate this way.

I have a preacher friend I used to do ministry with, and he tells a story about going to visit some prisoners in a prison in Louisiana, and it was a very hardcore prison, and they spent some time going to death row.

And as they walked with the chaplain and the warden of the prison down death row, they stopped in front of a very large man who was there on death row.

He'd been there for a long period of time.

And so my pastor friend stopped to talk to him.

He wanted to shake hands with him, and this big hulking man reached through the bars and grabbed my pastor friend by the shoulders and gave him as good of a hug as he could in that setting.

And he said, Pastor, I want to thank you for coming here today.

He said, I don't want you to spend a lot of time with me.

He said, I'm guilty.

I know what I did, and I need to pay the price, but I also want you to know in here I met Jesus.

And I may be in this cell, but I'm a free man.

I'm free in Jesus.

And he said, these other men, they need to hear how they can be free.

So don't spend a lot of time with me.

I want you to go talk to them.

You see, freedom is a very deep concept.

And it goes beyond some of the simple discussions that we have in our culture today.

But it's important that we take time to understand these concepts and be able to pass them through a biblical lens.

Because it is such a common discussion and concept in church life, and it's such a common discussion and concept in our society life, often those definitions get passed over and moved through.

Often we take pieces of history and things that we understand them to be, and we formulate them, and they're not necessarily the way they even were then, or what we were taught.

Janet and I visited one place that was a village that represented the first pilgrim village outside of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

And we were laughing.

It's like, man, we didn't remember all this because we studied this in third grade.

I heard one guy say, basically, what we remember were the pilgrims landed on a rock.

They wore funny hats and big collars.

They had buckles on their shoes, and they needed the Indians to feed them at Thanksgiving.

And he said, That's about what we remember.

Right?

But there's a whole lot more rich history and complicated history in that.

We went to a um uh a monument that was built there by the people of Massachusetts, or some people in Massachusetts, that honored the decision and the process that the pilgrims used to leave to find the freedom to worship the way they felt God had led them to worship and Scripture taught them to worship.

And at the top of the statue is the Statue of Liberty.

And then there are pieces around the statue that speak about their philosophy of how that of how that became.

For example, we are uh going to monuments that are representing the units of the Union Army who gave their lives to free slaves and to end slavery in America.

We went to the home and saw places where people in the north refused to be abolitionists because they did business with the cotton plants and the cotton farms in the South, and they needed that price to be small, below, so they would have a profit margin as they shipped that around the world as vendors.

And so they didn't have slaves, but they dealt with slaves and they dealt with slave-holding people.

We went by the uh city of Salem, which is famous for the Salem witch trials.

And in October, I understand, there were a hundred thousand tourists in Salem.

Because of that, we stayed away from that.

I don't want to stand in a restaurant line that long on my vacation.

You know what I'm saying?

Uh but what we learned about the pilgrims is they came for religious freedom, but when they got here, they didn't think anybody else ought to be able to worship the way they wanted to because the pilgrims had the right idea.

And the pilgrims actually were the instigators of what ended up becoming the Salem Witch Trials.

We spent some time in touring the city of Boston and traveled around Harvard.

Harvard University started as a seminary and was one of the cradles of theological thought and training that led to the men who preached the gospel that brought about the first and the second great awakenings.

And while we are in Boston, in the very time that we are there, the administration of Harvard University is having to deal with the fact that they have students who are protesting the nation of Israel and are standing up for Hamas and all the murders that they did, and they're dealing with all of that deal in the very campus where the preachers were trained who preached the gospel and saw the Great Awakening.

When you get in a setting like that and you are confronted with all of these different movements and varying degrees, and everybody trying to cloak everything in the language of freedom, you understand that we have an issue that we need to properly define what freedom is.

As we traveled around that area, there are churches everywhere.

We went to an event at the Roger Williams Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island.

And Roger Williams was one of the founders of what we now refer ourselves to as Baptists, right?

There are churches everywhere.

And yet now we drove past churches that were flying rainbow flags and all of that sort of stuff and had moved away from the gospel.

In fact, as Janet and I were leaving, we were talking about just our experiences, and she said, What really strikes you in the New England area is with all of these indicators of faith and of Jesus and of the gospel culturally that there is just an absence of God.

There's just an absence of God.

It's not there.

They don't talk about it.

It doesn't exist.

They have other language that they describe and discuss.

Now, as I walk through this message with you, we're going to anchor it in Scripture, and clearly I can't cover some of the concepts of this in just one 35-minute message.

I can't cover all their books and books and articles and all of that written.

But I think as I we traveled and as I we were processing all of that, and I would have my quiet times and talk to the Lord at various times.

We're moving into election.

We have a lot of things going on.

We're praying for Israel.

We're watching all these arguments, all these things are happening around us, and everyone is using language, and we need to define them and learn to understand them from a biblical perspective.

We need to learn to view history from a biblical perspective.

And so I just want to take a few minutes to anchor us in the truth of freedom, and I've called it that because of what Jesus says in this passage of Scripture.

Read with me in John chapter 8, verse 21.

John 8:21

Then Jesus said to them again, I'm going away.

You will look for me, and you will die in your sin.

Where I'm going, you cannot come.

Now, obviously, this is confusing to them and a very, very strong statement.

So the Jews said again, He won't kill himself, will he?

Since he says, Where I'm going, you cannot come.

They don't understand what all that means.

He says, You are from below, and I am from above.

You are of this world, and I am not of this world.

That's why I told you that you will die in your sins, for if you do not believe that I am He, and now He's referring to the Messiah, you will die in your sin.

Who are you, they question?

Precisely what I've been telling you from the very beginning, Jesus told them.

Just as the Father taught me, I say these things, the one who has sent me is with me.

He has not left me alone, because I always do what he pleases.

As he was saying these things, many believed in him.

So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, If you continue in my word, you really are my disciples.

You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

We are descendants of Abraham, they answered him, and we have never been enslaved to anyone.

How can you say you will become free?

Now that is an interesting question right there.

Here they are asking that, and we're about to go into Passover, which represented when God brought them out of the bondage and slavery of Egypt in the Old Testament.

Now, in their generation, they hadn't necessarily been enslaved in that sense that we would think of slaves, but they're standing in the middle of a nation that has been conquered and occupied by Rome, and they are a conquered people.

And so it is clear that when we bring our perspective to this question of freedom, we need some definition of what it means.

I mean, they're asking a question that's basically nonsensical given the history and the current state of Israel at that time.

And we ask these questions now.

And we have the same struggles over what is freedom and what does it mean and all of that.

And so Jesus says to them, I assure you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.

A slave does not remain in the household forever, but a son does remain forever.

Therefore, if the son sets you free, you will really be free.

Or you may have heard it in the King James Version that I really like that says, if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.

And so Jesus gives us the truth to understand what true freedom is.

So, first, point number one, let me give you a definition of freedom.

We must properly understand it.

When this language happens and when people use it, we must process it through a biblical worldview and understand what freedom is.

First, let me tell you what freedom is not.

Freedom is not unlimited choices without restraint or consequences.

That is not freedom.

In fact, that does not exist.

It is a concept that does not actually exist in reality.

You cannot do whatever you want to do and expect it not to have an effect.

Pastor Our group grew up, used to say all the time, people sow their wild oats during the week and they come to church on Sunday and pray for crop failure.

Like we act like they're not consequences to whatever we do.

Just unlimited, I can do whatever I want to do and do whatever I think I want to do, there is no such thing as that that exists.

Look at what Jesus says very clearly.

If you commit sin, you are a slave to sin.

When he says, You shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

You have to be set free from something, and you have to be set free from captivity, from restraint.

And so clearly that going doing whatever we want to do comes from the broken heart of sin.

It comes from the human desire to be selfish and do what we want to do.

And that's why Jesus says if you are in the condition of being a sinner and the truth has not set you free, you are captive to that sin.

Sin is driven by selfishness, and its destination is always bondage that drives it deeper into bondage in a way that it can never be fulfilled.

So, what is freedom?

Well, here's my attempt.

When you go look up freedom in dictionaries, you get all kinds of weird answers.

It proves the point that people are struggling trying to find a definition.

And as Jesus said, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

Outside of the truth, you cannot find an accurate definition of freedom.

And this is my best attempt to create a definition of freedom.

It is the condition in which you are liberated from coercion or bondage to fundamentally choose to pursue God and his design for what is right, just, and good.

Let me give that to you again.

It is the condition in which you are liberated from coercion or bondage to intentionally choose to pursue God and his design for what is right, just, and good.

History throughout the ages of every culture, of every nation, of every tongue, of every people group, in every epoch of time on every continent, there is always the pursuit for the creator.

There is always the existential question of what happens after I die.

There is always the desire to figure out how we create a culture and a family in the setting in which we are in.

And in the midst of all of that is the existence of religion, which is the pursuit of who is God.

We were created to walk in relationship with the Lord and to flourish under his hand and guidance as we pursue what he defines as just, right, and good.

And when we sinned, we broke that relationship and we prohibited ourselves from being able to accomplish the purpose that he created for us.

We were broken by sin.

His desire for us is to walk in relationship with him.

That's why he created us free to worship him and created worship.

And his desire is for human flourishing.

He wants us to experience the blessings of being his children.

That's why he put them in the Garden of Eden and not in Mississippi somewhere.

That was a joke, y'all.

There are more of y'all here from Mississippi than I thought this morning.

That's why he put them in the Garden of Eden.

And when sin broke us and separated us from God and separated us from that place, we began this search, and that search has always existed, and you cannot define freedom outside of breaking the bonds of sin and freeing the human heart to pursue who God is, find out exactly who he is through truth, and walk with him.

In our efforts as humans, we flourish when we pursue what God's design of just right and good is.

And when we are not doing that, what we are led to is frustration and difficulty and bondage and more consequences of sin.

Read the book of Ecclesiastes.

That is the theme of the entire book.

You can pursue power, wealth, pleasure, fun, me, whatever it is, and the end is always destruction.

In a famous sermon called Payday Someday that Dr.

R.

G.

Leaves to preach, he used to say this the devil always pays in counterfeit money.

And when you pursue the wrong things, it never ends up in a good place.

So that's the first thing.

We must define freedom.

Second, there must be a standard of actual, absolute truth in order to determine what is right, just, and good.

We live in a culture today where everybody says, we're right and you're wrong.

We're right and you're wrong.

We now live in a culture that people are free to say, you're right, you're wrong, I'm right, now I'm going to cancel you, or you're going to be eradicated from public life or discussion or any other kind of a thing, and we have this battle.

So who is accurate?

Who knows what is proper?

Jesus said very clearly, you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

How can Jesus say in verse 21, you will die in your sin?

How can Jesus say in verse 24, I told you, you will die in your sins?

Because Jesus is the truth, the way, and the life.

And no one comes to the Father but by Him.

Jesus makes very clearly in verse 25 and on, he says, Um, the one who sent me is true, and what I have heard from him, these are the things that I tell the world.

He is telling them, I am telling you what God says.

There is an absolute clear truth, and this is the only way that you can understand.

These matters.

And the only way that you can be free from the slavery and the bondage and the penalty and the consequences of sin is for you to trust in Jesus Himself, he's saying, as the Savior.

There has to be a definition.

Otherwise, if there is not a definition of truth, which our culture has now worked to try to eradicate truth, then how do we know what's true?

How do we know what right trumps what right?

How can we refer to the freedom of choice as my right when I'm destroying a life and eliminating all rights of another human being?

We end up in these weird arguments in our culture.

We end up in these weird arguments like parents are not allowed to know in a school system if a child has an identity issue, question, or problem, unless we're going to allow that parent to take that child to the doctor and have destructive hormones, or even worse, a neutering surgery.

Who's free?

Where's the freedom in any of that?

We talk about in our culture things like gambling is a big deal, and nobody talks about that anymore.

But listen to what I'm saying.

The aberrant ideas that we end up in because we do not have a definition that comes from God of what's right.

We have the lottery in Arkansas in a number of states.

It's the dumbest idea that's ever come out of any legislator.

There has never been a lottery that ever positively affected the number of people that went to college in any positive way.

It is statistically proven in every state that it is the most regressive tax system that possibly exists in any of our ways that we do economy in the in the American culture.

And we have ended up creating a system where the least sophisticated people in the lowest economic brackets are buying them based on some hope that they can score and then be free because they don't have to worry about money issues anymore, to send middle class and upper class kids to college.

How's that free?

How's that free?

Even we have universities that say we have free education based on the lottery deal.

It's not free.

It's not free.

And then that creates a validation of culture.

So now, in a relatively short period of time, we have gone into this whole gambling on the NFL and all this kind of stuff, and you're inundated with all those apps.

And it hasn't taken very long.

If you will notice, fellas, when you watch football games this afternoon, people are having to create commercials to warn you about the danger of being addicted to gambling because you have that sports app on your phone.

How can something be right and how is it free for us to gamble if it is by nature an addictive behavior?

And we create that logic because of things like alcohol.

Alcohol is incredibly addictive.

It is incredibly destructive.

And freedom is not the ability to ingest something that takes away your faculties to such you can kill someone on the road.

And then those companies are spending millions of dollars to advertise, please don't drink our product because you have to drive home.

And we validated that in our culture.

We validated it in gambling, we validated it in that, but now you get to the political deal where you go to marijuana.

Marijuana is more addictive and has a greater impact on reducing your faculties.

But have you ever seen any of the marijuana companies advertise don't use our product?

Why?

Because then you won't vote for it if they advertise that.

And we end up in these discussions in our culture that make absolutely no sense.

There is no logic in them whatsoever.

And people are being destroyed on this end of it, and people who want to reap the benefits of it on this end are claiming this is freedom and the government accounts, and all that kind of stuff, because no one has a sense of the truth.

And the truth is we were created to worship God.

And his design defines what is just, right, and good.

And when we are not followers of his, and as Jesus says, we are not continuing in his word as his disciples, then we do not know the truth.

And because we are unanchored from the truth, none of our logic makes sense.

And it lands on the heads of people in all kinds of walks of life.

And it creates bondage in devastating ways in our culture.

And so we've got to understand as believers, when we are hearing these arguments, when we are having these discussions, when we are teaching our kids, you cannot define freedom without the biblical definition and understanding of what it is.

Number three.

Freedom is necessarily not absolute.

And it is limited by the reality of truth as defined by Scripture.

Freedom is not absolute.

It is never absolute.

Jesus makes it very clear, you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.

But what are you freed from?

First of all, you're freed from the bondage of sin.

So if Jesus hadn't freed you, you are a captive to sin.

But if Jesus frees you, then what are you free?

What does freedom mean for us?

Well, if you continue in his word, you are really his disciples.

You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

What are we set free to?

We are set free to be slaves of Jesus Christ.

And you're going to be a slave to something.

There are consequences, there are actions, there are responsibilities, and so freedom is never absolute.

It is necessarily limited.

Your life as a Christian is a life that is spent in obligation and surrender to everything and everybody.

Listen to what the Bible says in Ephesians chapter 5.

Ephesians 5 · chapter mention

It begins this way, and it says that you are to imitate me as I follow the Father.

So your life is to be an imitation of Jesus.

That's what he says when he says, if you continue in my word, you're my disciples.

We are set free to follow him.

And then he says, in that process, that you are to be surrendered to the Holy Spirit.

So I am surrendered to the image of Jesus, and I am surrendered to have to follow him and do what he does and not what I want to do.

And then I am surrendered to the Holy Spirit and the leadership and guidance of the Holy Spirit.

And then it says, under my surrendered life, walking in imitation of Jesus, and under my surrender to the Holy Spirit, I am then surrendered to the body of Christ.

And so every person out here, I am your servant.

And you are servant to everyone here.

Jesus said, A command, new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you.

And Jesus loved us by dying for us.

And so the command on you is that you are obligated to die for the people who are your brothers and sisters in Christ.

Then he says, Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands as to the Lord.

Husbands, he says, husbands, you are to love your wives as Christ loved the church, and gave himself for the church, and so you're supposed to die on the cross for your wives.

Then it says, children, obey your parents, and you are in submission to your parents, just like you are in submission to the authorities in the church.

And then he tells parents, listen, you are to love your children in such a way that you do not create rage and stress and frustration and rebellion in their lives.

You are to be submitted in the time and effort and the amount of effort and prayer and everything else that you put in raising your children to walk with the Lord.

We talked about that for a long time.

And then he tells this employees or slaves or servants or whatever person would be in an economic condition in that time.

He says, you are to be submitted to your masters.

So quit talking about your boss at work and submit to your boss at work.

And then he says, if you're a boss, if you're a master, you are to treat your employees or your slaves or your servants or whatever condition they are in, you are to treat them as a brother and sister in Christ.

You are not free as a Christian to do what you want to do, and you do not have rights as a believer.

You gave up all your rights when you surrendered your life to Jesus.

Jesus says, if you continue in my word, you are really my disciples.

What freedom does is it frees us to follow Jesus.

It frees us from sin that would keep us from following Jesus, and it frees us to follow Jesus because the bonds of that sin are broken.

And now I can be surrendered to Him.

I can walk in relationship with Him according to His definition of what that relationship looks like.

And now I can pursue His design for what is just good and right.

And I have to follow Him.

It's clear, you see it all throughout Scripture.

If you just go home and spend a little time with your Thoris, or as my son-in-law would say, give it a goog, the biblical reference of freedom or liberty.

And you see how many times Scripture tells you you are free in Christ, but never use your liberty to harm someone else.

We are in submission to each other.

You are not free in the worldly definition of you can do what you want to do without restraint or consequence.

Freedom always has restraint.

We live a surrendered life.

And because of that, number four, freedom is a function of personal responsibility to obey what is true.

Freedom is a function of personal responsibility to obey what is true.

Jesus makes it clear as he shares the gospel.

He says, I am who I've been telling you all along I am, and that is I am the Messiah.

I am the sacrifice.

Verse 28, when you lift up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am He, and that I do nothing on my own.

And the one who sent me is with me, and He has not left me alone because I will always do what pleases Him.

In other words, when I go to the cross, you're going to see and understand why I went to the cross.

And when I am raised from the dead, you're going to see that God has not left me and that he has created a means of salvation, that I am the Savior.

And then he says, if you continue in my word, you are really my disciples.

You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

You must know the truth, you must understand the truth, you must continue in the truth, and you must be obedient and surrendered to the truth.

Freedom and personal responsibility can never be disconnected.

That's why we teach our children that there are consequences to bad choices.

All throughout Scripture, you see the theme of choices in Scripture.

And when you choose to obey the Lord, there is a blessing.

And when you choose to disobey the Lord, there is a consequence to that.

Freedom is always limited and connected, and it is at two limits that we must obey under the teaching of truth.

That's why we know there is no salvation outside of Jesus taking personal responsibility to come down and die on the cross for our sins.

We cannot be saved without taking personal responsibility for I am a sinner.

I must repent of my sin.

No one can do that for me.

And I surrender my life to Jesus.

Now my freedom, I'm free from the bonds of sin and the struggles of sin, but I am free to serve the Lord, to imitate him, to be surrendered to the Holy Spirit, to have the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and then to serve as Jesus served.

And advance the gospel as Jesus advanced the gospel.

Even Jesus makes it clear.

He only speaks what God tells him to speak.

He models surrender and following the Lord with perfection, righteousness, and holiness.

And then that isn't at an individual level.

That's why society and laws and all of that can never fix the issues.

It can hold accountable, it can point to things, it can support a social contract and construct in our culture where there is a freedom to preach the gospel like this and share Jesus and people to pursue what is true and find out, but it never fixes the human heart.

Liberal definitions of we need to be free from systemic this and systemic that and the police and all this other kind of stuff, all that happens is sin abounds more.

When you remove restraint, sin abounds.

The Bible says that in the book of Proverbs.

But here's what happens: you never get rid of the need for those restraints because nothing changes the human heart except salvation in Jesus Christ.

And so it can't fix that.

And freedom doesn't fix that.

The only true definition of freedom is I am in the condition where I am free from something that would coerce me or force me to follow sin because I've been saved by Jesus, and now I am free to walk in relationship with Him, pursue Him, and to pursue His design for what is just right and good.

You see that at society level, you see it at a government level.

So why does it matter to us?

First is what I just said the gospel is the only thing that frees individual from the bondage of sin to true freedom.

True freedom is the ability without restraint to pursue the relationship with God and his design for what is just, good, and right.

Now here's what's awesome about this.

Just think about this just for a second.

I don't want to chase this rabbit too long, but listen to this.

When we think about government and we think about society and philosophy and all that, none of that frees anybody.

I hear my conservative brothers, and I'm conservative as you can get, all right?

Politically and all that.

And there is truth to this.

In nations or cultures that have a Judeo-Christian ethic, that teach things like freedom and responsibility and all of that, and they allow a freedom of religion, and so people are more free to pursue and find out who God is, and through the gospel they become saved and more of that.

They talk about, well, we, you know, our nation built on freedom and all this, and our structure of government and freedom and religion and all that, and there's more human flourishing and capitalistic Judeo-Christian and all, and that's all true.

Right?

It's all true.

It's all true.

But I want to refer you to the nation of China.

There is no one free in a society sense or a government sense in China.

But they tell us there are over 50,000 people a day who are being saved in China.

There's rampant revival in Islamic nations under Shia rule that we don't hear about because the wall is closed between us and them, but there is revival moving throughout Islamic nations.

Government does not create freedom.

Only the gospel does.

Now, praise the Lord that nobody's going to put me in jail for preaching this sermon today.

I would much rather go out to eat after church, right?

But we've got to understand and in our minds grapple with the fact that it is only the gospel that creates freedom.

And that creates certain things for us.

Parents, you must teach your children in line with the biblical principles that we discussed to walk with Jesus.

And a part of that is you help them understand the principles of freedom and personal responsibility.

They must understand what sin is, and they must understand that I've given you that responsibility because your character has risen to that level.

And when your character does not rise to that level of personal restraint and obeying what's true, then your freedoms are restricted because that is the scriptural reality of what happens with sin and judgment.

And so you've got to teach your children, have them exercise freedom.

Give them more when they show their character to be pursuing God's design of what's just, right, and true.

And you've got to pull it back when they are violating.

We've got to help them understand these principles that are scriptural so they can understand how to walk with Jesus.

Number three, we must learn to filter these philosophical discussions much more clearly from a biblical perspective.

It's true when we're dealing with things like cancel culture.

It's true when we're dealing with things like politics, and we're moving from, you know, moving into a heavy political deal, and there's all kinds of conversations, and people are all kinds of stuff.

And listen, like I get it, if you want to go talk about politics, come see me this week.

We'll have coffee and I'll give all you that you want.

I have opinions about everything.

But here's what it doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

And no party is ever going to bring revival in America.

That's not where it's going to come from.

And so we've got to understand when we talk about freedom, what does that mean?

And we've got to address it in an appropriate way.

And then we've got to filter it because we are being inundated with this language from everyone.

Everyone is trying to say, this is what freedom is, this is what freedom is, this is what freedom is, and the word has now lost its meaning.

It only means what that person thinks it means.

Or it only means their freedom of their point of view, not yours.

And so we have got to learn to filter from a biblical perspective.

As Jesus said, continue in his word, know the truth.

And then finally, we must prioritize the advance of the gospel above all.

Because it is only the gospel that frees.

Individually, you must work your love list.

You must have those three people that you're praying for.

You must be faithful to pray for them to be saved.

Be faithful to invite them to church.

Be faithful to pray for God to open an opportunity for sharing your testimony.

Where God has planted you, you must cover it in prayer and open opportunities to share the gospel.

We must be soul winners individually.

It is the only hope.

As a church, we're going to start working on ways to pray more systematically for spiritual awakening, for revival to break out in our country.

Number two, we're going to continue to build on the community missions process that we've developed.

You think about the work we're doing in the BCMs in our school system, our Crisis Pregnancy Center.

We're going to continue to grow and move forward in those.

And every opportunity we have to step in and to show the love of Jesus, we're going to do that as a church.

And it's going to take all of us to do that.

There will be more opportunities that are created in our community.

For example, when the air base opens with the F-35s, and we have people from all over the world come here, and we have military personnel, and we have general dynamics people and everybody else who move here.

And we talk about the impact of that.

And praise the Lord, all our house values are going to go up.

Yay! But God's bringing us a bunch of folks that we have the opportunity to share Jesus with.

And that's what we need to be focused on.

And finally, we need to be focused on missions where we can be most effective.

Praise the Lord for you as a church.

You've helped us film, translate that film into another language where people can see and understand the truth of Jesus in their heart language.

And praise the Lord for our men who are going, and praise the Lord for many of you who've given to help make that happen.

Thank you for how you give to missions, gave to Dixie Jackson.

Thank you for those things that we're doing.

And let's continue to press forward.

Because freedom only comes when they know the truth of Jesus.

We pray this message has been a blessing to you and helped to strengthen your walk with Jesus.

Please know we want to minister to you and pray for you.

Send an email to contact us at fsfbc.org and let us pray for you and help you in any way we can.

Thank you for listening to Chapter and First, the Bible Teaching Ministry of Fort Smith's First Baptist Church.