Transcript

Let’s go to the old part of the book, Psalm 133. I will ask your forgiveness for not continuing this morning’s message. It just wasn’t working. I want to work on it some more before I finish the rest of it and this was already ready so if you came to hear the rest of this morning and can’t come next Sunday morning, we will gladly get you a copy if you’d just give the secretary at the church office an address or an email address, we’ll make sure you get that and I ask your forgiveness again for speaking before I knew what I was talking about this morning. I didn’t know that I wasn’t going to get through with all of it and it just wasn’t together. As a matter of fact, this next section of Luke where the Lord through the person of Abraham speaks to the rich man in torment and says, “You know, nobody’s going to rise from the dead and be able to convince your brothers not to come here. If they will not hear Moses and the prophets, they will not repent even if someone is raised from the dead.” That’s a powerful truth about the importance and the foundation of God’s ordained means of the word of God being the instrument God uses to convince and convict men’s hearts. And we have so much in our culture about creative stuff, unique stuff, new stuff, culturally relevant stuff to package the Gospel so that we can get men saved. Wouldn’t it be dreadful if you went to heaven and said, “Well, a lot of my family went to hell because my pastor wasn’t witty, creative and culturally relevant as the other pastor.” You see God’s wisdom in making it the preaching of the word because you can do that in the jungle of Papua, New Guinea or in the metropolis of New York City. There is one means God has primarily ordained and that’s his word for the conviction of sin and bringing about repentance and faith and if you want your family saved, you get your family under the preaching of the word of God. As a matter of fact, though I want to be careful and balanced, not too harsh, a lot of other stuff that’s going on in church services…I saw, somebody in my family showed me a picture of a church in town that had set up their whole, it’s not a pulpit and a platform anymore, they’re stages now because they’re putting on shows. And the whole stage was set up like the set of the animated program “Frozen” that you know our kids love so much and somehow that supposed to help the Gospel. Poor Jesus, you know, you just feel like, “What are we doing when we’re putting all of these trappings as if Christ is not glorious and beautiful and powerful as he is that we have to help him out.”

Well, I’ve just preached part of the message, haven’t I? But we want to look at some of that without being too harsh because we don’t want to say that any and all creative things, our media effects, are always wrong but I think you’ve got to be very, very careful.

Because you do understand theater was a great and big attraction in the day the Scriptures were written, especially in places like Corinth and Athens and Rome. So it was there and if that was a vital part of “getting people convinced,” the Apostle Paul or Christ, somebody would have said, “Hey, make sure you use all this stuff.” I can’t even begin to comprehend that our Lord would make your soul and your family’s eternal souls dependent upon the media and artistic ability of your church staff. Amen? It’s the word of God and if God is not going to save them with the truth of the word of God, he’s not going to save them and that’s why we have so many people experiencing a lot of things, being illumined, being excited, being stirred, being emotionally overwhelmed but not spiritually converted.

Well, let’s look at Psalm 133. What a powerful picture this is and what a glorious picture this is as the Psalmist writes one of those Psalms of ascent. This is a Psalm they would sing as they traveled out of captivity back into Jerusalem and they are looking forward to the great fellowship and the great oneness they are going to enjoy with the people of God. But there are powerful portraits of Christ and of Christian unity here that are very instructive and practically instructive for us today.

Verse 1, “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is For brothers to dwell together in unity!” Now, here’s what’s interesting: he goes from this statement of unity to what he’s going to say in verses 2 and 3. “It is like the precious oil upon the head, Coming down upon the beard, Even Aaron’s beard, Coming down upon the edge of his robes.” Now, in just a casual look at that, what does this glorious statement about the pleasantness of unity in the body of Christ have to do with Aaron having oil running all over him? Well, a whole lot and we’re going to look at that. Verse 3, “It is like the dew of Hermon Coming down upon the mountains of Zion; For there the LORD commanded the blessing – life forever.”

So I want to talk about this precious unity God has given us as his children. It’s an old adage and I hope it’s not a too overused adage that you can take 2 cats and tie their tails together and throw them over a clothes line and you have togetherness but you’re not going to have unity. So often in the church today, we have the notion of, “Well, let us don’t do that because that will disrupt the unity. Now pastor, don’t preach that, that’s going to hurt the unity of the church.” We have in our journey of reforming the church hopefully to better and healthier church life, have had numerous people through the years who have said, “That’s upsetting So-and-so and that’s upsetting So-and-so,” and there’s all these notions about how we can keep the unity. There is a real sense in which we don’t keep it, God keeps it and let’s delve into this a little bit further.

These pilgrims, of course, in the cultural context here, they are heading to Jerusalem and they are thinking about the glorious unity they’re looking forward to having with the people of God and particularly or primarily the great feast and celebrations God had ordained for the Jews to celebrate together. Now I. in our outline from verse 2, let’s look at the provision of unity. The provision of unity. Now, the reason I think you have Aaron pictured here and talked about here so prominently when he says, “This unity is like the oil that comes down upon Aaron’s head and down across his beard and across his garment and even down to the hem of his garment.” Well, Aaron was, of course, the first high priest and in Jewish cultural, spiritual, religious, political life, Aaron was the center of it all. He was the centerpiece as the high priest of the nation of Israel and the priests were always anointed with oil. But it’s interesting, the Old Testament pictures more of a sprinkling of oil when you find the narratives that give the actual descriptions and this is clearly a heavier, a more copious amount of oil. It’s poured upon himself.

Now, it’s interesting that Numbers 3:3 calls Aaron the anointed and I think what we get from that as we have with all the great pictures of Christ in the Old Testament and that is that Aaron is a picture, a type, if you will, of Christ. He’s a foreshadow of what and who Christ was and I think what we have here is this description of the precious oil coming down on Aaron is a picture of the unique and full anointing of the Father on Jesus Christ. Aaron was a fallen sinner just like we all are yet he portrayed Christ. Now, we have all kinds of Old Testament typologies. For example, Moses was a type of Christ in that he was the person used to write the first 5 books of the Bible. He was the prophet speaking for God. Jesus is the ultimate prophet who speaks for God. Moses was a type, Christ is the anti-type of the true prophet. Aaron of course here, he’s the priest of God, the first high priest and he is a type of how Christ is the high priest, the only one who can bridge the gap between God and man and give us union and fellowship with God. Then of course, you have King David, another type of Christ. As Christ is King, David typified how Christ would be King and that’s why as we studied through Isaiah around Christmas, we saw how God promised that Jesus would come and sit upon the throne of his father David. David came and ruled as King but he was only foreshadowing the great kingdom that Christ would rule over, by the way, which will never, never, ever fade away. David’s faded away but Christ’s will not.

So the Old Testament just is abundant with pictures and types of Jesus Christ and Jesus, as you know, his name means, his title means, “the anointed one.” He is Jesus Christ, God’s anointed. This is truly a picture of Jesus Christ. Acts 10:38 reminds us that, “God anointed Him with the Holy Spirit and with power.” So you have this interesting package, if you will, or parallel statements here: one is about the pleasantness and the wonder and the goodness of unity and then you have this statement about the great anointing of Jesus Christ who typified, of course, through Aaron. Well, the point is this: true unity and union in the body of Christ is through Jesus Christ. Now, don’t just, well we all kind of hear that, “Oh yeah, we know that. We understand that.” No, we don’t know it and understand it like we ought to. You have to be one of Christ’s. In other words, you can’t just walk into a church and just say, “I’m going to discipline myself and commit myself. I’m going to be cooperative. I’m going to be humble. I’m going to be yielded. I’m going to be sweet. I’m going to give forbearance to others. I’m going to keep the unity and the union of this church.” By the way, that’s a great attitude to have but you just can’t do that in your strength. It is Christ in you that enables you to be in union and in unity with others in God’s church.

Now, let’s look at this. First of all, we see that the oil was poured upon Aaron’s head. The great anointing of the head of Christ speaks of his majesty and we know he is the high and exalted one. He is the majestic one. The Bible says he sits at the right hand of the majesty on high. Christ’s position is the glorious position, the most glorious position that there is. Now, the church is the body of Christ and there is nothing on this earth that can change the fact that his body has an anointed and glorious head and majestic head in heaven. I think that’s a wonderful thing to think on that you are inseparably connected to Christ. As a matter of fact, the phrase the Apostle Paul uses over and over again to talk about who we are is the phrase “you are in Christ.” You are in Christ, you have a union in Christ and if you are going to have unity one to one another in the church, each individual person must have union with Christ. That’s why there’s such clear biblical qualification for church membership and church elders, primarily the church body generally but the church elders primarily, are commanded in Scripture to guard membership. Now why is that? Because you’ve got to make sure those that get into his body are those he has added to his body. In the book of Acts as people were getting saved, the Bible says, “And the Lord was adding to the church.” I mean, in the book of Acts, you do not have pastors doing all kinds of fanciful things to get people interested in becoming church members. As a matter of fact, it was right the opposite. It was almost like, “Join us and suffer. Join us, people hate us. Join us, people are running us out of our homes and we’re losing our jobs and some of us are going to prison. Join us.” What’s the point? But when God’s Spirit worked, men were convicted of their sin, they were made deeply aware of their great wanting before God, they put their faith in Christ as their only hope of forgiveness and cleansing and they were reborn in their spirit and with a new reborn spirit, their unity was naturally there and all of those with a new reborn spirit are drawn one to another.

Well, I’m probably getting a little bit ahead of myself here but let’s go to the second thought here on this picture of Aaron being a type of Christ: not only does the oil on Aaron’s head speak of his majesty, the oil running down then upon his beard, the Scripture says, speaks of his manliness. Christ was able to save us, make us his, make us partakers of the Holy Spirit because he didn’t just remain God. Let me say, he did remain God but while he remained God, he also became man. He was 100% man as if he were not God at all and at the same time, he was 100% God as if he were not man at all. Theologians often just say he was the God-man. There is only one of those in all the universe, ever will be, ever has been. Jesus is the God-man.

As a matter of fact, I’m convinced he was man’s man and he was God’s man. Strong men like Peter and James and John, men who worked with their hands, men who were obviously very strong in their bodies and rugged in their demeanors were attracted to Jesus. They saw something in him that appealed and, of course, to be a carpenter in this day was not a job for weaklings or a job for men who were effeminate and weak in spirit. I mean, it was a rugged job and a difficult job. He was a man but I’m convinced he was a man’s man. Women. Women like Mary Magdalene and Mary of Bethany showed great honor and respect to him. He gained the respect of men. He gained the respect of women. Then the Bible tells us that children clung to him. He was so attractive to the children that the disciples at times would try to shoo them away and you think about all the attractiveness that he had to people because of his manliness. I remember reading about Abraham Lincoln one time and one biographer said Abraham Lincoln was steel velvet. He knew how to be strong and firm and hard like steel but he knew when to be caring and meek and lowly and sweet and humble. I see that in Jesus Christ. You know, he cleansed the temple twice. He boldly rebuked those who had the authority to take his life yet he humbly submitted to his heavenly Father. That’s a beautiful portrait of manhood that I see in a lot of our men here and I mean that honestly and genuinely. That is, there is a courage and a strength of manliness but in a moment’s notice, a humility before God. Brother, if you don’t have both of those, you don’t really have either one of them. You ought to be able to have a childlike brokenness unto God but if the calling of God requires, a bold strongness and conviction and courage before men.

We need more men. The church needs more men, the community needs more men. Our government could use a few men. I’m so tired of these little sissy men that we’ve got in office today in our country. They just whine around and seem to sit around and wait until what the will liberal women tell them what to say and think and believe. Well, I get in trouble when I chase those rabbits so let’s move on.

The oil was poured upon Aaron’s head and I think that speaks of Christ’s majesty. There was a majesty to Aaron but the ultimate fulfillment, of course, was Christ. The oil, the Bible says, ran upon Aaron’s beard which speaks of his manliness. Then the oil, thirdly, ran down upon Aaron’s garments. These were the priestly garments. That speaks of Christ in his ministry that he came as the anointed of God. He came as the God-man. He became one of us, the Scripture says and he came among us. He himself says that “The Son of Man did not come to be ministered to but to minister to others.” What a glorious picture that is. He didn’t come and just say, “Hey, you bow down before me,” though that was the right thing to do and certainly he receive that kind of worship but he came saying, “I’m going to go and bow all of my rights and be nailed to a cross so in the end I might redeem and cleanse and have you forgiven so that you can be my children.”

The Bible says that he gave his life a ransom for many. That speaks of his ministry. His ministry was Calvary’s cross. Now, we don’t want to de-emphasize that Jesus had mercy and compassion for the hurting, he certainly did that. He certainly fed those who were hungry. He certainly healed so many of those who were sick. He raised some of those who were dead from the grave but he didn’t feed everyone that was hungry and he could have. He didn’t heal everyone who was sick and he could have. He didn’t raise everyone from the dead who had died, but he could have. Because while he did those ministries, those were not his primary ministries. Those were testifying works that he was God’s sent one, that he might perform the primary ministry his Father had sent him to perform and that was Calvary. His ministry was Calvary’s cross. His ministry was to go to the cross and as Paul so powerfully and beautifully expounds in the epistles, and there on the cross, what a weighty phrase, he became sin. What a thought. Jesus in his ministry on the cross became sin. I believe the truth there is that he took on what we are so that God looked upon him though he had never lied but as if he was a liar. God looked upon him though he had never stolen anything as if he was a thief. God looked upon him though he had never been unfaithful in any way shape or fashion or impure as though he were a fornicator or maybe even an adulterer. The heavenly Father, because he was taking our place, Jesus went to the cross as a vicarious atonement, that is, in our place. The Father viewed him as if he were sin. That’s Christ’s ministry. Never let the liberals convince you that Jesus was just here to give us some new example of how mankind could care for one another. He does teach us that but that’s secondary. That’s a foundation stone. That’s not his pinnacle ministry. Never let people tell you that Jesus came to exhibit signs, wonders and miracles. He did lots of those things and by the way, I think he still does some of it today but he’s sovereign and we don’t know if and when and how he will do it. Listen, don’t get caught up. Look, Satan would love for us to chase those kind of… listen, all that was to testify that he was God’s anointed one to go to the cross and redeem for him and the Father, a people whom he would know and love and cherish and would know and love and cherish him for all eternity.

His ministry was Calvary but, thank God and praise his name, look, you can go home tonight, lay your head on the pillow and go to sleep with absolute assurance of your salvation tonight because not only was his ministry at Calvary, his ministry is continuing. Do you know his ministry is continuing? The Bible says that he is at the right hand of the Father where he ever intercedes for us. One of the old song says, “There his wounds doth plead.” Now, I’m sure it doesn’t work out in the way humankind would think about relationships and communication but in our minds eye we can pictures Jesus there, nail pierced hands, nail pierced feet, gaping wound in his side and should Satan the accuser of the brethren come up to God the Father and say, “Ah-ha, there is one of those who says he believes in you and he lied this week. He stole something this week. He was dishonest. He was envious this week and he disqualifies for heaven.” And Jesus just says, “Father,” and the wounds doth plead. And Father says, “Based on the merits of my Son, that unworthy one, not guilty.”

His ministry was at Calvary and his ministry was continuing. The oil came down upon Aaron’s head speaks of the majesty of Christ. It flowed down his beard, speaks of the manliness. He had to become man to save us. The manliness of Christ. The oil went down across his robes, those glorious ministry robes that speaks of the ministry of Christ. Fourthly, the Bible says the oil ran to the hem of Aaron’s garment. I hope you don’t think I’m spiritualizing too far, if you do, I’m good with the balance of biblical truth here: that speaks of the mercy of Christ. All the way down to the hem of the garment. We know when the Bible wanted to help us understand how great Christ’s mercy was, at least in a human time and space illustration, remember the woman with the issue of blood? She had been hemorrhaging for 12 years and no doctor could help her. The Bible said even when she went to the doctors. You know, they would bleed you or something and she’d get sicker than she was already and she barely had any energy at all and Jesus was passing through her town and she heard that it was Jesus and with every bit of might and energy she had left, the Bible says she touched the hem, literally the tassel on the bottom of the garment and immediately she was healed. What God wants you to understand there is that God has mercy for the lowest of the low, the weakest of the weak, the most defiled of all the defiled, the most vile of all the vile. Are you listening to me? That is Christ’s mercy. It goes all the way to the bottom, to the hem of the garment. His mercy reaches all the way down, down to where we are in the pits of sin and lostness and woe and in ruin.

Christ’s ministry is not cold but compassionate. His ministry is understanding. His ministry is sympathetic. His ministry his personal. Listen, I love that concept of personal. Look, we preach a Gospel where God is personally involved with that person. We’ve got to be careful that when we preach the great power of God in the Gospel that there is power to save everyone and if anyone and everyone will repent and believe, if 1,000 earths full of people repent and believe, there is power in the Gospel to save all of them but yet the Bible does not let us separate the personal aspect out of it either, that Christ cares about you, your particular need and your particular hurt and your particular weakness and your particular struggle. He is a sympathetic, the Bible says, a sympathetic high priest.

Do you know what? You’re pretty rotten. You’re pretty filthy. You’re awful dirty and you don’t know the tenth of it. He does. He knows it all and extends full mercy to the undeserving. Oh my goodness, God help the legalist who thinks somehow he’s going to pull himself up by his bootstraps and dot some religious “i’s” and cross some religious “t’s” and clean up some stuff and maybe God will be pleased with him. Here’s what I have to say about that: you fool. You can’t even lift up your head toward him much less get to him with any good work. But he can come all the way to you. He can come all the way, all the way to where you are and he has done it and he will do it. And he’ll do it again. And he’ll do it again. And he’ll do it again. He’s that kind of Christ. He has that kind of mercy.

It runs all the way down. He has a down-to-earth ministry. You talk about being relevant, so many of these novel, new guys, come along and talk about, “Well, we’ve got a ministry that’s relevant, that meets people where they are today. It’s a new day.” I’m going to tell you where they are: they’re in the pit of hell. They’re in the pit of destruction. They are in the pit of doom and wrath and woe and condemnation and that’s the reality. Don’t tell folks a lie just because they are thinking a lie, tell them the truth and they might get saved.

Well, it ran down all the way to the hem of his garment. The oil was on his head, majesty. The oil flowed down on Aaron’s beard, manliness. The oil flowed all through his garments, the priestly garment of ministry, that speaks of Christ’s ministry. The oil flowed all the way down to the hem, that speaks of Christ’s mercy. Then the oil more than anything as we’ve seen, the Bible is all over Aaron. Again, it’s kind of interesting that he doesn’t use what we usually find in the narrative of just a sprinkling of oil, this is a saturation of oil. It’s over all the members of Aaron’s body. I think that speaks of the members, Christ’s members. Isn’t it interesting that the Scripture very, very clearly teaches that he is the head and we are the body. He is God’s anointed one and we under his headship are anointed to function, work and serve with him and alongside him. 1 Corinthians 16:15 says we are members of his body. We are members of the body of Christ and one interconnected to the other, the Scripture would teach. We’re Christ’s representatives here on the earth. As we walk in the earth, we are to carry the fragrant oil of Christ with us as we journey down here.

As a matter of fact, keep your Bible ribbon in Psalm 133 and turn over to 2 Corinthians 2. Would you do that? 2 Corinthians 2. 2 Corinthians comes right after 1 Corinthians. 2 Corinthians 2, and we’re in verse 14. Paul in something of a summary spirit says, “But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ, and manifests through us,” notice that, “through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place.” Now it’s interesting that he it says aroma here. Now if you will, look at verse 15, “For we are a fragrance of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing.” It’s interesting, we smell different to different kinds of people. Look at verse 16, “to the one an aroma from death to death.” If you go out there in the real world, now listen friend, if you go out there in the real world and you’ve got a lost relative, loved one, a lost neighbor, a lost work associate, a lost classmate and you shouldn’t go browbeating and trying to just run deep theology down their necks all the time but nevertheless, when you’re witnessing or sharing about the things of God, you share the truth. Share about the great depravity and sinfulness of man. Share about the necessity of the Spirit of God to bring conviction. Share about the truth of Christ dying on the cross and becoming sin. Do you know what? To a lot of people that’s going to be an aroma of death. They’ll say, “We don’t think we like that kind of religion. We’re not really attracted to that. That’s not really what we’re looking for. We want something a little different than that.” To some, we just don’t smell good. The savor of Christ is not attractive to them.

But then he goes on to say in verse 16, “from the one an aroma from death to death, to the other an aroma from life to life. And who is adequate for these things?” In other words, you’re kind of saying, “Wow, what an incomparable calling that we take Christ with us where we go.” Don’t be deceived by the notions that float around that if you are godly like Christ, that everybody is going to love you. Now, many will and certainly you will win some influence, if you will, because you have the capacity for humility and deference but there are also times when you’ll have to be bold and convicted and clear and sometimes folks are going to reject you over that. But nevertheless, just as the anointing oil that they would put on the high priest in this case, on Aaron, the high priest, the first high priest of the nation of Israel, it was always mingled with fragrant scent so there would be a beautiful scent that would come out as they were anointing the oil and he says, “Not only is that true of Christ, we are in Christ. We are one with Christ. It’s true of us as we work and walk and minister in this world.”

Now, here’s what we get to. You say, “Pastor, all that’s wonderful and glorious and good but the text is, Psalm 133 again, verse 1, ‘Behold, how good and how pleasant it is For brothers to dwell together in unity!'” Well, here’s the point: if you don’t get Jesus, you never get unity. If you don’t have Christ, you can’t be in unity in God’s church. Now, there’s a lot going on in the church, the professing church that’s called unity but it’s not. I call it toleration of the flesh. “Don’t upset Jane over here, let’s let her have her way or she’ll cause trouble. Don’t let it upset Joe over here. He likes this, this and this and we’re going to cater to him,” and pretty soon you’re making idols of all these trouble makers in the church and keeping them kind of halfway pacified and that’s called being a good pastor. I’m going to tell you what that’s called: that’s called being a compromising hireling. That’s not being a good pastor. A good pastor is when we all love one Jesus and our great love for Jesus is so much greater than our love for us. Your love for Jesus is greater than your love for yourself. That’s why the Bible says you can put your brother’s needs or thoughts higher than your own and that’s spiritual unity.

And only Christ can do that. First of all, of course, Christ’s provision for this true unity is that he gives us unity with God. Through believing on the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior, we become united with God. We become partakers of the Holy Spirit of God and that is the agent where Christ is certainly the provision in the same flow of thinking, the Holy Spirit is the agent of unity in the church and God has given us many years now of precious, precious, sweet unity. And I can guarantee you because I talk with pastors every week almost without exception and I’m hearing what they are dealing with and I’m hearing the strife and the division and the backbiting and the difficulty in the church and it’s very, very clear the Spirit of God is not working in those people’s lives. There is only one reason why Grace Life Church of the Shoals has had a, not perfect, but has had a sweet unity for such a while now and that is we just have a lot of people who walk in the Spirit of God. Not perfect people but spiritual people and it makes a difference.

So there’s the unity we have with God through the provision of Christ and then, of course, the unity we have that is of God, the unity of God produced by God in our lives. In other words, our spirits unite from one true Christian to another and that produces a beautiful oneness and a beautiful unity. But both my unity with God and my unity of God that I know with you is a provision of Christ and does not come from ourselves. So we’re not looking in the church to bend the corners on doctrine because it will upset someone. Again, an illustration that’s been around a long time but it’s a good illustration, it kind of teaches the truth quite well: we have a piano in our home, of course, you know Pam is a musician and we have a man come out every so often and tune that piano. He brings a tuning fork and he tunes that one piano to that tuning fork. But I found out he doesn’t just come to our house. He’d go broke just coming to our house. He goes to all kinds of houses and all kinds of churches and all kinds of places and he tunes all of those pianos to the same tuning fork and when he gets all of those pianos perfectly tuned, you can come in there and you can press a key and I have no idea what the key would be, does F minor sound okay? Does that work? If all those pianists hit F minor if that’s what’s on there, at the same time, they’d all sound, they’d all have the same tone. They would all sound just alike because they are all tuned to one and the same tuning fork.

That’s Christian unity. We take the word of God and we say, “We’re going to yield to this right here.” Now, when there’s stuff in here that’s not real clear, Brother Jim you can have one opinion and I can have another and we’ll still love each other but when it’s clear in here, and you say, “Now Brother Jeff, it’s clear right there on the page.” I’ll say, “Brother Jim, you’re right. I want to repent and humble myself,” and we’re in unity again. This is the tuning fork. Amen? This is the tuning fork and we dedicate our hearts. Now, why would we do that? Why don’t we become obstinate and contentious and ornery and just kind of love our sin and try to work around and find us some Scripture to make us feel happy? There’s only one way you can be the kind of person that wants to humble yourself and deal with your sin and that’s if the Spirit of God lives in you. So he’s the agent of unity.

Now, a true child of God that’s got the Spirit of God in his heart, can have a moment or 2 of being ornery. He might have, hey, let me help us, she might have a little season or 2 of being contentious but if the Spirit of God is there and the word of God is taught and preached and shared, for every single person starting with this pastor, we will have our moments and we say, “O God, would you please forgive me? I repent. I reject my notion, my feeling and my viewpoint. I line up with this tuning fork right here.” Then all the other brothers and sisters who have that same spiritual enablement, did you get that? Flesh can’t do this. Hello? Flesh can’t do that but all the children of God who have the Spirit of God helping them, they have that kind of humility. When pastors sometimes ask me, “Brother Jeff, how do you put that conference on? How do you have those people just in unison, just holding the line together, rowing together, serving together and nobody cares who gets the credit. Nobody cares who’s the big noise.” I remember years and years ago how much problem we had with the music program because everybody wanted their kid to sing the solo. Just stuff like that all the time. I don’t know. We don’t have that. People tell me that today and I say, “Are you kidding me? In God’s church?” It’s not about my kid or your kid, it’s about God and the glory of God and I can give preference to another if I need to because I know Jesus Christ and he gives me a peace and a satisfaction. Spirit-empowered people can have spiritual unity but fleshly people can’t do it. Now, they can force it for a while but pretty soon it just runs out. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, amen?

Well, we’ll look at some more of this later. Let’s stand together in prayer, alright?