Sunday VT – 7/20/2014

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Speakers:

• Steven Atherton
• Scott Stevens

Scriptures used:

• Colossians 3
• John 8:32
• Psalm 51

Subject:

• It’s interesting to learn as we grow in the Lord that we have an enemy.  It’s easy to make the enemy someone who offended you.  Most of the time the enemy is my own self … the things I walked in before I became a Christian.  We still have some strongholds that overtake us in our day to day where it really counts.
• When we are together naturally before we know the Lord you’ve got some baggage between you.  It’s a sin pool.  The longer your relationship was together before it had Jesus in it, the uglier and nastier the sin pool.
• Being a covetous man doesn’t make you less of a head in your household.  It’s easy to see the sin of those who have the rule over you.  It’s easier to look at the sins of them than to look at the sins in ourselves.
• If you want to get free from sin, you have to first get to a place where you can see it and not be burdened by it and you can then move forward in the body of Christ rather than being held captive by the ‘sin pool’.
• All that requires is that you accept that you are a sinner and repent.
• Colossians 3:1 If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above, where Christ sitteth on the right hand of God.  2  Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth.  3  For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God.
• The sin pool is usually what brought us together and that is usually the problem.
• There is not a soul whose sins were not nailed to the cross with Jesus, however unless you receive that it is of no good to you.
• When you come out of jail (i.e. if you were a sex offender) you are put on a registry and you get a stigma that walks around with you forever.  You carry that black mark around with you for the rest of your life.  We like that.  However the Lord does not and says come in and you may sit at my table, my daughter can become your wife, because what Jesus did for us frees us to sit at his table and be called His child, if we will receive it.
• Son of Sam was a serial killer.  He had a beautiful testimony of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  The ministry who was using him had a desire to attack pornography etc.  He acknowledged that pornography wasn’t great but it wasn’t the problem.  The Lord had him write to one of his victims sisters because she could not forgive him.  He realized that her inability to forgive him when God had forgiven him was actually holding her back.
• Can you imagine being asked to do such a thing?  He did it because he loved the sister, he recognized what he had done was wrong, and because God freed him, he was able to write to her.
• Corrie Ten Boom was a Christian in Nazi Germany.  The movie The Hiding Place is about her life as a part of a Dutch family who protected Jews.  Corrie’s sister died in a camp and many years later when she was ministering a concentration camp guard came to her and she knew him but he didn’t know her.  He asked forgiveness of her and she didn’t have the strength to forgive him.  She knew she was supposed to, but she couldn’t and she reached out her hand, notwithstanding that she couldn’t find the strength in herself to forgive and as she did that the Lord gave her freedom as well as him.  She was set free.
• Compost is good stuff, but it comes from bad stuff.  The truth shall make you free.  There’s a lot of ‘crap’ in our lives, that we wish we could sweep under a rug and never see again, but if you leave it there it will sneak back out and come out and steal from us, kill us and destroy us, just like satan.  When we’re willing to acknowledge it and repent from it then it has no power over us.
• In Psalm 52 we learn about David.  David slept with a married woman, got her pregnant, tried to cover up his sin and the husband wouldn’t fall for it, so he had the husband killed.  Before this ever happened, David killed a lion and a bear with his bare hands – he was just a boy.  Then David took on Goliath who was bigger than everyone but David had the confidence in the Lord and courage and he overcame Goliath.  David says who is this Phillistine dog and he kills him with stones and a slingshot and then cuts his head off with Goliath’s own sword.  The testimony of the Lord moving through David before the story of Bathsheba should give us hope to walk free of that burden.
• You don’t need mercy unless you have already acknowledged that you’ve done wrong.
• God does not bring back the things that you have already done wrong.  Once you’re forgiven, you are forgiven and have a clean slate.
• Iniquity is pride – for example it’s not my fault, it’s your fault.  There’s no responsibility on our part, we blame others instead of seeking for our own fault in a thing so we cannot learn what the Lord is trying to teach us.
• Jesus is the only one who’s right all the time … He is the only perfect person.
• Every single one of us are sinners.  Even the children are sinners.
• I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is ever before me is the thing we’re trying to get rid of so we don’t have to look at it again.
• All of us are conceived in sin because we are all sinners, not because we’ve done something wrong, just because we were all born sinners.
• David recognizes that he cannot get out of this himself.  So he calls upon the Lord to purge him with hyssop.
• Psalm 51:8 reminds us of the concentration camp guard mentioned above in the story of Corrie Ten Boom.  He could not be free from what he had done.
• You can then extend the same love that was extended to you to others so they can be saved.