Usually you can tell when the writer's transitioning from one topic or subject to another subject, and so it's helpful in our newer translations when the Bible is broken down in paragraphs. The verses give us a helpful reference point. Sometimes they're a hindrance in the flow of thought from passage to passage. They break up a passage unnecessarily and awkwardly. First Peter chapter 1, let's look at the remaining verses 22 through 25. 22 through 25. Listen to the word of the Lord. May it speak to us in power, may it speak to us in purity, and may God be honored as his word is magnified above his name. Since you have purified your souls in obeying the truth through the Spirit, in sincere love of the brethren, love one another fervently with a pure heart, having been born again, not of corruptible seed, but by incorruptible, through the Word of God, which lives and abides forever. Because all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man is the flower of the grass. The grass withers, and its flower falls away. But the Word of the Lord endures forever. Now, this is the Word which by the Gospel was preached to you. So may God bless His Word this morning. Join me in prayer. Father, we thank You that with the advancement of the printing press and beyond that now, with the technologies are available, the Word of God is being produced in a mass way to be distributed among the nations, among the peoples of the nations, that they might learn the truth about the true and living God, and learn that there is a way back to heaven, a way to have reconciliation, restoration, peace with God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, and that is through the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ was set forth in this book, The Good News. Thank you that many, if not all, in this auditorium have at one point in their lives been convicted of their need of Christ, their sins, their lostness. They've been humbled and they turn to you in faith and are saved, are justified, reconciled. redeemed. And how blessed that we can sing about these things and read about these things in the Word of God. Bless us now in these moments together as we meditate upon your Word. May it enter into our being. into our minds and completely into our hearts. For Jesus' sake, amen. There's a Latin phrase that I became familiar with, not so much in Bible college, but in seminary. because some of her he is kind of advanced training in scripture beyond bible college for which i'm thankful uh... not the degree i'm not concerned about degree i got from the institution but what i learned there and uh... in that institution one of the latin phrases that was used uh... on occasion and not only from The pulpit and from the teaching lectern, but also in books that you would Read it was the Latin phrase sine qua non Sine qua non how many ever heard that phrase before? Okay, what does it mean Steve? Just probing if you don't Okay, do you remember Daniel Sine, what means without which not. If you give a rough translation, without which not. Which, expressing in our language, is something that is indispensable. Without which not. There are some things, just to illustrate it, To flying a kite, the wind is sine qua non. It's indispensable to fly a kite. Chocolate chip cookies, chocolate chips are indispensable to making chocolate chip cookies. To make a transition over into our text and what we've read from 1 Corinthians chapter 13, And it being the expression of the life and ministry of our Lord Jesus among the apostles, the exercise and practice of Christian love is the sine qua non. It's indispensable. It's indispensable for your life spiritually. But that love has a vertical component. between you and God. He is the first one who is to be the object of your love. You love Him supremely. It is a summation in the first commandment. What is the greatest commandment of all? You're to love the Lord God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind and strength. It's indispensable. You have to love him. And then, on a horizontal level, you have to love. Church life, apart from the expression of love, which is an overflow of your love for God, is indispensable. If Christians are at strife, If they're envying and hating one another, they're doing nothing other than what is in the world. And there is a particular passage, I think, that I'd like to use in my introductory thoughts found in Titus chapter 3. Titus chapter 3. That's one of the pastoral epistles. Titus chapter 3. Verse 1 says, remind them to be subject to rulers and authorities, to obey, to be ready for every good work, to speak evil of no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing all humility to all men. I'll let that soak into you. I've talked about that before. Showing all humility to all men, for we ourselves were, that's past tense, we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasure, living in malice. And that is an intent of the heart to do harm to another person. That's malice. And envy, we used to live in that realm. Envy, and here it says, hateful and hating one another. I know when my wife worked in the secular world, that my, my, my, In those environments with office workers, you had to deal with envy and jealousy and hatred and all of these things. That's how the world functions apart from Christ. When Christ changes the heart, he changes it from a heart of hatred to a heart love love for God and then love for one another and that is a concentric love It begins in the home showing love toward your wife men and It spreads to your neighbor that's the next it goes into the assembly of the church and it goes even more broadly and that is toward your enemies and That's the difficult part, but that's the thing that distinguishes you and distinguishes me as a Christian, a follower of Yeshua from the world, is that instead of retaliating toward our enemies, we love them. We love them. Don't know exactly the backdrop by which Peter deals with this subject here in the context, but the main command, the main verb is in verse 22, the very last part of it. Love one another fervently with a pure heart. Love one another. fervently, that is intensely. That's why I chose that for the title of my message, intense brotherly love. There is to be a fervency about our love that uniquely identifies us. That's why Jesus said, by this shall all men know that you are my disciples, that you follow me. by your love one to another. It is the signature element. It is the sine qua non by which the unbelieving world knows us uniquely as followers of Jesus Christ. It's not by your religiosity. It's not by Pretended worship. It is by your love toward one another. And I need it probably more than any of you. To love one another, to love you, to love with a pure heart, fervently. This is something that if you remember the name, he's been dead for a while, Chuck Colson. Y'all remember the name Charles Colson. He was one of that inner group involved in Watergate with Nixon. and was sent to prison. He was there several months. But in that context, he came to faith in Jesus Christ. And as a young believer, he wrestled with love, and especially love for God. And he described it in his book entitled Loving God. He writes, The greatest commandment of all, Jesus said, is love the Lord God with all your heart. with all your soul, with all your mind. Colson continues to write, I'd memorized those words but had never really thought about what they meant in practical terms. And you may be on that level yourself. What does it mean to love God with all your heart? And the practical terms that he meant by that is how to fulfill that command. How do we obey that command to love God? Because that's foundational to this text. It's foundational to the Christian life. And he said, I wondered if others felt the same way. So he said, I asked a number of more experienced Christians how they loved God. And his conclusion was this, the cumulative effect of my survey convinced me that most of us as professing Christians do not really know how to love God. Do you have that? Do you have that struggle? I do. All of us struggle in that area with our love toward God. He concludes with this statement. He says, not only have we not given thought to what the greatest commandment means in our day-to-day existence, but we have not obeyed it. I trust your presence here in the assembly of God's saints this morning is because you love God first and foremost. You're not here to hear me. necessarily. You're here to hear the Word of God, that's for sure, I hope. But I hope you're here out of love for Christ and love for the Father. And that love that you have for Him spills over into the second command, you shall love your neighbor as yourself. That's the way the Christian life, first and foremost, is to be evidenced. And so Peter brings his readers to this subject and focuses on it by way of a command. But this command does not come out of a vacuum. In other words, I can't just walk up to the average person on the street and say, look here, you are to obey this commandment. Something has to happen. Something must transform the individual. From a God-hater, according to Romans chapter one, that's what we all are, is that we hate God in a state of sin. Being dead and trespasses in our sins, we hate God. That is, at least the God of Scripture. The God of Scripture is to be loved supremely. I like what one writer said, Patrick Morley. He said, the height of our love for God will never exceed the depth our love for one another another writer put it this way said ordinary words are not enough to describe the affection Christians felt for one another so they took an old word Agape. You've probably heard that before. Some churches are called Agape Church or whatever. That's the Greek word. Agape. Or the verb is agapeo. They took an old word, pagan word, that had fallen into disuse. They took it, they dusted it off. And infused it with a new meaning. This word means basically sacrificial giving, for God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her. It is sacrificial giving with the intended results to benefit the object which we love. If you love somebody, you are concerned about their benefit, their well-being, their goodness, their advancement. You're not to speak disparagingly, critically, harmfully toward other people. And so we have first of all in our text, and that's why I concentrate on the latter part, I'm going to fill in the blanks, so to speak, with this, the imperative of love. The imperative of love. Thomas Reed, Puritan writer, said, The supreme love to the Lord Jesus Christ is the governing principle of every believer. The sacred attachment to the Savior forms the grand distinction between the children of God and the children of the wicked one. The command itself I would have thought it was in the present tense, that it's to be an ongoing thing. But it's actually in what's called the aorist tense. Some call it the punctiliar text, but it really is not. Whatever the imperative is aorist in its tense, it denotes a sense of urgency. Something to which you must give immediate attention. It's not something that you can just dismiss or discard. To his readers and to us here in Sovereign Grace, Baptist Church assembled here this morning. He addresses you from the standpoint that you give urgent and eminent attention to this matter. Love. Love one another. Love one another. Now, he gives the foundation for that, and I'll explain that. momentarily. So this love is urgent. It must come from the heart. Love the Lord God with all your heart. And that is the inward man. I believe that that is the predominant word in the Bible and in the New Testament to describe the immaterial being, the heart. The heart of man, which is made up of many components. And so it's from the inward man. And the reason he addresses that is because that is the part of our being that has been transformed. It's been transformed, and we'll see momentarily, by the power of regeneration. You're not the same person. If you're truly a believer, If you've truly trusted Christ alone for your salvation, something has changed. The Bible refers to it as being a new creation, a new creature in Christ, a new man. The old man is gone. We do still have a deposit of sin within us. There's no question about that. We struggle with sin. But constitutionally and essentially, within your heart, you've been changed. That's what salvation is. I give them a heart of flesh in place of a heart of stone. The old prophet says, there's a change. And that change happens at a moment in time. It is the seed of our affections. The object of our love is one another. See that you love one another. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote this, he says, I wish I could love the human race. I wish I could love its silly face. I wish I liked the way it walks. I wish I liked the way it talks. And when I'm introduced to one, I wish I thought, what a jolly fun. He recognizes that the expression of love is in relationships one with another, one with another. You are to be the object of my love. I am to be the object of your Christian love. And you're always seeking out the benefit of the object that you love, so that you reach down, if necessary, within your resources and give, just as God daily gives to his enemies. He causes the sun to shine on the unjust. He causes the rain to fall on the unjust on this earth. And in His common grace, it's referred to, He loves every man upon this planet by showing them daily the food he provides, the enjoyment of his creation, and all of these things in common grace. It ought to lead him to the Creator. Unfortunately, men being creatures of darkness, they love darkness rather than light, and do not love the Lord God, but he loves them, provides for them every day. I don't know if you've ever sat down and in your mind at least, I've tried to calculate how much food do you think is dispensed on this planet every day? From the harvest of farmers, the harvest of ranchers, the harvest of vine dressers, and those who have orchards and so forth, the fruit of the land. How much is dispensed every day. I would venture to give. It is boxcar loads full of, to feed eight billion people. But that is an expression of God's love. It's not redemptive love, but it is love. And he calls upon us to love one another. And that's even if people abuse you. All of us have been, sadly, the object of someone's disservice to us. I'll leave that aside. So he stresses here, the urgency of love, the object of love, one another, fellow Christians, and then the intensity of the love. the intensity of the love. That adverb is not just filler space. It is telling you the type of activity or type of emotion that is to be accompanied with this expression of your love, fervently, fervently. I had to think about that for a little bit. And to help gain some of the imagery behind this, Matthew Poole, in his commentary, makes this analysis. He says, the word that is used here for fervently can be translated vehemently, intensely, strongly. But he said it seems to come from the metaphor of a bow. Talking about a bow and an arrow. which the more it is bent, with the greater force it sends forth the arrow. So love, the more fervent and strong it is, the more abundantly it puts forth itself for the benefit of others. As you increase the intensity of your love toward God, I would say de facto it translates intensely in your love to one another. You get that? Does that make sense? So as you begin your day, start off your day loving your wife, man, as they ought to be loved. Love your neighbors as they ought to be loved. Love your fellow Christians. But it starts by taking that bow and pulling it back through your intense love for Christ and then letting it go and releasing it throughout the day, so to speak. The stronger, the more fervent your love for him, the stronger and more fervent your love is one to another. And then he says, from a pure heart, from a pure heart. It parallels in context the opening phrase, since you have purified your souls, and that again is referring to the inward part of your being, your souls. This word for pure, well the first word for pure is living basically a pure life, an observably pure life. Your souls have been purified and it translates into your behavior as you see it here, obeying the truth. The purification of your life is directly associated with Objective obedience and compliance with the truth, the word of God. The second word is to deal with ceremonial cleansing, the cleansing, the purification that, for instance, pilgrims who would come into Jerusalem during festive occasions that dealt with temple worship, Passover in particular, would go to these pools. dozens of pools by the temple center called mikvahs. They're cleansing pools, cleansing tubs. That's why, just as an aside, they canard that there wasn't sufficient enough water in Jerusalem to baptize 3,000 souls. It's crazy. Because right there by the temple mount would have been pools filled with all kinds of water that were used for ceremonial purification and cleansing in their worship of the Lord. That was external. But what he's talking about here is a purification internally of the heart. That every day you need to confess your sins, and the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sins as we confess our sins. We keep short accounts with those with whom we're at odds, and we confess our faults one to another, and we get restoration, and on and on. But it's from a pure heart. Pure motives. That's what the Pharisees, Sadducees, the scribes of Jesus' day lacked. They didn't have a change of heart. They were just as dead as the pagan Samaritans who were their neighbors. Dead in trespasses and sin. But the scriptures use this idea again. Paul writes, 1 Timothy 1.5, Now the purpose of the commandment is love from a pure heart. from a good conscience and from sincere faith. Sincere faith. In his second epistle, he says, flee to Timothy, flee, you fool us, but pursue righteousness, faith, love, peace, and with those who call on the Lord Jesus Christ out of a pure heart. Same language, same concept. Now, how is it that this brotherly love can be demonstrated? Two ways. First of all, through a clean soul, and secondly, through a regenerate heart, or a changed heart. These are things that happen, and that's the reason why in our text the translator is, I think, capturing the sense of the opening phrase. He says, since you have purified your souls. He assumes that as followers of Jesus that this has transpired. in their lives. And he uses what is called the perfect tense. It's a perfect participle which contains or contains the thought of something that happened in past time with continuing results. having had your souls purified, and they continue to be purified in the obedience that you've expressed to the truth, and that through the Spirit, in sincere, unfeigned, no hypocrisy, love of the brethren. So what must have transpired in your life, what transpired in their lives, is to experience a spiritual purification. That's what happens in conversion. It's part of that whole milieu of sanctification, where positionally we have been washed, past tense, We've been cleansed. And daily, as we've seen earlier in our text, we are to be holy, verse 16, for our Lord is holy. Be holy in all your conduct. Verses 15 and 16. This is a part, I think, of restating that obvious fact. Since you've been purified, you've been cleansed, your souls have. That's internally. It's not just external. That's why baptism does not wash away sins. It's only the blood of Christ, redeeming blood of Christ, that can wash away sin. Baptism is an expression that our sins have been washed away internally. And I love the phrase that the obedience to the truth is through the instrumentality of the Spirit. That's one of the things that I struggled with early on in my Christian experience. How do you live this Christian life? Are you saved you believe in Jesus and then you've just kind of kind of got a grin and bear it you got to have Remember the movie true grit with John Wayne They didn't follow up that With one of the bridges boys did that true grit that means you You've got to the fortitude the Constitution will just move forward you plow ahead in the midst of all obstacles That's not what he's talking about You cannot live the Christian life apart from the Spirit turn with me to Galatians chapter 3 this is one of the most profound texts in Scripture, in my opinion, when it deals with what justification is and also with what sanctification is. They were being influenced by a group of people going throughout the ancient world, wherever Paul ministered, Judaizers, who were trying to bring a mixture of legalism with grace, and that's an impossibility. They're incompatible. Verse 2, look it there. This only I want to learn from you. In other words, I'm going to sit down for a moment, Galatians, and I want you to teach me. Did you receive the Spirit by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith? As believers in Jesus, and one of the things that is the experience of every believer is that they receive the Spirit of Christ. The Holy Spirit, he's called. He's given to them. Did you get that? Did you receive that by doing something? Or did you simply believe what you heard? He says, are you so foolish having begun in the Spirit? And that's true. You began the Christian life in the Spirit. The Spirit of God did a work of conviction and regeneration in your life, and you began to commence your Christian life in the Spirit. Are you now being made perfect by the flesh? And the obvious answer to that rhetorical question is, in no way! What you began with is what you continue with in the Christian life. Through the help of the indwelling Spirit and how He can indwell me and you and every believer across the globe. I have no, that's a mystery. I can't explain it, but I know it's true. His personal indwelling of me is as personal to you, the same spirit. Have you suffered so many things in vain, as believers, because you follow Jesus, if indeed it was in vain? He's worried, I think, in those statements. He's anxious, at least. Therefore, he who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you, does he do it by the works of the law or by the hearing of faith? It's faith. And going back to our text, then, the obeying the truth through the Spirit. We find our strength to live the Christian life through the means of the Spirit. And that includes His Word. And that includes the conscience. Because the Spirit works through the conscience. That's why we are warned not to grieve the Spirit of God, whereby you're sealed to the day of redemption. Our sins Do not expel the Spirit. He will not leave us. He's been given to us throughout this age. And He doesn't leave us. And we live our Christian life through his strength and wisdom, which he affords us through his word. And also, this gathering here is the temple of the Holy Spirit. Paul looks at the church as the temple collectively in 1 Corinthians chapter 3. So when we meet, we're in the realm of the Spirit, and it's in that context that we find vibrancy and strength to continue on in our experience watching others go through what they do in their Christian life to be faithful to the Lord. But the goal of the Spirit is always the obedience to the truth. And this is in the context of sincere love. Now, the word love the brethren is actually one word, the word we know as the city in Pennsylvania known as Philadelphia. Brotherly love, the city of brotherly love. And he's calling upon us to love one another because of what the Spirit has done and is doing in our lives. And secondly, He's talking about a regenerate heart. The reason we can love. Notice here he states, again it's a perfect tense. It's passive voice again. And it takes us back to the language earlier in the chapter. Verse 3, where it says, "...Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who according to His abundant mercy has begotten us." Again, God the subject here. Here, it's in the active voice. You're not the subject of this action. I'm not the subject. has begotten us again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. Back to verse 23, having been born again, and we continue in that state of the new birth, we don't lose it. Once your heart has been transformed, once your being has been transformed by the grace of God, it is not something that you can lose because He did it. He did it, not you. It's a work of God. Not a work of the flesh. There's a profound text. I say profound because most people just gloss over it. But it's 1 John 5, verse 1. 1 John 5, verse 1. My first understanding of this verse, or clear understanding of this verse, came from Donald Gray Barnhouse, who used, he's dead now with the Lord, but he was a predominant evangelical, strong preacher in his day, back in the 50s. I forget exactly when he passed away. But notice the text, it says, whoever believes, or it could be translated, all who believe, that Jesus is the Christ. That is, whosoever believes that Jesus is Messiah is born of God. Again, it's passive voice. It's perfect tense. Has been born of God. God here being the agent of the new birth. It's not of my blood, it's not of my will, nor is it of man's will. No one could influence this outcome but God himself. Have been born of God. And everyone who loves him who begat, there it's active voice, also loves him who is begotten of him. So here it translates into love one to another. And it's to be fervent. It's to be fervent, unrelenting. That's predicated on a changed heart. Here he leads us into another agent that is involved in the new birth. It's just not a work of the Spirit alone. It is a work of the Spirit along with a work of the Word of God. Having been born again, not of corruptible seed, everything in our world today is subject to the law of disintegration, or it's called, the scientific word is entropy. Everything is decay. But the Word of God is not decaying. It lives and abides forever. It is the eternal Word of God. And it's incorruptible. But incorruptible through the Word of God which lives, it is alive, and abides forever. Wow. Can you think about this for a moment? The Word of God he's talking about, I believe, the written Word of God. the written word of God which we have, when it began to be transcribed or put into writing, beginning actually probably with Job, the book of Job. Don't know who the author of Job is, but Job precedes being believed to be during the patriarchal period, that is, Abraham and that age in God's redemptive history. And so the pages of Scripture, the scrolls of Scripture began to be written then. And then subsequently with Moses as he did his own investigative work to get the information for the book of Genesis. And then through Revelation during the period of the Exodus and so forth, he begins to put that part of the Bible together. And it's remained. What God wants us to have remains. It is eternal, it lives and abides, and I hasten on for the sake of time. And abides forever. Men have tried to destroy this book. Men have tried to ban this book. Men, regimes, governments have confiscated the Word of God, but there's no way that it will ever disappear. It abides forever. And it's being published and it's being recorded and sent to the nations of the earth to bring in, I believe, what will be a great harvest in these last days. We see a moving of the Spirit of God that's unparalleled. And God may be giving us a respite. Having been born again, are you born again? That phrase is thrown around flippantly in Christian circles. Oh, I'm a born-again Christian. What other kind are there? Truly, I don't mean to be facetious. There's no such thing as a Christian who is not, a true Christian who is not born again. As if there are Christians, I know that there is out there within the religious world, Christians or professing Christians, or at least who put on the appearance of Christians that are not born again. So I asked the question, have you been born again? It was a question that was pertinent to Nicodemus. He was inquisitive as to the mighty works that were being done And he says to him, Jesus says to him, except a man be born again, cannot see the kingdom of God. That's how essential it is. And I'll be careful in my phrasing here. It is essential. to be born again to go to heaven, but it is not sufficient. You say, well what do you mean by that? Let me show you in John chapter 3. It is essential that you have life, that you have a new heart, that you be changed. But it's not sufficient. There are other elements to salvation that are absolutely essential. He says you must be born again. It's absolute necessity. But notice what else he writes and how this text unfolds. Verse 14, as Moses lifted up the servant in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up. Now you may have new life, but if your sins have not been atoned for and taken care of, your new life is inadequate. That's why Jesus must be lifted up And he's referring there back to Moses and the serpents being lifted up so that anyone in the camp who had been bitten by a serpent, all they had to do was look to that serpent on the post and they lived. And Jesus here is saying to Nicodemus, that what also must happen is that the Son of Man be lifted up in order that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life. The removal of condemnation. We're all under the wrath of God. We're all under condemnation, and there is therefore no condemnation to those in Christ Jesus, and therefore we're not perishing. We're not lost in our sins. And so it took not only regeneration, but it took the death of Christ. Or it would have been insufficient, necessary, but insufficient. And so Christ had to die and be lifted up. And he explains why. For God so loved the world. Why did He lift up His Son? Because of His infinite love. Again, the result that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. And so looking back at our text again, and I quickly hasten on, because all flesh is grass. He compares its abiding and eternal nature to the temporary nature of everything. All flesh is as grass. He's using a simile or comparison. And all the glory of man is as another comparison, the flower of the grass. The glory of man, all of his grandeur, all of the kingdoms that have existed from time immemorial, from even before the flood and on into the new world when they built the Tower of Babel, where is it today? It's gone. All the glory of man is as the flower of grass. Where is Babylon? Where is Assyria? Where is Persia today? They're gone. In the dust of antiquity, all the glory of man as the flower of the grass, the grass withers and the flower falls away. Ah, but not so with the Word. The Word the Lord endures forever. That's the instrumentality. that God used. And in point of fact, it was in the Gospel, the last sentence of our verse. Now this is the Word by which the Gospel was preached to you. The eternal Word of God. We get the source of our information. We get the Gospel out of this book. It's a book that sets forth good news for you and for me. And that's what we need this time of year. The good news of the incarnation of the Savior Christ. Jesus comes into the world to save sinners. Paul writes, of whom I am foremost. I'm number one. I'm the number one sinner. And so in order to be born again, you have had to hear the Word of God, You've had to read the Word of God and attract or read the Bible itself. Many people have come to faith that way. But other people have come simply through the preaching of the Word. The day of Pentecost, 3,000 people were converted through the Word, the living and abiding Word. Amen. This is the Word. which by the gospel was preached or proclaimed or announced the good news to you." Do you know that? Do you know that? So he too uses the living agent of the Holy Spirit, God Himself doing it. He uses the agency of the living and abiding Word. Let me just close with this illustration. You're familiar with the Ganges River? It's a sacred river in India, and it, along with other of the world's largest freshwater sources, is one that is held in India in high regard. The headwaters actually emerge from a glacier high in the western Himalayas, and then it drops down a steep mountain canyon into India's fernal northern plain. And just after it, it merges with the Brahmaputra, the Ganges empties into the Bay of Bengal. And it supports more than a quarter of India's 1.4 billion people, all of Nepal and part of Bangladesh. Here's the sad reality. The Ganges has also been one of the world's most polluted rivers. The river is befouled, it is said, according to this article, by poisonous byproducts from hundreds of factories and towns, arsenic, chromium, and mercury combined with hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage that flow into the river on a daily basis. However, despite countless studies and evidence providing the river's polluted state, environmentalists have gained little traction in cleaning up the river. Why? This is the answer. This was written by Simon Sinek. The Ganges River is a sacred waterway. Worshipped by a billion Hindus as Mother Ganges, a living goddess with the power to purify the soul and to cleanse itself. There was a recent article in National Geographic that explains, quote, there is this belief that the river can cleanse itself. So these people walk into this polluted river thinking that they're receiving some type of spiritual cleansing because they believe that it self-cleans itself. Since the river can clean itself, then why should we have to worry about it? Many people say the river cannot be polluted. It can go on forever. What a tragic picture of man's inadequate efforts somehow to gain nirvana or eternal existence or come in by reincarnation into life again by a higher form, by washing themselves, cleansing themselves in this polluted river. The only way you can come to Christ is through the pure power of the Word of God, through the pure power of the Holy Spirit working in you. You have to come or you'll die in your sins. Jesus said, you believe not that I am He, you will die in your sins. That's clear. So my question is, are you a believer? Now then, if you are, you have a responsibility on top of that. to love me as well as I love you, fervently, out of a heart that's been purified by the grace of God. I invite you to come to him. If you need to talk to anybody about that, feel free to linger around and explore the issues of what it means to truly be born again, to be a Christian. If not, you're walking in darkness. That's what Paul said of the Ephesians, having the understanding darken, being alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them. If you don't know Christ, you're ignorant. And you're walking around in a state of darkness, even though you may think you're in enlightenment, sadly. Well, join me in closing prayer. Father, we thank you this morning for that.