So we've been in part two, talking about Christian liberty and the liberty of the conscience. And we started out saying that God alone is Lord of the conscience. And we kind of brought out these truths. And I changed that passage, Gary, that you'd notice on 1 Corinthians 7. It says, he has left it free from all doctrines and commandments of men which are in any respect contrary to his word. This is going to be very important when we're talking about today's sermon in 1 Corinthians. As you look through the end of the Bible, especially the New Testament, you see that as soon as Jesus Christ dies on the cross, as he's doing that, false teachers are coming in all over the place, and they're bringing in false doctrine. But the Bible is clear, 1 Corinthians. What we read a few months ago, a month and a half ago or so, was the fact that Paul says, as a Corinthian church, as the church, you're to be united and not divided in doctrine. We're supposed to have the same understanding, the same reasoning, the same teaching, the same concept, the same mentality of what the doctrines are. That's 1 Corinthians chapter 1. At the very onset he says, you are saints, and because you're saints, because you're Christians, you should all be in unity, in fellowship, unity in thought, and unity in teaching. When I'm talking to churches, especially about church leadership, pastoral ministry, who should be selecting the pastor for the churches, I get the question all the time, but my opinion is this, or my opinion is that, or I think this, or I think that, and I keep asking people, okay, does the Bible say that we should all just worry about our own opinions or be united under the Spirit? Well, the Bible makes it clear there's one faith, one Lord, and one baptism. There's one Holy Spirit, and He's not divided against God the Father or God the Son. So as Christians, if we all have the Spirit of God, we should all be unified in the truth. Now, that doesn't mean that every single church is going to believe every single thing the same. But that means as we come together and learn from the Word of God, we should be able to discern what the truth of the Bible is. Now, there's going to be people come in, they're going to say, but I think this. And you're going to say, wait a minute. If you think this, whatever it is, We need to discuss it and see what the Bible says, not just sit here and hold your own opinion. What does the Bible say? Now we need to submit to that. And that's what this is saying here. God has left us free from all doctrines and commandments of men. We don't have to submit to man's commandments, man's doctrines. But the Bible says we do submit to the apostles doctrine. the word of God, the teaching of Jesus Christ, the words that God has given us, we submit to that. And we're to be unified in that. So that's where we're going there. And in this Christian liberty we read this, thus to believe such doctrines or to obey such commandments out of conscience is to betray true liberty of conscience. So in other words, if you have been taught the truth, If the Holy Spirit lives inside of you and the truth is right in front of you in that Bible, is it right or wrong for you to go listen to somebody else's opinion over that word? Think about what's going on in our society today. You have people calling the church to silence over LGBT, over social justice, over politics, over ethics and morality, you name it, over teaching. You know, even when it comes to college-level teaching, well, we're PhDs. You're just a stupid Christian. You don't know anything, so shut up. You don't have a right to have a place here. You shouldn't have a voice. In fact, there are people teaching right now that if you're a Christian, you should not have the right to homeschool, to teach your children, because that's wickedness. I mean, we saw what Ken Ham was saying on this foundations course. And he said that the atheists were saying, and he quoted it, that the most wicked thing he saw in the Answers Museum was their teaching to children, because those children are being indoctrinated to believe in God, and that's wickedness. We should not let children be around Christians, because man's opinion has reigned supreme. And that's why this is so important. Guys, there's nothing new under the sun here. All this stuff is going on, and what's happened is the church, instead of standing up and fighting, has been told to be cowards. What's the outcome? Silly, compromised churches that don't want to hear the word of God. Compromised people that don't want to believe the word of God and don't want to submit to it. You have groups and groups and groups of people that are factious, they fight, they argue about every little thing under the sun, because everybody's got their own opinion. Nobody wants to submit to any truth. Nobody wants to submit to any leadership. We want to be in the world and of the world. And if somebody comes along and teaches something like this, well, I think you're too harsh. I think that you're pushing too much. I don't think that you should do that. I would rather hear opinion rather than the word of God. We want, you know, we have that itching ears today. This society, the people, we have this itching ears to where we want to hear everybody's opinions about doctrine or opinions about God or opinions about everything. Oprah Winfrey is a great example of this. She brings in everybody, except for true teachers, she brings in everybody that will expound some half-hearted truth. Deepak Chopra on one end who says the name of God and yet blasphemes every single word that comes out of his mouth. I mean, he's twisted God into a pretzel where it's not even God. You're God, he's not, and he's just waiting for you to do all that you're gonna do under your divine power and all you gotta do is realize your next level of this, that, and the other. And you have Rob Bell, he comes in and Well, you're the one that's in power and God really is not gonna do anything. He's just gonna take everybody to heaven, you know Man had these wrong ideas about hell and Jesus never really meant hell and we've twisted the scripture And then you have all these other people coming in and Oprah promotes it like it was the Word of God She promotes it like crazy. I mean, it's insane all the stuff she promotes, you know Priscilla Schreier and all these false teachers come in and she's just lifting these people up and I remember watching her saying that Jesus can't be the only way to God. A woman actually finally said, wait a minute, what are you talking about? Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes with a father. But he just can't be. Everybody claps. Everybody cheers. All the Christians running around lauding how wonderful a Christian she is. And now she's out here talking about, you know, shout your abortion. Yeah, she's part of that group. She's that part. Look you have all this stuff going on because people want to appeal that to the doctrines of men You want to deal with the societal issues have the church stop being like the world? Because it says we used to believe that if you appealed to the doctrines of men And you submitted to those truths over the Word of God you were in sin To you that know to do right, and you don't do it. It is a sin Colossians 2.20, Kristen, you want to start there? Because of this, wherefore, because of this, if you're dead in Christ, and from the rudiments of the world, the foundational, fundamental, the ideological platforms or mores of the world, if you're dead in Christ, Okay, if you have died and Christ is now Lord in your life, if he is alive, you know, Paul says the same way, real caution says you are dead. And Christ lives in you. He must be, you know, I must decrease, he must increase. It's a concept that in Christ, you died to yourself. Either that or you're not a Christian. I mean, it's just a fact. Either you're dead in Christ and you are the Holy Spirit living in you as a new creature in the new covenant, and you don't love the things of the world, lust over the things of the world, love the rebellion of the world, love the lust of the world. And I don't mean that in a sexual sense. I mean all the passions of the world. I mean, think about it. This entire country, let's just talk about America that we know of for sure. We're running desperately for something to believe in, running desperately for freedom. We don't want to be under the thumb of God, but we want to be unified, drawn together in our anarchy, just mad rage to get stuff. To, you know, go work and probably maybe not go work, to collect, let's say it better that way, not work for it, but collect stuff, whether it be from welfare or work, to fill our lives up with junk, the stuff of the world, movies, entertainment, social media, everything in the world. And if you've ever read screw tape letters, one of the demons says we should just take their time. take their time, get, you know, everything that we can do to bombard their lives with every possible thing. It's, you know, it's every possible thing that you can push into their lives. We've done that. We push it in there, push it in there, push it in there so that we are running constantly towards what the world's providing. When's the last time you just opened your Bible up and just sat around and okay, I gotta go do this. I gotta do that and just stop and say, look, I just want to read my Bible and see what God has to say. and just sat and read and studied God's word. When's the last time you just filled yourself, you should be doing this daily. When's the last time you just filled yourself with that? We fill ourselves up with everything else and it's not picking on you, it's picking on all of us. We fill ourselves up with everything else and whenever it's convenient, we don't set aside, this is the time I'm going to spend time with my God and see what he says and what he's given me. And as a result, We've got to go to conferences. We've got to watch YouTube and listen to something motivational. We've got to listen to something quote unquote religious that sounds really good. Paul Washer or John MacArthur or anybody else. We've got to listen to somebody else's preaching and teaching because we don't fill ourselves up with the word of God. I'm not saying those guys are bad. I'm just saying that we fill ourselves up with everything everybody else does. And the one truth source that we say we own, we have, is that Bible. The one truth source. to believe such doctrines or obey such commands out of the conscience is to betray true liberty of conscience. How do you know what you're free from and free to? Is it just because you feel good about it? Well, I don't like what you say. I don't like what your opinion is. I don't like your things, but I like these things. Well, who's to say my opinion and your opinion are right? I'm doing these things out of conscience. And my opinion is it's, and it's not, but my opinion is it's okay to kill a baby in the womb because it's not really a baby because science says it's not a baby and so it's okay. Well, almost half now of Christianity, professing Christianity says that it's okay to murder a baby in the womb because my conscience says it's okay because science says this and science says that and science says this and my pastor says this and I've got a friend over here that says this and my Sunday school teacher says this and on and on and on and on and on and on. It's her right anyway. But the question is, what does the Bible say? I don't care. I know what I feel. I chose abortion to talk about for a second. But how many other areas? What you watch on TV, what you go to watch at the movies, what you listen to, who you hang out with. Don't you know that bad company corrupts good morals? That's what the Bible says are good manners. You know what? I mean, think about it. The people you hang out with, the stuff you watch in your life, the stuff you inculcate your body with, that's the idea of the rapid-fire teaching. It's just over and over again just piling teaching upon teaching. That's that inculcating idea. Hold on a second. That's this idea that just keeps piling up on you. Those things that you keep allowing to happen, that you keep setting in your mind and then because we complain about at school at public schools that they get you know forty plus eighty plus hours a week to indoctrinate your kids and on friday night it's television movies and on saturday it's television movies everything else and friends and parties and everything else and then you get one hour on sunday two hours on sunday to undo all of that but the problem is our fault because you've allowed yourself to be sucked into the one eyed monster. You've heard that term before. When I was a kid, I was told I got two hours on Saturday and that's it. We don't watch TV. It was 530 in the morning when the Super Friends came on and we watched Thor and we watched The Incredible Hulk and whatnot. It was 30 minute little shows and that was it. And we were out the door. We were playing. We were having a good time. Reading our Bibles. We were studying. We did all that. We filled ourselves up with everything else. And yet, the only source of truth is right in front of us. So which is it? My opinion versus your opinion? Or we wipe out this idea of our opinions and stick to the word of God? Now, okay, then we go, okay, which word? The one that God has planted inside of us. that affirms that word, the truth, is by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the one that guides us and teaches us. You know, we look here in Colossians 2.20, He's talking about religious ordinances. Touch not, taste not, don't do this, don't do that. But they're all religious ordinances wrapped around the morality of things you should do. Right? It's moral for you to not do these things, to abstain from these things, because this makes you right with God. Cautions two, Gary, you wanna do that one? I wish they just left 21 in there as well, because it's talking about, like we just said, it's talking about those ordinances of those things that you don't eat, don't taste, don't touch, even to the point of forbidding people from getting married and all these other things. And you're right, it's the Roman Catholic Church is a big proponent of that, there's others. When people try to bring in their own ideas of doctrine, God's Word rebels against it. God's Word says, no, this is wrong. It's not your opinion or your ideas. It's the Word of God. Which all are to perish with the using. All of those things are going to go away. It doesn't matter. Jesus says it's not the things that go into your mouth that defile you. It's the things that come out of your heart. It's that wickedness that comes out of your heart. If you've been converted and you're truly a Christian and the Holy Spirit lives in you, when you do sin, it's sin from the heart. It's stuff that is defiling. It's stuff that is wicked that you need to repent of and not be like the world. And you say, well, but I'm a Christian. OK, then quit acting like you're not. Well, the scripture tells us to study to show yourself approved unto God. It's to be diligent in your study. The ESV says be diligent. The King James says study to show yourself approved. The whole idea, what we were just reading, it talks about every religion. There are people that say, they call it the hyper-Calvinist. You don't have to do anything, go out and witness, because God's elect, he's gonna save his elect in his own way, and we don't need to go out and share the gospel, we don't need to witness, we don't need to do these things going out into the world. But the Bible says, Jesus himself says, if you love me, you'll keep my commandments. What's one of the commandments he said? Go ye, therefore, into all the world, proclaim the gospel. Now, if you're only doing out of obedience, at least you're doing it. But if you say, this humility and asceticism type thing, if you say, well, God will save his own people, that's sin. Yes, he's going to save whom he will, but you're still called to obey God and go out and share the gospel. That is because God uses means, and you're the means of the gospel going out. You know, it's not like, you know, discipleship 101. The only way you can disciple somebody is you have to study the Word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit and teach people the Word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit. But they also have to understand the Word of God by the power of the Holy Spirit. The requiring of an implicit faith and absolute and blind obedience is to destroy liberty of conscience and reason also. 1 Corinthians 3, 5 through 7. When do you want to get that one? Think of the power of that when you recognize that 1 Corinthians starts out with the strife and division and disunity and this insanity of being factious. Well, I like this person. I like that person. I like this one. This is my leader. This is my guy. Well, it's not just saying, hey, I sure do like his preaching. You know what? I like his preaching or his preaching. It is everybody else's stuff besides this one guy is wrong because this is the guy that leads me to God. This is the guy that's the only one. He's it. Everybody else is wrong. You know, and it's this, it's so much so that you're ready to go to war against other people. And this is in one church. There's going to be division over doctrine. I mean, we sit down and have a meeting with 100 Baptists, we're going to have 200 different doctrinal beliefs come out in 10 minutes, right? There's always going to be somebody believing something slightly different. But when we go to the Word of God, and we start studying these things, we can ground down these, you know, the Word of God. And we can, you know, people love to divide over the smallest things. I mean, they do. They love to divide over the smallest things and have factions and divisions. I mean, I have to tell you, we saw it here at the church when we were over at our building. We saw one lady coming in and she's all over their phone telling everybody, no, this is wrong, this is wrong. And she pulls in a group of people that are listening to her. Hey, this is wrong, this is wrong, this is wrong, I don't believe this, I don't believe this. And they set off to themselves and went home to themselves and had their own little Bible studies, their own little teaching. This is why home Bible study is so dangerous. I'm telling you this, because what happens is, yes, I know, but I'm telling you this, if it's not led right and everybody's opinions are just flowing out, guess whose opinion gets to be the dominant one? Not a minister of God, not the strongest personality in the room. Exactly. It's not a man of God called by God to preach the word of God and teach it. It's not the word of God being the final authority in what we do. It's whoever's loudest. And we saw it. And it caused major strife and contention. This is what we're being warned against. If your conscience is not controlled by the very word of God and by the doctrines of God and you're willing to submit to everybody else's opinion, guess what happens? You fall into sin. It doesn't matter how well you think they're right. The requirement of an implicit faith, an absolute and blind obedience is to destroy liberty. God tells us to study, to reason together, not blind faith. I've said this many times. As we're studying these truths, if you can show me where I'm wrong, that's fine. But if your opinion is that I'm wrong and you can't show where I'm wrong, then you're wrong. I mean, if we open the Scripture up and we study it together and you say, well, I don't like that. And how many times have we heard, well, I don't like that. Too bad. Get over it. You're the one wrong, not the Bible. If I'm wrong, I'm the one wrong, not the Bible. You don't like this, too bad, okay? God didn't ask you your opinion when he wrote the Bible. He didn't sit down and say, hey Gary, are you okay if I say this this way? He never said one time, hey Wendy, hey Justin, or anybody else, do you mind if I say this? Never once. But what he did say is, you better submit to it. As a parent, Now, and this is a bad analogy, because parents don't do everything perfect, right? We do mess up a lot. But then kids come along and say, amen, you sure do. Yeah, you do. Okay, who says? Well, you just said that. Okay, I'm giving my opinion. But the Bible says that you're supposed to humble yourself and submit to your parents. It didn't say as soon as you reach a certain age, you don't have to do that anymore. Soon as they reach a certain age, you don't need to do that. But as a kid, you say, well, I don't understand it. We're not required to understand it, you're required to submit to it. Well, I don't agree with it, okay? You haven't been around long enough and you haven't been given the wisdom and authority to teach and to concern yourself and to lead. And as soon as you become a parent, everything in your life will change. And while you think you know everything, I remember when I was growing up, we'd get, you know, 20 years old, so I'm a parent, I'll never do, I'll never do, I'll never do. And all those things have been turned on their head. You know because I didn't understand I didn't know until I became a parent and I started learning especially You know start getting teenagers coming in the house and just all of these things start changing the things that I thought that I would do differently right I Think I'm trying to do the right thing doing the best thing and I hear but but I don't agree But why but why but you know and you're on but wait a minute You're required not to ask why all the time. You're required to submit and trust. 2 Corinthians 1.24, and I think we're going to finish up there. Paul says, we are not your commanders. We are not the boss. There's one Lord. We all submit to one Lord. But the thing is, and this is why I take really seriously this idea of ordained eldership. I really do. I mean, when we were trying down at Grace Baptist, we're trying to work out things with them, it was crystal clear to me that the problem was is they are not submitting to ordained eldership. They are not trusting that God has called these men together to live their lives, to study, to show themselves approved, so that they can teach and guide God's people. It was just, hey, man, I like your hair. You want to be a deacon? You know what? You're a doctor. You should be a deacon. You're a lawyer. Oh, man, you need to be a deacon. Hey, you know what? You're a nice guy. Let's be a deacon. Hey, you know what? Let's be in leadership. the biblical qualifications are out the window, it doesn't matter. What matters is how do we feel about you and your ability to lead. And we don't look at this and say, there's one Lord and we all submit to him, and God says what ordained leadership is. And when God ordains it, then he says you submit to them because the Holy Spirit is guiding them to teach you well. I mean, I can take you to a dozen more passages that talk about the fact that the people of God are to submit to the Word of God and the preachers who preach diligently and to preach faithfully. There's a test for those that are teaching falsely, and if they don't make the grade, they're done. That doesn't mean you kick them out of the church necessarily, but they can't be leaders and teachers. But if they're not good teachers, they don't need to be teaching. They don't need to be leading. If they're not good leaders, they don't need to be leading, okay? They need to understand their strong suits and their weak suits, and that's why I keep on talking about the gifts of the Spirit, because it's not, oh, you can go make somebody healed and raise them from the dead and everything else. You lead the church. You can teach well. You understand your limitations. You try to pull out the best in other people. And the problem is, is when we say, I'm free to do whatever I want to in my own opinions. We destroy that unity. We destroy all of those things You know when you're when you have one or two people trying to teach truth and the rest of the people say I don't want to hear it Guys, we're talking to Corinthian Church We go back to the Corinthian Church I am convinced that people need to start preaching and teaching about the Corinthian Church as much as they can nowadays Because what we're seeing right now is the Corinthian Church all over again Unless we decide that we as a people are going to submit to God and his word and forget all this stuff You're talking about your life eternal life. You're talking about other people's eternal life You know This message is going to go out Might reach 800 900 people might reach a couple thousand people But the message that we preach in our lives, the message that we teach by how we live our lives, it goes out everywhere. I mean, everybody sees it. Everybody sees it. And you don't believe it? Look at what America used to be to what it is now. We have absolute open rebellion in the pulpits. Do you know why Roe vs. Wade turned into such the fiasco that it turned into? Because the supposed Christian judges of the Supreme Court turned around and said, you know, the Word of God really doesn't mean what it means. That's the same thing with that Scopes Monkey Trial. Same exact thing. They won the trial, but what happened is they brought up this man who didn't believe the Word of God. And he says, I'll defend it. It all has to do with the same. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, but it's an outcome of Christianity. It's an outcome of Christianity when you live it out and you're calling other people to salvation and the gospel changes hearts and true doctrine and true preaching is in the churches without compromise. Men of God stand up and they start living it out in their lives and, you know, I won't say people's names, but you have governors and congressmen and local leaders in the community who start to live their lives as biblical Christians, and they have been taught and they learn biblical morals and values and principles and teaching, and they learn that God is the God of all, including the government. they're going to influence in that way. And it's not that the church is trying to take over, but the influence of their moral values that comes from the Word of God and the teaching of God, that influences the change that affects the culture. We're not trying to be cultural change agents, but the culture changes as the Word of God prevails. You had a few men going out proclaiming the gospel in the book of Acts. You had a few men going out proclaiming the gospel, and 3,000 get saved, and 5,000 saved, and all these people are getting saved, so much so that one man comes along and says, these Christians are taking over the whole world. The hyperbole there is that everybody's becoming a Christian. The whole entire society changed. I mean, it got so bad for the pagans that what happened? The Romans became quote-unquote Christian. The entire nation of Rome converted to Christianity as what they recognized. America recognized a Christian-like mentality. I won't say they were all Christians, but they recognized Christianity and the God of the Bible so much that he is in our Constitution. Well, I don't disagree with that. But they had an understanding of not just a hire, but who the hire was. But think about what's going on. You have men's opinions that dominated, and a group of people, the Puritans, the Mayflower Puritans, who were mostly Anabaptists that had been rejected. by the way. They were cast out because they didn't want them in society. They were brought over. You had the Puritans of the Protestant church. They were cast out, and they brought them over, and they brought in their little groups. And the Protestants were killing the Anabaptists because they didn't want them in America. And you had all these things going on in those little subcultures, and it just keeps perpetuating itself. When we try to shove Let's just say it says implicit faith and absolute blind obedience. You're talking about man's doctrine. We try to shove that down somebody's throat and demand that. You are violating the liberty of true conscience and reason also. Look we can look at the Word of God and study it and I'm gonna tell you one of the evidences is that when we look around at the churches that we've been at in our own community I've listened I've talked to multitudes of pastors who say well yeah I know what the truth is but if I preach it if I teach it the way the Bible says it they will get angry when not come to church I had one pastor actually say to me, you are absolutely right, and I will never preach what you teach, because people will leave our church, and they give themselves over to Paul Washer's six flags over Jesus. You bring them in with party plays and fun and everything else, and you've got to keep them there with light teaching, light preaching, and party plays and fun. There's got to be pizza in there somewhere, too. Even in solid groups of churches and small churches and whatnot, you have these solid churches and solid families and people get angry at them because they say, well, look what everybody else is doing. I don't have any friends. I don't have any family. I don't have any loved ones here because they don't want to hear the truth. They don't want this. But the end game is this. It's God's church. It's God's house. He can do whatever He wants to with it. And I want to make it clear. There is no body that has dominion over the people in the body of Christ. You see dominion being played out in the false churches. In true churches, you see biblical eldership and rule from the Word of God, leadership from the Word of God as everyone submits to God and does what God says in His Word. That creates true biblical freedom. We are free from the world and from sin and free to worship God in the way that God wants to be worshipped, demands to be worshipped, and we are free to hold each other accountable and love one another. You don't think accountability is loving until you actually start realizing that you're our sinner that needs to be accountable. Well, let's pray. We're going to be on point number three next week. Let's go ahead and pray now, and then we'll catch up there next week. Dear Heavenly Father, Lord, thank you for our time together. Thank you for just giving us some truth and some wisdom to hang our hat on to think about. Lord, I do pray, God, that if we've been convicted over sin, that we'll submit to it and repent and humble ourselves. If we've been convicted, Lord, of not reading and studying the Word of God, well, I pray to God that you'll continue and convict us every moment and help us to get our minds out of the world's gutter and into your Word. Instead of spending time doing everything else, let's study to show ourselves approved. Lord, look over us. In your name I pray, Lord. Amen.