Elements of the world, now this is interesting. The elements of the world. It's saying, okay, so you weren't raised in a Roman home, or you weren't raised in a Jewish home, or a Greek home, and that's not the way it was. We didn't have a servant. I didn't have Alice in my house, you know, that was the cook, you know, like the Brady Bunch to switch TV shows. But I was raised in this world, and the way that they can best summarize what he means by the elements of the world here is the ABCs of the universe. There's a way in which the world works, right? We can all kind of figure out this is how it functions. There is good and there is evil. And you learn that and you figure that out as a kid. Some of us are slower than others. Some of us are quick on the uptake and have a sensitive heart to it. Some of us are obstinate and never wanna learn and they find themselves in prison their whole life. But there are rules of the universe. There's right and there's wrong. There are how things work in the world. In America, we have things that work a certain way that we expect to work that way. The rules, the process, how society's supposed to work. contract in our country, in our society that's supposed to work in that way where we are all gonna pull up to a stop sign in the middle of the night and no one else is around and we're gonna stop, or at least slow way, way down, right? We're in the country, right? Or you're gonna stop at the red light, you're gonna go at the green. We have all these things, we have this social contract that we're all gonna abide by, this society will function. Because you want some European or some, African city or something like that, India, you watch their traffic, you're like, how can everyone drive there? It's just chaos. It's like we have rules, we have structure on how it's supposed to be and how things are supposed to work. It gives you wisdom. You learn from this as you're growing. We have an education system, whether you're homeschooled or in a public school, how you wait your turn, you stand in line, we do things in a decent and orderly fashion, again and again and again. Verse three, even so, we, when we were children, were in bondage of the elements of the world. There's laws. Elements of the world, the ABCs of how the universe worked that we had to do it. That's how the whole world operates. Verse four, but when the fullness of time was come, God sent forth his son, made of a woman, made under the law. The fullness of time was come, there was a set time. It was pregnant and ready for him to be delivered, basically. At that time, Rome was the common language. Rome was in charge, there was a common language, a trade language, probably Latin or something like that. Everyone could read and write in this no matter what culture you were in. Most of that came on the heels of the Hellenistic Greeks. They kind of made this whole system where they could do it. There was an ease of travel that was never been in the world before because of these Roman roads and the conquering of this one empire. There was a common culture that you can function in. It was full because of Daniel 9, the 483 year prophecy was about to be able to come to that 483 year part. There's 490 years in it, but the 483 year part was coming down to it. Matter of fact, it was within 30 years of that being fulfilled. When Jesus Christ was born, he comes out and presents himself on this thy day in Luke 21 that we've mentioned before. And so God perfectly predicted it. The time was coming. It was a pregnant time. The fullness of time was coming. He sends his son under the law, under this examples of the universe, under this Jewish Roman culture where they all kind of worked in the family this way with an heir and a servant over them, teaching them these things. And you get to verse five. What's he do? To redeem them. That's a slavery word. To purchase out of slavery. To redeem them that were under the law that we might receive the adoption as sons. So we've come to that fullness. We're under the schoolmaster no more. God has said now it's time to be free. We can be adopted as a son. Just like the Romans would adopt a son when they saw that he was ready. So God said the world was ready. And so you get out from underneath that old school teacher. He redeems us like slaves. We are now set free. Verse six, and because you are sons, God has sent forth the spirit of his son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father. Under the old system, under the old master, it was a little more rigid. It was a rigid home. It was one of those homes where you were like, yes, Father, no, Father, right away, Father. You don't, if you're in a house like that, you know, we've all seen a portrayed movie, especially like, it seems like even a rich house, you know, they have a father. You know, Little House on the Prairie, you have daddy. Yeah, but under the rigid master, a taskmaster of the rules and the laws and what? Paul, sorry, sorry, yeah, but. Sorry, my resident Little House on the Prairie expert. But you know, but it's that closeness, you know, it's not father, it's not the formal. There's a closeness in a home where it's daddy, Right? Some of you as adults still call your dad daddy, I've heard you. That tells me what kind of home you were growing up in, that you had a father you had access to, someone that you were close to, someone that you still have a care and a concern about because it's daddy. It wasn't father, some person who's just footing the bill and doing all that. No, it's a daddy who knows who you are and where you are and plays with you and knows the things that are going on, because we're adopted into that. So you're adopted out of the law where you had a master, a father, And think of the Old Testament, there was a father, a holy father, Jesus teaches him. And they're like, we don't pray like you, you call him daddy. And Jesus is like, yeah, you can have that. You can be your daddy too. And he teaches us that. And we've grown up under that. In the church, we know daddy father, Abba father. That brings us close. See, we're in the family business. He's brought us in. He's like, you know, you've repented of your sins. You trust me as Savior. You're no longer under the law and under the schoolmaster where I'm a father and a judge who's over you. I'm now your daddy. I'll be your Abba. I'll be your father. And so there's nothing in between us now. We can run right and boldly into the throne room and talk to him. I can't think of that. I did not think of the picture of JFK when he's sitting at the desk, you know, and JFK Jr. is playing underneath the presidential desk in the Oval Office, because that's his daddy. And he had access to that. You know, he can run in and do it. Verse seven. Wherefore, thou art no more a servant, but a son. See, responsibility comes with that. And if a son, then an heir of God through Christ. It's who we are now. See, we're in a new relationship. There are new terms. There's new accessibility. We have a new freedom. There's no manager over us anymore. There's not a servant over us. Now we can truly be Batman. We can truly be whatever it is that we are called to be. We have it. We can use the money for whatever we want. We can buy a cave and a crazy car. No. That's what he did. But maybe what he did, he said in his heart to stop evil, right? He abhorred evil. He wanted to oppose it. He wanted to fight for justice. He wanted to defend the innocent. He set up things to uphold decency and order. He looked out for orphans and widows and he had all these fundraisers and did all that. That's us. It's the same thing we're to be doing. We've arrived. We're on our own. It's our own time here and now. That's who we are. But verse eight. Here's the promise, it says, how be it then, when you knew not God, you did not service unto them which were by nature no gods, but now that you have known God, or rather are known of God, you turn again unto these weak and beggarly elements, whereunto you desire again to be in bondage. You observe days and months and times and years. I am afraid of you or afraid for you, lest I have bestowed upon you a labor in vain. He's like, you're gonna go back? You've been set free, you know who he is, you've been adopted as a father, and you're gonna go back under that old system? You're gonna go back under the schoolmaster? You're gonna go back under a manager? You're gonna have somebody who's over you, a servant, a schoolteacher? The pagans in verse 80 talks about, you're gonna go with some strange god? You're gonna have, even those gods had these rules, you had to sacrifice, you had to do all this, and now you're gonna try to go back into that? Like you're gonna appease God by doing some service? No, he was served, and he was appeased by Jesus Christ. We're not doing anything. I please him. but I'm not gaining favor by obeying in the sense that, oh, now God has to take notice of me and I'm gonna rank higher than you because of what I did. No, it's so hard for us because it's ingrained in us. Verse 10 says you observe days and months and times and years. Yes, we should, the Catechism is their calendar and we should learn from that, but it's not like it constrains us or we think that it brings us merit by doing these things. I wanna learn from them. We're gonna camp out here this fall Not as we feel like it's obfuscated, this makes us better Christians and that we stand better than any other church. No, I want to understand deeper. I want to have a closer relationship with him. I want to appreciate this all the more and see the picture that's there, but not as a, oh, I got one more on my stack than you. No, we don't want to be seesters. That's ones who come and put their seat in the seat at Christmas and Easter, the chriesters who think that, well, I went two times this year, so now God's pleased with me. It must be better than the others. No, I gave up something for Lent. Did you? I'm fasting right now. Did you fast? You think you're doing it? I serve. I am in service. I am better. I am better. I'm better than them. I'm better than you. I'm better than this. I have gained merit with God. No. No Jew, no Gentile, no Greek, no bond, no free, no male, no female. We're all equal in Him in that. We're not gaining merit. Now, do we want to earn rewards that we could cast at His feet? That's different. We're talking about trying to appease God and make ourselves Him-pleased with us for what we are doing. Because that's what we do, right? You know, when all of a sudden the car is acting up, you start singing the hymn, thinking that's going to get you to the gas station. It's like, Maybe you should have been praying earlier. Now he's got your attention. But it's not like you're doing some merit that all of a sudden that God's like, oh, here's someone who's doing, no, that's religion. We don't want religion. We have a relationship with Jesus Christ. He's our father, he's our daddy. Can we talk to him? I love it when my kids do things that please me. I still love it when my kids do things that please me. They're always gonna be my sons and daughter. They don't have to do that, try to earn that. They have that. That's with us. We have that. We need to wrestle. They were trying to earn it. We have that. Let's quit trying to earn it. Because see, that's the problem with church today. It's religion. We want religion. When we have a responsibility to be a son, to be serving our father, our daddy, We have a responsibility to resist evil. That's a responsibility put upon us here and now today, to stand for justice, to shout out evil and say, no, that's wretched. That is despised. That is the things that we are not to do. We are to do that. We are to put sin back in the closet and say, that is embarrassing. It's not something to be celebrated. We're to say, remove it, get it out of our culture. We don't want it. It's not good. It's not healthy. It's not right. We oppose that. We abhor it. We have been silent too long. and we thought we were doing God a justice, we thought we were doing the world a justice, and we've now made evil mainstream, and it's forced upon us, it's not just tolerate it, you must embrace it, you must celebrate it, you must encourage it, or you are wrong, that's what we've allowed in. Wickedness gets a month, our veterans get a day. Is that just, is that right? No, but that's where we are now. Our justice system doesn't punish crime, it'll punish an individual. It goes after them. Crime is allowed up to $1,000. You can steal up to $1,000 in a store and they won't do nothing to you. I don't wanna go in that store. Shoplifters are not stopped. Let them go, let them take it. We don't prosecute, we don't whatever. Gangs would just go in a group and ransack stores. These cities are now losing those stores as they should. Not here. Let's make sure it stops at our county line or wherever we were supposed to before. We don't do that. We don't allow that. Let's not stand for that. The church plays nice. And we just say, well, the church's job is just to preach the gospel. Great, we should, are we? But we should. But we're called more than that just to preach the gospel, we're to make disciples. And disciples are then trained up to be like the son, you know, because they are sons. We are to be kind of a schoolmaster in the sense of that, teaching them, guiding them on how we ought to be, not just say, oh, I got my fire insurance, now I can just go into eternity. We are called for more. We are called to serve Him. We have responsibilities as heirs, as sons. We are to be change agents of our culture. That's what we're called to be, that's what we're called to do. Romans 10.9 says, for a believer that will confess Jesus Christ, I'll believe and I'll confess Jesus Christ as Savior. That means at the threat of death. And how many times we're afraid to speak to Him, but what's the workplace? Oh, I can't bring it up in this meeting. It's a government meeting. I can't bring it up in here. Oh, afraid we're gonna lose our job? Afraid we get kicked off Facebook or kicked off social media? God, it's almost expected now. We don't wanna try to repel people, we wanna try to reach them, but we're not to drop our responsibility. We're not supposed to drop our responsibility as an heir to stand for the Lord. No, a lot of people think the church should not be political, that we're all about spiritual things. Eric Metaxas is an author. He's written a new book called The Religionless Christianity. It's a book that talks about how because the church stood around and did nothing and just said our job is to preach the gospel, Nazism rode in and destroyed Germany. They were a Christian nation. They were a nation that went to church, but the pulpits all decided, there was a line in the sand where they all decided to turn their eyes and let them do what they were doing, that's government, and we're just gonna be church. We're just gonna go, we're gonna sing our songs, we're not gonna talk about political things, we're not gonna do it, and it destroyed them. It destroyed a lot of people in the world as well and almost destroyed the Jews completely. The church did nothing, said nothing. They went along with it. They loved more and had their love more sign out there. They had their rainbows up and they did it all. And it was death to millions. It was death to their nation. We are on the brink of that this very week in the United States of America. Is the church gonna turn a blind eye to how evil and corruption is going on in our world and just say, oh well, that's them. We're gonna go and sing, praise the Lord. and not do anything about it. All eyes are on us in eternity right now. It's our chapter in the book of Acts, you know, chapter 2001, wherever they're at in that, because the book of Acts doesn't end. It's a chapter that's to continue to be written. Will we be silent? The trend seems to say, yeah, we will. Because in the spring elections here in Johnson County, I don't know about every county, but in Johnson County, 16% of registered voters showed up to vote. 16%. And only a small percentage of people in the county have even registered to vote, but even a smaller amount do that. So if we show up in the polls, all the Christians, we could change things. I mean, literally, we could be a majority just by standing up and saying something. Are you happy with how the country is right now? Do you agree with the morality and the norm that we have set apart in our society? We say, yes, we want more of this. Yes, this should be celebrated. Yes, this should be encouraged. Are you pleased and do you trust our justice system to be just? Would you like to have your life put on trial today knowing that the courts are going to do what's right and just and decent in your life and uphold every law as it's always been known? Or they're going to rewrite and put new laws in to go after you? Are they going to do that? Do you trust this system? Are these in office representing you and the way you think America should be going and how America has always been and this is the America that we want for the future? Are we happy with that? Are you happy with food prices? Are you happy with the price of your electric bill? Are you happy with the strength of the dollar, our economy as a whole? Are you happy with that? Do you think sending money to other countries and helping them all around the world, billions of dollars versus putting into our own country and to our own veterans and to do things with our own people that are needy? Do you like funding monies and putting into and getting involved in endless wars around the world? Should we have our finger and our budget into all those things? Should we be allowing and are you happy for open borders, giving illegals more benefits than our veterans and even our own retired citizens and things in that way? Evil. even allowing illegal citizens to vote. That shouldn't even be a sentence, but that has been fought for and allowed today. If so, then don't vote. Or vote for the same people you always have year after year. Say nothing. Put your head down. Keep quiet. comply. That's what they want. That's what we've been doing. Let's keep doing that. Or will we be like Christians in the Bible? Joseph, Moses, they are involved in the governments of Egypt. They were leaders and they were rulers, and the countries benefited because of them being in those powerful positions. Matter of fact, they saved the world. and saved a whole culture there. Elijah opposed the evil government that was imposed that day. He thought he was the only one, but there were some silent ones that he didn't know about that were praying and he was just the front man. Maybe you're the front man or maybe you're the praying man, but we're to be involved in our culture, standing up for what is good and what is right and what is decent. John the Baptist opposed the king to his face. You are living evil, you are living wickedly. This wife is not your wife, it is your brother's sister. Cost him his life, but he did what was right. He did what he was called to do. Jesus Christ went in and flipped over the tables and called them out for what they were doing, saying, let's not corrupt this. We are heirs. We are to represent him. He was not silent. They were not silent. We are to be silent. Does God think it's okay to be silent? Does God think it's okay to have a corrupt country? No, and neither should we. We are to preach the gospel, that is for sure. We are to abhor evil, but we're to do it in a way that God gets the glory that is right. I went back and reviewed Romans and we covered that. Being a Christian isn't easy. We are called to much. There is much that is put upon us that is expected of us as heirs of God to do. And we have our hands tied behind our back because the world is violent, they lie, they cheat, and they'll use every rule against you. But God says, I gotcha. You do it right, and you do it decent, and you have your arms tied behind your back, and you do it in a way that brings me honor, and brings me glory, and it'll go further than you would ever think. It always has, it always wills. We have rules. We represent a God in heaven, and they are godless. And so we are to act accordingly. We are to act like him. We're to behave like him. If you are his, you will act like him. We should, right? The first Christians were called Christians because they were behaving like him. We should be behaving like them, and you will do something. We won't turn a blind eye. We won't just play church and stay safe and cozy in our little aisle in our little world and don't involve me with the things in the world and what is going on. We'll put on a religious show to try to impress one another and that's where it'll end. God has called us to more. God has called us to be heirs. We are to stand up for Christ for sure and we are to speak up and we are to speak out for those who can't. We're to call evil, evil. We are to shine the light of the gospel and shine it in their face. We are to resist evil. We are to stand and expect justice to be done justly. We're to help with widows. We're to help with orphans. We're to do all we can. We're to share the gospel around the world. But we're to be active. We're not to be pew sitters. We're not just be complacent to be on the sideline and cheer for a few others. What kind of action might call for it? I don't know. I'm just saying, let's just let people know. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid to stand up for Christ. Stephen did. And Jesus stood up for him. This is one of mine. Because he saw him, we'll see it in Acts chapter two. Well, no, it's a little bit further. But he says, Jesus stood up. I see the Son of Man standing at the right hand of the Father. Last time we saw him he was seated. Now he's standing, saying this is one of mine. Behaving like mine. He's preaching the gospel. They didn't let him finish the message, but he was preaching to them, trying to open their blind eyes as they rocked him to sleep by stoning him to death. So I don't know what it is. I don't know what God's calling you for. I don't know what God's calling me for. But let's be resolved to be heirs. To be not under the law, thinking we're doing something just to be keeping the law or pleasing God in that way and then getting some kind of merit. But to stand up and be a change agent in this world. To preach the gospel of Christ in this country that used to be the one who sent all the missionaries out. We need revival here and now. Let's do that, let's resolve something. That has to be a big step, a small step, something. I will stand for Him. I will live for Him. I will do this uncompromisingly. I will not be silent any longer. I will speak up and let my opinion be heard. I don't know what that looks like, but we'll confess Him. Let's make that resolve today. As Christians, we will confess Him. The threat of death, if it comes to that, and pray that it doesn't, if we start early enough now, it doesn't have to get that way. But we are on the brink where it's about ready to tip over. We're just gonna go that way. Some young man gave a speech and mentioned Jesus Christ and it was denied as a diploma in the United States of America. I'll not be, I'll not be. So we have a chance to search our hearts this morning. Say, Lord, I don't know what you're calling me for. I don't know what it is. I don't know how it looks like in my life. But I think if it starts here at the grassroots of who we are, that the church is alive and well, and Christ is still involved, and he is king, and he's gonna come back and take over. We're not just saying they're bringing the kingdom. We don't have the kingdom without the king here, but we are gonna represent him here on this earth as ambassadors. As strangers and pilgrims in this foreign world, we're going to tell them who he is and what he's done and stand for that. I pray that we make that decision in our hearts today. Let's close in prayer. Lord, I pray you search our hearts and Lord, that as Christians, that we decide to stand for you, that we would take a stand for you, that we quit watching things go by saying someone else will do it or someone else will stand up or someone else will say something. Maybe it's time we start saying something, that we start doing something, or at least look into what can we say, or what can we do? We've waited too long, we've gotta let it go on, been the silent majority so long, we're no longer, yeah, we're a majority. We've said it's okay. Be that way, behave that way, do that in our schools, do that with our children. Let's stand up and say no more. Maybe it starts here in our local school, or schools, or local towns. something where we just say, no, we are calling it back, we're reeling it in, we're saying too far, put on the brakes, let's go in reverse a little bit and get it back as it should have been, as it was meant to be, as God has lordened over these things. And Lord, I pray if there's any here today that don't know you as Savior, who aren't heirs, that they'd realize that they are under the schoolmaster of the law, and he's a hard schoolmaster, He expects a lot, and there's never any satisfaction. I pray that they would surrender, and they'd repent of their sins, and they would trust in Jesus Christ, their Savior, to be the one who does all the saving for them. Then they could be adopted as a son, and be counted as an heir. Be with us as we sing, Lord. Search our hearts as we sing, I've decided. Let's make some decisions. Let's make some decisions for Christ today. In your Son, Jesus' name I pray.