 We're going to have at the end of this month and also at the end of this month we're going to be starting three more home groups and about three more home groups next month and about five more three months from now. I am so excited. Next year is going to be, this is the year actually, this year we started home groups. We did not have home groups for three years and so we really kind of got the vision and really started running with it and I'm so excited to see people being fired up. On the night prayer, when one after another people start sharing how one person shared their faith in college, how one person shared their faith at work, David shared in the morning prayer today how he led somebody to Jesus yesterday in the gold's gym and so it's just, I'm just so fired up to see what the Lord is doing through all those people who catch this vision for the glory of God. Amen. And so I just really want you to be kind of looking forward to this coming year and what God is going to do for us in Jesus' name. If you have your Bible, I'm just going to open up right away with the verses and then we want to talk about this topic. Genesis chapter two and verse nine says the following. Are you going to give me that, Leo? Okay. So Genesis chapter two and verse nine says the following, and out of the ground the Lord God made every tree to grow that is pleasant in the side and good for food. The tree of life was also in the midst of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and in the Bible, there usually goes verse 10 and et cetera, but we're going to skip a few verses and we'll go to verse 17. But the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die. And let's go to the New Testament on second Corinthians chapter three and verse six. And Apostle Paul says, who has made us Jesus has made us sufficient as ministers of the new covenant, not of the letter, but of the spirit, for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. Somebody say life. Holy spirit gives life. And the message, if you are taking notes and we encourage every person to take notes, the message title is going to be called the tale of two trees, the tale of two trees. A lot of times when we read, the Bible is divided into two parts, Old Testament and New Testament. Old Testament is the time till Jesus came and the New Testament is when Jesus came. And the Old Testament, the whole basis was about the law. The New Testament is, you can kind of summarize the New Testament into the one word. It's God's love. And both are very necessary. Both are very important. Old Testament has 600 or something rules that people had to keep in order to keep a relationship with God. And when you go into the New Testament, you know, Jesus kind of narrows everything down to loving God and loving people. Many times people ask questions, should we follow the rules in the Old Testament? Should we still, you know, uphold those rules? There's some rules like, you know, don't eat pork. Some rules are like, don't wear women's clothing. Some rules are like, you know, you cannot put tattoos. And the next verse after that says, you cannot shave your beard. And then it says, there's a lot of different things there that are just really different. This is what I want you to know, traditionally, if you can go back and show me that slide, traditionally, there's three types of laws in the Bible. The first type of law is ceremonial, which talks about the feast, talk about the killing of the animals and talk about all of the ceremony deal. And that was fulfilled by Jesus. This was the one that fulfilled those feasts. And today we don't bring, you know, you don't bring a sheep to the church and we kind of slaughter it here, spray blood on you and you go, I mean, if we would do that, we would really have a big problem with IRS. So no ceremonial things have been fulfilled. The second laws, a lot of in the Old Testament is civil laws, which apply to the nation of Israel. For example, like every so many amount of years, you cannot plant anything you have to give the land like Sabbath. There's also laws about the cities of Refuge, if you kill somebody unintentionally run to the city. See, you can't fulfill that because we don't have those cities. You can't run to Benton City if you kill somebody in an accident. I mean, that's just not going to work because this is only applying to the nation of Israel. And so these don't apply to you because you don't live there. You live in the United States and our rules are a little bit different. And so ceremonial laws are fulfilled by Jesus. The civil laws, they are applying only to the nation of Israel. But there's also in the Old Testament, there's moral laws, like for example, Ten Commandments and there's few other things there which talk about things like, do not lie, do not cheat, you know, don't cut nobody off, it talks about, you know, don't commit adultery, it talks about, you know, not building idols, not worshiping Satan. Those laws are timeless. They don't change. And just because you're a Christian who has been washed by the blood of Jesus and you are enjoying a relationship with God, that does not mean that the moral law of God completely goes off of the table for you. That is still something that you have to abide by and respect, amen? Because it reveals God's character and secondly, these laws, moral laws, they bring blessing into our life. It's important to understand with that said that rules or laws, they do not condition our relationship with God, they confirm our relationship with God. They do not condition our relationship with God, they confirm our relationship with God. What does that mean? I'm going to give you an illustration. There's rules in two types of environments. Rules in your local gym and rules in your family. In the local gym, rules, they condition your relationship with that gym. For example, you go to the gym and they set rules before you. For example, you cannot run around in underwears on the treadmill. That's just the rule. There is also rule. You can't bring your bicycle and run and ride your bicycle in a tennis court. It's a rule. You can't bring your whole family from Seattle and Portland and go to that gym without paying a certain amount of money. That's a rule. When you subscribe to the rules, you can join in. Because of those rules, you can join in. The moment you break those rules, for example, if you don't pay for your membership, guess what happens? You get kicked out. Many people see the law or the rules are like that in the kingdom of God. When you agree with certain rules with God and then God immediately says, okay, come on in. And the moment you stop obeying some of those rules, God says, now get out. But that's not how it is with God. That's how it is with religion, where rules condition. But with God, it's like with the family. For example, how many of us in your family, you had rules? Some of you didn't have rules or you just didn't obey them. I didn't ask you if you obeyed them. I asked you if you had them. I know that you didn't obey them. What else? You wouldn't be in church. I'm just kidding. But everybody had rules in the family. Now the reason why you had rules in the family is because you were in the family. You didn't have rules so you can be a part of the family. You had rules because you were a part of the family. So in the family, it's different. You have rules only because you're in the family. Not because so you can be in the family. And that's how it is with God. Rules are not so they can bring you to God. Rules are because you are with God and once you're with God, because He loves you and because you love Him, He wants to care for you and provide for you and He said certain rules or guardrails in your life, it's for your good. For example, one of the rules we had in my family was that we would go to church on Sunday. It was not an option. I couldn't pull a card and say, Mom, I'm an atheist, okay? I will not fly. And one of the other rules that we had is on Sunday we were not allowed to do any work. Now, I know for some of you that's exciting, but it wasn't exciting. We couldn't use scissors. We couldn't vacuum. We couldn't do anything on Sunday. We were like almost like seven day Adventists. We couldn't do nothing on Sunday. It was like a very, very sacred day and it was just part of those rules. We knew those rules. Another rule that we had in our family is that when you come into the house, you had to remove your shoes. And so you had to remove your shoes. That was part of the rules. We were not allowed to curse in our family. I remember when I was a teenager and I discovered that cursing was fun. When I was about 11 or 12 years of age, I don't know, I got this demon that came in me of cursing. It was literally a demon because I could not stop cursing. I would go and I would curse for fun. I would just walk on the street and I would just curse everything I see. I would just curse. I was like a cussing sailor. I would cuss and cuss and cuss and until, but I would come home and I would, you know, restrain myself because my parents, you know, they were pretty hostile and they believed in the belt. And so I did not want to be spanked. And I remember this particular time, a little kid, I was milking the cow and I did not know that my dad was passing by the barn and I'm milking the cow and that cow pushed with the leg the bucket and so all the milk got spilled. And I told that cow, things, my goodness, that when I remember it now, I mean, I cursed the cow so bad and at that moment my dad walks in and I mean, I just froze to death and my dad's like, what are you doing? And I just, I just tried to explain that she did this and my next thing that happened is that my behind God also spanked and it's interesting how after that day I stopped cursing and I never enjoyed cursing again. But we had rules. I broke almost all of those rules that my parents have had and never once when I broke those rules, my parents told me that they don't love me. When I broke those rules and sometimes I would walk into the house and not take my shoes off because it would take so long to put them back on and my parents would be disappointed but they wouldn't kick me out out of the house. And I knew all the time that keeping the rules in the house is not why they love them. Love me. They love me because they made me. They can't stop loving me. If they wouldn't want to love me, they wouldn't make me. And you kind of have that mindset about your parents and you have to have the same mindset about God. God loves you and that's why he makes you, you know, eat veggies instead of candies. There are certain rules God says and they're not to harm you, punish you, or even earn your salvation. These are the rules. It's because he cares for us and he loves us. When the parents tell the kid go brush your teeth, it's not because they want to just really make him miserable. When they say put your toys away, it's not because they just thrive on making a kid's life just hell on earth. It's like man, you caused me so much pain when you were getting out of the womb. I'm going to pay you back. I'll make you do everything you would like to do. I'll make you wake up early in the morning. I'm going to take away your candy, give you a toothbrush and I'm just going to make you eat those veggies for the rest of your life. That is not why they do that. Now it will seem like the rules in the family are to punish us, but in reality they are to protect and to bless us, protect us from cavities, protect us from cancer, and just raise us up as disciplined people. Amen. Until you become a parent, you don't see that, but every parent always loves their kids more than the rules. Well, I hope they do. But parents love their kids more the rules. And these rules, they don't condition our relationship. They confirm our relationship. So is with God. Many people, when they approach God or they approach Bible and they see things in the Bible where God says, you know, don't sin or don't do this. And people make mistakes. They immediately freak out. And it's a good thing that they freak out because they're afraid of hell. I had one gentleman last Wednesday came up to me and he said, Pastor, I know that I gave my life to Jesus the Wednesday before. And he said, I'm so happy. But he says, is it this week? I just kind of had one evil thought in my head and and he grabbed my hand and I was like, OK, he's like, I'm afraid to go to hell. I was like, that's a good thing. He's like, I know, but I don't want to go to hell. And he's like, and the Bible says, if we say we don't have sin, we have we are lying. And so he says, then I have sin because if I say, I don't have sin, that means I'm lying. And if I have sin, I'm going to hell. He says, either way, I'm going to hell. And I look and I was like, oh my goodness, that is confusing. I'm like, you just confuse me myself. And I looked at him and I said, do you have daughters? Well, I knew he did. He did have daughters. He said, yes, I do. I said, do you have rules in the family in your house? He said, yes, I do. I asked him to mention one rule. He mentioned that rule. He said, I said, if they don't obey that rule, does that offend you? He's like, oh yeah, do you still love them? He said, yeah, I'm like, does your love drop? Love drops when they don't obey those rules? He said, no, no, no, I still love them. I may not have the best relationship with them, but I still love them. I'm like, well, you can come out of the house. He said, no. And I said, here you have an answer. I'm like, you are a man, not God. God loves us more than you love your daughters. And when you make mistakes, God is not going to reject you. God is not going to throw you away. He said, what if I make a mistake and I didn't have time to repent and I die at that moment? I asked him, what if your daughter makes a mistake, doesn't clean the room, and she dies in an accident? What would happen? He said, oh, man, don't bring that up, man. Of course I would love her. And I said, see, your problem is that you're looking at God through the view of Gold's Gym, not through the view of the family. You're looking at God. He's not a Gold's Gym. He's not a club where you subscribe to rules if you break him, you get kicked out. God is a father and we are in a family. Now, if you choose to walk away from God and say, I don't wanna do nothing with Jesus, this whole Jesus thing, I don't believe this is not for me, then the Bible says, truly, then the redemption is not for us because it's for those who believe. But for those of us who make mistakes, we must understand the love of the father. Can somebody say amen? So you need rules in your life. Rules are needed. You cannot just simply have this mindset. Because of Jesus, I don't need any rules. That's crazy. Imagine you're growing up in a family where your parents say, we love you so much, we want you to do whatever you want to do. If you get a chance to get a ladder and climb on the top of the roof and jump from the roof, awesome, we still love you. If you just go in the kitchen and just take anything, salt and pepper, combine everything and eat, you can sleep any time you want to sleep. You don't have to sleep. You can watch whatever you want to why because we are different parents than anybody else. We just love you. Your parents are either mental or crazy. Nobody in the right mind will do that. Even the worst parents in tri-cities who may be straying out on drugs, still have certain rules because they care and they love for their children. It's not to condition our relationship. It's to confirm our relationship with God because somebody say amen. Jesus did not come to remove rules. He came to put them in the right place. Jesus did not come to remove religion. He came to put religion in the right place. Before Jesus, rules and religion was always first. And when Jesus comes, he says rules and religion, it has its place. But it cannot be first. What is first is first is my love, God's love for humanity. That is first and secondly is man, man's need, man's problems, man is second. And third is the rules. Our Jesus was so awesome is that because see, when you are religious, when you are like a Pharisee, rules are the most important in your life. Pharisees were willing to kill a woman to protect rules. Jesus was willing to die for a woman to save her. Religion will kill people just to honor the rules. But Christianity will save people. Rules are always second, rules are not first. Love of Jesus Christ for humanity is first and secondly is our love for people comes second. That's why when you become religious, when I become religious and religious people are not Baptist churches, religious people are not Catholic churches, religious people is not the church down the street, religious people is everywhere in every church. It's people who don't put Jesus in the first place and people in the second place. The kind of hair you have is in the third place. First is Jesus and secondly your soul, your hair is third. Your tattoo is third. The fact your sexual orientation is third. First comes Jesus' love for somebody, second comes the fact you are an eternal soul and thirdly comes all of your issues. When you become like somebody like Jesus and you put Him first and you put people second and issues go third, something happens. People will be saved. There's one thing you know about religious people, religious churches. People don't ever get saved in religious churches. You can never be saved. And when there is a religion and we are in danger of being there, religion does this. It puts rules first. It makes the leaders self-righteous and the followers hypocrites. Because leaders in the religion are those who are the best amongst them and they are very self-righteous, judgmental, critical self-righteous but the followers can never match up to those rules. So what they do is they pretend like they do and we just have a bunch of hypocrites. When religion is first, rules are first. This is what's gonna happen. Mercy always suffers. There's no mercy because religious people do not know mercy. You will never know mercy if Jesus is not first. Jesus is example of mercy. We are not examples of mercy. If Jesus is not first in our life, we are the most meanest monsters you will ever meet in your life. We do not have mercy inside of us. We do not have mercy for ourselves. We do not have mercy for other people. We are mercies less. But if Jesus's love is first and he teaches us that people are second and mercy has a chance. Not because we're better, but because Jesus has modeled the way. Because somebody say amen. Jesus puts religion in its right place. Jesus puts rules in the right place. Religion puts rules first. Jesus puts rules last. When Jesus healed the woman in the Sabbath, it broke the rule. It wasn't the God's rule. It broke the rule in the synagogue. I want you to notice this. There's a difference between Christianity and Churchianity. Most of us start in Christianity and then with time move to Churchianity. Churchianity is anything church adds to Christianity is Churchianity. It's not bad. As long as we know the difference between the two. Moses said on the Sabbath people should do this and don't do this and don't do this. And then the people, the Pharisees, the scribes and all the people came in and they added to it so much more that on the Sabbath you had to be like robot. That's what you could do. And so Jesus comes on the Sabbath and he says I'm not gonna you know plow anything but I'm just gonna heal the person. He heals the person. And people got so mad because Jesus healed the person. Why would you get mad when somebody got healed? Because it did not happen on the right day and it didn't happen the right way. And Jesus right away revealed by that his heart and the heart of religion. The religious heart is this. Rules are always more important than people. Jesus reveals this. People are always more important than rules. People are always more important. And Jesus revealed something else that is also very, very important. It's possible for the Christianity with time, new revelations, new traditions, new things in the culture. And we add more, more, more, more until Christianity begins to look more like churchianity instead of Christianity. We will all have different rules, different things in our church. For example, certain things on the stage we don't do. Certain ways we don't pray. Certain encouragement. Even today the whale radar service was going on, I wrote down few notes. There are certain things that need to be done better but these things have nothing to do with the Bible. These things all have to do with us getting better and they're not rules like in the Bible. Somebody say amen. Now let me end with the message. I mentioned I think yesterday on my Facebook and it really touched me that Jesus is my savior. He is not my religion. For many people, Jesus is their religion. And they start out as people whom Jesus is their savior but then they upgrade to Jesus becoming their religion and it's very dangerous. Jesus has to be your savior. Stay your savior. In the garden, the Bible says that in a garden of Eden God created two trees. One tree was the tree of life. It was the center of the garden. And then we see another tree was the tree of knowledge, of good and evil. I want everybody to pay attention to me. The second tree is the tree of knowledge, of good and evil. And the first tree was a tree of life. We see actually that tree reappearing again in Revelation and that tree will also be in heaven. So this is kind of the only thing that probably gonna remain out of the earth except the humans is gonna be this tree, the tree of life. It will be in heaven and we actually gonna be able to eat of that tree. And the second tree was the tree of knowledge, of good and evil. Now we don't know what fruit this tree produced. Most of the time people say it was an apple tree. It was not an apple tree. It's because an apple has that thing. That means that it came from there. We don't know which fruit it was there. We actually don't know anything else about this tree. Some people speculate that this tree was actually not made by God, it was made by the devil. That the devil came in and he saw the seed and that's how the tree grew. That's not in the Bible. We also don't know anything else about this tree. What we know about this tree is this. It was there and we don't even know if it was bad. We know one thing is that man, if he would not eat of it, it would be good. If he will eat of it, it will be bad. Maybe that's why it was called the tree of evil and good. Good, if you don't eat of it, bad, if he will eat of it. What I want you to point to you is this. The tree was there. Adam's job wasn't to remove it. Adam's job wasn't to live off of it. I wanna equate this tree to rules in your life. You need to have them in your life but they cannot be your life. Rules is something you need to have in your life but they cannot be your life. Rules is something that we need them just like this tree. They need to be there, they have their place and Jesus doesn't come to chop the tree out. Jesus comes to remind us this tree is not to be eaten from. That means this tree cannot bring me nourishment. It cannot bring me life. It's something else and someone else brings me life and that someone is Jesus. Same thing happens in every area of your life. I want you to pay attention very closely. The world tells us, the self-help book guy tells us, guys tell us, the TV shows, everybody tells us. If you set up certain rules in your life, your life will get better. If you set up the rule to wake up earlier, you run, you become healthier. If you set up rules, even the rules I mentioned to you, how to fight in the marriage instead of you know, just kind of going gloves off and just punching another person verbally. But you set up certain guard lines, your life will get better. And when you start to set up rules and you begin to live your life by rules but you don't have a tree of life in your garden, something happens. Very soon you find out these rules helped you for a few weeks. And after that, you abandon the rules, you abandon the whole thing together. You as a human cannot live your life by the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Rules are not going to give you life. Only one person gives us life and that person is Jesus Christ. Rules do not have any power in them. Disciplines and guardrails don't have any power in them. What they do is they actually only take power from us but they don't give power to us. One of the greatest blessings in marriage or in any relationship is when a person, one person and the other person has a relationship with God that is real and genuine and the relationship with God where they love God more than they love their person that they're married to. What this does is that when the rules they have and the rules get broken and the person is stubborn and the person says, no, my way is the right way. I will never do this, you crazy. And you're saying all of these things but when they go to God, the tree of life and God gives them that dirty look and you know why? Because what you did to your wife the night before or how you talked to your parents the night before and you're like, no God, you cannot be on their side. I thought you were on my side. Past of last and Wednesday you're on my side. You're not on their side. And then you begin to press into God and you feel God is saying, hmm, that's not good. That's not good what you did there. That's not good what you did there. That's not good what you did there. And next thing that happens is okay Lord, I admit I was wrong. I just did not want to admit it to that person. And then when God begins to touch your heart you're going and admit it to that person and the relationship grows stronger. Why? Because of tree of life. Because of your relationship with God that fuels your life, your relationship with God that fuels every single thing and causes things to change. Without this, what's going to happen is this is you are your own God. You have to be your own God. You have to find life. You have to find source of strength inside of you and you won't. No amount of books, no amount of podcasts and sadly to say no amount of church services. A personal relationship with Jesus Christ has to be. Some people say, well, what do you mean? The churches, I just come to church that should be enough. I love Starbucks. I've been going there so many times. Yesterday they already gave me a golden card. But it has never made me into a latte. No amount of times going there has never made me into Carmel Frappuccino. You cannot simply think that just because I go to church and the way I live my week that already means I have a relationship with God. It's only a start. It's only a beginning. But there has to be a real genuine connection between you and the Lord. That is your tree of life. You cannot live off of the rules. You gotta have them, but you cannot keep them without God. You're gonna fail your own rules, be disappointed. If there is no relationship with Jesus, the Holy Spirit, on a personal level. I'm not talking about having three hour prayer every day. I'm talking maybe 15 minutes, whatever it is, but if you don't have that, you and God, you will not keep those rules. You will try to live by those rules, they'll fail you. My illustration is this, is when I was studying for this and this was my own revelation for me. This wasn't for the sermon a few days ago. And the picture that Jesus gave me in prayer was a fork. A fork. And in my prayer, I felt like the rules and religion is like a fork. You need to have a fork at a table. But everybody in the right mind understands you cannot eat a fork. You can eat with the fork, but the moment you grab a fork, a plastic fork and you try to chew it and eat it, you're gonna get sick. And you're not gonna get fed. Jesus, on the other hand, is the bread of life. Jesus is life. And so Jesus is at our table. Jesus is in our life and says, I want to be your nourishment and I want to be your life. And here you got forks. One fork is this, I wanna be nice to my kids. Another fork is once a month, I wanna bring flowers to my wife. Another fork is that I'm not gonna smoke, I'm not gonna drink, I'm not gonna do this, I'm gonna pay my taxes. And you got a lot of forks and forks are good. But at the end of the day, if your life is all about eating forks, you're gonna die. You can't live, that's why God says, if you eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, what's gonna happen? You are gonna die. This tree is never meant to give you life. This tree is meant to guard and keep you away from danger, but it's never meant to be the source of your life. The source of your life is the bread of life, which is Jesus Christ. It's somebody saying, man. So don't eat the fork. You know what religious people like to do? They like to take a fork and poke you with it. They're like, not only I'm gonna chew this, I'm gonna poke you with it. And we have a fork fight. You know, you said this and she said this and they're not doing this right and they're not doing that. Jesus never gave you a fork to be a weapon against your brother. He gave it as a tool to reach something that you couldn't reach before. That means when you keep certain rules in your life, it's not so you walk around, I am better than you and you are worse than me. I am holier than you and you are such a sinner, such a worse sinner than me. No, so you can use those rules to achieve success and inspire other people for the glory of God. Jesus is my bread, religion is my fork. Can somebody say amen? And yes, you need a fork. Yes, you need rules. Yes, you need certain things in your life, but they are not first. Jesus comes to put religion in its place and Jesus comes and tells us true life exists from him. True life exists from our relationship with the Holy Spirit and from that we receive the strength and religion goes in its right place. Amen. At the end, I just wanna show you the difference between religion and Christianity. Religion says behave, Christianity says believe. Religion says do, Christianity says done. Religion focuses on external means your hair, your clothes and your kind of external things. Christianity focuses on internal, motives, thoughts and intentions. Religion is willpower, Christianity is holy power. Religion brings death, Christianity, Jesus brings life. Religion focuses on trying, Christianity focuses on trusting. Religion is all about rules, regulations and Christianity is all about relationship.