 Okay, Revelation chapter 3, now you're going to have to bear with me a little bit because we need to establish a little bit of history. We need to establish a bit of an understanding and a premise and a little bit of a preface as well as we get into this book. So it's always interesting. I love coming to churches where I know the people are learned and educated considerably in the Word of God. I know that David's been, Pastor David's been faithful to teach you guys the Word. So I'm already teaching you with the assumption that you understand a lot of the things that are being communicated here. And what that enables me to do as a Bible teacher is it enables me to elevate a little bit what I would from maybe speaking to a crowd who maybe doesn't know the Word real well, you know? And it's unfortunate, it's really sad. You guys actually are on the fortunate side of this, you're blessed. I've gone to many churches and have spoken to many places where people were so poorly taught the Word that they had no idea of the things that were being said. I mean, like literally, I'm not talking about ignorant, I'm talking ignorant. You know what I'm talking about? I mean, just really, I'm talking. So it's awesome to see that I get to come to a place where I know people are being taught the Word so that I get to take a slightly different angle in that I can raise the level of education just like your pastor does and kind of bring you into an in-depth place of understanding things a little bit more clearly. So let's take a little journey. Let's do a little bit of a history lesson here, OK? So how about we pretend that it is roughly or the setting is somewhere around zero to three, maybe four AD. You are a young Jewish boy or girl that has, let's just say boy, we'll say that, OK? You're a young Jewish boy who has been taught your whole life about the history of your people. You learned about Abraham. You learned about Isaac. You learned about Jacob. You learned about the work that God did as your forefathers sojourned through the land. You heard about Joseph and what God did through him and how God made a great nation as the generations passed. You heard about the pharaoh who actually did not know Joseph. And you heard the stories of how you were enslaved by the Egyptians and from the time of slavery all the way till the time of the current day. You have a very, very, very colored and difficult history, a painful history of being abused by those that were called Gentiles. You've heard stories of how the nation of Israel was established in great glory. You've heard accounts of King David coming in and telling the Lord, hey, I want to build a temple for you. And you hear about how that dream was realized in Solomon who built a beautiful temple structure and how that temple structure was destroyed by a fellow by the name of Nebuchadnezzar at the hands of the warnings of Jeremiah and Isaiah, the great prophets. You hear about all the horrible things that led up to that point. You hear about the history of the Assyrians coming in and torturing the people, your people, coming in and raping your women, killing your babies. You hear the countless accounts of suffering and pain that took place amongst your people. And in the current day of the accounts of all the pain and all the history, you certainly take no exception to the fact that the Romans themselves are the current occupying force. So much they've occupied that even the beautiful temple that has been rebuilt and reconstructed by a fellow by the name of Herod can't even be lad or kept in peace because there are Gentile Roman guards that are overseeing the courtyards. You've also heard stories of this Messiah that would one day come. You've been told that He would be the one that would deliver you from the political oppression of the Gentiles. You've been told the stories of how He would deliver your people from the bondage and from the slavery that they regularly experience. You hear all the accounts of what everybody has to say concerning what this Messiah may do for your future and how free you may live. And you have been longing even as a young child, you have been longing for the opportunity to see this Messiah. One day, you wake up in the morning only to hear rabbis and priests and leaders walking through the streets, wearing sackcloth and ashes all over themselves, falling to the floor and wailing out at the top of their lungs, Ye Ya'ilahi, why God, why God? Why have you done this? And you stand a bit astounded and shocked on that very day because your whole life you've been used to hearing about how the Gentiles have forsaken you. Your whole life you've been used to hearing about how people have oppressed you and your people and you've become very accustomed to it. But yet the one thing that you have never been accustomed to is the God of your fathers forsaking you. But on that day, you cannot help but to feel just like the rest of the people wailing and crying that the God of your fathers has forsaken you. The reason why you feel that way is because in Genesis chapter 49, when Ya'qob Israel is literally handing out his final blessings, the Lord uses him to tell something very important to his sons, something critical that you and your people have held on to forever and he says, the scepter shall not depart from Judah until Shiloh comes. Now what does that mean to you? It simply means this. The way you've understood it is that the right to capital punishment will not be taken away from your people until the Messiah would come. Because in your mind, you don't need the right to capital punishment if the Messiah is there because he's the one that will now rule. But yet in your mind, on that day, you know that the Romans have taken away the Jews' right to capital punishment. Your people's right to capital punishment and yet in your mind, Shiloh had not yet come. As powerful and as vivid as that pain is in your heart, as sure as you are that you have been forsaken by God, you are just as mistaken in your own mind and heart. Because, yes, the scepter did depart from Judah, but in a small little town, Bethlehem, to be specific, Shiloh did come. Born literally in a cave, not the birth of a king by any stretch. He was raised up, the Bible says, as the only man on the face of the earth that fulfilled the law completely to its wholeness and its accurate interpretation and depiction, completely whether on its face implied, he fulfilled every jot and tittle. If you don't know what a jot and tittle is, a jot and tittle were literal descriptors that were being used in Hebrew grammar, almost like grammatical structures, although they weren't, but little tiny structures that would depict markers, for lack of a better term, that would depict how accurate the translators were. In other words, you didn't miss a single detail. This man, this Messiah, did miss a single detail of the law of God, and not even a dot that would be used to mark where the scribes had left off in the copies of the manuscripts. You lived the life, the Messiah, he lived the life perfectly. He healed the sick. He gave the blind sight. He took the hopeless and he gave them hope. He took those that were filled with sin and forgave them of their sin. He was truly the Lamb of God who took away the sins of the world, and as a young man who was following him, you find yourself on one day in the year somewhere around 32 A.D., standing up, looking at a cross, watching the man who you thought was your Messiah, being hung on a cross, a criminal's death. As you're standing there with his mother, you hear the words being yelled out at the top of his lungs. You hear him say, Ilahi, ilahi la musabahtini, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And at that moment, you witnessed world history, human history, because at that moment you watched God the Father, judge, God the Son, the very Messiah. You were there three days later when he resurrected from the dead after being sealed in a rich man's grave, Roman guards standing so that nobody would steal the body. You watched the miraculous worm. You watch, you hear of the great things that he does in the next 40 days, and you are there on the day of Pentecost after 40 days after Christ descends. You're there when the Holy Spirit comes down in a way that is so powerful and unique and special that he overwhelms the room, fills people and causes them to speak in other tongues. You watch the church being born. You watch Peter, who used to be scared of little girls, preach the gospel with great power, and 3,000 people being added to the church that day. You stand to watch God, the creator of the universe through the power of his spirit, transform the lives of a very, very broken world. Thirty years now goes by from that day of Pentecost. Titus has already come in. Destroyed the temple. People are losing heart, they're fainting, and you even begin to realize that there is a whole generation of kids who never got to experience the Messiah, who now look at the Messiah as an abstract God, one of many gods that they worship, and so you feel so compelled and so strong that you have to grab a scroll and you have to write these words. You have to say, In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. And from the beginning of those powerful words that you write down in the native language, the Greek language that you were so familiar with, the language of the Romans, you begin to describe with great vivid accuracy the story of what happened during the life of the Messiah that you still worship. You begin to put in your own words, he was so real to me back then, and he's real to me now, and he's more real to me now than he was back then, and guys, you need to worship him as such. You see a revival even amongst the Gentile church, and you see great things begin to happen even specifically in Asia Minor, and now you find yourself somewhere around in 90 AD. You've been beat up. You've been persecuted. They've tried to kill you many times. They just tried to boil you in oil, and that didn't work. Because of your stand for Jesus Christ, you're the last living apostle. James died by the sword. Peter was crucified upside down. You're the last one, and you find yourself wondering, what's the purpose of my existence until something powerful and unique happens yet once again to you? And the Lord Jesus Christ Himself appears to you and says, write down the things which I show you. I'm going to show you the current state of affairs. I'm going to show you what was, and I'm going to definitely show you what is to come. And I want you to write down exactly that which I tell you, because these words will be necessary for the future of the church. Then the Lord does this. He tells John, he says, look, I want you to write down the words that I have to give you to seven different churches. Every single one of these letters, by the way, that he writes to all of these churches are very valid, very powerful, very relevant to us today. But the one I want to focus on today is I believe the one that is probably the most applicable to us in the current condition we are in in the church in the West. And that is what starts in verse 14 when Jesus writes a letter to the church in Laodicea. Now, I'm reading from the King James because I like Elizabethan English, right? But some of you might not like to be tortured by that type of English, so I'll walk you through what some of this means. Look what it says in verse 14. It says, and to the angel of the church of the Laodiceans, write. So there's a command. Jesus is saying, hey, John, I want you to write this letter to the angel of the church. Now, some people will say, well, this means that there's a literal angel assigned to a church. I don't necessarily take that view because I just don't think that that's what's being depicted here. When it says to the angel of the church, literally the Greek word is angelos. Surely you're familiar with that term. David's spoken about it many, many times. And what this word can mean or actually predominantly does mean is the messenger of the church who's the messenger of the church, the messenger of the church is the pastor of the church. Why is the messenger of the church being spoken to as opposed to the church as a whole? Here's the reason why. Because when God wants the body of Christ to behave a specific way, who does he tell to behave that way first? The pastors. They're the leaders. God doesn't say, do as I say. He says, do as I say and as I do. Right? So when we consider this, he's saying, I want this message to go out to my body so as a result, give it to the messenger here. Then the messenger will take and will deal with this. He'll bring it out. So he wants to get the attention of the church. Look what he goes on to say. He says, these things sayeth the amen. Now we'll stop at that word amen for just a second. I'm gonna spend a lot of time on this word because I want you to understand it. Now, we throw this word around quite a bit, don't we? We say it in different contexts, right? Well, some of us say it. We hear it in different ways. I'll say a prayer and you've heard this many, many times. We've probably done it four times already today here at church. We'll say a prayer, Lord, in Jesus' name, amen, right? We always say that and I even noticed when I said amen many of you said amen with me, right? So we say it that way. Then there's other ways we say amen. Some of the more common ways. Maybe sometimes I'll be teaching a Bible study and then every now and then I'll have somebody out there go, amen. And I kind of like that little bit of affirmation. You know, it's kind of cool. When I do it, I tend to, as a pastor, say amen, ha, you know, praise the Lord, ha, ha. No, not that crazy, but you know. We say it different ways, different contexts in which we say amen, right? Sometimes you can even use that word in a way that is sort of secular, if you know what I mean. Like something that doesn't necessarily relate to God, although I think food relates to God. I'll use food as an example here, okay? This is a good one. Perfect example. I went recently to a place that I love. It's called Ham Bones. In our neighborhood, it's a great, it's the best barbecue place you ever, let me tell you the kind of barbecue it is. It's a type of barbecue where they give you like hope, like wonder bread. You know what I'm talking about? Like the white wonder bread, you know what I mean? Where the food has been barbecuing for, you know, the meats have been barbecuing for like 12 hours, you know? Oh man, it's the best stuff. And we're sitting there eating away and man, it's just so good. And someone said, dude, this food is the bomb. And he wasn't even eating with me with somebody else, like on the other side of the barroom. And I turned around and went amen. I'm in church up in this place right now. Ah! You know? And we say amen in all kinds of different contexts. We use the word amen in all kinds of different places and in all kinds of different ways. But there's a way that amen, amen is being used here that some of you might not be familiar with. The way the word is being used here is it's a title to depict a particular characteristic that is so foundational and fundamental that you cannot identify with God without understanding it. And that is this. Amen also means when it says so be it, also means it is permanent. In other words, when I say it's gonna happen, it's gonna happen. God doesn't play around. He doesn't say, come on into heaven. Nah, I'm just kidding, go to hell. He doesn't do that. He doesn't. And when you examine it, there are gods or people who claim to be God who are filled with lies. I shared with you a passage from the Quran the last time I was here that tells us to lie because Allah is the chief of liars. How would you like to give your life as a martyr for a God that is called the chief of liars? Can you trust it? No, you can't. When they tell you on TV, oh Islam is a religion of peace. It's not a religion of hate. It's not a religion of violence. It's a liar. It's a lie. There's nothing true about that. You cannot give Allah the title of Amen because what he says is not always so. He by his own words in his own holy book, the Quran, calls himself the chief of liars. By the way, who does the Bible say is the chief of liars? I'll say it in Arabic, shaitan. Satan, not on the other hand. The true and living God, the God of the Bible is not a liar. When he says he's going to do something, folks, he's gonna do it. He's not like, okay. He's not like the little young new age girl that you might see at the grocery store. It has to be like a fancy grocery store, you know what I mean? Like one of the rich people grocery stores. It has to be like in a really, really nice neighborhood or a grocery store that's like, you ever wonder that? If you have a Ralph's that's like somewhere in South LA, it looks like a liquor store somewhere, right? But if it's a Ralph's that's like, you know, in a really, really nice part of Orange County, dude, it looks like, man, what? I mean, it's like, they have their own department store in there, you know what I'm talking about? They got a little restaurant in the middle of the place and you know what I'm talking about? So you gotta go to a restaurant like that. I don't know why, it just happens to be there, you know? Because if you go to a grocery store in the ghetto, you won't see this. But you know what I'm talking about? This has happened to me. I've gone to these grocery stores and you see this mom saying, and it's a little boy, it's like a little boy and a little girl having a fit at like three years old. And then the mom says, okay, honey, now I'm gonna count to three. And if by the time I get to three, you don't stop. You're gonna be in trouble. Whatever, you walk away. Go get whatever you need. You come back 20 minutes later and the girl is still sitting there counting to now. I think she's at 300. You know what I mean? And the kids are like, my dad didn't do me that way. You know what I'm talking about? That's why I say you'll never see this in the ghetto. You have a little kid that throws a fit, that mom won't even say, I'm gonna count to three. That mom will be like, what, boom! You know what I'm talking about? That's two good parents over there, you know? You gotta be that way. My dad, I've never gone away with doing that with my dad. Do you know if my dad told me to do something, if by the time I said, oh, and no, I would say, no, my dad, my hand would see, my dad's hand would literally see my mouth. No, oh, before I could even say no, the back of his hand, right there. When my, this is why I think I have such a grasp, and listen to me, parents, especially fathers, this is why I think I have such a great grasp on my heavenly father, is because of the man of God my dad was and still is. When my dad told me something, it was gonna happen. That was the way it was. My dad, there's no way in the world that I don't care what it was. If my dad said it was gonna happen, there was no way in the world you could convince me that it was not gonna happen. When my dad said it, it was happening. I remember this one time. I don't know, 12 years old, something like that. My dad says, if you ever say that again or respond back to me disrespectfully again, I'm warning you right now, I am gonna spank you. He used to say in Arabic, which means I'm gonna grind you up like a pile of meat, basically. So he would tell me, and I decided to get bold. I mean, I don't know if you wanna call a bold or stupid, but when my dad told me that that day, I remember, I still remember where I was. I was upstairs at the top of the stairs. It was that traumatic. I told my dad, I said, and I'm telling you, if you ever lay a hand on me like that again, I'm gonna call Child Protective Services. So I told my dad, in the almost 41 years that my dad was married to my mom before my mom went to go be with the Lord, my dad never raised his voice on my mom, ever. Only time you would hear my dad use a loud voice with my mom is when my mom was downstairs and needed to be heard and my dad was upstairs, like when he was calling for her. And I hear my dad at the top of his lungs call out my mom and tell my mom when my mom gets to the base of the stairs, what's wrong, Sam, is everything okay? And my dad says, get the video camera right now. He says it in Arabic there, but then the accents are, and you know, when my dad gets really mad, then the accent gets really thick, you know? The Middle Eastern accent gets really thick. So as my dad is waiting, while my mom was bringing everything up, you know, my dad's getting all riled up and everything, and then it gets really scary because you know, when dad gets mad, it was okay, it was not a big deal because when dad got mad, you know he wouldn't act out in his anger because he never did, but when he started calming down, that's when I would freak out. You know what I mean? That's when I got scared. So my dad was beginning to calm down as my mom was bringing up the whole video camera setup or whatever, he asked my mom to run back downstairs and go get the little iPod, the little iPod, the little pod, you know, the little pod boom setup, you know? And so he sets out the whole video camera up and he gets a videotape and he puts it in there, make sure it's pointed at me, he makes sure my mom's got the record button. Elaine, is it recording like now? Yeah, yeah, baby, yeah it is. Okay, make sure you are pointed at me and James. And then my dad manages to give me the weapon of a lifetime. I mean, wha-ba! I think there may have been a shoe involved, I don't know. I don't remember. When he's done doing it, where I'm begging him, stop, stop! He then walks up to the video camera, hits the stop, ejects the cassette, the tape and hands it to me and says, and when you call the Child Protective Services, give this to them too! I'm lying, that's true! When my dad said something, it happened. Now, it's hard for me not to get emotional when I think about this. Because when Jesus Christ calls himself the Amen, he is saying, listen to me because the words that I say are with penality. They are permanent, they are not, I take it back! When he says it, he means it, and it's gonna happen. Make no mistake about it, nothing in the world that you can possibly imagine or think of will stop what he says from happening, from happening. We can respond two ways, one of two ways. We can say, ah, whatever, and then when it does happen, be devastated. Or we can say, whoa, I believe this. And then, be blessed. I spend a lot of time expounding upon what it means to be called the Amen. Because if you do not understand the word Amen, as it's associatively valued with Christ in his character, you cannot understand the other words that are listed here. By the way, this is really cool. This is, I do this a lot in the Bible College environment, especially when I teach original language classes. This is really cool. You're gonna notice something right now. We're gonna see a couple of other words being said here that he associates himself with. And because I spent so much time describing to you the foundation of both words, both of these other words will make sense. I don't even have to explain it to you. Watch this. He calls himself the Amen. You guys now understand what Amen is. Can I get an Amen? Amen, all right. Look what he says. These things say if the Amen, the faithful and true witness. I think this through. If he is the Amen, that means whatever he says will happen, which means his word is faithful. His word doesn't lie, which means he's true. He's faithful and true. It will happen and it will happen exactly as it is said. It is completely 100% accurate and he is 100% faithful. And then he says this. He says the beginning of the creation of God. Now, let me tell you why this is heavy. He is called, Jesus Christ is called the beginning of the creation of God. Not because he had a beginning point. As a matter of fact, that passage that I quoted to you in John where he says, The beginning was the word and the word was God and the word was God. Watch this. What that implies, there is a use or a rendering of the use. I said that backwards, the use of the rendering of the imperfect in the Greek New Testament, which would imply that Jesus has always been there when the beginning came into existence. But yet over here he's called the beginning of what? The creation of God. Let me tell you what this implies. And boy, let me tell you, this is heavy. Watch this. This is gonna bless you. If Jesus is called the beginning of the creation of God, then what that would imply as you look at this in the original language and what it would apply if you just simply look at it within good context and you bring it together, is it would imply that when God created you, he already had his son in place for your benefit? Because his son is the beginning of the creation of God. If his son is the beginning of the creation of God, that means his son was already in place for your benefit. In other words, the Lord specifically in his purposes knew from the very beginning that his son would be set aside for our benefit, which is why he's called the beginning of the creation of God. Whoa, when we put all this together, why is that really important? We put it together because he's saying what I say is final. You can count on everything that I say will happen. So watch out, you're on notice. But know that I'm telling you this with the deepest and sincere, innermost depth of my love. I'm telling you because I love you. Pretty heavy verse verse here. Look what it goes on to say in the 15th. It says, I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot. I want that that work cold or hot, so then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. This passage is probably one of the most incorrectly taught passages in the Bible. It is one of the easiestly misconstrued passages and certainly one of the most highestly inappropriate or misappropriated passages you will find. Why? Because the most common teaching of this passage is, God would rather that you love him, which of course is being represented by hot, right? Or God would rather that you hate him, which is represented as being cold. He wants to know whether or not you hate him or love him. But instead because you're in the middle, that's why he's mad and he's gonna spew out of his mouth. That is wrong. The Bible says that God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked. How in the world could God, and he says I would rather, in other words, the way it's written here in the Greek, I sincerely wish that you would be cold or hot. That does not mean that God sincerely wishes that we would hate him. He does not wish that for his creation. He just finished telling us that he's the beginning of his own creation. He loves us. What he's saying is, you ready for this? He's saying something completely different. Let's go over it for a second. How many of you like to drink coffee? Raise your hand. Or any hot drink? Raise your hand. Come on, we need audience participation, but you like drinking hot drinks, raise your hand. Ready? Okay. Man, is it good to have a nice, now I like coffee just black. Just plain Jane, nothing in it, just black. Some of y'all order coffees. I don't even know how you pronounce some of the names of it, you know? I'll have a ristretto latte, brown with sugar on this kind of soy milk and whatever, whatever, dude. No shame in your game, but man. But imagine your favorite hot drink and it's a cold day. For Southern California, that would mean like 68 degrees, you know? It's a cold day. We're all freezing. There is nothing better than to see that big hot steaming cup of coffee and you pick it up and you take a little sip and all that felt good going down. You know what I'm talking about? Or how about this? How about it's a super hot day. I had to go to an FBI class many years ago. And mind you, this is when I was 300 plus pounds heavier than I am now, okay? In St. Louis, 100 and three, no 104 degrees with 100% humidity. Yeah. I hear the pain in your voice. That stinks. That's miserable. You know the best thing I could do when I was there on those days? You know, a big fat tub, I mean like a tub, like one of them like 800 ounce, you know, cups. Where you go in there and you fill it all the way to the top with ice and then you pour a little bit of water on top, right? And you shake it up pretty good where it gets really cold and then ah, you just drink away. Man, that feels good cold going down your throat. It just cools you off. There's nothing better than that. Man, does that, ooh, that's good. There's nothing that refreshes me more than that type of situation. In that kind of heat. Now, let's contrast this for a second. Go back to that same cold day that we were talking about. It's even more cold. It's 66 degrees instead of 68. And we're really freezing now. And you see this looks like a just piping hot cup of coffee or whatever your, whatever latte, soy, whatever it is. And you see the steam coming out of the cup and you go to pick it up and it's so lukewarm that you don't even know you're drinking it because it's the same temperature as your mouth. Pretty nasty, isn't it? Or maybe you go back to that hot day where it's humid and nasty and you see your cup that's been sitting there filled with ice for a long time. You still see a few cubes of ice at the top. Lots of condensation. The table is wet from the condensation and you go to pick it up and all of a sudden you taste nothing because it's the same thing just lukewarm. What are you gonna do, Google? Grotes. What hot and cold is as it's described here are both wonderful. If you're cold, you love the Lord. If you're hot, you love the Lord. Let me give you some examples of what colder hot is. Hot, that's me. I'll give you, well, you know, I am kind of hot, you know what I mean? At least my fiance tells me, I don't, I'm just. Steaming hot. I get up here and I'm, wha! My buddy Tony Clark's the same way. You ever heard Tony on the radio, you know? You hear him and he's like, praise the Lord! You know? Or maybe Tony Evans, have you heard him on K-Wave Reason? That guy's like, and I said, ah! You know? Those guys are hot. I am categorized as slightly hot. Pastor David, ooh, he's cold. And let me tell you, he's the good kind of cold. He's the man that stinks. I'm all mustied up in the steam and the, and you just drink that cup and, oh, it feels so good. That's David, that's Pastor Chuck. That's a guy like Brian Brodersen. They both represent the hot and the cold. They both represent extremes that are refreshing. In other words, God gave you all different personalities and he wants you to live in those personalities but in the extreme for him. By the way, do you know the only other time in the Greek New Testament, other than the localized context here, where you see the Greek word for cold, sucros actually being used? It actually is used in one other place and that's where Jesus says, when you give one of these cold cups of water to these children such as a kingdom. Interesting. What the Lord doesn't want is he does not want you to just show up and not really care. He wants you to be you. He doesn't want you to try and be like somebody else. He wants you to be exactly how he's made you but he wants you to do you in the most extreme way you can think. In other words, in your relationship with God. By the way, let me tell you what doing you does not mean. Doing you does not mean, well that's the way I am. If you don't like it, then forget it. A lot of husbands do that to their wives and I'm gonna beat up on the husbands a little bit because that's really what happens. They go to their wives and they say, you're just gonna have to accept me this way. I have to have all my life, I've watched football on this day and that's the way it's gonna be. Really? It doesn't mean that. It means denying yourself in the greatest way you can think of, reflected in your personality. By the way, husband's here's a word of encouragement to you. If you spent as much time trying to get your wife to accept you the way you are, if you spent as much time actually trying to allow God to change you to bless your wife, everything would change. You know wives are pretty right or die. You know that? Women are pretty much that way. Once they're committed to a man, it takes a lot for a woman to get frustrated with their husbands and want to not be by their side. It takes a man to really, really beat up and abuse his wife for a wife to get to that point. So if you come to me, to my office, at Cabbage Apple Single Home, you have a marriage counseling appointment and you say, my wife don't respect me, she don't love me, whatever. I'm gonna say, what in the world did you do? Really? It's true. It's true. I've learned this in the 20 some odd years that I've been counseling couples as a pastor. And I've learned this from the example of my mom and my dad. And I'm learning this from the example and the ministry that God's given me now to my sweetheart, my Nicole that I'm gonna be marrying in a month. I'll tell you this right now. Here's what it is. You better learn, men, you better learn to deny yourself for your spouse. If you say you're denying yourself and it's not enough, I would tell you on the spot, you're a liar. And the reason why I would say that is because there's only three known cases in the last 100 years of mankind of what's called hematrodosis, which means sweating blood. Jesus Christ sweat blood for the church and he tells us to love our wives as Christ loved the church. Have you sweat blood for her yet? You haven't. You don't understand, I hate doing this and it's just ridiculous, whatever. You think Christ wanted to go to the cross? You're out of your mind if you think Christ went to the cross willingly. You don't read the Bible. Jesus said, not my will be done, but thy will be done. Christ didn't go to the cross willingly, he went to the cross obediently. You might not wanna serve your wife a specific way willingly. Who cares? I don't care, God doesn't care. He wants you to serve your wife obediently. He did it for us to be the model, right? The way God made you, but do it in obedience, direct obedience to God. And those personalities reflected in your life will be amazing in the way people are changed. Watch this, by the way. Consider this thought. The alternative to that is to simply be lukewarm, which means you don't care. You're apathetic. By the way, that's really easy to do in the church today. You know the people who are at the most fault in this area? The people who fall most to this? Pastor, this building is beautiful. You go to the areas around the, I mean, this is like a little oasis. The pastor's offices are nice. If you go to Cabbage Apple Signal Hill, you'll see all the oil wells and everything, but you come into our sanctuary, you'll see beautiful artwork. You come into my office, it's like a little oasis like Pastor David's. Everywhere we go, in a lot of these churches where God is blessed, you'll see nothing but comfortable, nice, big, fat, thick pews to sit on that don't hurt your bottom, you know? I mean, everything's nice. Air conditioning, you've got the nice sound system, you've got the beautiful music, you've got great musicians. Everything is comfortable. Boy, is it easy to come up and to just do things as status quo and then to walk away and not do anything extreme because you're just cruising. Right? It's easy to be. God says that kind of apathy will destroy you. By the way, if you're here today and you say, well, I'm numb and I have no emotion, but I love Jesus with all my heart, I'm not talking about you. Because if you're numb and you have no emotion and you're going through one of the most difficult times of your life, that's the time where God is gonna show up the most. Just keep doing you. In the name of Jesus, obediently, to God's word. Now, this is the statement that the Lord makes. He says, because you say I'm rich and increased with goods and of need of nothing and know it's not that thou art wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked. Remember what I just told you? Because we're so comfortable in all of our materialism, we don't realize we need anything. By the way, is it bad? Is it a sin to have a nice car in a beautiful home and all kinds of fun things to play with and toys and all that stuff? It is absolutely not a sin. As a matter of fact, there are wonderful gifts from God that I believe the Lord gives us in life to enjoy, but the bottom line is, they can easily become a sin when we put them before the Lord our God. By the way, this also applies to relationships. You know the easiest way to have a successful marriage? The easiest way, it's one simple thing. Love the Lord your God more than you love your own wife or your own husband. Because if you learn to love God more than you love your own wife and your own husband, when your wife or husband is a big stinker, you're still gonna love them. You're gonna love them the way God wants you to love them. More than they could ever need to be or wanna be loved. That's what it's all about. Now that he's established it, you know, hey, you're naked even though you think you're not. He says, this is what I tell you to do. This is where I want you to go. This is the exhortation and this is the verse we close in. Two verses, actually. He says, I counsel thee to buy of me gold, try to the fire that thou mayest be rich and white raiment that thou mayest be clothed that the shame of thy nakedness do not appear and anoint thine eyes with eyes out and thou that thou mayest see. By the way, to get pure gold, you know what you have to do to that gold? You have to burn every single last impurity out of it, which means it has to go through a serious forging process. There's a lot of heat. You ever watch Gold Rush? I love that show, by the way, okay? But you guys watch Gold Rush. It's a great show where they dig for gold and then they put all the dirt together and they get it all out and then they take the gold and they melt it all down and then all the crud comes to the top and they got this beautiful, beautiful, like brick worth of gold. Oh, that's so cool. Guess what? God says, I need you to buy that stuff for me. Now, what does that mean? That means you are buying gold in its most pure form. The only kind of gold that can be at its purest level, that's the gold that's bought from the Lord himself. Now, the only way you get that is to burn. What does that mean? That means you've got to go through some heat. You've got to go through some trials. You've got to go through some difficulty. There is a breaking process, but there is nothing better than to go through that breaking process because the other end of that breaking process is the glory of God. Oh, yeah. That's something that you can say, amen to, you know what I mean? Because I get excited about that because life is not easy sometimes. I had some on the other day and I just laughed uncontrollably. I just started laughing. I couldn't control myself. I started laughing uncontrollably. I had a lazy man come to me the other day and say, you know, all these jobs aren't working out for me. I think I'm gonna try to get into the ministry full time. You know where I can go to do that? I still laugh at that thought. Really? That's like saying I'm scared of heights and I don't want to step off of a curb. Can you find me the highest high rise to jump off of? It's that foolish of a question, right? God's gonna break us guys for his glory if we don't want to be breaking. So it's a good idea to break ourselves before the Lord and let God do the work he's gonna do. That's what buying gold that's refined by God's fire does. What happens when a person realizes they're naked? They do anything they can to get clothing, right? If you don't realize you're naked, you're walking around going, the emperor has clothes, the emperor has clothes. Yeah, look at me, I'm styling. No, you're not, you're offensive, you know? True, let's close here. He says, as many as I love, I rebuke and chase. Remember what we talked about? How the Lord loves us and because he loves us, he will rebuke us and he will chase in us. He will discipline us. We talked about that, right? He says, because I love you, that's what I will do. But here's the commands that he gives us. Two commands and they're very important. He says, be zealous therefore and repent. Two commands issued to us in what is the rendering of the present, active, imperative in the Greek, which means continue to be zealous and continue to repent. As you identify areas in your life that you are going that is contrary to the gospel of Jesus Christ, turn away from it. And stay turned away from it. And as you identify another area that you need to turn away from, turn away from that. But then here's one that we miss. He says, be zealous continually. What does that mean? Does that mean when you preach, be as loud as you can preaching? Well, if that was the case, I'd be the godliest man on the earth. Doesn't mean that. It means put your whole heart into worshiping the Lord. I had somebody come up to me the other day at our church. Guy that I love, I love him and his family. He comes up to me and he says, you know what, James? You talked about being zealous and giving yourself to the Lord. I don't even know what that means. I didn't even respond to him except with one word. You're a liar. You just lied to me. What do you mean? How could you say I'm a liar? I can't deal for direction. And you go into work every day. Six o'clock? Okay, hold on to that answer for a second. Hold on to that thought. You lied to me about that, but we'll get into that in a second. What time did you come to church this morning? 9.30? What time does church start? 8.30? You said six o'clock? You go into work, right? Well, that's what I'm supposed to come in. Yeah, you come in at 5.15. You wanna know why? Because every single day, religiously, at 5.15, I see you post a picture from your office on Facebook and you give people financial advice because you're in the financial services industry and you do that. And of course, you're willing to pack up your kids and send them the daycare there and do all that other stuff that you have to do so that you could be at work at 5.15. Yet, oh, you don't know how hard it is to get here at 9.30. Liar. You're more zealous for something that's gonna crash and burn one day than you are for the own salvation and soul of your children and your wife. You will wake up at four o'clock in the morning so you can be at your job at 5.15 to literally preach the gospel of the almighty dollar and yet you'll tell your wife you're too tired to lay in bed with her and give her a devotion. You're zealous. You are remarkably zealous. But you're zealous in the wrong area. It's that same guy that will come to me 15 years from now and will say, my child is a disaster. Can you please talk to them? What in reality, what he needed to do was tell his child that the things of God were more important than his homework assignments because if the things of God were more important than his schoolwork, then his schoolwork would never be an issue. When I told him that, he goes, you don't understand how hard it is nowadays to pay for a kid to go to college. You're right. I'll give you a piece of advice that I gave him. It's a great piece of advice, by the way, for you parents that are getting ready to face children going to college. It's the best scholarship program in existence. And I'm a big proponent of education so I'm pretty much familiar with a lot of them. But this is the best one. You ready for this? It's the trust in the Lord with all your heart doting on your own understanding and all your ways acknowledge him. Be not wise in thine own eyes. Hear the Lord and depart from evil scholarship program. We have a guy that goes to our church right now who's one of the state of California's newest attorneys. He knows that I went to law school back in the day and he came to me and he said, hey, I think I want to be a lawyer one day. What do you think? I said, I think you'll make a great attorney, kiddo. One of the elders in our church. I think you'll make a great attorney. Yeah, but you know what, man? I just, the money that it's gonna take to pay for all this. I said, look, let me give you the best piece of advice that I can give you. Just love the Lord with all of your heart. Serve him in every way that you can and God's gonna provide for you every step of the way. This was a kid who at the time he asked me this was not even in this country legally. And the Lord not only was able to work out his immigration status, but the Lord through a series of amazing miracles paid for every last dollar of his legal education. And he graduated from LMU, one of the better law schools in this country. Passed the bar his first try and is serving the Lord with all of his heart and loved his wife and God is blessing him because he put the Lord first. Now I'm not asking you to put the Lord first so that maybe he can pay for everything and bankroll everything, whatever. I'm asking you to put the Lord first because we owe him, he deserves it. And here's the thing, when we begin to get hot and cold for the Lord, we begin to see everything else fall in place. I've watched God restore marriages when people have done this. I've watched God provide for people financially. I've watched God give grace to people physically. I've watched God transform people's whole worlds. The Lord is coming back soon, guys. We don't have time. We don't have time. Have you paid attention? What's going on in the Middle East? I've talked about this. I was here New Year's talking about it. If you wanna catch up on that, you can pull the New Year's study. It's crazy. What are we doing, guys? What are we doing? Are we putting God first? Are we making him the passion of our hearts? Are we seeking him out? There's one thing I didn't share with First Service because we were running out of time. But God immediately after these commands says this, if anybody wants in, all they've gotta do is knock. He doesn't say that. He says, I'm the one that's being proactive. I'm knocking. You don't even have to knock. All you've gotta do is open the door. You don't have to get right. All you have to do is come in exactly the state you're in and the Lord will come into your heart and will change your life. Nick, right? Almost 33 years ago, my mom, after knowing she was pregnant, was told by her doctor that she would likely have a little boy with Down syndrome and that she should have an abortion because that little boy wouldn't live. My mom fired the doctor and as of yesterday, 32 years ago, little Joseph Kdeese was born into this world with Down syndrome and with what is called a ventricular shunt, which means he has a hole in his heart. He wasn't even supposed to survive that surgery that he had. We had a doctor from South Africa operate on him and he's a healthy little guy now. God uses Joseph to bring certain insights into my life all the time. One of the most significant insights that God bought into my life with Joseph was through my little brother's singing. Give me an example. We had a guy that got saved in our church who was a crazy old school long beach slot policeman. I mean, the type of guy that had killed a bunch of people in the line of duty just very hard on the outside, didn't like people, sat in the back of the room, didn't trust anybody, whatever. Heard I was a police chaplain, got saved in our ministry, but then he still was kind of this rough guy didn't want to ever sing worship. Joseph walks right up to him one day, sits right by him, and Joseph loves to lift up his hands when he sings worship. So he would grab David's hand, his name is David, wonderful man of God by the way. He'd grab David's hand and David's like, by week two, by week two, they were always looking for each other every service and they would lift up their hands to the Lord singing to the Lord. One of my favorite songs that Joseph sings, because Joseph has a massive tongue, so it affects his speech. One of my favorite songs that Joseph sings is a song, I think Joseph Sobolek wrote it, and I like Joe, he sings a song, come just as you are. You know that song, come just as you are. That's okay, great song. Joseph doesn't sing it that way. Because of his speech impediment, it sounds like this, come nasty as you are. I love it. Right? It's cute how he sings it to, come nasty as you are. Hear the spirit call, come nasty as you are. Come and see, come believe, come and live forever. It's like, God, that's the wonderful part. You don't have to get fixed up for God. He'll fix you up. Just open the door, that's it. He's knocking, let him do the work.