 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 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 going to 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 an 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 merciless. But if Jesus' 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 a robot. That's what you could do. And so Jesus comes on the Sabbath and he says I'm not going to plow anything, but I'm just going to heal a person. He heals a person. And people got so mad because Jesus healed a 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. 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 Wail Raider service was going on. I wrote down a few notes. There are certain things that need to be getting done better, but these things have nothing to do with the Bible. These things all have to do with us getting better and there are not rules like in the Bible. Can somebody say amen? Amen. Now let me end with the message. I mentioned I think yesterday on my Facebook and it really touched me. 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 the 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 the 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 going to remain out of the earth except the humans is going to be this tree, the tree of life. It will be in heaven and we actually going to 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. It doesn't mean 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 sowed 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 would 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 you 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 want to 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. 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 a relationship with God where they love God more than they love the 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, 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 time on 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, life 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 to 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 church is, I just come to church. That should be enough. I am, 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.