Revelation 8:6-13 Part 2

Live church, how are you guys doing? How are you guys looking great today? Come in your Sunday best. You ready to dive into the Word? All right, let’s do it. If you have your Bibles, pull those out. Turn with me to Revelation Chapter eight, we’re going to start in verse number six. Whether it’s your electronic bible or it is your paper Bible. How many of you like the paper Bible? Oh, how many of you like the electronic Bible? Doesn’t matter. It’s God’s word, no matter where it is. But my Bible is made out of buffalo skin, so, you know, smells nice. Revelation chapter and verse six We’re in the middle of a series called Omega this. It is a study on the Book of Revelation, and so we’re going to dive in to look at this. This is actually the same portion of text that we looked at last week, and I’ll explain why here in just a little bit. The Revelation Chapter eight, starting in verse number six, I’m going to ask if you would please stand just one more time in honor of God’s word for our initial and primary reading of it today. Now, the seven angels who have the seven trumpets prepared to blow them. The first angel blew his trumpet in there, followed hell and fire mixed with blood. And these were thrown upon the Earth and a third of the Earth was burned up. And a third of the trees were burned up in all, green grass was burned up. The second angel blew his trumpet and something like a great mountain burning with fire was thrown into the sea and a third of the sea became blood. A third of the living creatures in the sea died and a third of the ships were destroyed. The third angel blew his trumpet and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is wormwood, a third of the waters became wormwood, and many people died from the water because it had been made bitter. The fourth angel blew his trumpet and a third of the sun was struck and a third of the moon and a third of the stars so that a third of their light might be darkened and a third of the day might be kept from shining. And likewise, a third of the night. Then I looked on, I heard an eagle crying with a loud voice as it flew directly overhead. Woe, woe, woe. To those who dwell on the Earth at the blast of the other trumpets that the three angels are about to blow, you may be seated. Last week we walked verse by verse through this text and offered a exegetical analysis of all the contents. I highly encourage you for full context of our conversation today that you, if you have not got that message that you make time to do so, you can do so via our website. We are live church. We also have a website that’s unbranded on purpose called Church Home Dot Online, where you can view the sermon as well as read the transcript. Listen to the podcast. Watch a shortened version of the sermon and also view it in five different languages. You can do this as well on our live TV app that you can download from your respective marketplaces. But in this sermon, we walk through, but today I want to expound upon that even further. And the thing that I want to look at today is the overall picture of what is going on here and why it is happening. This text highlights the events surrounding the first four of what’s called the trumpet judgment. We call them the trumpet judgments because they’re all initiated by the sounding of a trumpet, by an angel in the presence of God. And as we see in this text, the first trumpet judgment was a judgment or an attack on the land. Hell, fire Blood was thrown to the Earth, and it burned up a third of all the vegetation. The second trumpet judgment was a judgment or an attack on the sea, a great burning mountain likely a meteorite, as John describes it, thrown into the sea and it destroyed sea creatures and ships. Well, the third trumpet judgment was an attack on rivers and springs and really drinking water as a star that John names wormwood shattered in the atmosphere. It dropped on a third of all rivers and springs. Then it turned the water into poison, and we go through great detail why we believe it turned it into poison in our sermon from last week. The fourth trumpet judgment was an attack on space. It was a judgment on space. God struck the Sun and the Moon in the stars with an infirmity that caused them not to shine at full strength. And again last week, we describe that in more full detail. So it’s a fair question without a lot of study to ask the question, what is God doing here? He’s literally. Destroying his creation. With his own creation. Why would he do this? The amazing, beautiful handiwork that he made is getting annihilated by his own hands. An atheistic point of view might say, well, this is God going on some sort of temper tantrum because he’s ticked off and he’s just. Wiping out everything. But that’s not the case at all. God is always a supremely calculated and intentional. This is no temper tantrum, there is no chaos in his world. It’s all intentional. Everything he does is intentional. Everything is thought out. Everything has a meaning and purpose. So every chess piece that he’s moving during this time is not just calculated, it’s actually also justified. And it’s Holy. God has every right to do the things that he’s doing here in Revelation Chapter eight. It’s his creation. He made it. He owns it all. He can do with it as he pleases, and he is righteous in doing so. He is righteous and justified to do with creation what he deems. So why would he want to do this? It’s important for us to answer these questions to understand the character of God, because when we stand up on Sunday morning and we sing songs, we’re not looking for emotional euphoria, you know we’re looking for you to worship the Lord on the basis of your understanding of who the character of God is and finding him to be worthy of your worship. So we need to understand these things. Romans Chapter one Verse 25 Why is he doing these things? This verse explains it to us because they exchange the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the creator who has blessed forever. Amen. So the Earth, the sea, the stars, the animals, the vegetation was all given to man to subdue it, to have dominion over it, to steward it. And it was a good, wholly perfect gift from God. Genesis chapter one verse 26 to 28 illustrates that for us, it says. Then God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the Earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God. He created them male and female. He created them. And God bless them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the Earth. It was all good. It was all perfect. You could say it was paradise. But then Sin entered the picture. And when it did, man who was created in the image of God fell from its original intent. Now we are distorted images of God. The creation which was supposed to serve man become a resource in this amazing paradise. Now the script has been flipped, and now creation itself has become an object of worship. Man rebelled and revolted against God’s holiness, and they rejected him and his ways, they abandoned the worship of the one true God. And they sold him out to bow their knee for the things that he had created. I mean, just imagine for a second, if if someone your child stopped loving you and started or started loving the gifts that you gave them at Christmas more than you? It deeply offends you at a very personal level. That’s good. These gifts were meant to be gifts, a symbol of grace and peace, a symbol of mercy. They were not to be loved more than the person who gave the gift. We have offended God at a deeply personal level, and he is righteous. To be ticked off and to condemn us. But because God is also full of mercy and grace. He decided to send us a way out. And so in the only possible formula that would work in the plan that you devised from the beginning of time, God put on flesh and he came and he absorbed the punishment that we deserved for this deep treason and violation. And now, through Grace by faith, we can receive the gift of salvation to where even though we deserve to be the recipient of God’s wrath because we rebelled against him, we don’t receive what we deserve. We receive what Jesus deserves and that is eternal life in Christ, Jesus, our Lord. He paid the price for our sin. But for now, man worships nature. We’ve taken the creator of this beautiful masterpiece, and we have credited it all to a accidental collision of particles in the atmosphere billions of years ago. Think about that for a second, if you were the inventor of something that was genius, you created something that nobody else had ever thought of. And then some jerk comes along, some pompous jerk comes along and says, you know what? This isn’t a big deal. You just threw a bunch of Legos together and all of a sudden out popped this amazing engine. How offensive to the creator that we would be so foolish to even suggest. That the miracle of the complex universe would just happen by happenstance. How the ecosystems work with each other like it just evolved. I’m not questioning that there isn’t some sort of micro evolution that takes place over time, but macro in the sense that we all came from a single cell is preposterous. Just look at the evidence this this week, I had quite a quite a week. I had an obstructed kidney stone, of which I had to have a procedure for. That’s one of the most painful things I have ever went through in my life. But as I’m sitting there and the doctors handing me their material as I’m reviewing all of this, I’m looking at the the system of the body. I got nothing else to do sitting there in the hospital room and soap operas on TV. I’m looking over this material, I’m just saying, look at the intelligent design of our bodies. How they work intricately, well, some organs, we got two of them. Always nice to have a backup. Hey, man, just just our systems of our body and how pain is communicated and how this tube runs over here and does this and how the body cleanses itself. I’m sitting here looking at the kidneys and going, I hate you right now because you’re producing these devil stones that are causing me to want to die, but the what you do for my body is amazing. You clean my blood. And then the brain just think about the human brain of which most people believe we only have a certain percentage that we’re actually able to tap into its ability. The human mind, the will, the emotions, the all of these things that that pull themselves together, just look at nature in of itself, this this bug, eat this bug and this this animal eats this animal and this the bee stings, but it also harvesters and polinates, and you have just the whole world itself is this ecosystem. So when you’re talking about extinction of one animal, there’s this trickle down effect of it affecting the entire ecosystem because that animal or that bug did one particular thing that God designed it to do. Just think of the intelligent design that went into all this. And then we turned around and said, you know what, I think an accidental collision of particles. Started all this. It’s asinine. Let’s just come out and say what you really think. You hate God. Let’s get down to the point, though, God has made himself known through his creation. We’ve chosen to hate him. And then as the ultimate slap in the face, we turned around and chosen to worship the create the things that he created. I want to take a look at how this plays itself out practically in three different ways. Number one. The worship of money, OK? One of the most obvious ways that we worship creation is the worship of money first Timothy Chapter six Verse 10. For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs. Now this is one of the most misquoted verses in the entire Bible. How is it often misquoted? Money is the root of all evil. That’s not true. You’ll notice this as the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. Evil does not exude from an inanimate object. Money is a piece of paper with a dead president on it. Smell it, it smells like mint government. Money is an inanimate object, inanimate objects do not possess the ability to be evil. It’s just an inanimate object, but it’s easier to blame inanimate objects for the evil of the world than rather blame the real problem. What’s the real problem? The human heart? It doesn’t say money is the root of all evil, says a love of money, which comes from the human heart. We can take anything that has no inherent evil and turn it into evil. That’s what we do all the time. The love for money, which come from the heart of man is the root for all kinds of evil, not necessarily all evil, but all kinds of evil. I’ve used this example recently. A lot of people don’t think that they worship money because they don’t view themselves as Scrooge McDuck rolling around inside the safe kissing and hugging and throwing money up in the air and swimming in their money. But the reality is, is that money helps us get the things that we do, worship and love. Money buys us shiny things, and we love shiny things. Money buys us comfort it buys us security it buys us diamonds and cars and technology, etc. Now these things, diamonds don’t have evil. Cars don’t have evil. Technology is not evil. Neither does owning them signify anything evil. But a love for these things creates all kinds of problems. It’s when we elevate these things to a status to where we serve them above serving the almighty God. That’s where the problem comes into play. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s shiny or not, shiny, nice or not nice, you can worship anything. The second thing that we see this playing out in is called the deification of nature. And what I mean by deification, it’s adding a divine attribute or a divine nature, a quality to nature. Man worships Mother Nature. They have for thousands of years. Whether it’s ancient tribes or cultures that perform rituals and sacrifices to honor and appease false gods of the elements of the Earth or its modern day heresies that creep into our everyday activity and thinking. Really, Josh, this is just for. The tree huggers, this is this doesn’t apply to us. There’s not really modern day movements that worshipped the Earth. Absolutely. There are. And this very thing has crept into some of our churches, and I’ll get to how that has happened. One example is a belief system called pantheism. Pantheism is the belief that everything in reality, everything that you see in the physical world is divine in all things encompass God the common statement and pantheism, is this God in all things? All things in God. All things are God. Now we have to be careful because you dress up false ideologies with Christian language, and all of a sudden it sounds biblical, right? But when you examine the heart of it, it’s very dangerous and heretical. It is true that God created all things and is also true that one of his attributes is that he is omnipresent, which means that is everywhere at all times. He’s not limited by space or time. But that doesn’t mean that everything is divine, just because God is everywhere and God created it. It simply means that it was created by a divine creator. But he’s independent of his creation. Just because he makes something doesn’t mean that it’s divine. Just because he made something doesn’t mean that all of a sudden it carries a divine DNA. DNA, the genetic code of living beings was given by God, but doesn’t mean it’s divine. It just means that’s the code that God assign that particular living being. Divine or defying nature, what it does is it makes God feel closer. Because everywhere you look, you can assign something a divine status. Aunt Betty’s Bird. The neighborhood cat. Your favorite oak tree in the backyard, you’re can assign anything of my nature, so it makes God feel closer but incredibly impersonal because these things don’t talk to you. And if the oak tree in the backyard is talking, I remember I have a number I need you to call if Grandma Betty’s bird talks to you and it’s not one of those whatever those mockingbirds are called. Thank you, parrots. You need to be evaluated. OK. By defying nature, we’re doing two things at the same time we’re elevating God’s creation by giving it the status of God, and we’re de-elevating God to the lowest parts of his creation because if you’re saying everything’s divine, you’re putting God in the same status as a snail. Now, if you don’t think this is a problem, let me show you why it is. Follow my trail here today. We see the rise of paganism and Wicca. Worldly philosophies that embody a universal and divine characteristic of God in nature. And used terms called pantheism and Panantheism now let me describe what those are. OK? The biblical viewpoint of how creation and its creator interact with each other is called Theism. And here’s what that looks like. You have God. Which eternally exists. He has created things. He’s created the universe, he’s created everything that we see, he’s created us. God is divine, he is supreme and he sits on the outside of his creation. The creation is not divine just because it was created by divinity. But God sits on the outside of it. This is Theism. This is the accurate viewpoint. There’s another viewpoint called pantheism. What does pantheism look like? Pantheism looks like that God and creation are all intertwined into one. It’s a universal concept. Creation is divine, God is divine, everything is divine, everything that you see as a part of the divine structure. There’s a compromise. There’s one in the middle. And though you won’t see pantheism a ton and progressive Christian movements, you will see panantheism. Which is the compromise of the two. They’re independent. But they still play within sight of the same bubble. Giving me the ability to to assign divine attributes to anything that I want. You’ll see where we’re going with this here in a second. Why is this important? Well, this is some of the very foundations to new age philosophies such as paganism and Wicca paganism and Wicca are the most rapid growing forms of religion in the world. It’s big in the United States, it’s big in our own backyard. In fact, it was a Wiccan movement that challenged the symbol of the eclipse on the Republic city logo decades ago and forced them to remove the eclipse, which is the Christian symbol the fish. There was a Wiccan movement. They’re here. OK. It’s big in the United States that came over from Europe, it’s big in our own backyard. Latest study indicates there is a presence of 1.5 million Wiccans as of 2018, and that’s up from zero in 1990. Now, why is this important? Well, because it’s had influences on progressive Christianity. Let me give you one of the key examples Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. As a well known celebrity of spirituality, Rohr is a known, pantheist. He has found influence not just in Christianity, but he mixes of the conglomerates like a buffet. He mixes Eastern Orthodoxy, Buddhism and Hinduism all together like a big melting pot. He is on record, this is one of his most famous sayings and one of his books. He says it’s important to note that Jesus and Christ are two different faith affirmations. Hardly any Christians have been taught that they think Christ is Jesus’s last name. He believes that Christ is something transcendent from Jesus, the Christ is a universal term that applies to a bigger universal concept, while Jesus is simply a part of Christ. He’s removing the inherent person of the Trinity and making Christ something more universalist in nature. While, using the argument that Christians think Christ as Jesus last name. No, we don’t think that. Jesus’s last name was Smith. No. The word Christ means anointed the Greek translation of the Hebrew word, word means messiah. Yes. There is no other definition or embodiment for the term Christ outside the person of Jesus, and that Jesus is the Christ. Christ is not a transcendent thing that Jesus fits into the picture. Jesus is the Christ. See, he said he came and said, Don’t hate me and they’ll reject me. So they’re trying to use Christian terminology to make things sound biblical and right. But they’re removing the savior and God from the picture. Jesus is not simply part of the Christology system of the universe. He is Christ. Period. This is a literal manifestation of the text we read earlier Romans Chapter one, verse 25 because they exchange the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and serve the creature rather than the creator who has blessed forever. Amen. It’s a literal manifestation of that very verse. Rohr teaches Universalism that everyone is eventually saved any religion that excludes people or condemns them to hell is not a religion that anyone should believe in. He also believes in something called perennial wisdom, which is the belief that all religions actually adhere to a single truth founded in love and inclusivity. Now here’s where it gets even better. Richard Rohr has been influenced directly by some people you may not have heard of Richard Rohr, but you may have heard of these people Oprah Winfrey, Rob Bell, Jen Hatmaker. Who call him a spiritual father. He was also ordained as a minister by the Roman Catholic Church. And he was a speaker at the Young Clergy Conference for the Nazarene Church in 2017. A mainline denomination. He has fingers of involvement in the progressive Christianity movement all over the place. Be careful. The enemy comes as an angel of light. He dresses himself up. If things can be dressed up with Christian terminology and things that sound like Bible verses. They can make it sound true. That’s why we have to be grounded and rooted in the Bible. Otherwise, we’re going to be blown about by the wind, Paul told us about this in Ephesians Chapter four, verse 14 so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by cunning, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes. Now, the whole idea gets even more dangerous in the third way this fleshes out, because now you’re going to see where this hits incredibly close to home. Not just the deification of nature, but the deification of man. Do you see in my logical reasoning, where if I can assign a divine nature to creation, I now can certainly ascribe a divine nature to man. The pinnacle of God’s creation. If Grandma Betty’s bird is divine, certainly I’m divine, right? Where you may not notice a ton of deification of nature in the church. I know you will find the deification of men everywhere. It’s often rooted in one of the most abused scriptures in all of the text genesis chapter one verse twenty seven. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God, he created him male and female. He created them. This has been taken to mean a lot of things. It’s been taken to mean that we are actually little gods. Little divine beings, because only things that reproduce, reproduce their own, so if a dog reproduces another dog cat, reproduces a cat, if God reproduces himself. He reproduces more gods. That we carry divine DNA because we were created in the image of God. Well, this changes all sorts of things. Now I have the ability to change things with my words, commands and decrees override God’s will. That is a major misinterpretation of what this verse means. The word image of God in Latin is image the image dia, and it refers to the immaterial part of humanity. When it says we’re created in God’s image, it means that humans are set apart from animals and all over all over creation so that we could establish dominion over God’s creation. And so that we can commune with the creator. We were given special gifts, and abilities to communicate with the creator and assert dominion over creation. That’s what it means. Human beings are created with the ability to reason and choose. Any time someone invents something, paints a picture, writes a story, does a math problem, we’re all displaying that we’re images of God. He’s giving us that gift of the ability to logic and reason. We exercise, reason, intelligent speech, moral consciousness, creativity, rationality and choice. But just because we have those abilities doesn’t mean we’re divine. Yes, we’ve been given an eternal soul. And yes, we possess as an inheritance for those who are found in Christ, the eternal divine Holy Spirit. But just because we possess them doesn’t mean that we have ownership over him. We possess Him because he’s been given as a gift to us, as a security onto our salvation and to empower us to live out this Christian life. The Holy Spirit is not given to us to be our little errand boy. He’s here to help sanctify me to make me more like Christ and help me live out this Christian life with power. He’s not here to be my errand boy, to just do in the name of Jesus, everything that I tell him to do. I don’t possess him as an ownership. I possess him as a gift. He’s still God. He still executes the will of God in my life. But when I start feeling like I’m divine, I start bossing the Holy Spirit around. Claiming things that I don’t I’ve never been promised. If you want the perfect image of God, you find it, no, you have no further to look than Christ Jesus himself. Hebrews Chapter one verse nine He is the radiance of the glory of God in the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power after making purification for sins. He sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high. Second Corinthians four four In their case, the God of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ. Who is the image of God? Colossians 115 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. Now why is this so important? These teachings are found in a lot of modern day progressive Christian movements. I’m going to make some of you may be a little upset, that’s OK because I love you enough to tell you the truth. Word of faith movement and hyper charismatic movements are flooded. With these falsehood of the deification of man. I’m going to name some names because I have a biblical responsibility to do so. You know what Paul did when Peter was teaching something, wrong called him out. Now, when I call out, no, I do it in love, and my desire is that these individuals come to an understanding of the gospel that is proper and they repent. But it’s also for the protection and the security of the body. I do not think I’m better than these people. It is up to God to ultimately hold the judgment, but the fruits of their teaching are major red flags. And when I say their name, I’m your I pray that your heart is not positioned to be angry at me, but rather that you point your your energy. And your emotions towards a study of the scripture that evaluates, are these teachers really telling the truth or are they not as good? So when I say these names, you’ll get really quick why this whole conversation is very, very important. Indivdiuals such as Steven Furtick. Joyce Meyer, Kenneth Copeland, Benny Hinn, Creflo Dollar, Joel Osteen, Kenneth Hagan, Paul Crouch, Fred Price, T.D. Jakes, Jesse Duplantis, Bill Johnson from Bethel Church. Chris Vallotine from Bethel Church. Brian Houston from Hillsong Church. Carl Lentz, who recently had a moral failure, was heavily influenced and hung out in circles with Richard Rohr and Oprah Winfrey as well. This is not biblical Christianity. This is self-made man worship and it’s self idolatry. And there’s a reason why these people draw large crowds. People want to be told you’re special and you’re divine and you have the ability to say things and and make things happen outside of God’s will. No, we have the ability to stand on scripture. To proclaim scripture, we have the ability to use God’s word for the purposes of his divine will and submission to his will. We are not divine. We were created by a divine living God to commune with them, and that is only possible through the Lord Jesus Christ. many modern day falls teachers love to teach this error because it makes us feel empowered to control our destinies. We don’t control our destiny, is God said from the beginning of time. I pre-destined your destiny. Read Ephesians. I made the plan from the beginning. I’m working all things out. Man makes his plans, but I order his steps. But we want to feel in control. And so when we deify ourselves, we feel like we’re grabbing back control. No, we’re just worshipping us. We want to be able to manipulate God’s will. Guess what? There’s a lot of times God doesn’t do things the way I would do them. Well, you know what, because he’s really smart and all knowing, and I’m really dumb sometimes and not all knowing. And there’s a lot of times I look back on my life, and I’m really thankful that God did things his way, even though they were not exactly the way I would have done things. But that’s because I’m not God. Oh, if I was God, I would have been the one on the temper tantrum blowing this place up. You would be, too don’t be sitting there looking at me like I’m. Not as holy as you, you would have blown this thing up to that first time that Aunt Susie popped off and said something at the Thanksgiving dinner. Laser eyes. They want to let people know that you can you can control your own destiny, manipulate God’s will and ultimately do whatever the heck you want. All you got to do is tack on in the name of Jesus at the end of it. But what is that? That’s blasphemy. You see, this is a very important topic. It’s everywhere, and you don’t got to travel very far, even around Republic to find. This. Close examination of the Bible shows us that God is the one that controls destiny, his will, the sovereign. He is the one that executes his will and the miracles. On his accord for his reason. For his own satisfaction. For his own glory. What’s so interesting is these these false teachers will set people up to fail. They’ll say, Well, if you just have enough faith, then you sow seed, which means give money in the offering. That you’ll get your miracle. I’m telling you, friends, there’s nowhere in the Bible. Anywhere. That’s manipulation. It’s some of the worst forms of spiritual manipulation. Then they take the money, they go live high on it. And then when you don’t get your miracle, guess whose fault it is. It’s yours, because you didn’t have enough faith and you didn’t sow enough seed. So now they heap. The unbearable weight of the fact that God didn’t answer your prayer on you. They get to ride off into the distance scot free. And you keep listening to them because you think maybe if I listen to one more sermon I’ll have enough faith to get that miracle? But faith is not a mystical force that you can conjure up more of. Faith is a gift of God, and it comes by. Hearing, hearing what the word of God, if we lack faith it’s because we don’t read this, I’m all. It’s not because we need to go, OK, all along, this is more safe. Look like that’s literally what they’re teaching, I just work it up inside me. Faith comes by hearing the word of God. You know what? James tells me that if I want more faith trials are going to come my way. Why? Because it builds perseverance. So guess what, you want more faith. fantastic going into that prayer trial. Suffering. But that’s how your faith grows. It doesn’t grow because you’re just going to wish it out of nowhere. What does that sound like? I just need to conjure up more of it. New Age. First Corinthians 8:6. Yet for us, there is one God, the father from whom are all things and from whom we exist and one Lord Jesus Christ through whom are all things and through whom we exist. What was the sin in the garden was that the apple looked good and and they were hungry. No, it was to be like God. Genesis, three, five, For, God knows that when you eat that, your eyes will be open and you will be like God knowing good and evil. The temptation wasn’t to eat the fruit. And that case, I’m sure, would have been like a like an ice cream brownie chocolate Fondo situation if the real temptation was to eat something, not fruit. Yeah. That’s how it would have been my wife’s cake balls that she makes it at Christmas glory to God like that would have been the temptation if it was really a thing about hunger. No, it was to be like, God, do this thing. Drop your seed. Do this thing. Have more faith. And you’ll be like God. You’ll be able to do the miracles that you want to do. God will do them for you, like his little errand boy. Oh, let me run around and do your bidding for you. My friends, that is not how God works. This has been the core problem since the beginning, Pride. We are not content with not being God. Every single one of us in the room, by the way, is guilty of this have there times in your life when you have not been content, not being God. Of course, every sin resonates from this. This leads us to the danger of false set of worshipping man rather than worshipping and worshipping this world rather than the one who created this world. And this is an offense, to holy God, who demands that we worship him as the creator? It’s an ultimate slap in the face. I created all these people. I gave him all these great things, and now they’re running around trying to be me. And ultimately, every sin can be tracked back to this problem. But the great the great news about this is this. If we know what the problem is, we now know if the answer is. The reality is, is that the reason why we sin, the reason why we love ourselves, the reason why we love control. The reason why we love being able to make things happen in our own will. The reason why we do we do those things is because we love it. The reason why we sin is because we love it, right? I got a couple of nods. We do we sin because we love it. You gossip because you love the look on the other person’s face. Whenever you get, you get to be the one that shares the information. Now, just come to me whenever you need to know something going on. You love I’ll use me, you love to overeat. Why? Because it helps mask your emotions and your your other pain, and it tastes really good going down. We love it, we love sin, but this actually answers one of the biggest problems we have, how do we overcome sin? We overcome with a greater love. If you have a recurring problem with pride, with any sin. It’s because right now you love that more than you love the savior. And how do you fix that tension you get on your knees, you repent, and you ask the Lord to transform your heart and what he does is he comes and he regenerates your heart. He knocks off the stone. He makes it flesh. And he causes. He puts the love for the savior inside of you. And you see him for who he really is. And then you look at that old habit, that old thing that old attitude to that old thing and you say that was disgusting. That was atrocious. And I don’t want to ever do it again because it dishonors the one whom I love the most. Amen. So when it comes down to it, my friends. What do you love the most? And it’s not a secret, everybody that’s close to you and knows you knows what you love the most. You can look at someone’s life and say, I know what you love the most. Is it the savior? Is it the Lord? And listen, we don’t want you to do today, because I guarantee you every single one of us in this room, we have something right now that we love more than the Lord. So we’re all in the same. We’re all in this with each other. There’s no sense in saying we’ll no so-and-so, I bet it’s him I just tell you, that’s what your problem is. OK, listen, we all got something in our life right now that we love more than God. So what are we to do with that, beat ourselves up, condemn ourselves, no Romans, 8:1, there’s therefore no condemnation for those who in Christ Jesus. So what do we do with that? Church, it’s time for us to get on our knees, repent and say, I’m sorry, Lord, that I loved something more than you. I’m sorry, Lord, I worship the creation, the creation over the creator. Would you change my heart so that I would love you more? We do far too less of that, and we do far too much of running around trying to boss God around. Well, instead of bossing God around, why don’t we get on our knees and say, Lord changed me, changed me? I’m the problem. Money is not the problem my love for it is. Change me. How many of you are willing to do that today?