Experiencing True Freedom

Grab your message notes that look like this. Free is the name of our verse by verse series in the book of Galatians. This morning let's talk about experiencing true freedom. Freedom, everybody wants freedom. Everybody longs for freedom and freedom is really what Palm Sunday was all about.

You ever asked yourself this question, why did thousands of people wave palm branches when Jesus rode in Jerusalem and proclaim him, "Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord." And then less than a week later they're calling, "Crucify him." What was that all about? Does this chronology ever confuse you? There's Palm Sunday, less than a week later, there's Good Friday, he's being killed. And then Easter he's resurrected. What was this all about?

Well, let me give you a little bit of a clue. When archeologists look in the strata of their digs, that's from the first century Roman era when Jesus was around here on earth, they find a lot of coins that the Jewish people minted with palms and palm branches on them. The palm or the palm branch was the national symbol of the Jewish nation in the first century. And so when they were waving palm branches, they were waving something that was like the stars and stripes would be for Americans. They were like waving Israeli flags at a giant parade. It was a patriotic rally.

The people were hoping for a revolution. And that's why they were saying, "Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, Hosanna." That's a quotation from Psalm 118, which all the scholars say, or almost all the scholars say was apparently some sort of a national anthem for the Jewish nation back in those days 20 centuries ago. So they're singing the national anthem. They're waving what amounts to the national flag. They are hoping that Jesus Christ is going to give them a political revolution, freedom from the oppressors, the Gentile, the foreign oppressors who in those days were who? The Romans, that's right.

You see, when Jesus rode into Jerusalem around 33 A.D., he was doing so on the bicentennial of the last great Jewish revolution, which happened around 167 B.C. That's when Judas Maccabeus came into Jerusalem. Judas Maccabeus was the last great Jewish revolutionary before Jesus Christ. And the people lauded him. The most common male name in Jesus' time was the name Judas. That's why two of Jesus' disciples were named Judas because he was their last great national hero, Judas Maccabeus.

He was a man from Galilee who rode down into Judea with his band of brothers. And he overthrew the Gentile oppressors at the time. They were the Syrians back in those days, 200 years before Christ rode in. And just like Jesus, Judas Maccabeus rode into town and then he strode up the Temple Mount and he cleansed the Temple. He threw the Syrian army out and proclaimed freedom for the Jewish nation.

So when the people see Jesus riding and then they see the following he has, they're figuring here's another revolution happening right now. And just like Judas Maccabeus, Jesus strides into Jerusalem. He goes up the Temple Mount and the people get excited because he starts fashioning a weapon, a whip. It's the first only time and first time you see Jesus with a weapon in his hands during his earthly ministry. And they're thinking this is it. He's gonna, it's a political revolution.

And he goes toward the fortress Antonia which was the garrison up on the Temple Mount where the Roman legions were. And they're thinking this is it, yeah, they're getting so excited. But then Jesus throws everybody's expectations off when he stops short of the Roman legions and he stops in what was known as the court of the Gentiles. This was a huge area on the Temple Mount meant for the Gentiles, the non-Jews to come and worship the one true God.

What's he doing there? Well, the Gentiles have been crowded out in the time of Christ because the whole thing was full of merchant stalls selling things like lambs and so on to support what had turned into a commercial enterprise upon the Temple. The Temple system had become completely corrupted in the time of Christ. And the Bible's not the only thing that talks about it. Excuse me, if you look at a lot of other ancient works, they talk about this as well.

So Jesus fashions this whip and what he uses it for is to overturn the tables of the money changers and the animal stalls and he's setting the animals free and he's driving out forcibly evicting all of these merchants because he says, "It is written, 'My house shall be a house of prayer for all nations.'" But you've turned it into a den of thieves. So do you see what's happening? Instead of kicking the Gentiles out, he's making room for more Gentiles.

And then to add kind of insult to injury, the Bible says the very next day he comes back to the Temple Mount where he'd done all this and the disciples and Jesus look around at all the grandeur and Jesus says, "I tell you the truth, very soon not one stone will be left on another." He's saying this whole Temple system is going to come tumbling down. Its day is done.

And when the religious leaders who are in charge of that Temple system hear that, they say, "No, one of us has got to go to Jesus and it's not going to be us. You've got to go." And so they put a conspiracy into motion because he has to go and of course God uses that to save the world. But do you see why they were against Christ? That whole week between Palm Sunday and Good Friday was a classic confrontation of the Temple model versus the Grace model.

And we talked about this a couple of weeks ago. These are the really the only two possible ways of looking at religion, of perceiving the way that we encounter God and have a relationship with Him and are saved. That's kind of a review for some of you who are here and kind of a chance for the rest of you to catch up.

The Temple model really is all about a sacred place. There always is a sacred place, kind of a Holy of Holies or maybe Nirvana or Heaven, someplace that people are trying to get to by following sacred rules that are interpreted by sacred authorities who rule over the scared people, right? And they're scared people because they know the only way they can get to the sacred place is by keeping all the sacred rules who are taught by the sacred authorities.

And the thing is, the game is rigged. No one's ever good enough to kind of achieve the highest level. It's impossible. You get into the next level by keeping these rules and then you realize there's another level and you've got to do more stuff. And in fact, let me just say this. Some of you probably left religion at some point in your lives. And maybe you're just here today because somebody invited you. But you left religion probably because you sniffed this out. You thought to yourself, it's rigged. It's impossible.

This kind of religion leads to oppression because it puts a lot of power in a few people's hands. It leads to depression because nobody ever knows if they can do enough. It can be summarized in one word, do. Do. Do more. Do better. Do this. Do that. Never ending rules. But the good news is when Jesus came, he came to start something completely different and revolutionary, what you could call the grace model. And that can be summarized in one word, done.

He has done it all. It's Christ's finished work on the cross. God came down and initiated a relationship with you. God came down and paid the debt. God came down and did everything that ever needed to be done. God does the doing. God loves you unconditionally. There's nothing you can do to make God love you any more than he already does because he loves you infinitely. And there's nothing you can do to make God love you any less because he loves you unconditionally.

That's called grace, the undeserved favor of God, a free gift, a new covenant. And whether you live your life by the temple model or the grace model absolutely changes everything about you. It changes everything about your motivation, changes everything about your worldview, changes everything about your religion.

And the biggest problem, listen, the biggest problem in the 2,000 year history of the Christian church has been that we keep trying to blend the grace model with the temple model. And when you do that, you get the worst kind of religion, one that starts out by promising grace. Look, God loves you so much. Jesus died on the cross just to accept Jesus. Okay, and now you got to keep all these rules and it ends in slavery.

And so many times when people say, yeah, I want to become a Christian because they're all sour and they're all hypocritical and they're all judgmental, what they're noticing is this problem. People who start on the grace model but then end up being slaves to the temple model. No wonder they're judgmental. No wonder they're hypocritical. And that's exactly why Galatians was written.

You remember it was written by the Apostle Paul and this guy was a leader in the temple model. He was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, he says. He knew all the ins and outs of the temple model but then he has a vision of Jesus. Suddenly he gets the grace model and he's an enthusiastic convert just as a 180. And on his first missionary journey, he goes to a region called Galatia where central Turkey is today.

The Galatians who were pagans, they completely embraced the grace model because they had their own temple model system sacrificing to their gods and they went, "Wow, this is way better." They received Jesus Christ. They become followers of Jesus. But then some people swooped down in from Jerusalem who tell them, "Oh, it's great that you accepted Christ but to be a real Jesus follower, technically what you have to do since Jesus was Jewish is you have to become Jewish first. You got to become a Jewish convert." And this was very complicated for Gentiles, especially for men.

Because it required a little surgery and all kinds of extra rules but the Galatians started buying into it, right? And so Paul writes this letter to them and he says, "No, no, no, no, no." Because if you try to blend the two, it will pollute and denude and dilute the grace model until it's worthless. This is a big deal for Paul. And it needs to be a big deal for all of us because this is at the root of everything that ever goes wrong with Christian churches.

This is at the root of everything that steals joy from Christians. This is at the root of what most people don't like about church when they say they don't like it. This is at the root of why you might have found your peace and love and joy leaking out. We've been going through Galatians verse by verse and this morning I'm just going to go through the first 14 verses or so of Galatians chapter 5.

And again, I want to say I am so indebted to so many people that I've read and listened to on these verses but especially two pastors from the East Coast, Tim Keller and Andy Stanley. They come from completely different traditions but they have a beautiful take on this passage. Jot these down.

Number one, the purpose of Christ is freedom. The purpose of Christ, the reason Jesus came, is your freedom. You know, freedom is such an important value in American culture, isn't it? We love movies like Braveheart. You remember that scene, William Wallace is being tortured and he cries out one word. What is it? Freedom! Right? We're like, yes, our country was founded on freedom. The Civil Rights Movement captured our imaginations because it was about freedom.

Paul McCartney, his last big hit was after 9/11. It was a song called "Freedom." Freedom is a high, high value for us in America and that is why a lot of Americans look at Christianity and they go, "I don't want to be a Christian because it will take away my freedom." And what they mean is they look at Christians who don't seem very free. They just seem little and mean and judgmental and their life is defined by what they don't do and they're on to something because the language of Jesus was just dripping with freedom.

First thing that Jesus does in his ministry, first day of his ministry, the Bible says he goes to the synagogue, he opens up a scroll and he reads from Isaiah and he says, this is the first thing, first day of his ministry, first moment. He says, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to proclaim freedom to the captives and to set the oppressed free." Later he says, "If the Son sets you free, you shall be what? Free indeed." Still later he says, "The truth will set you what? Free." And here Paul says, don't miss it in Galatians 5 starting in verse 1.

In fact, let's just read this verse out loud together. Let me hear you. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Free, free, free. In other words, if your experience with Christianity is not making you feel free, lighter, more joyful, if your experience with Christianity is making you feel more burdened or heavy or guilty, then there's something wrong with it. What could be wrong with it? Well, that's what Paul talks about here.

Number 2, the product of legalism is slavery. The product of legalism, that just means the temple model, is slavery. Look at the rest of verse 1. "Stand firm then and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery." And he's not talking about sin here. When he says a yoke of slavery, in this verse he's talking about religion. Jesus came to set you free from religiosity.

How so? How does religion make me enslaved again? Well, for one thing you feel an obligation to endless rules. An obligation to endless rules. Look at verses 2 and 3. Don't miss this. "Mark my words." He says, "I, Paul." And what he's saying here is, "I should know. I live my life in the temple model. I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all." Now, what is all this about circumcision, by the way? Paul was not against the procedure, the medical procedure of circumcision. Paul was circumcised. All of the original disciples of Christ were circumcised. They were all Jewish men, so they were all circumcised.

Many of us. In fact, if you've been circumcised, no, just kidding. I'm just joking. I feel sorry for the guy who was like in the front, who went, "Oh, no." The joke was funny a month ago when Mark did it, and it's still funny today. But Paul was not against circumcision as a thing. He was against it in this context, because in the thinking of the temple model teachers, that was just the first step. That was like the entry-level step for men to become true Christians.

And so Paul says, "Again, I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he'll be obligated to obey the whole law." Circle that horrible word, obligated. See, at this point, the Galatians were probably thinking, "Paul, what is the big deal? It's just one little extra religious requirement. We're really cool with it." But Paul's saying, "If you think you have to do just this one little rule, you are so wrong. Because if you just begin to give the temple model any authority in your life," he's saying, "Believe me, I, Paul, tell you, you have no idea of the burden, that you have no idea the door that you're letting in. The camel has put its nose in the tent, and it's just going to take over."

What's he talking about? Well, let's just look at the tradition that Paul is from, that this happens in any rule-oriented system, but just let's look at Paul's tradition of Judaism. So there's 10 commandments, and there's roughly 613 other commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures, right? But even by the time of Christ, that had been added to by thousands of rules. For example, the rule, "Rest on the Sabbath, keep the Sabbath day holy." That's a great rule, right? Who doesn't need a seventh day of rest, right?

Well, but that had been turned into, "Don't work on the Sabbath," and that had been turned into, "Here's what defines work on the Sabbath," and that had been turned into a whole bunch of rules, and it didn't stop on the day of Christ. It went on and on and on for centuries and centuries afterwards, and it had been defined by thousands of rules like, "You can only lift a certain weight of fork to your mouth on the Sabbath, because if you lift a heavy fork, it'll be considered work, but you need to use a fork, so they made special Sabbath forks."

Or, like when I was in Jerusalem just a few weeks ago, there were special Sabbath elevators, and you can't work by touching a button on an elevator, so the Sabbath elevators go up and down to every floor incessantly, so you don't have to do any work by pressing a button. You can't use a TV remote on the Sabbath. The list just goes on and on and on and on and on. And you see this happens in any rule-oriented spiritual economy, because the thinking is, if one rule is good, then 100 rules are 100 times better, and it just never ends, and it gets worse.

In fact, it leads to an obsession with self. Instead of a focus on God, you become obsessed with yourself, because you're always looking at your own performance. Your spiritual life is this, "How am I doing? How am I doing? How am I doing? I'm not saying, 'God, I thank you and praise you.' You're going, 'God, how am I doing? God, I'm so sorry. God, I'll do better.' You're obsessed with yourself.

Verse 4, "You who are trying to be justified by the law have been alienated from Christ. You have fallen away from grace." Now, I used to hear that phrase, "fallen from grace." He fell from grace. She fell from grace. And it was used to describe somebody who fell into sin. But do you see here, Paul isn't saying, "They fell away into sin." He's saying, "They fell into religion and away from grace." Does that blow your mind? He's saying, "Grace is the hallmark of the Christian experience. Grace is your heavenly Father knows all your secrets, and He loves you anyway."

Grace is you don't deserve it, but He gives it to you anyway. Grace means the word "deserve" isn't even in the Christian lexicon. That's what grace is. And the moment you start trying to earn your way, then grace actually falls completely apart. Let me illustrate it this way. Let's say that you come up to me after church and you give me a gift card for a restaurant here in Santa Cruz, and it's a $50 gift card, right? And I go, "Fifty dollar gift card? I can't let you do that for me. Here, let me pay you back. I got 50 bucks in my wallet right here." You go, "Of course not. That's a free gift. Just take the gift card." I go, "At least let me pay you 40. Here's a couple of 20s." You go, "No, no, René, it's a gift. Take it." I go, "30." You go, "No." I go, "20. Just take a $20 bill." And you go, "All right, all right. I'll take a 20 here." But you take the $50 gift card. In that moment, it's not a gift anymore. It's a discount. Do you see that?

And the same thing happens with your salvation. The moment you say, "Jesus, thank you so much for dying on the cross for me. That's such a great gift that you did for me. I got to pay you back a little bit. I know I can't pay you back entirely, but let me pay you back a little bit with my tithing and with my church attendance and my good deeds." Now salvation's not a gift. It's a discount. Grace completely is shattered. It's not grace anymore. That's exactly what Paul is saying here. The minute you start trying to earn your salvation, you've fallen away from the whole concept of grace. It's so subtle, so insidious, isn't it?

That's what he means when he says, "You've been alienated from Christ." Christ isn't alienating you. You're alienating yourself from a focus on Christ. How? "An obsession with right and wrong makes me self-conscious rather than God-conscious." Right? Man, I've been there so focused on what I was trying to stop and what I couldn't do that I was focused so much on this thing I was trying to get out of my life that I wasn't looking at the cross and saying, "Jesus, thank you. I love you so much." You're alienating yourself from a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Now Paul is not saying, "Hey, you're saved by grace. God forgives you anyway. There's nothing you can do to make him love you any less." So go ahead and feel free to murder people. Go ahead and feel free to just indulge your most self-destructive whim. Now that's not grace either. He's saying, number three, top of page two, "The point of grace is love." The point of grace is not sin. The point is love. And these next two verses are so crucial. They're packed with meaning, but just look at this.

He says, "For through the Spirit we eagerly await by faith the righteousness for which we hope." Now stop right there for just a second. This is hard to understand for English-speaking people because the trouble with the word "hope" in English is that it doesn't get across the Greek meaning. In Greek, hope means absolute conviction, something I know is going to happen for sure. In English, it kind of means the opposite, right? "Hey, René, do you have a good bracket chosen for March Madness?" "Well, I sure hope so. I don't know." But in Greek, hope means absolute certainty.

When he says, "Through the Spirit we eagerly await the righteousness for which we hope," what he's saying is, "Listen, if I know I'm saved by God's grace and not my performance, then what I know is in my future." What I know is that in glory, God is going to embrace me with His love, and I am going to become perfectly Christlike. I am going to transform into the most beautiful creation that I can ever imagine. It's beyond my imagination how beautiful I am going to be in glory. And now enveloped by God's love and perfect and holy I'm going to be, that's the righteousness for which I hope.

Now if you're in the temple system, you don't have any certainty because you're never sure if you do enough. You don't know what's awaiting you. I don't know. I might go to hell. I might go to heaven. Maybe I'll go to heaven and I'll like live in a shack. Everybody else is in a mansion. I don't know, right? And if you're purely secular, you really don't know what's ahead for you. I don't know. I'm just going to be molecules spread all over the earth in dust, right? But if you believe in grace, you go, "No, this is what I hope for," and it's so motivating, right? It's so bracing to think that this is my future.

Why is this important? Because sometimes people go, "René, how can you preach 100% grace?" "René, if I lose my fear of being rejected by God, if I lose my fear of going to hell, I'm going to go crazy and go completely nuts into sin." My answer is really, if what you're saying to me is if you lose your fear of being rejected by God, then you're just going to sin like crazy, then what you're telling me is your only motivation to obey is fear. But what Paul is saying here is there's a much better motivation, and that's hope.

That's knowing, "Wow, this amazing thing is ahead for me, and I just want to take as many people with me as I can, and I want to be an agent of God's love because I eagerly await the righteousness for which I hope." And then Paul says something really amazing, verse 6, "For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value, not any value." And in the next sentence, he says something that is so extreme, you may not even have realized it is in the New Testament.

And in fact, if I preached a sermon just on this one sentence and I didn't tell you it was in the Bible, you'd go, "Man, René has gone all Oprah on us here. He has gone all soft and fuzzy." And if you're here and you're not into religion, you're going to love this. Listen to what an ex-pharisee, temple model leader, who now gets grace, says, "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love." Let's read that together. "The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love." Wait a minute, Paul. The only thing that counts? Paul, have you seen how thick the Bible is? Yeah, the only thing that counts.

Paul, aren't there 10 commandments? How many things count? One. One thing. Faith expressing itself through love. This is a big deal. This is a really, really big deal to Paul. In fact, it's such a big deal to him that he goes on and says again, he goes, "Listen, you've got to be very careful. Don't dilute it." He says to them in verse 7, "You were running a good race. You were doing so good. Who cut in on you to keep you from obeying the truth?" That kind of persuasion doesn't come from the one who calls you.

Do you see what he's saying? That kind of persuasion, the kind of guilt-oriented, pressure-packed, performance-oriented persuasion, he's saying, "If you are feeling that, that does not come from Jesus Christ." And then he quotes a proverb. He says, "A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough." What's that mean? Let me show you a microscopic picture of yeast. That's kind of grotesque, isn't it? This is yeast. Yeast is a single-cell fungus. That's what yeast is. But if you put a tiny bit of yeast in dough, you come back a little bit later, the whole loaf has changed. It's all blown up. It's yeast rolls.

And he's saying, "It only takes a small dose of yeast." That's all. A little microscopic thing. This is the difference between a cracker and bread. It's just yeast, right? It changes the whole nature of it. And he's saying that about our faith. What he's saying is, "It's all grace or nothing." You can't have a little bit of law in there because a little bit corrupts the whole thing. Sometimes people come up to me and say, "René, but I know you preach grace a lot, but shouldn't we have a balance?" Do you see Paul is saying, "There's no such thing as balance."

It ends up being either the grace model or the temple model. You cannot have balance. Paul's so emotional here. You want to say, "But Paul, calm down here." But Paul knew exactly where this would lead. He knew that a little yeast would lead to exactly what it has led to for 2,000 years. Churches whose vague message can be summarized as "try harder." You need to earn God's blessing. Try harder to be a good little boy. Try harder to be a good little girl. And Paul's going, "No, no. That's what I escaped from. Don't go back to that slavery."

And then he says something really R-rated. You ready for this? Parents, plug the ears of your little children here, because here's what he says. He says, "As for those agitators, I wish they would go the whole way and emasculate themselves." Going, "What?" You know what Paul's saying here? It's very clever, actually. He's saying, "You know, if they think that cutting off a little bit is so good, why don't they go all the way? Then they'll be super spiritual." Right? He is using this absurd argument to show how ridiculous it is to think, "My spirituality can be defined by what I don't do and by the pain I inflict on myself."

And he's saying, "This is what it can logically lead to and, by the way, has led to in the history of Christianity." Paul's saying it's absurd. Now, he does say, "Don't misuse it. Don't misuse grace." He says, verse 13, "You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be," and here's the word again, "free." But don't use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature either. That's just another kind of slavery, right? Addictions, compulsions, grudges, those are just-- Don't exchange the chains of religion for the chains of self-destructive behavior.

He's saying, "This is not some ooey-gooey, we can do whatever we want. It's all grace." That's not loving. Listen, when Paul says, "The temple model doesn't work to make you holy," he's not saying, "Don't be holy." He's saying, "The temple model doesn't work." But there's another way to be holy. If you're struggling with sin and you're going, "I keep trying and trying and trying and trying and trying and trying and trying and it's not working," there's another way.

If you've been religious your whole life and you're going, "I keep trying to be good and I keep doing these things and I'm just not sure God loves me," there's another way. How can you improve your relationships? How can you get over your destructive habits? How can you become more Christ-like without being in the temple model? Well, you'll have to come back the weekend after Easter because that's when we'll start talking about that.

Because Paul takes this turn in Galatians and goes into this beautiful practical Christian living section but he wraps up this part with a warning. He's saying, "Don't complicate it. Don't complicate grace." Now, don't miss this. Watch this. This brilliant, brilliant... Paul was so brilliant, verse 14. "For the entire law," the entire law, he's talking about the Hebrew Scriptures, the Torah, what Christians call the Old Testament, the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command. "Love your neighbor as yourself."

Now, this is so powerful because this is a quote from the Old Testament law. In fact, it's from the middle of the book. That's the core of the Old Testament law, the book of Leviticus. Paul's saying, "Do you see how grace was a part of the core message?" All the way back then, Paul is saying, "My Jewish brothers and sisters, do you see how we had the truth all along the whole time?" Now that he's set free, he has had this vision of Christ, he goes, "How was I so blind? Abraham was saved by grace. Sarah had her baby by grace. Moses was called by God when he was a murderer by God's grace.

Grace is in the core of the Levitical law." He's saying, "He was there the whole time, the whole time. It's on every page of the first two-thirds of the Bible. How did I miss it?" Because the corrupted temple model took all my attention and all my energy and all my time and hid grace from my view. And now he sees the same thing happening again in Christianity. And he's going, "No, no, no, no." Do you see why this is such a big deal?

Now, if this feels extreme, when Paul's saying, "Only one thing matters, and it's faith expressing itself through love, it's only grace, you can't have a balance, it's only grace, no law." If you're like, "Wow, that feels loose, that feels dangerous," it's because you've been paying attention. Because that's exactly how the first Christians felt, and that's why the temple model crept back into the church. But there's a legendary Bible scholar, just a brainiac pastor of a generation ago, Martin Lloyd-Jones, who said this, listen to this quote, he says, "Any true explanation of what the Bible says about grace will carry this scent of danger about it, that the preacher's going too far, that he's too lax on sin."

And he said, "If it does not have this element of danger about it, then he is not preaching grace." You see, this is what Paul was getting at with the Galatians. He's saying, "I know it seems crazy, but don't let the yeast of law leaven the church again." And what we want to do here at Twin Lakes Churches, we want to get that back out. Because imagine how different our churches would be, how different our communities would be, how different our world would be if most Christians grasped this. Imagine the world. Imagine how your life will be changed. It will totally change everything.

And we're going to look at how Paul talks about that in the weeks after Easter as we dig into the rest of Galatians. But I want to close with this. Think back on that first poem Sunday. The people waved palm branches because they thought Jesus was coming to free them politically. And Jesus says, "You know what? I could do that, but that kind of freedom really doesn't last because it doesn't address the key problem, which is human nature." He says, "I will come to free you at a spiritual level, at a much deeper, longer-lasting level. I will free you through grace, bought a great price on the cross."

And that's the glorious truth that we remember this Good Friday and this Easter. Let's pray together. Would you bow your heads with me? Heavenly Father, thank you so much for your grace. Thank you for setting us free. And God, help us to stand firm and not be burdened again by either yoke of slavery, not the yoke of religiosity and legalism or the yoke of sin and self-indulgence. Help us to just be free. Help us to shine as a community of believers that are motivated by grace.

And God, especially, I just want to pray that if there's anybody here who's realizing, I have been trying to compromise with grace and the temple model, and that's not a compromise, the temple model just takes over, and it's dawning on me. And I want to just live by faith in God's grace because I have a feeling that would change everything. I pray that right now they would just say, "God, count me in." And those who've been living shackled by self-indulgence and sin, that they would say, "God, free me from these chains to count me in. Thank you for your grace, paid for at great cost on the cross for my freedom." And so I'm holding up my chains that bind me right now, and I'm allowing you to just break those shackles as I receive Jesus and His grace. In His name I pray, amen.

Amen.