Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Welcome to the Karma Chaj podcast.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Wow.
Do you know, I think it'd be really hard to be smarter than Steve. Don't you think so? I don't think I'm smarter than Steve. While we're praying standing, let's just pray. Father, thank you for all you've already done in the service today.
Thank you for the lives that have been touched.
Thank you for the worship that's ascended to your throne.
And right now, Lord, we just open our hearts because we want our lives to count for you even more in this generation.
So, Lord, just speak to us afresh.
Stir us, equip us, enable us. We pray in Jesus name.
Amen. Please take your seats.
I told them at the first service that this is the only place where I've got so excited that I fell off the platform, but I almost tripped onto the platform today, which was a different experience altogether. But it's great to be with you, and I just love being at Cromer. And one of the things I love is that, you know, things that God is doing here.
I'm hearing about, you know, there was a time when I was having to tell people about Cromer, but now people tell me about Cromer, and it's just exciting to know that, you know, I'm preaching in the church, which is really a strategic church at the moment. God is doing some interesting things across the land. You know, it's great that you're sowing into churches like Soul Church. God is doing some very interesting things and he's raising up churches with a real sense of strategy so that they have got a sense of what God is doing and are prepared to model what they're building to do that. And I see this church as one of those, and it's just a joy to have the friendship and the relationship. Someone was saying to me, is your wife with you today? Well, actually, between the first service and this service, I found out that my wife, who was sleeping rough in Bromley last night to raise funds for the homeless, she sent me a message because I said, how much did you sleep?
Well, they were actually sleeping in the churchyard. And the church clock strikes every quarter of an hour.
She said, I must have slept a bit because I missed a couple of the times when the clock struck. But she said she was listening to the world Service most of the time. And it got to 5:30 this morning and they said, we're now going over to Radio 4 so that you can listen to some church bells. And she thought, I've listened to enough church bells all Night. At this point, I'm taking the earplugs out. So anyway, so she's had an interesting time, but she's very happy that I'm here. Now, Steve's asked me to do a little assignment with you. I know that he's been teaching on the commandments and just how important it is to keep those commandments. And I know that if this church is going to be the testimony that God wants it to be, it's got to be a church that can set an example in the nation.
And so keeping commandments is really important.
But what Steve wants me to do is to link the Old Testament and the New Testament, emphasis on the commandments, so that we can get an understanding of what God wants us to do. And I was able to do that a little bit at the first service, and I'm going to do a bit more now. And Steve says we just have to see how it goes tonight, because it may be we'll get a question and answer session. So if you find there are things that I'm sharing in this service that you think, oh, you know, I'd like to ask questions, maybe you need to come back tonight and we can do a bit more of an interactive time around the things that I'm talking about, because these are really big things that are going to make a difference in the nation.
One of the things that really speaks to me is that the picture of the church that we have ultimately is in the last two chapters of the Bible.
Now, I often tell this story, but I once gave a Bible to someone in prison, and when I visited them the next time, I said to them, what did you read first in the Bible? They said, oh, I read the last two chapters. I said, why did you do that?
Oh, you've never been in prison, have you? I said, no.
Well, if you go to get a book out the library, I was told, and it's a whodunit, you'll find that the last two pages are always ripped out. So the person who read it first never lets anyone else know who did it.
And I thought, well, actually, when you start reading the Bible, by reading the first two last two pages first, you get a really interesting insight because a lot of people are panicking today about where's the world at and where's it all going. But when you get to the end of the Bible, you discover it works out absolutely incredibly. We got a new heaven and a new earth where there's righteousness and there's a picture of the church there, the bride of Christ coming down from heaven. So whilst we're doing all this stuff on earth, God's actually doing, doing something in the heavens. And in the end, when we see the church, we're going to see what has been prepared in the heavens.
So what we're doing here is actually preparatory for something really good. And when you see that church descending from heaven, it is amazing because you don't normally see the foundations of a city, do you?
But actually when that new Jerusalem comes down, you can see the foundations of the city. And you can see that actually the names of the apostles are on precious stones on the foundation of the walls.
And so you think to yourself, hey, you know, this has been built for a long time. If we go right back 2,000 years, when the apostles were preaching in Solomon's colonnade, they were laying the foundations for the walls of the city. And when we preach the gospel today, we're continuing to build the walls of the city. And if the church has got strong walls, it can have wide open gates.
Now that's amazing, isn't it? Because a lot of churches I go to, they say we've got very open doors, but they're only open to the people that they trust.
I think really the church needs to have open doors. And we trust God that the people that come through the gates will be transformed. When you look at the church, in the book of Acts, it said no one dared join themselves to them, but God added daily, such as were being saved.
So there's a picture there of, you know, people thinking, do you know God's doing something in that company that is just so incredible that I can't just sort of gate crash it. But if the gates are open, I can enter and God can do something transformative. We're seeing that happen, aren't we? Which is amazing. But you know, you keep looking at that picture and you realize there's a brightness in the center of the city which is so great, which is just amazing. And I know that when Jesus appears, the brightness of his coming is going to be so great that it's going to sort a lot of things out. I know that we're told that every knee is going to bow and every tongue is going to confess. And I know that that is a way that no one is going to be protesting that the judgment of God is unfair.
You know, you'll recognize that what he does and what he says is actually absolutely something you have to bow the knee to and confess his name.
But I also know this, that for many, the brightness of that Light. It actually says, you know, heaven and earth will want to flee away.
But there are those that God is raising up who know the brightness of his presence and won't want to back away from it.
I find it amazing. You know, I used to think a lot about the second coming. And I was really touched by the fact that the angels, when they were speaking to the apostles after the Ascension, said this same Jesus.
And I really hold onto that. The Jesus who's coming back is the same Jesus who we've already met in the Gospels.
And I really hold on to that. So one of the things I want to say to you is this. There is a bright future we might be going through, some times that are tough. And I know sometimes we look at the nation and we think it's tough out there, but actually God's got a great plan and that's what we want to hold on to.
So I'm going to read some verses from John's Gospel where Jesus was talking in the upper room. Most of John's. A whole lot of John's Gospel is about what Jesus said in the upper room. The other Gospels just mention it briefly, but John goes into great detail, and in chapter 14, he says this. I'm going to read from verse 15.
If you love me, keep my commandments, and I will ask the Father, and He will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever.
The spirit of truth.
The world cannot accept him because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him. For he lives with you and will be in you.
I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me because I live. You also will live.
On that day, you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in Me. And I'm in you. Whoever has my commands and keeps them is the one who loves me. The one who loves me will be loved by me, by my Father. And I too will love them and show myself to them. That passage is incredible because it actually talks right at the start about keeping the commandments. And just towards the end of what I read, it talks about that again, keeping the commandments.
And when we look at Jesus saying keeping my commandments, he's not talking about any different from the commandments that are there in the Old Testament.
Sometimes we get this idea that Jesus only turns up in the New Testament. If you really understand it, you'll see that right at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, when God said, let us make man in our own image, that's demonstrating that Father, Son and Holy Spirit were involved right at the beginning in, in creation, all the way through the Old Testament.
So it's not that we just see the Father in the Old Testament, whilst the Holy Spirit and Jesus are passively waiting for their turn, there's an active involvement. So when Jesus says keep my Commandments, he actually owns all of the commandments that are there in the Old Testament because they are his commandments. I know they were given at a time when the children of Israel were about to go into the promised land.
But what was happening at that point was God's intention was to move into the promised land with them. And so it was like sort of housekeeping rules. I'm going to move in with you, so there will be no murdering, there will be no adultery. There will be none of this because I'm moving in with you and my presence is going to be in your midst. And you're going to have to be a holy people because you're hosting a holy God in, in the midst of you big things.
But when we're saying that, we realize that all of those things that were spoken out at that point through Moses were what Jesus was, including when he says my commandments.
Jesus expects us to live a life that matches up with those expectations.
And the challenge is, how are we going to do it?
Because when we look at what has been going on before that, we realized that those commandments had been given, but the ability to keep them seemed to be a long, long way away from where people were at.
So is it any different for us, people that are part of this move of God that came when Jesus died on the cross and rose again, that we might have life.
I'm going to suggest to you today that there are three reasons that stand out from this passage and elsewhere that in the upper room that really show us that God is enabling us to keep his commandments. And that's really what I want us to see, because I believe that we need to be a church that demonstrates to the world that we are people that keep the commands of God and are able to live them. The world might want to lower the bar, say, you know, this is too challenging, you know, fornication. Well, it's the pattern. This is the pattern. That's the pattern. But actually God is saying, no, my standards haven't changed.
But the world needs to see that God is raising up people that can keep to God's standards.
And that's a big challenge. So how is he going to do it.
Well, when we're going through this, we see that really there are three things that are going to make a difference.
First of all, he's giving us new life.
That's huge.
He's also giving us new love, and that's really important when it comes to keeping commandments. And he's also giving us a new covenant, which is really significant when we're talking about the transition from the Old Testament to the New Testament or the Old Covenant to the New Covenant. These things really matter. So let's pick up first of all on that one about new life.
Jesus said, I've come that you might have life and have it to the full.
Now, when God created man in the beginning, we know that he breathed life into Adam in the garden.
We're told that in Scripture.
But we also know that God had more life to give because he put a tree of life in the middle of the garden and said, you can have more life if you eat of this tree.
He also emphasized the choice by putting another tree alongside it, which we call the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.
It became the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil because there had been a rebellion in the heavenly realm and evil had entered a world that God was hoping to make and intending to see imperfection. And this is where it ends up. But what we see here is that with that choice, it really came down to this.
Are you going to take more of my life, in which case you'll know more of my love and more of my light, or are you going to go for more of self?
Because that's what the tree of knowledge and evil was basically offering a kind of growth, if you like, of people's reliance on their physicality, intellectuality, determination and emotional ability.
And you know what it's like if you went out into the streets of Leicester and said to someone, are you alive? They're all going to say they're alive. Even though the Bible says that outside of Christ, we're dead in our trespasses and sins. So how is it that we. We say that we're alive when on the inside we're spiritually dead?
It's because we can live from the strength of our physicality, our emotional ability, our intellectuality, and our determination.
That combination is what the Bible calls the flesh.
And we've all lived our lives in the flesh before. We were made alive by the Spirit of God, because becoming one Spirit with our spirit and bringing to life again that which died, you know, on the day that they ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, something on the inside of them died, says in the day you eat of it, you will die. There was a spiritual death that took place and there now needs to be a spiritual resurrection in people. And this is why when Jesus came, he said, I have come that you might have life and have it to the full. He's basically saying the, the choice is coming back onto the earth.
The tree of life is going to be accessible. When Jesus went to that cross, it was the tree of life.
But actually, in order to receive the life of God, there's something else that has to happen. It's very obvious actually that if the problem was eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that since then all of us in the world have been born to live from our physicality, intellectuality, emotional ability and determination, then something has to be cut back in order for us to be in a place where we can receive what God wants us to have.
And the evidence of that is clear when you look at the way it's spelt out in the Old Testament, it says that when they refused to eat of the tree of life, the possibility of accessing it was removed from them. And an angel with a sword was placed to guard the way to the tree of life.
I've often thought about that and thought to myself, what would it have been like having been expelled from Eden, looking back into that land, longing to get to the tree of life and realizing that was an angel with a flaming sword in the way.
The only way to get to the tree of life was basically to walk through that sword, to know a cutting back of all that had come upon humanity from that going down the wrong route.
And this is where we face things today. And this is one of the reasons why we can see so clearly why Jesus came.
He came and you look at the cross, what does the cross look like to you? I mean, the cross to me is I struck out.
That's what Jesus did on the cross.
He came to deal with that self centeredness.
This is why if we want to receive the life of Christ, we've got to come in repentance and faith.
We've got to be saying no to self because in coming to Christ he wants to deal with the old in order to bring us into the new.
These are big things, but this is really what's being spoken about in scripture.
In the Old Testament they had a sign, they had the sign of circumcision, which was just a little symbol about really what God wants to do is to Cut away the flesh. But they knew, and Paul spells this out in the New Testament, that, that actually that physical sign doesn't achieve anything because what God really wants to do is to circumcise people's hearts.
But you know, that would be a physical impossibility, wouldn't it? Really, it would cause all kinds of problems for cardiac surgeons having to put it all back together again. But what we're saying here is that when we come to Christ and we repent, God counts that moment of repentance as that opportunity to strike through the self centeredness in our life.
When you come to Christ, you're never the same again.
There's something that's happened that actually has brought you into a new relationship with God.
He deals with the old in order to bring us into the new. He died on the cross to forgive our sins, to take up where we got it all wrong. He died on the cross to deal with our self centeredness. But he rose again, having reconciled us to God through that work on the cross, he rose again that we might have his life. We have the resurrection life of Jesus.
And do you know what? That makes a big, big difference when it comes to keeping the commandments.
Someone put it like this. You know, when you realize what God is doing, suddenly those things which seem so impossible become possible.
It's almost like when a commandment comes instead of just being something that hangs over you, it becomes a promise that you can keep.
Just think about it.
You shall not kill could become you shall not kill.
You've got a different life principle operating on the inside of you.
It's not even going to be on your agenda. It's not even going to be on your thought. And you can go through all of those commands. You won't steal.
But let me add to that, because I said new life, new life is what God wants to give us. That's what Jesus came to do, give us his life. It's written in that passage that I read to you. Jesus said, you know, I've been with you, but I'm going to be in you. Which is better.
He said, because I live, you will live also.
Isn't that an incredible statement?
But we can miss it. We just don't realize what an enormous turning point in history is. This is the point when God says what went wrong at the fall is now going to be put right.
And it's an opportunity for us individually to respond.
In a sense, we don't get the chance in the initial instance because as the Bible puts it, we all die. In Adam.
But in Christ, we have the opportunity to be made alive.
The choice is back.
We can choose life. Isn't that incredible?
But we can also choose love.
Now, Jesus made it really clear that the commandments are kept through love.
When he was asked to summarize the commandments, he said, you know, there are two real commandments. One is, love God with all your heart, and the other is love your neighbour as yourself.
So you can see that if we've got love in our lives, it enables us to be keepers of the commandments.
And that love is something that we need to realise, is even beyond that which is hinted at when it says, love your neighbour as yourself.
Because that's great. It just means that actually when you love your neighbour as yourself, you don't pamper yourself and deprive your neighbour.
We've all got a natural inclination to look after ourselves.
You know, when we're hungry, we want food. When we're cold, we want clothing. We look after ourselves. And to love your neighbor as yourself means that don't let your neighbor go cold whilst you're being clothed. Don't let your neighbor go hungry whilst you're being fed.
But Jesus comes along and he says, I'm raising the bar.
It's not just love your neighbor as yourself, because if that's the case, we're all going to go into a kind of narcissistic introspection. How much do I love myself?
Maybe if I love myself a little bit more, I'd love my neighbour a little bit more. No. Jesus comes along and says, okay, that's basic.
By this shall all men know you are my disciples, in that you love one another as I have loved you. Wow, that is like putting the bar right up, isn't it?
It's not just, you know, love one another in the way you love yourself, but think how Jesus loved you. My goodness. His arms on the cross were outstretched. He's basically saying, anyone can come. Look, I'm open to embrace everybody.
I've allowed my hands to be fixed, so I can't change my mind.
Anybody can come. Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.
And Paul put his hand up and says, and he was the worst. He was pretty bad, actually. But he got saved.
And that's because of the love of God, which is so enormous.
He doesn't just love us because he sees what we can be. He loves us even in the midst of what we are, even when we were yet sinners. Christ died for us. He didn't wait till you washed Yourself up, smartened yourself up, sorted yourself out before he died for you.
He paid the price when we were at our worst.
And he loved you and he values you. And in some ways, you know, when you got saved, it was because he had need of you, because he values you and he looked at you and thought, I want this person.
I can clean them up, I can transform them. And things that you thought maybe you just did by coincidence in your life, God can use them.
You know, everything you do before you got saved is something that God can clean up and use in the future.
It's called sanctification. But hey, we won't go into too much technical theological terms today, but just think about this love.
There was a walk.
There was a really important walk that Jesus had with Peter.
It's recorded at the end of John's Gospel.
Jesus has been raised from the dead and Peter is still guilt ridden because the way he denied Jesus three times and Jesus is going to restore him.
And they are having breakfast on the shores of Galilee and Jesus takes Peter aside.
Sometimes when we need to deal with people, it's better to take them aside rather than deal with it publicly. But John didn't want to miss out. He knew that Jesus was going to baptize him in the Holy Spirit. And he thought, if this is going to happen to Peter, I want to be there. So he was following along, just keeping a watch. And eventually he records what he'd obviously picked up from Peter. Jesus said, and Jesus said to Peter, first of all, do you love me more than these?
Because Peter had boasted, he said, even if all of these desert you, I won't desert you.
So Jesus was able to point to them and say, well, do you love me more than these?
You were the one that denied me.
But the interesting thing is he actually says, do you love me with the love of God? He uses the word agape.
And when Peter answers, he uses a different word.
He says, lord, you know that I like you.
Now, I know we don't quite bring this out in our translations because we tend to use both agape and philio and just call them love. But they're very different levels of love.
Philio, which is the answer that Peter gives, means brotherly affection.
I have a brotherly affection for you.
Agape, the love that God demonstrates is, it's unconditional, it's sacrificial, it lays down a life for someone else.
And Peter's only being honest on this walk.
Jesus is saying, do you love me with the love of God? And he's saying, no, Lord, you know that I like you.
And he responds with philio twice. And then Jesus says to him, on the third occasion, peter, do you Philo me? Do you like me? Do you love me with a brotherly affection? And it's like he heaves a sigh of relief because, yes, Lord, you know that I like you.
But the reality is it isn't going to stay like that.
Because just as when the Holy Spirit comes, they receive that new life.
When the Holy Spirit comes, we're told In Romans chapter 5, he comes to shed the love of God abroad in our hearts.
Now isn't that amazing that he actually comes and brings a new level of love into your life?
There are different types of love. There's physical attraction, there's brotherly affection, and then there's this amazing love of God.
And it's that amazing love of God that we need to experience when we're loving one another as Jesus loved us.
And if we get to that point, this will transform marriages. You know, I mean, marriages shouldn't just be based on physical attraction.
There should be that sacrificial love that comes in once the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts. This is why Christian marriage shouldn't be so precarious.
It should be secure.
Because there's that sacrificial love, that kind of love that we read about in First Corinthians 13, which tends to get quoted at every wedding. And I wonder just how much it gets into people's hearts and minds.
New life, but a new love.
And Jesus said that if. If love is the fulfilling of these things, and if we've got this new love, then we're going to keep the commandments, aren't we?
It's going to change things.
We don't want to steal from anyone because we've. We love them.
We won't want to abuse anyone because we love them.
It changes things.
So, new life, new love.
But there's a third one I mentioned which is new covenant.
We know that actually the Pentecost feast was when they celebrated the giving of the law.
And if we look back to that which they celebrated at that Pentecost feast, we'll realize that when Moses came down from the mountain with the tablets of stone and he came down to give the law to the people, people who God had said he wanted to make priests in his kingdom, but people who said, we don't want to get that close to God. Let Moses go and talk to God on our behalf.
When he came down, he found people dancing round A golden calf.
And he had to ask them, who's on the Lord's side?
And there were 3,000 people who refused to say yes to the Lord that day.
And when that old Covenant came in, 3,000 people died.
It wasn't a great start, was it really?
But they were told that if they kept the Commandments, God would be with them.
And as the years went by in the promised land, even though God was there, his presence in the holiest of holies, in the tabernacle, he wished he could have been more widely present. But they weren't up for that.
Even though he was there in the midst of them.
Keeping the commandments was just something they did not manage to do.
And in the end, the consequences were that first, the northern kingdom, the ten tribes in the north, were taken off into captivity by the Assyrians and then split up. Some sent back to the land, some went here, there and everywhere.
And then the southern kingdom, which had been priding itself on the fact that we're not like the northern kingdom, we're the commandment keeping bit down here in the south, the tribes of Judah and Benjamin.
But they were not commandment keeping people either.
And in the end, God took them off to Babylon.
And whilst they were in Babylon, we've got a prophet in Babylon called Ezekiel and a prophet in Jerusalem called Jeremiah. And they were prophesying the same thing, and they were saying, yes, you've been taken off, but God's going to bring restoration.
And part of the restoration is this, that he will make a new covenant with his people.
Wow.
And then Jeremiah spells it out in chapter 31, and this is what the new covenant will be like.
God will write his laws not just on a tablet of stone that you're carrying around in a box, but he will write them on your heart and on your minds.
And you won't have to tell people to know the Lord, because people will know Him.
And at the same time, Ezekiel was saying, God will take out the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh, and you will be able to keep his commandments, a new covenant with fantastic promises. Now, just think about this. Instead of having the Law in a box externally sort of to be applied, you've now got it written on your heart and in your mind now. Wow, that makes a big difference, doesn't it?
Because it means that now this is your natural disposition, is to live out what God wants you to be.
You know, he's given you a heart of flesh rather than a heart of stone, so that he can write on It.
And he writes on your heart, his laws, you shall not kill, you shall not. This, you shall not. And each of these suddenly becomes a promise, doesn't it, really?
And in some ways, the Bible doesn't just become a textbook, it becomes a test book.
Am I living right according to what God wants?
Is what he's working into my life, what I'm working out in my life?
Because that's what we need to see.
New covenant promise.
500 plus. About 550 years go by.
The people come back into the land. Some of them do, some of them don't.
And we get to Jesus in the upper room.
He takes the bread, he shares it with them.
Then he takes the cup and he says, this is the new covenant in my blood.
Now, we say that at a communion service, but just imagine what it would have been like for the people in the upper room. Hold on. Okay.
550 years waiting, and he's saying that through the shedding of his blood, we're going to enter into this new covenant that was promised where God would write his laws on our hearts and on our minds.
Incredible, isn't it? This is part of the new covenant that we have.
You know, we just think, oh, it's a separate part of the Bible. We get to Malachi, end of Old Testament. Oh, hello, Matthew. We're in the New Testament. Actually, the New Testament really begins when you get to the day of Pentecost, when the new covenant really comes in and God's law gets written on our hearts and on our minds.
And what Jesus was saying in the upper room, if you love me, keep my commandments.
It's basically saying, I'm going to give you a love that will enable you to keep my commandments.
I'm going to give you a life that will enable you to keep my commandments.
I'm going to bring you into a covenant that's different from the old covenant, which is not just carrying them around in a box with the mercy seat on top of it, where God sits. I'm so glad he sits on that mercy seat. It's like saying that the law is the foundation of his throne.
And then they had added into that the pot of manna and Aaron's rod that budded because provision and grace are also part of the foundation of God's throne.
But just think what this means for us today.
It means that if God's people, if the church of Jesus Christ really grasps new life, new love, new covenant, we'll have people living a life that actually matches up To God's expectation that whilst the world is saying, can we lower the standards a bit because we find it a little bit hard, can we sort of say this is okay now and that's okay now, There will be people who say you don't have to lower the standards, you just have to meet the one who will write the laws that on your heart and on your mind, you need to meet the one who will give you the life and will deal with the self centeredness that was such a problem for you before.
You'll meet the One who will flood you with his agape love.
And I want you to realize that when God loves you, he doesn't treat you like some kind of drainpipe, you know what I mean? Where it comes in the top and flows out the bottom.
I've heard this so many times, Lord, you know, help me to love people.
And what really God wants to say is, let's start by me loving you.
Let me shed my love abroad in your heart by actually loving you.
And then as I love you, it will put a love on the inside of you, a new level of security, a new level of grace that'll make it possible for you to love each other. It'll go beyond just loving yourself.
You'll feel loved like you've never been loved before.
And it'll make it possible for you to love other people.
You know, in the end the world is going to know that we're the disciples of Jesus because we love one another.
I was hoping to be a missionary going out to Africa years ago and I remember being in a prayer meeting with some people who were like minded and we were thinking about, okay, you know, we'll go out and we'll be a missionary here or a missionary there. And then we thought, well, actually Jesus said it's how we love one another that will convince people that we're his disciples. And we thought, maybe what people need to see is not just individual missionaries, but a vibrant church where people are really loving one another and living up to God's standards. And if they could see that.
So we started praying, Lord, instead of us going there, send people here so that they might see a vibrant church. I think the first part of our prayer has been answered abundantly. God has sent a lot of people here, but people need to see a vibrant church.
They need to see a vibrant church. You live in the midst of a very multicultural city, but the only look around, see what God is doing. He's actually giving you a multicultural church to witness to a multicultural city.
And the witness to the multicultural city will be the level of your love for one another, your ability to keep the commandments to be different in the face of it all, to bring wisdom from God instead of the wisdom of the world that sometimes wants to creep into the church.
Are you up for this, folks?
I mean, to me, this is just so important.
And when Steve said to me, just come and help us see how you connect the commandments to what God is doing, I'm saying to you, the commandments stand.
You know, we might not be under the law, but it doesn't mean that we don't match up to the law.
But this is the heart of God and Cromer. I pray for you because God's actually doing something. You're a bit like a city set on the hill at the moment.
Everywhere I go, people know about Cromer. I don't know who's doing that. It must be God. I don't think you've got a particularly strong publicity machine that's out there everywhere. It's just God.
But let's see the fullness of what God can do, do, and let's see the strength of that testimony. I'll pray and then I'm going to hand the microphone back to Steve and I'll be around afterwards. You can meet me outside. There's a few books that might be helpful, but I just hope this has been helpful just sharing these things. Father, I love this church.
I know you love it, too.
I know you love every single person in this place.
The arms of your embrace.
You want to meet each one, deal with our insecurities. You want to remind us that you don't just love us now that we're scrubbed up and clean. You loved us even before you reached out and saved us.
Lord, I just pray that every single one of us here will know that new life that. That new love, that new covenant that enables to be a real testimony in this world.
Because this world needs that testimony.
It needs to see the greatness of what our God can do.
So make that real in our lives, we pray in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:41:14] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to the Chroma Charge podcast. If you enjoyed this message, you can like and subscribe.
You can also join us in person or online every Sunday at Cromer Church. For more information about us, including our ministries, events, worship, and how to donate, visit our website at Cromer Church.
