I know 2020 was terrible for everybody, but it was worse for Will. Will went into basic training on January 15th, and he didn't know none of us knew that he was going to be gone for more than eight weeks. Eight weeks in, you're supposed to have graduation. But seven weeks in, the COVID pandemic really kind of hit. And so his class was the first class to not get to have graduation. He had done thousands of push-ups so that he could earn an extra day off to be with us in San Antonio. He didn't get that. We didn't get to see him. He had to go straight into the tech school to go in the tech school. He had to be quarantined for 14 days. Nobody knew what to do. He actually heard somebody on the radio say we don't know what to do with these people. And so they put him in a room and they said, you can't have your phone. You have to stand and you can't talk for eight hours a day. You can talk, I'm sorry, but you can't look at your phone. They're in a game room. You can't play the games because they didn't know what to do with them. And no idea. He first of all had to be in his room for 23 and a half hours a day. Then he had to go spend a month doing this kind of complete waste of time until his tech school started. And so he didn't get home and talk. And when he came home, he surprised me one Sunday after church. And this embrace that you've seen, that's what the surprise was like. And for eight months, that's what the reunion was like. And there's something about that that just gets to the core of our souls, isn't it? There's something about those kind of reunions that are just wholehearted, completely, utterly right. When the thing that you've been longing for is there and you are just hugging each other so tightly, you're trying to feel like you're trying to pull them into your heart and complete you. And you are delighted in this person. And this person is delighted in you. And you never want it to end. There's something about that that just appeals to the very core of your being, isn't it? And the reason why is because that is what you are created. Jesus praised for us in John chapter 17. He says, I want to be back with you the way you were. In the beginning, when I was in you and you were in me. When there was no distinction between us, of course, we're separate persons. But there's no clear place where I am and you begin, we are in each other. We are face to face before each other. We are just taking deep joy and pleasure in each other. Jesus, Father, I want them to be there with us, in us. They and each other, they and me, me and you. That the reason why you exist is to experience this moment, that kind of intimate, precious, vulnerable, whole-hearted moment. All eternity with God. And the good news that I have for you is, if you are in Christ, you have it. If you are in Christ, you already begin to taste it. You've already began to experience it and nothing can take it away from you. Nothing can take that away from you. And what all you're called to do from now and to the moment you experience it fully is, A, protect it. Don't let anybody tell you you have to earn it. Don't let anybody tell you you can lose it. You protect it. You protect it from everybody else and you protect it from yourself. Protect that and share it. Paul is going to tell us that religion and immorality amount to nothing. The only thing that matters is that moment expressing itself in love, expressing itself and how we love each other. Protect it and share it. Jesus has done everything that has to be done to completely fill you with everything that God is. Enjoy it and share it. Please stand as we read from Galatians chapter 5, beginning with verse 1. For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm therefore and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Look, I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. You are severed from Christ you who'd be justified by the law. You've fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit by faith we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision or uncircumcision counts for anything but only faith working through love. You are running well who hindered you from obeying the truth. This persuasion is not from him who calls you. A little leaven and will leavens the whole lot. I have confidence in the Lord that you will take no other view. And that the one who is troubling you will bear the penalty whoever he is. But if I, brother, still preach circumcision, why am I being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been removed. I wish those who unsettle you would immasculate themselves. For you were called to freedom brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh. But through love serve one another. For the whole law is filled in this one word you shall love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite into vow or one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another. As far the reading of God's word, it is sweeter than honey from the honeycomb and is precious than gold, even much fine gold. Please be seated. Christ has done everything necessary to reunite us with God and to experience him fully. Protect that. Don't let anybody tell you that you have to own it or that you can lose it. Paul uses the word freedom here. The word freedom is a beautiful and wonderful word. But somehow it is kind of misunderstood. Modern freedom is kind of the word in our culture. It almost has a hard edge to it. You can't tell me nothing, I am free. I don't have to go home for Christmas, I am free to do whatever I want. You know, I am a full grown man, I am free. And that is not what we are talking about at all. This freedom that Paul is describing to us is not the freedom to celebrate your independence and rub it into everybody else's face and dare somebody to come and get it. This is freedom to be what you are created to be. You see the life of an unbeliever, the life before you meet Jesus is the life of never actually getting to be what you are created to be. You are enslaved to sin, you are enslaved to these things that you are seeking after and you want, but they never quite fulfill you. You are always searching after that thing out there that you are so sure when you get it you will finally be complete, you will finally be fulfilled and you never quite get it. And you are enslaved to the race, you are enslaved to the chase after. But once you are in Christ, you receive a love and a joy and a fulfillment and you know that this is everything, this is all there is. And you get to be for the first time, you get to be what you are created to be, you get to be loved, you get to know God, you get to be known by God, you get to see his smile face to face, you get to feel it. That is what you are created for, that is true freedom, the freedom to be what you are created to be. And Paul says, once you have that, don't let anybody take it. Freedom has to be defended, freedom has to be protected. He says protect it, don't lose it, the burden is on you to protect it. And there are different things we have to protect it from. First and foremost, we have to protect it from those who would try to tell us we have to earn it. We have to remember that the danger of losing Christ to the law, to obedience, to religion, to the danger of losing Christ in this enormous mass of Christianity that we live in. And we just, we don't see it. And he says the burden is really on you to protect it. I love the way he says it in Colossians, the same thought, but he says it in a different way. He says don't let anybody judge you. It is kind of the opposite of what you would think, right? You tell me, expect him to say don't judge anybody. Jesus said that, he did not repeat it. He says don't let anybody judge you. You are in Christ. And if you are not doing it the way other people want you to do it, that is okay. But don't you let anybody say that if you really want to be a Christian you need to do that. Or if you want to be, and some of you said this, right, let's just be honest. Some of you said, you know, so and so she's a good Christian. As opposed to what exactly do you have to do to be a bad one? Are you a bad Christian? Do you not have all of Jesus? And we have to fight that temptation. We have to fight that belief that somehow there's this ranking of Christians and the missionaries, man, they're at the top. And the people who just go to worship once a week, they're at the bottom. That is a lie. It's a lie. You're in Christ. You can't be more in Christ. You have it all. Receive that, accept that, believe that. The burden is on you to protect it because there's a slavery of Christian work so it's waiting to take you in and it will do it. You will never quite get there. You're always going to be trying to get better and you'll never quite get there. And the reason why you'll never quite get there is because you weren't designed to get there in Rome. You weren't designed to. You were designed to enjoy God's grace. And it's hard to enjoy God's grace. And we're trying so badly not to need it. Bianca reminded me of this yesterday, when we had littles around the house and she would always kind of do something. Every day she would just not be that perfect mom. Only she thought she needed to be. And every day I would remind her, honey, if you did it perfectly, you wouldn't need Jesus. If you did it perfectly, you wouldn't need Jesus. And he's there and he's always there. And he's in every moment and he's specifically in those moments when you fail. But a lot of times we don't see him. We don't receive him because we're so mad at whoever kept us from being perfect that day. We're at ourselves for not being perfect that day. One day we, our first house had wooden floors in the kitchen. I don't recommend that. But whatever. And Brondis had just gotten to the age, our oldest, and just gotten to the age where he could pull himself up on things. Couldn't walk yet. We could pull himself up. And we were not yet used to how high he could reach. And so he could reach to the counter. He could reach to the counter, not what was on the counter. And the orange-use carton was on the very edge. And he could reach to it. He couldn't do anything with it when he got it. And he had pulled it and it started just, and beyond. And I hear the sound of orange-use hitting the wood floor. And she takes off running and she hits the orange juice and slides into the dishwasher. And the door of the dishwasher comes over and is a huge clatter. And Brondis just terrified sitting in orange juice and he starts crying. And Bianca goes, honey, it's okay, it's okay. It's my fault. And he goes, it's okay, Mommy, I forgive you. It's a precious moment. That's just the gospel right there waiting on you. But it asks a question, right? Do you really think this is your fault? Can you forgive yourself for this? Do you think you've ruined something? If you do, you can't laugh. And if you can't laugh at yourself, you're just not ready to receive Jesus yet. You're taking yourself too seriously. Can you receive Him in those moments? You can only receive Him when you stop trying to perfect yourself and you allow Him to perfect you. And Paul says a pretty strong word about it, doesn't he? He says you've been cut off from Jesus. He says the crosses of no value to you. And I think there's two things you need to see in that. One is it is possible for believers, for people who are in Jesus, to not get the value out of Christ is there for them. There's a great scene in the last battle, which is the final of the Chronicles of Narnia. It's about these kids who find themselves in this strange faraway land. There's also a very, very nearer called Narnia. And God figuring that book is a lion if you haven't read it. And one of the very last scenes, the lion looks at them and he says to them, my children, you don't seem as happy as I want you to see. And I think Jesus looks at us a lot of times and says that. You're just not as happy as I want you to be. Are you under the impression that I'm keeping something from you? Are you under the impression that you've disappointed me today? Are you under the impression that Christianity is going to lose? What is keeping you from being is happy. He says he wants joy, inexpressible, filled with glory. Actually, he didn't say he wants it. He says he's giving you everything you need for joy, inexpressible, filled with glory. All you need is him. So there is that. I think what Paul is one of the things Paul is saying is, if it is possible to be a Christian, to be in Christ, but not get the full value of being in Christ. The other thing he's saying, very specifically, he says, you who want to be made righteous by your works, you who want to do this, be justified by your own efforts, having severed from Christ, you're not in Him. You're still cut off. And we have to acknowledge that there's always been a whole column of people who have been in the church since this very beginning. Paul's talking to them in 20 years after Jesus's death, and I'm still talking to them now. There's a whole group of people who honestly just believe in their heart of hearts that what God expects of them is that they be good, and if they're good enough, he's going to receive them. And they don't understand this whole faith thing, and they're not going to give up on their own efforts, because that's for the weak, and I'm not weak, and I'm just going to be good enough. And you don't understand a, you just don't understand the whole picture. You don't understand the whole picture of what God is doing and what sin is done to you. And therefore, you're just going the wrong direction, and you can run as fast as you want to the wrong direction, you're never going to get there. I don't care if the world is around, you're never going to get there, because at the very heart of this belief that I just have to be good enough is independence. And at the very heart of what you're created to be is dependence. And trying harder and harder and harder to be independent of God will never make you dependent on God. Trying harder and harder and harder to fulfill yourself will never make you be fulfilled by Him. He wants you to love Him. That's what I've been trying to communicate to you through everything we've done over the last several weeks. We've called to worship. What was the very first thing in the Old Testament? Well, the very first thing that those who lived in Jerusalem would hear every morning, someone would walk out from the temple and say, here, oh, Israel, the Lord, your God, the Lord is one. You must love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength. Hear that? Loving yourself harder is never going to make you love Him. He wants you in a relationship with Him and trying to be gooder and gooder and gooder doesn't get you there. At the end of the day, you're trying to serve yourself by being good. You're trying to serve yourself by being good. Charles Burden, Old Baptist Evangelist, used this story, and I think it's as good as any. He talked about a king coming out, riding out into the lands around his castle and a farmer came up to him with a carrot. And he said, King, this is the best carrot I've ever grown. It's the best carrot I'm ever going to grow. And I want you to have it. And the king graciously took it and then he said to him, I've noticed you. I've noticed how well you tend your crops and how faithfully farm your land. And I've got a field that's right next to yours. So you know it, and of course the man knew it because it was 20 times the size of his. And he said, I want you to have it. It's yours because I know you'll take care of it. Now on the wagon, the chariot, whatever it was, what do you call it, a really nice carriage, on the carriage was one of this courtyards. So here's this, hmm, one gift times 20, like that number. Next day when the king is in the courtyard of his castle, the courtyard comes with this beautiful white horse and he says to the king, sorry, this is the most beautiful horse in my stable. It's the most beautiful horse we've ever bred or that I will ever breed. And I want you to have it. And the king said, thank you and walked off. And the courtyard had this look of just May on his face and the king said to him, when that farmer gave me the carrot, he was giving it to me. When you gave me this horse, you were giving it to yourself. You were giving it to me so that I would give you something better. Why does God not receive our efforts to perfect ourselves? Because we're doing it to try to get him to give us something. If you only love me for my money, you don't love me. You love my money. If you're only obeying me in an effort to get me to let you into heaven, then you don't love me. And that is where it starts. You haven't started in the right place. You are going the wrong direction. And today, maybe today is the day when you need to just say, I can't do it. I want to stop trying to perfect myself. And I'm going to receive what Christ has done for me. What do you have to do to get God to love you and to receive you? Stop trying to earn it. Stop trying to earn it. And just receive it. The first way we can lose the freedom, the joy of Christianity, is to try to earn it. To forget that it's given. We have to protect that. But there's another way. The enemies to our faith aren't just out there in the church. The enemies for faith are in here. And the Apostle Paul says, not only are you in danger of losing Christ, you're also in danger of losing each other. Because you can't use this freedom to indulge sin. And sometimes we do that. Especially when you have a little bit of a rebellious nature like me. Sometimes you get this temptation to use your freedom as an opportunity to indulge the flesh. And you forget that our sin entangles us. And sometimes we forget what we have. There's a parable that Jesus tells. I used to always read it to my students when they were graduate when I was a campus minister. And it's a parable of these seas that go into different kind of soils. And there's rocky soil where the word never penetrates. And there's shallow soil where the word penetrates. For a little while. And then it's wilted and dies. And then there's really good soil where the word penetrates. And it grows. But weeds grow up a lot along with it. And the weeds choke out the word. And he says, those weeds are the cares of life. The deceitfulness of wealth and anxieties. The deceitfulness of wealth. And it's very easy for us to just end up the hustle and the bustle and the treadmill of life to begin living for our wealth, living for our reputation, living for our pleasures, and forgetting to let those things get in between our enjoyment of God. We're not separated from Him, but we are not enjoying Him either. And we just lose it. We lose ourselves and we lose Him. And it's like, we just forget where we were. We forget who we are. And we look back at a friend who was a lawyer, and lawyers are wonderful people sometimes. But he was a believer. And they really are. It's easy. There's certain professions as he's kind of easy to throw dirt on us, too. There's good lawyers and bad lawyers. There's good preachers and a lot of bad ones. And he was a good man, but a terrible lawyer. And he said that. He admitted that. And he recognized that his 30 years spent practicing law have been 30 years dedicated to himself to building up his reputation, building up his well. And he lost everything. He referred to those 30 years. And he was a Christian the whole time. He lost those 30 years as the years the locust ate. And he just let the weeds choke out all the value, all the fruit of being in Christ. There was no love and there was no joy and there was no peace. And that's a real temptation for us. There's all kinds of ways that we forget that our sin entangles us. And we need to let our joy we have in Jesus. And we need to let our salvation and the wonderfulness of God's embrace inspire us. Not to let anything come in between us. If you're enjoying this wonderful embrace, why would you want anything to come in between you and him? And sometimes we're just tempted to look away. We're tempted to look away. We have the tendency to be insecure in our salvation. Or we have this tendency to begin to bite and devour each other. There's a million different facets to God's love. None of us will experience all of them. And there's a million different ways to enjoy it. And that's great. But it's really interesting to me how protective we get of the way that we enjoy it. And we show that protectiveness by being mad at the way other people do. And that could be theological. That could be, you know, you don't understand. You don't have all five points when you're a tulip. You're not really enjoying God. And they're like, wow, thought it was. And we get mad at people for not believing the way we do. We get mad at people for not worshipping the way we do. You know, I'm from Tennessee. And some people in Tennessee they don't think they're worshipping if they're not sweatin'. You know, they gotta be dancing and running in place. And that's great. It's not me. They don't think I've ever worshipped. And I'm tempted to think they've never worshipped. And we can bite and we can devour each other over who's doing it right. And we can miss the fact that right here we are in Jesus presence. The fact that you're not doing it right can completely make me miss the fact that you are in Christ. I am. One year my brother decided that he was gonna take his family on a trip on Christmas Eve, which was the unforgivable in our family. He was not gonna be in my mom's house on Christmas Eve, which was the law. We had a great dinner on December 23rd. And everybody was so mad at him that no one taught during dinner. And finally I broke the ice and I said, what's going on? And, you know, the accusations started flying and my brother went, I'm here now. I'm here now. Everybody was so mad he wasn't gonna be here tomorrow that you completely miss these here now. And it's easy for us to do that with each other. We get so mad that you did something wrong ten years ago, or that you're doing something not the way that I'm going to do it tomorrow, that we missed the fact that we're right here. And that's the opposite of what God calls us to do. God calls us. He pours this love upon us, not so that we can lose each other, but so that we can do the only thing that matters, which is love each other, love each other. It's fascinating that he says this. It doesn't matter. Circumcision or uncircumcision, there's a lot of things that means, but ultimately it means how you practice religion or don't practice it. It doesn't matter. Some of you like to keep days. Great. Some of you like Ash Wednesday. Awesome. I know I'm supposed to gash his on my face. That's gross. It doesn't matter. Meaningless. The only thing that matters is faith expressing itself in love. The only thing that matters is that I have received this embrace from God, and I'm going to share it. Expressing itself in love. He says, if you keep this one law, love your neighbor as yourself. You're keeping the whole law. You can just do that because Christ is in this person. And if I love this person as myself, I'm loving him and Christ. And that's the only thing that matters is right there in the Bible. I'm not making this up. Right there, he says it. Fight with the Apostle Paul. Don't fight with me. If you love your neighbor as yourself, you're keeping the whole law. Don't bite into power each other. If you're confident that you have all you need and we share it with each other, then we embrace. And when we embrace, if I'm embracing you and you are in the embrace of Christ, I'm embracing Christ when I embrace you. And I get to experience it more. The reason why it exists, and you get to experience it more. The reason why you exist. We're in him together. We're confident that we have all we need. We're free to be generous. Generous with our stuff. Generous with our time. Generous with our hearts. I don't have to be withholding. I don't have to punish you by saying I'm only going to love you if. That knowledge that you're going to love me anyway frees me up to confess my sin to you. In a way that will make me less likely to sin ever. In a way that's going to make you love me more, which is the way that we enjoy the embrace of Christ even more. What is this life resulting? It results in us enjoying this even more. Please pray with me. Father in heaven, sometimes we miss it. We just miss it. In our critical spirits, they're so fast to point out what's wrong. And our insecure hearts that just assume that we're missing something. And so if only we could do one more thing, maybe. And in all that, we just miss it. And I pray, Father, that you would show us the things that are getting in our way. And help us remove them. I pray that you put your arm around us today and say, let's finally begin to work on that way, that one that you've been ignoring for a long time. Let's start it today. Father, for the ones in here who have just been trying so hard to be good enough for you. I pray that you stop trying and arrest in your arms and let you be good enough for them. And a perfect and precious name of Jesus we pray. Amen.