And back in the 70s, my mother-in-law had this chronic back pain and she could not really deal with or worth no medication at that time other than muscle relaxers to help and she didn't like taking those and she was just, she was in pain all the time and she heard about an acupuncturist who could help so she went and he practiced out of his apartment which is a little sketchy and but if you know if you've ever been in chronic pain you'll try anything and she tried anything and it more or less helped years later, 25 years later. I'm shaving in my mirror in the bathroom and I hear the phone ringing and I'm on one at the house, you young people don't run, no, wouldn't be able to relate to this but when we had one phone I had to leave and go pick it up and she said, hey I didn't know who else to call, I'm spitting up blood, I just thought somebody all know and I said okay well that sounds bad, where's your husband, where's Harold, he's at work, I can't get him, again no cell phones, okay, well okay I'm in Mississippi, she's in Houston, I hang up, I immediately call a friend of mine who's a practicing physician by God's grace, he answers the phone, I have no idea how he had time to do that and I told him what she had said and he said you need to get her to a hospital right now and so I hung up, I called Harold's boss, he got a hold of Harold, Harold went home, took her to the hospital, long story short when she had gone to get that acupuncture, she contracted Hepatitis C and it was growing and wrecking her liver very quietly for about 25 years until it showed up and we had two years left with her, it was a hidden, it was completely 100% hidden, she was completely healthy, she was playing tennis into her 60s, she was vibrant and she was dying because she had this disease in her that was never gonna go away and she didn't even know it, that is what the Apostle Paul is talking about here is he ends his book of Galatians, he is just sending us one more reminder that sin doesn't go away, it's gonna sit there in your heart as long as you cuddle it, as long as you practice it, as long as you live without confessing it, it will consume you, it will not go away, there is this law of nature that God put into the creation, it's called you reap what you sow, you reap what you sow, and under God's penalty he allows us to reap the harvest of sin and everything that it brings with it which is dead, and under God's grace he allows us to reap infinitely more than we would expect, and he invites us, will you reap to the flesh or sow to the spirit, please stand as we read this wonderful text from Galatians chapter 6, let the one who has taught the word share all good things with the one who teaches, that thus ends the reading, sorry, good I should never resist, do not be deceived, God is not mocked, for whatever one sows that will he also reap, for the one who sows to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but the one who sows to the spirit will from the spirit reap eternal life, and let us not grow weary of doing good, for in due season we will reap if we do not give up, so then as we have opportunity let us do good to everyone, especially to those who are of the household of faith, see with what large letters I m writing to you with my own hand, it is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh who had forced you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ, for even those who are circumcised do not themselves keep the law, but they desire to have you circumcised that they may boast in your flesh, but far be it for me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world, for neither circumcision nor un-circumcision counts for anything, but only a new creation, and as for all who walk by this rule, peace, and mercy be upon them, and upon the Israel of God, from now on let no one calls me trouble, for I bear on my body the marks of Jesus, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, be with your spirit brothers. Amen. This ends the reading of God's Word, all men are like grass, and all of our glories like the flowers in the field, and the grass withers, and the flowers fall, but not God's Word. God's Word stands forever, you may be seated. So we can reaping, it is in the very fabric of our universe, it is a forever principle, and the truth of the matter is if we so sin, we reap a harvest that is worse than we would have ever imagined. And if we so about to the spirit, we reap a harvest that exceeds our wildest dreams and expectations. The first thing I want you to see is that God is not mocked. He is holy. He is exactly what he says that he is. He is our Lord. He sees everything, and he tells us, do not confuse his patience for blindness. Do not confuse his patience for blindness. He sees us. He hears us. He hears our hearts when, y'all know this feeling, when there's a conversation you need to have, when there is a hurt that you have inflicted on someone else, and you really need to tell them that you at least see what you did, and you just choose not to. You just choose not to. You kind of close your heart up to your brothers. You close your stomach up to your brothers. You refuse to do that one simple thing, that one phrase of forgiveness, that one phrase of apology, you just refuse to do it. Your pride won't let you. Your hurt won't let you. Your ego won't let you. God hears it. He sees it. Second Peter 3 says, the Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise to some counsel, but he is patient toward you. He doesn't wish that anyone should perish, but that all should reach repentance. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. It will come. And when the Lord hand this over to judgment, the judgment is that he allows this principle of sowing and reaping to take place in your life. You reap what you sow. If you sow to bitterness, you will reap a bitter character. If you sow to sexual immorality, then you will reap a life that's incapable of experiencing the intimacy and the joy of love that it was created for. Or if you sow to greed, you will reap a life where you may probably have the wealth and the riches that you wanted, but you don't have the capacity in your heart to enjoy them, because the only way to truly enjoy wealth is to share it. And you just can't, because you become small and tight. You reap what you sow. That is the law. He gives us over to ourselves. He says, and just earlier in the passage, we read it just a few weeks ago, the whole law is fulfilled in one word. You should love your neighbor as yourself. But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed about one another. That's just reading what you sow. If you reap a life of biting and devouring, you sow, I mean, I always get that confused. If you sow a life of biting and devouring and criticism and anger and bitterness, you will reap. Someone else talking about you and being bitter and angry. And you will consume each other. Congratulations. That's the bad news. God gives us over to what we want. Romans 1, 28 through 30, says this, since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what they ought to do. They refused to acknowledge God. They refused to repent and see Him. And therefore he gave them over to their own minds, to their own hearts. So what did it look like? They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil and disobedient to their parents. I wish thought that was an interesting one to stick on there. My kids aren't even here. You reap what you sow. Sense serious. It's not going anywhere. You can push it down. You can cover it up with the appearance of health, with the veneer of spiritual vitality. But if you are, if you're coddling those sins, if you're refusing to confess, if you're refusing to bring them to the surface and deal with them, it's a cancer underneath. And it's wrecking you underneath. You reap what you sow. If you sow to the flesh, you reap death. But I got to the bud. The good news is that God is endlessly merciful. The good news is that when you sow to the spirit, you don't reap what you sow. You reap infinitely more than you sow. I don't know if you notice in the call to worship. Look it back at it in the bulletin. You'll see what? If you sow tears, you reap joy. That's a pretty good transaction. Those who go out, sowing in the morning and weeping in the morning, come back in the evening with shouts of joy. The God is endlessly merciful and gracious. If you sow to the spirit, you reap eternal life. I mean, that's like putting macaroni and cheese in the microwave. And 30 seconds later, ding, you open the microwave and there's wagyu, beef, lamb, onion, potatoes, and salad. You just keep pulling out the entire feast from mac and cheese. You put in so little and you get back so much. I can't imagine what a state plant would look like, but it's like you're sowing turnips and you come back and there's a flame. It's infinitely more than you expected. If you sow to the spirit, you reap eternal life. That is good news for friends. That is good news. You reap justification. You're accepted into the household of faith. That's what eternal life is. It is a now truth that you are accepted. That your sins are taken away and that your clothes and the righteousness and the beauty of Christ, he has dressed us like a bridegroom ready for our wedding. He's put beautiful garments upon us. I say a 61 says. He talks about us being in the household of faith. You're in the family. You're accepted. You've been brought in by God's son and he has adopted you and he's given you all the access that the sons and daughters of God could possibly have. Full access given to you. He's your father. He's endlessly merciful. He's made you a member of the household of faith. He's cleansed you. He's given you sanctification. If I boast, I boast only in the cross of Christ through which I've been crucified and the world has been crucified to me. What does that mean? It means we can see our sins through the cross of Christ. They've been paid for. We see what they're truly like. We see their nature. The world's been crucified to me. Those things that used to be so appealing. I now see them through the cross. And through the cross, I see that they bring death and shame and rejection and darkness. And I'm not enticed by those things anymore. I see that I see where my sin leads and I don't want to follow that anymore. And I'm able to live a life of freedom of cleansing. I don't live a life of shame anymore. I don't live a life of beating myself up anymore. I was talking to my wife this morning. She went to Houston to be with her dad for his birthday. I only know how to cook one meal. I just sent a text out to my boys that I'm going to be grilling steaks. It's all I know how to do. Literally, that was the entire meal. And I said, you know, come over if you want to. I'm going to be grilling them if I've already come over if you want to. I was shocked. All of them came over. They all came over. They brought their wives and brought one mother-in-law. The house was just full. I was literally shocked. I was texting my wife about it. She's like, how was it? She's all jealous. I said it was great. It was just wonderful. I was really shocked that they came. And she said, why? And I said, I just can't think about them and their childhood without beating myself up and convincing myself that they resent me. It's not true. There's a satanic accusation that is crucified to me. It's not true. That's not who I am. I'm free from that. Yeah, I messed up. But that's not my reputation. That's not what I don't for. I'm a new creation. I'm new. There's nothing we could possibly sow. I mean, don't get confused. I want you to understand the miraculous existence of this. Okay. You don't sow anything that deserves to grow back as new creation. It's not like if you apologize hard enough. You deserve the new creation. It's miraculous. It is a gift of God because he loves to be gracious. He loves to just love to show mercy. We have acceptance in the God's family. We have cleansing and death to sin and we're alive to Christ. We have new creation. We have the Holy Spirit. We have the Holy Spirit in us. I don't know if you notice this, but if you go back and you look at verse 8, it says, for the one who sows whose own flesh, well, from the flesh, reap corruption, but the one who sows to the spirit, capital S, will from the spirit, capital S, reap eternal life. You've got the Holy Spirit within you. He resides in you. He's the secret services forward team. If the president is going to come to your town, the secret service gets there days before and they prepare everything so that you're ready, you're secure, you're safe, you're prepared for the arrival of the president. And the Holy Spirit is taking up residence within us and he is making us prepared and ready and secure to be united, to Christ, to be united to the Father, once and for all. If we were united to him immediately, we'd be consumed by his holiness, but he's at work in us to prepare us for it because as shocking as it is, we are made partakers in the divine nature. You've got the Holy Spirit within you, making you partakers of the divine nature. You're not simply human anymore. You're infinitely more. You've got the spirit within you. You reap that. Again, you don't have spirit seeds in you. There's nothing worthy of that you have, but God plants the seed in you. He plants the seed in us so that not only is the Holy Spirit within us, but we actually are capable of doing good. It was funny this week if you were there on Wednesdays, I talked about perseverance of the saints and I stress that the word is perseverance, not preservation. It's both. The reason why we persevere is because he preserves us, but I stress this perseverance because I want you to understand that you have God's seed within you. You have this spirit within you and that's not going anywhere. And you are capable now of doing good. You're capable of doing his work and anytime you try, you know, sometimes it's hard, you know, and you're just, I don't know, you have a friend who's struggling and you want so badly to help and you think, man, if I just say the right thing, I'll fix everything. That's not how it works. But you listen and you try. That's sowing to the spirit, that's showing kindness and the Holy Spirit now has something to work with. It gets behind you and he just goes behind you. He works with you. He's the wind is blowing you along. You become like the woodpecker that, you know, packs a few times on a tree and then all of a sudden lightning strikes it and cuts it in half and you pick yourself up and you go show your friends what you did. The spirit is within you, somebody got it. This spirit is within you and you're able, you are able to have consequence. Your actions matter. You can actually do good. He says in verse 9, let us not grow weary of doing good for in due season we will reap if we do not give up. Therefore as we have opportunity, let us do good to everyone, especially to those who are of the household of faith. Sometimes we do what we don't want to do just because the Holy Spirit is in there and he enables us to do what we don't want to do. Every Saturday I know that my phone ring is my dad calling and I answer and I let him talk to me because he wants to and because God wants me to be kind to him. He wants me to be kind. He wants me to show mercy and that is what we call walking in step with the spirit, not breathing the spirit. Doing what the Lord wants us to do to do good to each other to show love to each other. When you combine God's holiness and the sinfulness of our sin with God's merciful abundance, what we see is that God's goodness leads us to repentance. It's God's goodness that leads us to repentance. This week was Ash Wednesday. Ash Wednesday was this week rather. And the classic passage that the Anglican Church reads for Ash Wednesday is Joel 2 verses 12 and 13. And he says, yeah, even now declares the Lord, return to me with fasting, with weeping and with mourning and with ringer hearts and not your garments. Return to the Lord your God as the classic passage of repentance. But it doesn't end there. Why would we return to the Lord our God for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and a bounding instead fast, never stopping, never ceasing, always pursuing, always faithful love? That's the kind of God he's like. It's that goodness that brings us to repentance. I mean, the classic parable about repentance, the prodigal son. You get that the lost son, he's feeding pigs, he's unclean himself, he is doing an unclean act, he's lost everything that he has and he remembers. He doesn't, he does not all of a sudden remember the fear of the Lord. He doesn't, he is reaping what he's sound, but he doesn't all of a sudden just think, oh my gosh. If I don't go back home, my father's going to send his army to spank me, to harm me, to arrest me. He says my father's servants have it better than I have. The goodness of the Lord. It's the goodness of the Lord that makes him come back. When the older brother refuses to come in and welcome his brother, the father comes out to him to seek him out and to say, everything I have is yours. He doesn't say, get in there and hug your brother. No, see how easily that just can't run off my time. I've said that a few thousand times in my life. He says son, everything I have is yours. You just got to walk in this door to get it. Everything I have is yours. The goodness of the Lord brings us to repentance. Look at the goodness that the Apostle Paul ends this text with. As for all who walk by this rule, peace and mercy be upon them. And then finally, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirits, brothers. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the peace, the shalom, the perfect, the feeling that everything is right and whole and complete. Do you know that? We don't, we don't, we don't, the Presbyterian Church don't stress the subjectivity of the Lord very much or, and by very much, I mean, ever at all not at the single time. The shalom is something you experience. It's a calmness. It's the feeling in your heart that the Lord describes as the peace it pursues, that surpasses all understanding. And why do we have that because of the mercy of the Lord? It never fails. It always pursues. It never gives up in the grace of the Lord, giving us infinitely more than we deserve, not giving us the spanking we deserve, not giving us the punishment we deserve, giving us infinitely more. I was trying to teach grace to my kids when they were little and Harold did something mean to Brundage. It was something that warned them about a hundred times. And he did it again. He did it blatantly. I don't want to make a, he was a kid, right? I'm not trying to make it sound bad. I wish I didn't say his name, but I did. Anyway, so I said, you know, I was on the verge of losing my temper and I said, get in the car. And I drove him around the corner and I lectured him on how hurtful he could have been. And he said, okay, I'm sorry. I said, what did I say I was going to do to you the next time you did that? And he said, you said you were going to spank me. I said, okay, so I started the car up and I drove to the snow cone stand. I said, go get a snow cone. And he said, why? I said, because you deserve spanking. And he said, what? And I said, son, not getting the spanking you deserve. That's mercy. Beginning a snow cone, which was at that time with his favorite thing in the universe, getting a snow cone when you deserve his spanking, that's grace. The Lord gives us his mercy and his grace. All we have to do is so our confession, so our repentance. And we reap snow cones of grace. Please pray with me. Father, we confess that we believe our sin does something for us. It gives us power. It gives us joy. It gives us status. It gives us security. Father, we confess that all those ideas are just wrong. We confess our sins to you and we pray that you would make us to feel and to know your grace. And your peace.