Righteously Qualified - No Reserves...No Retreat...No Regrets...

I got some great news for you tonight. Here, let's try this. Doug, what great news do you have for us? I've got some great news for you tonight. Well, here it is. In a world desperate for Jesus, God has made a way for us to be righteously qualified. For his magnificent kingdom work. He'll do it by giving us a heart positioned to hear his voice and a spirit poised for courageous obedience. My sheep listen to my voice, I know them, and they follow me. Uh let's uh let's uh look at some more clues about uh how we can be qualified for this magnificent kingdom work. Back in 2 Timothy here. In 2 Timothy 2, it says, in a large house, and uh and Paul is writing to Timothy here, he's describing the church. This is this is Christians, the body of Christ. In a large house, there's articles not of only gold and silver, but also of wood and clay. Some, we're going to keep coming back to this, are for special purposes. Some are for common use. Those who cleanse themselves, follow me here, will be instruments for special purposes, talking about the body of Christ, made holy, useful to the master, and prepared to do any good work. So flee the evil desires of youth, Timothy, and pursue righteousness, faith, love, and peace, along with those who call on the Lord. out of a pure heart. Dad brought up a Hutchcraft DNA. It got me thinking a little bit. I I like it, you know, for the most part. Some things are uh I'm grateful for a spiritual legacy Dad has more musical talent than he he says. He can sing great. Some things I'm not as thankful for. Someone Ask me, this was a friend, believe it or not. Doug, do you think you could actually land an airplane on your forehead? Well thank you. How friendly. That that's a Hutchcraft trait. Um I also have these things. It didn't used to be this way. Dad has these Where I'm getting my my fingers are starting to turn in different directions because of uh they do this and you look that way because of uh some arthritis in there. And then of course the whole hobbit thing that dad mentioned yesterday But maybe the worst one is um that's been the most frustrating to me over the years is I do not have a mechanical bone in my body. Like like mechanics who may who who fix cars Is anyone good at that in here? Like you're just a natural mechanic? You good at it because I man I'm not and that makes it hard, you know, when you have a car problem and and you're trying to find a an honest mechanic that is not snowing you You know what I'm talking about? They could say anything to me, and I'm not gonna know if he's taking advantage of me. You know, sir, we uh have been looking at your car, your uh discombobulator is acting up Oh okay. Also you're an exasperator. What's that? Okay. That'll be four thousand dollars. Okay, sure. Frustrating. We just had this situation recently, actually. I've got important work that needs to be done, but I'm having a hard time finding someone I can trust to do it. Then I wonder if As we look around the body of Christ in the church today, I wonder if that's the cry of our Heavenly Father's heart. We've got a world desperate for hope. 2 Chronicles 16, 9, one of the first scriptures I taught my to my boys. The Lord's eyes roam to and fro throughout the earth, seeking who he who he can give uh power to, strength to, whose hearts are fully committed to him. This is an interesting picture. It it's just kind of implied if God is having to look It's kind of this God radar looking to and fro about the earth. Is there anyone there that I can give my strength to? Because he doesn't just hand it out Um randomly. He hands it out to folks whose hearts are what? Fully, fully Committed to him. He's got this holy radar going on. We need these powered up people in the body of Christ. So we got some bad news. I hate to start with bad news, but we're gonna. The bad news is we are perhaps more than ever living in a dying world. Back to Second Timothy, you're gonna hear this and you're gonna go, Yep, yep, I see it every day. There'll be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, of money. Boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving. Boy, this is a list. Slanderous, without self-control, brutal Not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited lovers of pleasure. Man, rather than the lovers of God. And that's just Tuesday Uh the good news is, so we got some bio we got some good news, there is an equipped army available to do something about this. Hebrews 13, may the God of peace equip you with everything good, everything good for doing his will. So anything we need is available to us. According to that scripture. Another uh here's a great promise. We've got an empowering God. Just like we read in 2 Chronicles 16. He wants to fill us up with his Holy Spirit power. When our hearts are right with him. So that's a promise, but we've got a big problem here, and that is that according to God's word If we really are getting into the final two minutes here, the two-minute warning before the Lord returns, as things get closer to his return, he says, we're going to have a disappearing army. In fact He says, back to the body of Christ, the love of most of the people who are supposed to be loving the world and the lost. The love of Moses is going to be growing cold. They're going to get so sick and tired of all the sin out there, and they're going to get angry with the sin and they're going to They're gonna hide in their houses and say, fine, I'll just raise my family. I want nothing to do with my neighbors. I don't none of them care about God anyway So the love of most grows cold. Now, this is especially terrible because according to Matthew, the harvest is plentiful. But here we go, the workers are few, and that was then. What happens to ripe crops if they're not harvested? What happens to them? Yeah, they die. In fact, 144 ,000 unharvested. Souls go into eternity, many of them unharvested, every day, 144,000 a day. This is urgent work. The enemy knows. He knows this. So obviously he is raging, knowing we're in this world's two-minute warning. We we know what you know in Revelation we said the enemy is uh Is filled with fury because he knows that his time is short. And at the same time, Christian love is growing frigid. At the time we need to be showing up in the harvest field on the battlefield more than ever. So the enemy's raging, we're retreating. Some of those fields ready for the gospel will see a harvest. Some won't. The difference is the workers. There's no more vital endeavor than rescue, but Houston, we have a uh a workers' problem here because according to God's word, they're either absent Or they're unqualified. Now make no mistake, we have all the power we need to do his work. But again, according to God's word, it has to be activated. That power has to be activated. Because equipped is not the same as qualified. Again, equipped, yes, we have God's power in us, but is not the same as qualified. To go and do his greatest, most holy work. Again, make no mistake, we have his power in us. Not just any power. Not just any power. Ephesians 1:18 Power. I pray you may know his incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is the same as the mighty strength he exerted when he raised Christ from the dead. Romans 11, power, the Spirit of God who raised Jesus. From the dead lives in you. Now, can we stop here for just a second? He, this is God Almighty saying that He has put the same power in each believer That he used to raise Jesus from the dead. That power is available to us I my all these Marvel movies Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, whatever, big deal, whatever powers they have. They don't have that one We have the source of power to overcome sin and temptation and fear, the ultimate guarantee of future resurrection. But until we unlock and activate that power, we're not in a position where he can use us, and I'll explain. Because we can be, we can be. How? What unleashes it? Well it's right there. We read it just a little bit earlier in uh 2 Timothy. Flee the evil desires of youth. And that's not, by the way, that's not just people think it's just sex or lust. It's not just that. There's a lot of stuff that goes with youthful mistakes, you know, um easy to anger and and uh gossip and all that stuff. Flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness. Those who cleanse themselves will be instruments for special purposes made holy, useful to the master. What a beautiful phrase. And prepared to do any good work. So we're running from sin and running to him. And we're living a set-apart, Holy Spirit, cleansed life. By resisting what so many others don't and pursuing him with a passion like so few others do. There's a great movie that came out a few years ago called The Untouchables. Uh starred Kevin Costner and Sean Connery And Kevin Costner played Elliot Ness, who was this uh detective. He was very by the book, and he really wanted to get Al Capone, and everything he tried didn't work Until he meets this street officer played by Sean Connery. And Sean Connery says, Look, you are so by the book, you're not willing to try anything out of your comfort zone. And until you do You're gonna have the same results. In fact, he said, what is it that you're willing to do? Well, actually it was Sean Connery, so he said, what is it you're willing to do? Did you get that right? Close? No? Um Is it possible the Lord is asking us that to do? Asking us to do that tonight? Is it possible He's asking, would you leave your comfort zone if it meant me? Using you to answer the most holy, deeply held, passionate prayers of your heart. Because I want to. But what is it you're willing to do? Are you willing to step outside what you've always done? Are you willing to make holy choices and decisions? That most a lot of Christians aren't, so I can fill you with this Holy Spirit of power. Some of those impossible prayers have a name. You might be thinking of them right now. Holy choice, daily holy choice, set apart living, is the spiritual plutonium of our lives. Like Paul told Timothy, common stuff, some lives will just be doing common stuff, everyday stuff, and some folks will have miraculous Make a difference like you never believed you could. Lives. All when this power is unlocked. We don't have to look around too long to to see the our our communities. Our families, our friends, our schools, our neighbors are desperate for Jesus ambassadors that are willing to do whatever it takes. to be filled with Holy Spirit power so God can use you in each one of their lives. Following him is fighting for them. Let me say that one more time. Following him, because he fills us with this Holy Spirit power, according to what Paul told Timothy. Following him is fighting for them. Um a passive status quo faith, no match for the challenges of this age. God's people choose empowered faith for unprecedented times. It's gonna take no less than the saved being his Soldiers. Um and say in Second Timothy, it says, no one serving uh as a soldier gets entangled in civilian affairs, but rather tries To please his commanding officer. Materialism, thirty hours of of golf a week Laziness, gossip, man, this is this is all civilian stuff. The petty arguments. We work for the one I like there's another uh version. The NLT says we work for the one that enlisted us. So we're not about all that civilian stuff. We 're about the one who enlisted us. So I want to make something clear here because God is not asking for perfection. The Bible says he knows that jars of clay and and and that um and that that we aren't perfect. We can never hope to be perfect. Listen to who actually says something about this. King David says, The Lord has dealt with me according to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands. He has rewarded me. The Lord saying, I want to use you in big ways. But let's get this thing right first. I'm really glad it was King David saying that Because uh you got a guy here who obviously was not a perfect man, but he has seen in his life that when he's honoring God, that God is honoring him and doing miraculous things through him, and when he's not honoring God God's not honoring him. Um not looking for perfect soldiers. In uh in back to second Timothy here, in uh in uh two uh chapter two verse twenty-one Wanna go back to four words that um these four words, if God's people got serious about them Would literally he he told us to bring the gospel to the ends of the earth, to make disciples of all men So think about all the countries that that represents. I mean, he's saying that that's he wouldn't ask us to do that if it wasn't possible. Okay? Jesus is saying, go into every Korea and China and the reservations and wherever else. Make disciples of all men. In 221, here's how. Here's how we'll use you and me. Four words that could bring the gospel to the ends of the earth. There it is. Useful to The master? What if every believer made those four words their life's marching orders? The legendary missionary to the Alka Indians, Jim Elliott, put it this way, being approved unto God. There is no greater significance than to be used by the Master for his holy purposes. Remember Onesimus I love this guy's name. I wish I had remembered his name before we named our kids. I love it that much. Such a cool name. Our children would have loved that. Sorry, Sam. It's in Philemon 11. I love this because Onisimus name is actually, do you know what it means? It means useful. Isn't that cool? He literally goes, he's called the poor guy. If he read this about himself, he would hurt, sting a little bit at first. Because at first he's useless. Oh, fantastic. Thank you. Thanks, Paul. But he goes from useless to unissimous. From useless to useful. It's a great reminder that the gospel doesn't just make lost people saved, it makes saved people holy. Uh oh Nissimus actually was freed if you know the story. He was a slave and Paul is is like, look, I'm gonna send him back to you. He ran away illegally. Faliman, I'm gonna send him back to you, and uh I I suggest you Release him from your power Paul here. And he did, and according to church history, Onesimus actually was freed, he became a bishop and was martyred So the gospel doesn't just make lost people saved, it makes saved people holy. And a holy life is a life useful to God for his greatest kingdom work. So the enemy knows that, so he's going to utilize one of his greatest weapons. So we're going to talk about here for a minute About the usefulness killer. Useful to the master. The enemy knows he doesn't want you to be, and so he's got some plans for you And here's the killer. Something called drift. Ron brought it up last night. Do any of you guys is this just me or When I was younger, I watched a lot of movies. The older I get, I have we have Netflix and in the older I get, like everything in my Netflix queue is a documentary. You used to watch like action movies, Star Wars, whatever. No, everything's a documentary now. If it's made well, I will watch any documentary, Anna was saying. She's like, are you really watching the history of the thimble right now, Doug? I said honey it's great. Check it out. No, I'm there. But I saw one called the Disaster Boy How's this for a title? What is this? Looks interesting. So this was a real thing. Yeah, there's the picture. This is a real thing. Place called Honda Point. It's 1923 This is actually a story about the largest peacetime loss of U. S. Navy ships in history. I had never heard of it before. Seven destroyers headed down to the California coast. They've done it before. We've got a captain that's done it before, an admiral that's done it before. It's a moonless night. It's dark. It's foggy. And the for some reason the captain of this whole thing wants to go really fast. Seriously, he had had some failure and and he wanted to make up for it. And he's like, I'm gonna break the record for getting there fast. They've done it before. But as a dark night, there was a new radio technology and he didn't want to trust it. The radio is telling him, hey, you might be off course for a few factors. He doesn't trust it, doesn't want to hear it. He also doesn't know that something called the Kanto, the Great Kanto earthquake that had happened in Japan a week earlier. has quietly has changed the currents there and is pushing the fleet of set of these seven destroyers off track. His sailors, the the guys that work for him, are begging him, will you please put down some uh markers so we can actually see where we think we are because we're not sure where? And he just refused to do it. So the flagship makes a fatal wrong turn into the rocks, and within 90 seconds, 23 sailors are dead. Because they crashed into the the jagged rocks off the coast of California. What killed them was the drift. They didn't know what was happening. They couldn't see it. They couldn't predict it. But it was happening, whether they knew it or not. It's interesting to me that Paul At one point talks about when a f when faith is ruined, calls it shipwrecked. Isn't that interesting? Because drift is deadly for us too. Spiritual drift, I'm going to define it here. It's a slow, it's a quiet, it's a gradual, unplanned movement. Away from God. No one plans for it. Usually we don't see it coming. But make no mistake, it's a spiritual assassin. It robs us of our effectiveness and use usefulness to God. The thing about drift is it is insidious. Um I think that the enemy uses it more towards maybe the the kind of folks that are in this room, towards mature believers, because he knows that you're not gonna fall for a hey, why don't you go and have adultery and ruin your life and ruin your marriage? Of course not. I'm gonna say no to that. Right away. Now, drift could could become that, but that's not where he starts. He starts, I think, more often affecting the condition of our hearts. For whatever it is that's going on in our lives, but our passion, our zeal, our our um maybe hidden lust, our grudges, unforgiveness. uh joy or peace, they're all robbed in the process of drift, but it's these little subtle shifts that And unless someone points it out to you, or you ask the Holy Spirit to do what David asked them to do in Psalm 139, come and examine my heart and let me know what's going on, Lord. Because again, according to Scripture, we are experts at lying to ourselves, even if we really love Jesus. A few evidences this might be happening, and I have been here. Prayer and Bible studies start to feel optional. I remember when I dad described when I I first got serious about the Lord, and the first thing I did, I could not get enough of God's word. I really couldn't. I was writing everything down. I'm like, is this really in here? This stuff is really in here. This is amazing. Wait, I know I've been through that. I know. And it was amazing. I was so passionate. And it kind of waned a little bit, and I went through a time, maybe a year after, where I'm barely there until he brought me back. So so these subtle shifts, maybe prayer and Bible study start to feel um optional or or um Or maybe it feels dry like an obligation. Maybe church community becomes negotiable. You say, you know what? Me and God, we got our own thing. Maybe you started watching um, we did this, maybe during COVID you started watching church on on uh on streaming. And somehow during that time you you go sometimes you get back to church and sometimes you didn't, even though God says don't forsake. Meeting, don't forget communityizing, because you can't do this without community. That's become optional, maybe Maybe uh you've become less sensitive to sin and and what used to bother you makes you shrug now. I remember that that Back to the Future movie. I remember I'm like, I can't wait to show it to my kids. And we didn't watch it through a filter. I put it on there and whoa! I forgot the Profanity was unbelievable in it, taking the Lord's name in vain constantly. I'm like, kids, we're gonna have to continue this at another time. Um they were thrilled about that. But I I had there was a time where that that didn't bother me And I was super insensitive to sensitive to it than I wasn't than I was. So maybe you're less sensitive to it to sin. What used to bother you makes you shrug now. Maybe your time is overly occupied with social media or sports or entertainment. See, according to back to 2 Timothy here, 2. 4. That's the danger of spiritual drift, this word entangled. Paul uses the word entangled. Is anyone in here not like spiders? Okay. Is anyone in here completely and utterly irrationally afraid of spiders? Yeah? Ladies and gentlemen, meet my wife Anna. She's Waving her arms back there. This this is a woman who I have seen literally in the face of mortal danger and death be the most courageous woman ever, but will jump on top of a table and start screaming. For a one-inch spider that you just saw. Doug, Doug, this just happened. Doug, get in here. Kill it. Kill it. Kill this thing. If you've got to burn the house down, do it You think I'm uh exaggerating. Uh I I just hate the webs they leave behind. You walked into your garage and you just you walk into like a really big one and it takes you 20 minutes to get out of that thing. That is a that's a really good picture of the result of drift. Um stuff that distracts us from his purposes. We just we wander into unhealthy relationships, maybe porn, bitterness, materialism, dark entertainment, maybe legalism. Self-righteousness. So we keep our eyes on heaven. Great quote from C. S. Lewis: aim at heaven and you'll get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you'll get neither. I like that. Hebrews 2. 1. We must pay the most careful attention, therefore, to what we have heard so that we don't, what? Drift away. As I'm talking about this, think if we're gonna pray about this a little in a little bit here. Think of any of if any of this has the Holy Spirit nudging you. Maybe realizing not realizing that that there's been some drift. Stuff that doesn't matter. I uh my dad said this to me once, and I went, I gotta write that down. Um I appreciate by the way dad how it d how dad we we put these together. Dad gets a um A book of the Bible, and he says, Hey Doug, Brad, here's seven different themes from this book, and choose one, and you go and run with it. Um and you and and he's got he's got uh it's it's uh well I he's got these notebooks just I was just telling this this story full of his time with the Lord, just literally boxes and boxes of written notebooks. He's just said so many amazing things that I've written down. This is one of them. Stuff that wouldn't mat that that wouldn't matter there, heaven, shouldn't matter here So the person God uses must fight drift that imperceptibly pulls us away from Jesus and towards the rocks. Man, there's some scary consequences when that happens. This one's awful. One of the most awful sentences in the Word of God. Jesus saying, You have forsaken the love you had at first. Something has grown cold, and you don't know what it is, you don't know why it is. But the passion, the zeal is not there. Another scary consequence, watch and pray so they won't fall into temptation. It gets so much easier to say. Yes to the temptations when they're in the middle of drift. So I want to look at uh uh drift fuel here real quick because uh there's something in 2 Timothy that I think Uh he that Paul addresses and he uses such strong language and I'm I I I think a lot of times When we think about what I'm about to bring up here, that Christians put this as kind of a class B felony and the sin list. He talks about godless chatter. A great drift accelerant is godless chatter. And we we tend to put this on the B level of sense, you know, A level is murder and adultery. This one's not that big of a deal, it's just words. I but check out this list. Check out this list of words he used as he's describing godless chatter. Ruins, ashamed, ungodly, gangrene, that's gross. Destroy. Um godless jatter can be any number of things. Profanity. Um Barna research says that if you're under the age of 35, almost half, half of folks that call themselves believers think there's no problem with using profanity. Interestingly enough they say but they think it's wrong in church. That's compartmentalizing a little bit there. Profanity, gossip, sometimes cleverly disguised as the prayer request. Have you ever had that one? Yeah. False teaching Oh, there's so much of it. Pointless arguments, usually political or some kind of conspiracy. And the the conspiracies go wild, and next thing you know, you find yourself spending three hours watching these conspiracy videos and getting in arguments with people about it. It's a waste of time. Standing up for truth isn't a waste of time. But spending time in pointless arguments where it's just about being right rather than changing a heart, those are. According to God, it is one of the most insidious, draining distractions from eternal things. If you think it's not that big of a deal, look at the burning wreckage of thousands and thousands of churches over the years. Just because one person couldn't keep their mouth shut, and then another one couldn't, and then another one couldn't. So people useful to the master treat this poisonous talk like the enemy it is They cleanse themselves of it, they oppose it. This is not being condemnation, Carl, who has a self-righteous spirit finding fault and everything, but it is courage to stand up and engage. when necessary. Um it says this in Colossians four six, ultimately the antidote to ugly chatter is salty speech. So if the world's default is gossip and anger and put downs Our default is encouraging, it's patient, it's honoring. So the false teaching apparently gets so bad in the church, Paul is starting to call people out by name. Try to pronounce these guys. I think this is uh in 217, Hymenius and Felitus. Hymenius and Feletus sounds like a good 70s folk band name. Um He says what these guys are doing is spreading like gangrene. There's that gross word again. This is the worst part. Gangrene is the worst part of Civil War movies. Have you ever seen one of these where it's just like Oh no, they're bringing in the injured guys from the battlefield. Oh no, it's looking like an amputation and the the camera goes away and all the screaming starts. Oh this is this is Terrible man, you take you take gangrene seriously because it spreads really fast. Um There's a reason they amputate so fast, because gangrene moves so fast. Technology makes it faster uh uh false teaching. I just saw a I just saw on you on a YouTube page. This came out a week ago. The title of the uh uh and this was apparently a this was seriously, the guy this guy calls himself a Bible scholar, and Came out a week ago, and the title of it was Nothing in the Hebrew Old Testament is Original. It's all made up. 302,000 views. In one week. It's all that's just one example. It's all over TikTok. Um Spiritual gangrene, we deal with it quickly or it becomes a killer. Um 1 Timothy uh command certain people Not to teach false doctrines any any longer or to devote themselves to myths. Such things promote controversial speculations rather than advancing God's work. That's a great test for if you're spending too much time uh in this stuff that you're uh you find you find yourself arguing a lot rather than actually doing something that advances the kingdom. They want to be teachers of the law, but they don't know what they're talking about What they so confidently affirm. Paul's report on his team in chapter four of of Timothy, Second Timothy indicates That these fanners of the flame are widely deployed. They're in churches. Some might be in your church. And again, this isn't about going and trying to find everything wrong with every person, but it is about having the courage to stand up to it. When it's starting to vi to divide people. Here is a uh, since we're talking about gangrene, and since I'm sure a lot of you guys are wondering about gangrene, Here's a random president's retreat gangrene fact. It actually forms from a loss of oxygen to a body part. That's how gangrene starts. What they use today, it still happens today, they use a thing called hyperbaric oxygen therapy to heal. So the way you heal the gangrene situation is you pour a lot of oxygen into it. The oxygen heals the gangrene. The oxygen of God's truth does the same. So if we are living in a world full of false teaching and all this awful teaching and and lies. What hope does this planet have for truth if God's people are not committed? To daily study of God's word, not just five minutes of a the devotionals are fine, but I'm talking about Study to pro to show yourself a workman approved type of study. Oh bless me God, 30-second prayers aren't gonna do it. Five minutes in God's word aren't gonna do it for people. Who want to be useful to the master, God's people, are uh another place in scripture says that the way you we look for truth in God's word is the way you look for buried treasure. Man, it takes digging, it takes time, it takes blood, sweat, and tears. When God's people are serious about that level of commitment to God's word and study of God's word, then we've got some useful to the master people that can battle these lies. And make a huge difference. So we've been talking a lot of uh defense here. I want to spend our last few minutes here going on the offense. Um real quick, three victory verbs to be approved by God. Here's the first one That we see in these scriptures in 2 Timothy. First one is cleanse. This is the single qualification of being useful to the Master This is interesting. It's a little confusing, could be a little confusing because it says, cleanse yourself. We go, well, wait a minute. I thought that God has cleansed us from all Unrighteousness, I thought the the that was all done. Well it is for in an eternal sense. But He also says, cleanse yourself. An important distinction here, David Jeremiah puts it this way. There's like judicial forgiveness, which is our sin is erased eternally, versus Uh relational forgiveness. This is choices that affect our closeness to God. And this is repentance. I was in uh I was on the reservation. I was in living in the town called Winslow, Arizona, yes, from the Eagles song Standing in the Corner in Winslow. That's in your head the rest of the night. Uh and a friend asked a friend asked me to come and ask me if I could work, help him with some sewage. Now I am uh a sewage problem is I'm now I'm from New Jersey, um a suburb and I go, okay, I'll bring my plunger. We'll get to work, it'll be great. Oh, you're not gonna need a plunger, you're gonna need this thing. I get there and it's like this this this huge long like metal, I don't even know what you call it. He's like, you gotta go down in that hole. And I look in that hole and there's a lot of in that hole because the pipe has burst. I'm like, this guy's let me live at his house for a little while uh when I was younger and go oh man I owe him a favor. So what do you want me to do? I want you to uh take this thing and and and uh and put it in the pipe and clear it out I said, if I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna have to go get into that. And he said, I know. So here it is. So I got in it. And oh man, I did the job and I could I felt so disgusting. It was the dirtiest I'd ever felt in my life. So guess what I did right when I was done? Yeah, about 19 showers. Uh I had never felt so dirty in my life And then I never felt so clean and refreshed in my life. That's what that act scripture is about. Repent then and turn to God. It's that you'll have times of refreshing. And you don't shower enough, you'll uh you'll also lose closeness to the people you love. It's the same with missing your spiritual showers. Day by day we accumulate this internal junk that we need a spiritual shower from. We don't always notice it. That's why we cannot miss that daily time with Jesus and why it's got to include that self-examination like we talked about earlier with David. To be clear, you can't do anything in your power to earn salvation, but there's a whole lot you can do in your power to earn being an onisimus, being useful. These are daily I love you, Lord, choices. These are Choices I'm making to spend selfishly or give sacrificially, to hold a grudge or to forgive graciously, uh, being about my to-do lists or being about people. Giving him my leftovers or giving him the best part of my day, taking time to build up and encourage that one person at work or at school or in your family that everyone else seems to ignore and has no time for, but you do Because you're an onissimus. So first one, cleanse, according to Second Timothy. Second one is flee. Um the the Greek for flee is this word fuego and it literally means to take flight to escape and urgent retreat. It's in what they call the present active imperative, trying to sound smart. I took uh a year of Greek at Wheaton and I this is about the only thing I can remember. Um but it is the present active imperative which means it's an active demand to demand to keep on running. We keep fleeing Flee is not just walk away or run. When I hear the word flee, I hear like my hat's falling off, my arms are flailing all over the place. I'm running as fast as I can to get away from the stuff. Not only That I don't want to fall into sin, but also away from the bridges that could lead me back to sin that I've been delivered from. So I run away from a swimsuit issue. So I run away from from uh uh sexual jokes and sitcoms because it could be a bridge back into what's Making me less than useful to the master, so I flee. This is radical obedience, because active lust and sinful desire can't be defeated by passive. Righteousness. And I'll tell you, in 35 years of ministry, I have learned just because someone is a ministry leader or a pastor that they are not dealing with addictions. Pray for your pastors, pray for your ministry leaders, because it's a high-pressure job, and sometimes it's really easy to turn to stuff for relief. That addicts you. And even sometimes it's these things that are more acceptable sins. I call them credictions. For Christians, Christian addictions, isn't that clever? I made that up myself. Nothing wrong with these things, but streaming. It's too much time on our streaming services, our social media, too much food, um unhealthy relationships. I'm gonna tell you real quick to combat stubborn sin. Employ what I call the three B 's. So I don't know if this is in your roads and your notes, but if you want to combat stubborn sin, porn, or whatever else, the three B's, a bat. It's like a baseball bat. Okay? This is taking a baseball bat to all the things that lead you back to that sin that entangled you at one point. So burning those bridges. A Bible, second one, a Bible praying scripture over that struggle. Memorize, memorize, memorize scripture that has to do with that struggle. And anytime you start to feel led going back over that bridge, if you haven't destroyed it. You pray that scripture. There's power. God's word does not return void. It's living. It's active. And it will rescue you in those moments. A bat a Bible and a brother, this is accountability. Put the software on your phone, it can be a humbling thing Software that will tell your wife, that will tell your daughter, whoever you want, everywhere you've been online. Do you need to get that serious about it? That's between you and the Lord. But sin is a vampire. Light kills it. It'll kill it, the light of God's word. Um so we've got cleanse, flee. The last one is pursue Another one of these Greek words that is uh in the present, or always doing. The word dioko means to hunt down with intensity and speed. This is actively intentionally waking up each day. This is all it is. This is the practical of it. Asking, what now, Lord? What do you have for me today? This is day by day. This isn't once a month. This is day by day. Lord, help me to see what you want me to do today. And we do this just back to that scripture in 2 Timothy, passionately pursuing the four pillars of pleasing God. It's righteousness, won't get into all of them, but it's faith. It's love, it's peace. So we pursue him more than ever by spending more time with him than ever. I always remember my dad telling me, Doug, I was a teenager, he said, remember when your Bible's gathering dust, it's not just the book you're not making time for. There's a uh this cool is I just saw these guys on Facebook. Uh two guys from Google invented this thing called the Bible scroll app. Guess what see what this is? I I I it was uh that that's what that's right. They said they realized their their brothers in Christ worked high up at Google and they realized both of us they were spending five minutes a day in God's Word And two hours a day doom scrolling, if you know what that is, just going down looking for bad news on Facebook, Instagram, or whatever, or just just on social media. So they invented this app where literally you can't start scrolling in Facebook, Instagram, whatever until you've accessed your Bible app. Isn't that interesting? That's a good idea. Again, do you need do you need to go that far? Maybe if you're finding yourself With uh social media a lot more than the Lord. So here's the headline Here's the headline for for tonight. If you want God's radar to light up when his eyes roam to and fro throughout the earth seeking Whom he may strengthen, whom whose hearts are fully committed to him. If you want to show up on God's use, use for big things radar, if you want to be on that useful to the master list. I think a shorter and shorter list. So even all that more important for us here. Well he gets all my heart. He gets everything. We have a desperate and hurting world that needs us so incredibly much. We're so distracted. But we have a personal God that empowers us and gives us resurrection power to do whatever He puts in front of us to do, more than we could ever ask or imagine. And somehow this creator of the universe that somehow mind-blowingly says he wants to be our friend. He says he wants to partner with us to do miraculous, life-changing, eternity-changing work. What happens next is up to us. Heavenly Father, thank you for your word. Thank you That it's alive and active. Thank you that when we obey you, big things happen in our lives. I know I look around this room, so many amazing friends, and I'm so honored to be with. We all, I believe, Lord, want to be useful to King Jesus, to our master. Would you show me, would you show each of us? What steps you would have us take as we invite you, like King David did, to examine our hearts and lead us in the way everlasting. Show us what we need to run from, what we need to run towards. And make us useful to the Master so we are prepared to do every good work you ask us to do. In Jesus' name, amen.