A very short first reading, so you need not turn to it, but it's in Philippians 3.10. Let's hear the Word of the Lord. That I may know Him in the power of His resurrection, in the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death. And thus far, the reading of God's holy Word. Let's come together now as we join our... And we'd like to welcome to our pulpit Elder Dave McKeon. Good morning, folks. A lot of familiar faces out here that I'm seeing and recognizing. Wow. My dear wife sits in the back of the cold, and I have an allergy attack going on, so if I sound a little froggy today, forgive us. My wife and I have developed a wonderful system. When I start talking about myself too much, you'll see her go, you know, the old, and when I get a little long-winded, she'll go, cut it off, you know, or stretch it out, you know. We've developed this wonderful system. She's my best critic, and I love her dearly. I could talk this morning. all about what you folks have done for me and what you mean to me. As most of you know, I was a flood survivor from Irene and benefited so greatly from your kindness and your goodness. And I'm just going to say thank you, because if I go on like that, you won't hear the sermon. All you'll hear is me talking about you folks. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm actually Believe it or not, one of the fellows somehow got the message that I was preached here before. Actually, I haven't. But I was here before, way back many years ago. I grew up in the Reformed Church of America. Actually, I grew up in the Reformed Church of America, in Westina Reformed, in Marivo, Presbyterian. My family was from Marivo. My family immigrated over during the potato famine. being good Catholics, had 12 kids, and there was no Catholic church in Moriville, so they settled into a Presbyterian background and grew from there. I came here at the time I was working with the Reformed Church through the ministry of Camp Follower. Some of you may know that I was the director of the volunteer organization. There were 127 churches, and we would open the camp and close the camp, and we went around and did various program, you know, informative speeches talking about what was going on. And when I came here, I believe the minister's name was Peter Shortway. Some of you may remember. The reason I remember it, because my mother-in-law said to me, you know, I used to date him back in the... How could I forget that one? I was born in Amsterdam. I've lived all my life in Pattersonville, and I conducted my business there. I'm actually a third generation carpet store retailer. My wife and I have three children who are grown now, and I have six grandchildren. Right, I love this grandchildren bit. Two of them live in the Chattanooga, Tennessee area, and one lives up in Watkins Glen area. So we're enjoying that part of life now that we have our life beginning to be put back together again. It's great. So when I approach this particular opportunity that you folks have given me, and by the way, I must step down a little bit here. If you're used to Jim Stewart, Those are big footsteps that I cannot fill, and I will not attempt to even come close to ministering in the depth of understanding and wisdom that Jim Stewart has. I admire Jim immensely. Although I disagree with him once in a while, but that's okay. We get along very good. Jim and Alice and their kids kind of are special in our lives. When I was approaching this, I couldn't get away from the idea of freedom, the freedom that we have in Christ to minister to other people. We're born in slavery. The Bible is fairly clear of that. And until we come to know Christ, that bondage is still there. But when we are convicted through the law and through the work of the Holy Spirit, And when we receive Christ, we begin to see things differently. We begin to look at things as the Bibles talk about a new covenant. And we'll be looking at that from our scriptures today. But I was just attracted to the word freedom. I didn't associate that topic with the passage of scripture that we have. So let's see if we can tie it all together this morning. I'm not here as a teacher. Jim Stewart is a teacher. I'm not. My work for the last Forty years has been to do the work of an evangelist. I've done pulpit supply in more churches than I can remember. All of my notes were washed away with the flood, so I used to save all the bulletins and I could rattle them off, but I can't anymore. And, you know, sometimes I think that's good. Keeps me from getting too proud. But that's been my joy, is to come alongside various churches from various backgrounds, and try to bring out a better understanding, to bring out something that is missing in your church or in the place that I'm going. Now, having said that, I sort of lay the groundwork for something else that I'm going to say, and that's that I keep thinking every time I come to this passage about four or five times, one of the fellows from Duanesburg Church, which I've had a pleasure to serve for many years, keeps coming to mind. And if I told you his name, you would know him, and so would you, Duane. But I won't do that. But he would come up to me during a service and say, Dave, take it easy on us today. Take it easy on us today. OK. You can't do that when you pick up the Scripture. You really can't. The Scripture cuts both ways, I will tell you. This passage of Scripture is not meant to cut you, but it sure did cut me. and bring me to reality of what the scriptures were talking about. The scriptures are not about fantasy land or lala land or something that I'm trying to sell you. They're based in the reality of life. They deal with situations and things and realities that are real. Although most of them are unseen, they're more real than the things that are seen. That's what brought me to this passage. So, if it appears to cut some of you, just remember it cut me pretty good. Our passage of scripture today is taken from 2 Corinthians chapter 3, and I'm going to be reading from the NIV version, because most of my other Bibles were washed away, and I can read this one, so this is what I've got. I was trying to follow what edition that you have. I really don't know what You have if you have a Bible, but this is from the NIV. I'm not sure what your practices are, but I'm going to ask that you stand for the reading of God's word. Not for anything that I am just because this is the word of God. Listen to our father's word. Are we beginning to commend ourselves again or do we need like some people letters of recommendation to you or from you? You yourselves are a letter written on our hearts. known and read by everyone, you show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with the ink, but with the spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of human hearts. Such confidence as this is ours through Christ before God. Not that we are competent in ourselves to claim anything for ourselves, but our competence comes from God. He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant. Not of the letter, but of the spirit, for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. Now, if this ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory fading, though it was, will not the ministry of the spirit be even more glorious? If the ministry that condemns men is glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness? For what was glorious has no glory now in comparison with the surpassing glory. And if what was fading away came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts. Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away. But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains. When the old covenant is read, it has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever, but whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now, the Lord is the spirit, and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the spirit. God had his blessing to the reading of his word. Please be seated. One thing you can say about St. Paul is that you don't have to be an angel to be a saint. Paul is very open in this particular letter, 2 Corinthians. He addressed problems in 1 Corinthians that were existing, false teachings, everything else that was coming against him. And this was a letter that he was writing and talking to Titus. I don't think he ever really thought that this would become what it is, but it's a very personal letter. It opens up his feelings, his emotions, some of the trials and tribulations that he has, like no other letter that's in the scripture. And for that reason, I think it's appropriate. I would want to add one more verse, if I could, just to try to bring it into context. That would be, you don't have to stand, but verse four, chapter four, verse one, therefore, since through God's mercy, we have this ministry, we do not lose heart. What I wanted to do is to encourage your ministry here, to tell you what I see in the scriptures as very, very important to the continuation of any ministry. It's a ministry that can be trusted, is defined here in no uncertain terms, I think. And, you know, we live in a world where success is everything. We dress for it. We look at other people who are successful in education, in business. They've made money. They have a great deal of accomplishments. And we lift them up as successes in the world. And we say, wow. And if the truth were known, we'd really spend a lot of time imitating or trying to be like them. Even in the church, I must admit, Chuck Swindoll's ministry, which is where I A lot of the information that stirs me comes from is a very successful minister who I followed for 20 some years. And at times I almost feel like I want to be Chuck, but that's not what it's all about. The success in God's eyes is very, very different. His glory, the glory of God is found in Jesus Christ and in him only. That's success in God's value system. He doesn't accept the world's set of values, but has his own. And there's not room for me, mine, mine, my pride, my arrogance, or even my distinguished letters and accomplishments in academia. That doesn't fit in his value system. It's Christ and Christ alone. See if I can find all these things. Pardon me, I'm a little... If we looked at the church, when we look at the church, we say, what does the church have to offer this sinful world that we have in? Is it a good family and maybe some good morals? Is it health? Is it happiness? Is it a great kids, a good Christian school? Is it a great ministry maybe to to disasters? You know what God would say? You know what Paul would say? No, it's about Jesus Christ and him only. That's what the church has to offer this world outside of us, this sinful world. And we live in a depraved, lost society that has accepted values that are contrary to what God finds acceptable in Christ. And yet we tend sometimes to adapt those things very easily. I do. If somebody told me they never did, I'd probably look at you a little weird. Because we all have sinned. We've all fallen short of the glory of God. At times we find ourselves prideful. Just ask me about my grandkids and you'll see pride sticking out of my nose and my ears. You know, ask me what Brad and Dwayne did and my head will swell up with all the things that I can tell you how great they are and what a great accomplishment they did for us and so on and so forth and so on. And yet sometimes those things actually obscure. Obscure Christ, we don't understand that if a ministry is going to be successful, if a ministry is going to be long lasting, God must be glorified in it. God is glorified in Christ Jesus. Listen to these words again as I try to break them apart for you in smaller bits. I think if you looked, you would first read the last verse of two. And we are with Unveil, I'm sorry, Paul is addressing in verse two, it almost talks about the confidence that he has, it almost seems like he's bragging to people, but then it's corrected in first chapter of the third. the first verse of the third chapter, are we beginning to commend ourselves again, or we need, like other people, letters of recommendation to you or from you. In those days, itinerant preachers, people that are doing what I do, basically, and have done for 30 years, go around from place to place, wherever there's a need. And they would bring with them big, long letters of recommendation from people. And these were accepted as valid credentials for speakers or for people. And today we still see a lot of that going on. Paul breaks that down and he says, no, he says, or you yourselves are our letters written on our hearts, known and read by everybody. You show that you are a letter from Christ, result of our ministry, written not with ink, but with the spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone, but on tablets of the human hearts. You get the picture. That's what's really important in God's thing. Christ working in you. When you go to certain places, there's certain people, there's a fragrance of Christ. I experienced it this week. I went up to Hope Church up in the Boston spot. As they say, I have a carpet business and they wanted to redo a secretary's room. And I strolled in there, Jim Cornick and Jeff, a couple of the fellows I've known up there. I've done some pulpit supply up there. I just walked into the church and all of a sudden I stopped when I got about a foot in the door and they were having an assembly in the sanctuary and all these elementary kids were singing praise and glory and honor to Jesus Christ. I couldn't move. I really couldn't. It was like a fragrance and it reminded me of so much of what I held so dearly when my kids were young. I'll make a confession. I don't really cry very often, but when we left Schenectady Christian School, I cried. It took me over an hour to compose myself. That's how dear those years, those formative years we spent with kids in this Christian school environment were to me. Now, my wife works as a secretary in Chalmont School. Needless to say, it's not quite the same environment. But we have opportunities now to minister there in ways that are very effective and very much needed. So, yes, but the fragrance of Christ is a real thing. When you see Christ and somebody working and changing and transforming, because that's what happened to Paul. He didn't just become a better religious leader. He became a transformed person, renewed in his mind by the Holy Spirit. where the law had brought condemnation and brought him to the point where he needed to know who his savior was. When the Lord interceded in his life, he became transformed by the life of Christ in him. And you can see that in everything he said and did from that point on. He was so on the mark, so in Christ, so determined that nothing would inhibit what he did as a ministry for Jesus Christ. Nothing. And if you looked on later, if we had time to go through four and he would talk about that with with openness, how he suffered and dealt with things. And yet he was not ever changed in his heart with his mission to his ministry. His hope was secured and firm in Christ Jesus. What a what an honor that must have been to hear him speak. to see and experience the fragrance of Christ in that man's life. Our confidence comes from God, he has made his confidence as ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter, but of the spirit, for the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. We recently experience. I had to ask my wife now, I've forgotten it. What was that moon? The full moon? No, it wasn't a full moon. It was the super moon that we recently saw out. We all went out at one o'clock in the morning. Oh yeah, it's there. Okay. See you in a couple hundred years. You know, it was beautiful. I mean, it was light. You know, it was quite a spectacular thing. But in the morning, when you woke up, the sun was coming up. The moon was no more. You see, the moon is but a moon, a shadow cast of the sun. And that's what he's talking about here, where the letter of the law, the law had its place. It was written on tablets of stone. It convicted people. It did its job. It's still there. But now there's a radiance in the sun in Christ that brings forth a new life. where the law, the letter of the law brings death, life in Christ brings light and life to people. That's what he's talking about here. He's talking about this new covenant relationship as the scriptures talk about it, at least in the NIV. That's what they are talking about, this newness, this goodness. When we see the sun, It doesn't fade, it goes down and the moon comes up. In the same way, the letter of the law, when people tell me, well, you've got to pay all the laws, I can't. I never will. I cannot fulfill the law. But Christ did. He fulfilled every iota, every jog, everything in the law. He fulfilled it. And the law is still good when it's used properly. And I love the law when it's used properly. You know, there was a time in our life growing up when we could just trust our leaders. We wanted to trust our leaders. We were told to trust our leaders. We grew up, and I grew up in the 50s and 60s, it was different then for somehow. It just seemed like there was a greater deal of expectations of trust. And then as time went on, we began to see failures in the presidency, in moral life of presidency, in leaders, in church leaders, in schools, and everything else began to really erode that confidence we had in the leadership of our country, in the leadership of all the things that are around us, until at times we began to wonder, well, how bad are we? Where are we headed? How can this possibly go on? How long will the Lord be patient and kind to us and forgiving and full of grace before he just says enough? And he will. There will come a time that he will say enough. That's very sobering. Therefore, since we have such a hope, we are very bold. We are not like Moses, who put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from glazing at while the radiance was fading away, but their minds were made dull. For to this day, the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. Now, the Lord is spirit. Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. I'm not going to belabor that. I think I've already given you a good illustration of what happens, but I have to read, and I don't like to read, but the topic discussion for NIV is from freedom, which is what originally drew me to this passage. The Bible is unmistakably clear and painfully honest about the condition in which human beings find themselves apart from Christ. The condition of bondage or slavery, the concept of freedom can only be understood With that revelation in mind, the great good news of the gospel is this. Jesus Christ delivers us from all bondage. He sets us free from sin and its guilt and punishment. Free from Satan and the spiritual forces of evil. Free from the grip of the law we could never hope to keep. Free from the fear that death spells the end of it all. He sets us free when we participate through faith in his death and resurrection. He sets us free to experience the complete freedom that comes when the spirit lives within us. The spirit does call us to a life of freedom from the burden of legalism. But Paul warns us not to use our freedom to hurt others, nor to indulge in sin. For if we do, we will discover that we have fallen back into slavery and to sin. Paradoxically, freedom is found not in the release from all restraints, but in submission to a new master. to Jesus Christ. Freedom, in other words, goes only in one direction, that of serving Christ and of serving others in love for the sake of Christ. And I I can't come up with words like that. I just can't. But it's true. The ministries that you do, you do in the power of the Holy Spirit, when you get discouraged and you will, it's a two way street. As a survivor, I went through terrible bouts of depression and sickness. I collapsed three times, was taken to the hospital, and I still suffer through a year and a half of viruses that I picked up from the stuff and all that. At times, I just want to throw the towel in, bulldoze. The first month, I would have bulldozed my house and gone home or gone south or someplace. Get me away from here. I don't want to deal with this anymore. That's the way life really is. And yet every day, people like the people that I came in contact would encourage me, would come alongside of me and provide that fragrance of Christ that I needed to get through that day. And sometimes on the other end, too, there's there's compassion fatigue. That also happens when people get tired of helping other people. I've seen that happen in churches. I will admit I spent 30 years in a liberal church, which was very much oriented toward uh, social gospel. All right. My head swelled way bigger than, than, than it should have. Way too broad minded. It wasn't until that I became an elder and I tried to, to actually, instead of just talk about things, to do things and to do them right, that I began to understand the importance of doing it the way God wants it done in the scriptures. I didn't last long in the liberal church after that. They asked me to leave, which was not fun. No, no, no. It was not fun. I love the people. They were good to me at a time when I was pretty unlovable. I wish nothing but God's grace and mercy to all those people that are still in the world of sin and darkness, people that still have not had the veil removed. God loves the world, and I know he's come for the elect, but he loves the world. His sacrifice was once and for all for the world. It was sufficient for any sin, for anything that's gone on. In Christ, it is sufficient. Pray for the world. Pray that people will have the veil removed as they are called by God to become in Christ what they were intended to be. I may get in trouble on that statement. I'm sorry, Chris. I didn't mean to throw you under the bus or get thrown under the bus. I'm not a theologian, but I'm just looking at my own practical life and saying things that I find very true. The freedom to serve others. and not to get discouraged, are two essential parts of the ministry that you, I pray, will continue to do at this church. To stand here and tell you, you will do many things, but these essential ingredients, that your competency is not in yourself, but in Christ Jesus, that your power is not in yourself, But it's in the power of the Holy Spirit and that you will need to repent and be kind to others as at times they become discouraged and disheartened and sometimes inflamed with their own goodness. Those are human conditions that we deal with every day in life. But oh, how it's needed. Dear folks, hear my heart, keep on keeping on, keep doing the things that God has called you, keep being The fragrance of Christ in Amsterdam, in wherever God sends you or takes you. The world needs that so desperately. How do you close up something that I don't know, except that the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control against such things. There is no law as much as I need to see ministry go on. This church in this world needs fruit. We as Christians need to be fruit producers. And these are the kinds of things that we need to see more of as your fellowship deepens with each other, as your life deepens in Christ. This is not an overnight thing that happens. This transformation is a lifelong thing that goes on. This pursuit of holiness is a lifelong thing as God begins to change and transform you into his glory in Christ. Don't get discouraged. Produce good fruit. Be thankful and praise him in all things. Amen. Heavenly Father, I thank you for your word for the reproof the correction and the training that is found in it. We ask, Father, that we submit to your Holy Spirit, that in us you recreate Christ in ways that will be pleasing to your sight, that you establish and root us in the truth of your word, and that the fruit of the Holy Spirit, that love, that joy, that peace, Even that long suffering and kindness and goodness, faithfulness and meekness and self-control be very evident as a result of being with you, as a result of you loving us first. Help us to treat others with the grace of which we have received and to be ever mindful of your glory that is found in Christ Jesus. We ask it in his name. Amen.