John chapter 7, I begin reading with verse 21. Jesus answered and said unto them, I have done one work, and ye all marvel. Moses therefore gave unto you circumcision, not because it is of Moses, but of the fathers. And ye on the Sabbath day circumcise a man. If a man on the Sabbath day receives circumcision, that the law of Moses should not be broken, Are ye angry at me, because I have made a man ever whithole on the Sabbath day? Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment. Now I want you to take a close look at verse 24, the last verse I read. I'm going to read that one more time. Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgment. That verse speaks to one thing, making decisions. You see this dollar bill? A one dollar bill. If I was going to give this away and I ask, who wants this one dollar bill? I'm sure there would be a lot of hands that would go up, if not everyone. Let's look at this dollar bill, and I want to do something. I'm going to just crumple it up. Now, it's all wrinkled. Then I'm going to drop it here on the floor, and I'm going to step on it. I'm going to grind it into the carpet. Now, it's still a dollar bill. Who would want it? Would you still want it? Most everybody would because it's still got value, right? It hasn't lost any of its value, has it? It's still worth a dollar. That is your value in God's eyes. We can go through life and we can be crumpled up We can get dirtied up. We can be stepped on. We can go through all of the problems and the issues of life. But we still have value in God's eyes. Now a lot of the crumpling and a lot of the wrinkles and a lot of the trouble and a lot of the issues that we have in our life are because of our decisions. Do you agree with me? It's because of decisions that we make. And we make decisions on a daily basis. Every one of us has made an innumerable amount of decisions already today. From the time we got out of bed this morning, we decided what clothes we were going to wear. And by deciding the clothes we were going to wear, we decided the statements that we were going to make about how we felt today. We decided which vehicle we were going to drive. We decided, most of us, before we got to church where we were going to go eat lunch after church. We made a lot of decisions. By doing that, we decided how much money we were going to spend after church. When we got up this morning, we made a decision about how much money we were going to give in offering. We made decisions. And those are just some that I am bringing right off the top of my head this morning. Those are decisions that we made. Now, when we think about making decisions and we think about verse 24 in our Bible, we have to realize that there is an art to making good decisions. And Jesus, in that one verse, gave us a very good lesson in the art of making good decisions. And that's what I want us to think about a little while out of the message this morning. Are we practicing the art of making good decisions in our lives? And if we aren't, we need to focus on that and we need to look at that individually. Not worry about other folks, other families, not worry about other churches, but worry about me and how I can make better decisions, how I can better use the art of making a good decision. Well, the art of making good decisions is based on sound morals. Now that raises a question. What does it mean to be moral? What is sound morals? Now today, we can get a very broad spectrum of answers from that question because depending upon who you ask and depending upon their basis of life and what they base right and wrong on is going to depend on their moral situation and their moral circumstances. For a point of discussion, let's understand this. That morals or being moral is being concerned with the principles of right and wrong behavior and human character. Okay? That makes it even cloudier, don't it? That don't clear up a lot with morals. It makes it cloudier. Because what determines right and wrong now? Right and wrong has a two-fold answer there. It is either absolute or it's abstract. To say right and wrong is absolute, it says there is a line that you cross between right and wrong. To say it's abstract, saying there is an iffy area between right and wrong. It says it's right if this works this way and it's wrong if it works this way. The biblical side of all of that is it's not neither and it's both. Let me illustrate something. Is a football game sinful? Is a football game sinful? Today there are football games that are going to be played all across the nation. Are they sinful? Not standing alone by themselves, no they're not, but they can be. It's an abstract. If someone plans to go to a football game today, and they have to miss church to do that. If they're a Christian, and they're going to go to a football game today, they have to miss church. And in all the reality, they're going to have to miss both services. Because if a football game kicks off at 1 o'clock in the afternoon, you've got to drive to the stadium. You've got to get into the stadium with your ticket. You've got to find your seats. You've got to sit there. You've got to wait on the beginning of the game. Then you've got to go through the game, which usually lasts somewhere around four hours if it doesn't You don't have overtime or anything like that. And then you have to drive, come out of the stadium, get in the parking lot, get out of the parking lot, get on the highway and get back home which goes to who knows what time of the night. So you're going to be missing church. Does that make it sin? It depends. Why did the person go to the ball game? There are morals that are dictated in our lives that come from our heart. And that's the point Jesus is making in this message and in this statement. When he says judge righteous judgment, he is looking at the hearts of the Pharisees that are there and he's using circumcision because they're trying to kill him because he healed someone on the Sabbath day. And they're saying, Jesus, you were wrong. You sinned because you healed someone on the Sabbath day. And Jesus says, but why is it a sin for me to do that? And you can circumcise on the Sabbath day. And they could. If you want to take the time to go back and do the study, I'll give you some scripture because I did as I studied this message. Circumcision was initiated in Genesis chapter 17 through Abraham, not Moses. It was initiated through Abraham and it was initiated because circumcision was a sign of a covenant relationship with God. just like baptism is in our church today. Baptism doesn't save anyone. But baptism is a picture, is a sign of a covenant relationship with God. You have that relationship, that covenant relationship with God through Jesus Christ and salvation and then as an outward sign of that, you give yourself over to baptism as a symbol of that covenant relationship. That's a picture of what circumcision was. Now, it's talked into much more detail as you go into it and study it through. Then, some 400 years after that, Moses picks up this thing and he adds it into his law. But at no time does he ever say that it can't take place on the Sabbath. Because God was very specific with the sign of circumcision. He said with a newborn child it had to take place on the 8th day. Now that was in the lineage of Abraham and Abraham's children. He said it had to take place on the 8th day. It didn't matter if the 8th day was a Sabbath day or not. It had to take place on the 8th day. For someone to become a proselyte in the Jewish religion which is a Gentile that becomes and practices Judaism, a male would have to be circumcised and that circumcision would take place on a recorded day whether or not it was a Sabbath day or not. So Jesus comes back to these folks and Jesus says, what's the big deal? You can do circumcision on the Sabbath day and it's no problem but I heal a whole man. spiritually and physically and you want to kill me. Jesus was telling them their morals were mixed up. Their heart was out of place. It wasn't about the action or the act of what was going on. It was the heart and the intent that they were practicing it under. That was the sound morals. We have sound morals. We have a guide for sound morals today. It's our Bible. The church has the Bible. God's written word is a guide for our morals of life. It guides us in getting our heart right, in keeping our heart right, keeping our intentions right. That is where we need to focus our attention and our hearts this morning. It is on being obedient to God. It is being obedient to Him and following what He wants and what He desires in our lives. Are we vessels that God can work through? That's the question that we have to ask. If we are, then are our morals morals that look toward satisfying God's will in our lives? Judge, righteous, judgment, Jesus says. Well, when we think of the Bible, we think of teaching. Teaching you and I, and that is part of the art of making good decisions, and it comes through maturity. We have morals. We have the basis of morals. We have the moral right and wrong of the Bible and the moral instruction of the Word of God in front of us. And we have an obligation to apply it. And when we start applying it to our lives, through that obligation, which should be actually a desire, we should have a desire to apply the Bible in our life. And that should lead us to a maturity. So, maturity is an image of someone who is older, who is often older. And that's accurate. Typically, mature people are people who are older, people who have had some experiences in life. But also, let's realize this. Maturity is also thinking and behaving in a sensible and moral manner. Now when we understand maturity to be that way, age doesn't play into it, not as heavily. Because there are many older people who don't think or behave in a sensible moral manner. who don't have the Bible as their guide, who don't recognize the Bible as anything in their life, who don't know and don't realize what morality is, and that it is both an absolute and an abstract in life, and that it comes from the intentions and the desires of the heart. When we understand that and we think it and we behave it and it becomes part of our life, then we start maturing. We start growing. Not only as an individual, not only as a person, but we grow spiritually in our walk with God and that's the most important thing. That is what we should desire because if we're not growing in our walk and in our work with God, then we're not growing in any part of life. It doesn't matter how well we are financially. It doesn't matter. how good our careers are moving. It doesn't matter about the material possessions. It doesn't matter about how many jobs in the church that we have. It doesn't matter how many titles that we have. It doesn't matter about education or any of that. If we're not growing and maturing in our walk with God, we're not growing and we're not maturing. So, Are we willing to let God teach us? Are we willing to let God's Word teach us? Are we willing to grow? I said in Genesis 17, we learn and begin to learn about circumcision. In verse 10, we read that God established with Abraham circumcision as a covenant for his people and that it was required on the eighth day. When God established the Sabbath through Moses, he didn't make any amendments. I've already referenced that. It was required on the eighth day. It's a symbol of ceremonial purity and covenant. It's a symbol. Mature thinking then will reason out if God will accept Sabbath circumcision, He will also accept healing. Healing of the whole man. Jesus was asking for moral and mature thought. That's what he was asking for. Now when we think about that and when we come face to face with that this morning, we have to realize the church is holding on to ceremonies and rituals that are symbolic to some kind of doctrine that's found in our own opinions. It may not be found biblically, but it's found in our own opinion. things that are special to us personally, and I'm not going to say that that is an inherent wrong, but I will say when it comes to a point where we use our opinions and our thoughts and our personal beliefs to make a doctrine or to make something stick in religion or in the church, we've crossed the moral line. Because it's no longer about the heart, it's about what we want. It has a personal desire. It starts becoming selfish. That's what had happened to the Pharisees. The Pharisees had so twisted and turned the Word of God into something of their own opinion, something of their own making, that no one recognized what it was anymore. And I'm sad and heartbroken to say this today, but there are many churches that are meeting this morning, and they're meeting under the guise of Christianity, but they don't have any idea what Christianity is. They don't have any idea what loving people and loving God is. They don't have any heart felt drawn to God, to serving Him. It's all about a personal program, a personal this. It's all about something else that has a nice wrapping of Christianity placed around it. Jesus says judge righteous judgment. He says make good decisions. The art of making a good decision, lastly this morning, is something that is always meaningful. We know it's moral, we know it deals with and develops maturity, and it's also meaningful today. And when I use the word meaningful, what I am saying is that making good decisions through proper morals and maturity communicates and expresses to others the glory of God's salvation and it often does that without saying anything. Some of the older preachers would call it testimony and witness. Our life comes back to being the greatest testimony that we have before those that are unchurched today. It's meaningful. It's meaningful. When we have in our lives the art of making good decisions and making them using the right tools, using the right instructions, using the right maturity, Understanding how God wants them made and putting them to work in our lives is meaningful not only in our life, it's meaningful in the lives of those that watch us, those that see us on a daily basis. It's meaningful to others that see you in the church. It's meaningful to others in other churches. It is a blessing and a benefit and an instruction. It's something that God uses to speak. to other people and to speak to us. It doesn't mean others won't ask what's going on in your life because actually it means they will. When God opens a door for someone to ask what's going on in your life, Why do things look so good in your life? Why are you so happy about things? Why, given everything that's going on, are you still cheerful? Are you still joyful? I want you to remember 1 Peter 3, verse 15. Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. Sanctify God in your hearts and always be ready. If we're making good decisions and practicing it the way God leads us and desires us and asks us to practice it, there is going to be evidence of it in our lives. It doesn't matter how crinkled up our lives were, It doesn't matter how dirty they may have been. It doesn't matter about any of that. The value of our life is still great in God's eyes. And when we practice the art of making good decisions based upon the instruction of His Word, It goes a long way toward helping us and giving others the right testimony of who God really is and what Christianity really is in this world of twisted religion today. Making good decisions creates one thing in our lives. It creates wisdom. Wisdom comes from God as a byproduct of right decisions. An application of scripture, of those principles and of those morals daily, worked out daily in our lives and in the circumstances of our lives reflects in wisdom because we always have something good, something godly to share with those around us. Wisdom comes from being faithful to the tasks, even the obscure tasks that few people ever see. Wisdom comes from living a disciplined life. As I begin to close this morning, I would like to ask if our musicians could come, prepare us a hymn of closing. And as they do make their way up, I want you to think about the art of making good decisions and how We can reflect back and we can see how the world, how maybe our decisions in the past, maybe the decisions of other people had crumpled up our lives. Maybe they had dirtied up our lives. Maybe they had caused problems or issues or situations or circumstances that had left a impression of bad decisions. Well, this morning we can start practicing the art of good decisions in our lives. We can get better at practicing good decisions when we know and understand what Jesus says when he says, but judge righteous judgment not according to appearance. not according to what it looks like, but according to what we know based on the morals of God's Word, the principles of God's Word, the maturity that we have by applying it in our lives, and the meaningful impact that it has in your life and in those that are in contact with you. Psalms 90 verse 12 says, Teach us to number our days aright that we may gain a heart of wisdom. Give account of our days and give account of them truly and sincerely. So this morning, when you think about the art of making a good decision, apply it to your life and apply it in such a way that God can use it and use you to influence and impact others. through the good news of Jesus Christ. Ladies.