Well, Trinitas Church, we have been in the midst of a short series beginning in December on the incarnation of Jesus Christ. And what we're gonna do today is we're gonna consider the importance of holding fast to our confession as to who Jesus Christ is. This is a time of year when many, many people make goals for the future. And I think we've underestimated The value of simply continuing in the faith. Maintaining our profession of who Jesus Christ is. In fact, continuing to do anything for any length of time. As you will soon discover with whatever resolutions you might have, it's much more difficult than many of us give it credit for or ever consider. In fact, this phrase, keep the faith, it's become a good bit of Americana, something you evoke maybe any time you're watching a game and your team is losing. But in fact, in fact, what it's really designed for, it's designed to be a resolution as regards your deepest faith. Your deepest faith, the things you believe the most, the things most important to you. It's not at all untrue to what Jesus said when he said, he who endures to the end will be saved. So we're gonna read a couple of scriptures today. One of which is the conclusion or one of the conclusions to the Gospel of John, another of which was spoken to Jewish Christians who are going back on their faith in Jesus Christ in the early church. And before we go to the word and read it, we're gonna pray and ask the almighty God to give us understanding in it. So please bow your heads with me. Mighty God, This gift of faith that you have given to us is the single most valuable thing that any one of us possess in this room. Lord Jesus, I pray that we would keep our faith in you by speaking it again and again, by making it our foremost consideration and putting us on guard against the many, many ways that the enemy seeks to steal away from us that bold confession. We ask that you would grant us your Holy Spirit this morning to operate in us and to give us focus and attention on the word of the almighty God. In Jesus' name we pray, by your spirit, amen. If you'll open your Bibles with me to John chapter 20, we're gonna read verses 26 to 31. We're also gonna read Hebrews chapter 10, verses 23 to 25. So, keep your finger in both passages. John chapter 20, verse 26. After eight days, his disciples were again inside, and Thomas with them. Jesus came, the doors having been shut, and stood in their midst and said, peace be with you. Then he said to Thomas, reach here with your finger and see my hands, and reach here, your hand, and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believing. Thomas answered and said to him, my Lord and my God. And Jesus said to him, because you have seen me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see and yet believed. Therefore many other signs Jesus also performed in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book, but these have been written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that, believing, you may have life in his name. Hebrews 10, 23. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how to stimulate one another to love and good deeds, not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some. but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the day drawing near. This is God's word. Thanks be to God. Trinitas, we have given weeks to meditate on Jesus' dual nature, the fact that he is fully God and fully man in one person, and that the incarnation is about the reconciliation of God and man in Jesus Christ. Today we are gonna consider the importance of not only believing this, but to continue believing this, continue professing it. In the Gospels, the profession of faith as to who Jesus is on the lips of Peter is of central significance and it marks a turning point in Jesus' ministry. Many of you know the episode recorded in Matthew, Mark, and Luke when the disciples are in Caesarea Philippi and Jesus says to his disciples, who do people say that I am? That, after all, is the most important matter. Before all those who encounter Jesus, who do you say that I am? The disciples report, for example, in Matthew 16, that others are saying that Jesus is in one way or another John the Baptist. Others were saying that Jesus is Elijah. And still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets. But Jesus then confronts them directly and demands from them their own conclusion. And he says, but who do you, that's plural, who do you guys say that I am? This question is as important today for you as it was for the disciples then, and as it will be for everyone for all time to come. And it's Simon Peter, who typically speaks for the whole group of the disciples, and he answers, you are the Christ, the son of the living God. At this point, the Lord declares to Peter that that answer was not simply given to you by men, or anyone else witnessing to who Jesus was, but by God the Father himself operating within his soul. It's a gift. There's a basic lesson here, friends, and it's at the forefront of the gospel. It was at the end of the gospel of John, the entire point of things being recorded. It's that our greatest responsibility is to confess the truth about who Jesus Christ is. This responsibility, it's individual, it belongs to each of you, and it is corporate as it was on this occasion. We have a responsibility to declare who Jesus is when given opportunity, and every Lord's Day we do that as a body. The confession of faith, for example, that follows the sermon every Lord's Day, it's there for a reason. It's as if the sermon would not be complete. until you, the body of Christ, confessed what you believe on the very basis of the scriptures that we have read and expounded. Your responsibility is to profess who Jesus is, and when you do it, every time you do it, you contradict the errors of this world. You will notice that when Peter confesses who Jesus is, he is contradicting the masses who have something lesser to say about Jesus. who are ready to declare that he's a great prophet, even the return of a prophet from old. But all these answers say too little. All these answers are incorrect. They fall short of the reality that Jesus is the very Son of God in human flesh. As the New Testament goes on, And after Jesus has risen from the dead, has been crucified on behalf of men, we see this formal profession of faith on behalf of the body of believers growing. In fact, when Peter declares that Jesus is the Son of God, Peter did not yet know, did not yet fully appreciate that this Son of God would have to go to the cross and die. His profession of faith had to grow. In fact, Peter argues with Jesus in the very next breath after this grand confession. When Jesus tells them that the Son of Man must go and die and be raised again on the third day, Peter doesn't want to hear one thing about the death of this great Savior. But again, After the reality of Jesus' passion and resurrection, we find in the New Testament itself a growing confession, not just of one man, but of the whole church. It says in 1 Timothy 3.16, one of the last epistles of Paul, by common confession, great is the mystery of godliness. And then he quotes what is an early Christian creed. A formulaic statement about who Jesus is, and here it is. He who was revealed in the flesh was vindicated in the spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on in the world, taken up in glory. This is a bigger confession than what Peter had said so early on in the gospel. It speaks to the reality of the incarnation. He was revealed in the flesh. It speaks to the reality of the resurrection, and by implication, Jesus' death as well. He was vindicated in the spirit, raised with the body, totally and entirely animated by God the Holy Spirit, no longer capable of suffering death. He was seen by angels at his resurrection, then subsequently proclaimed throughout the nations, encompassed by Rome and beyond. believed on in the world and taken up in glory, the ascension. As time went on, even beyond the boundaries of the New Testament, the earliest Christian creed, which nobody knows who even wrote this, by the way, the Apostles' Creed summarizes still more and more fully who this person of Jesus is. We spoke in the Apostles' Creed before in this church, we'll do so after the sermon today, but you will notice that the bulk of it, it depends and focuses on who Jesus is and what he has done. See, the best bet as to why this Apostles' Creed was written is because the earliest Christian heresies actually denied that Jesus was a real historical man. What they affirmed was that he was fully God, but all the things he did in the body had to be a mere illusion, because God cannot suffer. And so, that earliest heresy, developed perhaps chiefly by Marcion in roughly 130 AD, That earliest heresy advocated the belief that in the Old Testament you have an entirely different God than in the New Testament. The Old Testament's about material, and the New Testament is about spirit, and therefore Jesus had to be a purely spiritual being. Marcion mangled the canon of the New Testament. He said that only Luke and Paul were inspired writings, and got rid of all the rest, including the Old. And it was to this error, to this false teaching, that the Apostles' Creed came as a response. This is what it said, this early Christian creed. I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. What this is declaring is that there is one God in the Old and the New Testament, creator and father, and he made everything, and he didn't make the world bad. He made it good. And then it says, and I believe in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified dead and buried. He descended into hell. And the third day he rose again from the dead and he ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. From there he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. Notice what it says. I believe that that same God who made everything in the Old Testament has a son. who really did die, who really did suffer, who really was buried. Where the creed says he descended into hell, it's not a statement to the effect that after he died on the cross he suffered more in some hellish place. It's a statement that he suffered the burdens of hell and torment on the cross and swallowed them up in the grave. But the point is that Jesus Christ was a true man. And then it concludes, I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, and the life everlasting. And I skipped the resurrection of the body because I wrote communion of saints twice, but it says that too. It's a declaration that the good news of the gospel is not just about your soul, it's also about your body. because Jesus was fully God, fully man, affirming the goodness of spirit and reality and material all alike. This teaches us that a confession of faith will grow as errors about Christ grows. As people have more confused beliefs about Jesus, our job as the church and as individuals is to contradict those things with the truth. And I'm gonna point out in passing that where this confession says, I believe in the Holy Catholic Church, it simply means I believe in a holy, worldwide, universal church. And this came in contradiction to early cults like Gnosticism, which said that in fact, there's just a small set of special super Christians who are saved. And the affirmation is that no, the church is as broad and wide as a true confession of Jesus Christ. That's what we mean when we confess these things. Trinitas Church, I hope you can see that from day one, whether it's Peter, whether it's the early apostolic church, or it's the church of the earliest church fathers, our confession of faith and what we believe about Jesus is central to our identity. And I'm just gonna talk to you about five challenges to your confession of faith. I hope that one of your deepest resolutions in 2026 is to maintain your confession, to have it grow, to sharpen it, to become more adept at speaking it. And the first burden, if you're keeping notes, the first challenge rather, are burdens of all kinds. This is true, that when you're burdened in some intense way throughout your life, you will often treat that thing as the central, most important thing in your life, and everything else will take the background. And this includes your profession of faith. Many will talk about their faith being rocked or challenged by the experience of suffering or evils in this life. And one of the most burdensome that you're gonna encounter, young people, is you're gonna find people who confess belief in God generally, but not your God, or confess belief in a Christ that's very different than the one you're being taught about here, and it's gonna frustrate you. And you see that they seem to have as deep a devotion for their faith as you do for yours. It's gonna challenge you this way when you encounter that particular burden. You're gonna go, is God really all-powerful? Is Jesus really reigning? Then why doesn't he just dispel all the false Christs out there of Islam, of Mormonism, of the Jehovah's Witnesses? Why does he let them exist? Why doesn't he eradicate the errors of Rome about justification by faith in Christ? Why doesn't this Almighty Jesus effect absolute uniform agreement among all evangelicals and Protestants? It's gonna really challenge your faith. It's gonna challenge you if you don't know what Jesus himself taught and you've spent precious little time in his word. Very sadly, so many of you, when you encounter these challenges, may have little appetite to investigate the matter and get good answers. In fact, the gripe itself contains some false premises in it. One of the false premises in it is really a premise that can only be called proud. It is the idea that my faith shouldn't be challenged and faith shouldn't be challenging. And I might ask you where you ever got that premise. The truth is that it is the nature of sin and of sinners like you and me to be confused and to go about confusing everything we can that God said. We've been doing it since Genesis 3. The Bible says we've suppressed the truth in unrighteousness. The false premise doesn't recognize that we deserve the confusion we have made for ourselves as a human race. And if you can't swallow that pill about what we have done to ourselves and to our neighbor, there's no way to receive the good news of the gospel and who Jesus is. Jesus is the one who told us many false prophets will arise and will mislead many. Precisely because, he says, lawlessness is increased, most people's love will grow cold, for false Christs and false prophets will arise. Jesus, He told you beforehand, there will be false teachers and a many, and they will be persuasive. And the root reason for this is because we deserve the confusion we've made for ourselves. Moreover, Another false premise, it is stemming from our love for sight. We would love for the true Jesus to be heralded by the most famous people, the smartest people, the largest group of people, the wealthiest people, the most beautiful people, and we say to the Lord, that is how we would like the truth to be wrapped. I'll tell you something, all of those metrics for finding the true Jesus, are contradicted by Jesus himself, about whom Isaiah 53 says, he has no stately former majesty that we should look upon him, nor appearance that we should be attracted to him. He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and like one from whom men hide their face. Jesus didn't come glowing with the sorts of riches of the world that catch our eye. This is why it's a basic error to suppose that Jesus is gonna be found in the most ornate and beautiful churches. Indeed, he's not. He didn't come that way the first time, and we shouldn't expect him to be coming like that through the age of the church. If you believe Jesus' fundamental message, you should expect for false Christ to arise and for his message to lack external glory. you should expect for your faith to be challenged. Because here's the truth of the matter. You cannot see Christ for who he is, brothers and sisters, unless you acknowledge the gravity of your own sin. And the confusion of the world magnifies the reality and the gravity of our sin. And you cannot see the gravity of your sin without meditating on the law of God and character of Jesus Christ. And once you get in that loop of seeing the Christ of Scripture and seeing your sin and looking back from your sin on the sufficiency of the Christ of Scripture and looking back on yourself even after redemption as a sinner to be in that loop, that's what it means to be born again. You will never find Christ by the measures and metrics of the world. I'm gonna tell you as well, the Lord ordained for our faith to be challenged so that it could grow and be strengthened. And we see this in all areas of life when we're challenged. Now, many of you know I'm not exactly Mr. Fix-It, okay? I'm not Gallagher Wilson or Tony Farrell or these guys who are deacons who can do all these things with their hands. But it happens that in the month of December, I decided to take up a little task for myself, which was to replace our kitchen sink. And at first, I was pretty confident I'd be great at this because I had replaced a sink in my bathroom and I did it so quickly. And it was an entirely different story with my kitchen sink. The kitchen sink situation worked out like this. I got busy trying to remove the old one and ran into some rusty bolts that my strength and the strength of my 14-year-old son combined could not move. And that led me in a position to simply try to destroy the old sink. And I did successfully do that. But in the course of that project, I must have bumped some of the various pipes. And as a result, the valves that had water coming into my house from the main water supply, they got leaky. That was not part of my original plan to replace. I was very frustrated by it. Now, typically what I'd do when I get in this situation is I'd call my buddy Gallagher and ask him what to do to get out of this nasty situation. But see, Gallagher's house at the time, it actually got hit by the floods and was underwater. And I just didn't feel quite right about calling him about my leaky valves while his house was underwater. It just didn't seem appropriate. And so I had to use YouTube and solve the problem myself. Friends, at the end of that, I'm gonna tell you something. I learned a ton. Like, I learned where the main water valve for my whole house is. See, I didn't know that before. It's actually in my neighbor's yard. It's kind of weird, okay? Real compact. On the other side of that, I'm significantly more prepared to respond to a variety of crises, and to be honest with you, I'm so much more thankful for something that I rely on every single day of my life, as do all of my kids. I'm so much more appreciative for this brilliant system of plumbing that runs through all of your homes and mine as well. What a shame it would be if we could have that sort of enlightenment about things in our home and not with our Christian faith. Every heresy that comes along and diminishes who Jesus is in one way or another ought to render us more thankful for the truth as soon as we see it collide with that falsehood. It ought to leave us actually glorifying God for vindicating His truth against a tireless enemy who keeps inventing more errors to subvert attention from Him. One of the reasons why Jesus allows heresies to exist is to show His might as the very light of God to shine in the darkness and not be swallowed up by it. A second burden for your faith, will be the pride of your intellect. See, there's this human appetite to try to square Christ and Christianity with worldly wisdom. The earliest Christological heresies about who Jesus was were trying to reconcile Christianity with Platonism and the various philosophies that prevailed in the Greek world. And this could not be done. Jesus does not come as a truth that will fit in your system. He comes as the truth. Many of you know in the enlightenment, many brilliant men were trying to square the Jesus of Scripture, who they admitted to be a great moral teacher, with their newfound understanding that miracles are impossible. And so you have what has since been called the Jefferson Bible. but was actually his work called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, where he eradicates all of the miracles of Jesus so we could just have the ethical teacher Jesus. You lose much when you do these things. I'll be honest with you. It burdens my soul to the depths of my soul. It burdens my soul just how many people I have walked the Christian life with who have subsequently left that profession of faith in the miracle worker Jesus and even disparaged it as insane. A simple Facebook post I had just a couple weeks ago celebrated the incarnation. Praise the Lord that God sent his son to take on human flesh and be born of a virgin and reconcile us to the Father. to which a man who carried on in a small group in my home for four years simply responded. In contradiction of his former profession of faith, can you understand how psychotic this is? I think psychotic was the wrong word. I don't even think he meant that. But it expressed his vitriol for a faith that he once professed. A softer version of this came from a man that I went to Northwest University with. I really love. He too has abandoned his profession of faith. In fact, as he put it, I stopped caring if the Christmas story is true. Defending a virgin birth or a bright star or how many wise men came just seems like a waste of energy. I wasn't there, so it seems weird to white knuckle my way into believing it all is historical fact. Well, I'll tell you something. It didn't seem like a waste of energy to the early church and to Christians who were slain in the Colosseums of Rome to maintain that profession of faith. And in fact, there is no retention of Christianity without embracing those difficult doctrines and those truths. To do so is to replace the Christ of Scripture with you yourself as the ultimate authority. And when you put it that way, seems a bit insane, doesn't it? Attempts to keep the ethic of the Bible without the Christ of Scripture do not work. No law or ethic can be more firm than the lawgiver who gave it. And if Jesus was just a mere man with some good ideas, guess what? People will abandon those good ideas as soon as they abandon the authority of that good man. This is why modern secular ethics didn't birth what Thomas Jefferson might have liked. or largely Christian culture who abandon the Christ of the Bible, what we have in fact, is a culture that will tell you in many of its segments that your ethnicity is a sin. Whatever privilege you have is a sin. They'll tell you that abortion is virtuous and that lies to people about their very identity are the deepest expression of kindness. They'll tell you that facts are hate. This is the upside down world we live in when we abandon the Christ of Scripture. Moreover, every opposition to Christ has a worldview with its own inexplicable miracles. Secular worldview will tell you that the world came into being something like a big bang. All things bursting into being from an infinitesimally small point. They'll tell you that life sprang into being, perhaps by a lightning bolt and some sort of proteins. All of this is just as miraculous as anything that Christianity has ever said, except for it posits miracles with no miracle worker. And when you have miracles, inexplicable happenings with no miracle worker, that's not a miracle, it's chaos. I'm just gonna tell you something. You cannot keep the faith in Christ and edit it to match worldly wisdom. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom. Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. And I would simply comfort you this way. If you're frustrated that that means you're gonna go into any number of dialogues and contradict the prevailing scientific wisdom, take comfort. The prevailing scientific wisdom doesn't stay the same for 30 years. It's changing all the time. The entire model of the universe, which was taken as ironclad fact, has recently been dispelled by the telescopes that can see the farthest into the universe. This phenomenon of abandoning a faithful profession of faith, it's appearing everywhere. I very much appreciate Kirk Cameron's willingness to stand up for Christ. Many of you know this actor, big in the 80s, Recently, on his podcast, he came out denying the reality of eternal conscious torment for those who don't believe in Jesus and has embraced something called annihilationism. Annihilationism is the idea that God simply makes your soul cease to exist if you don't believe in Jesus, you just disappear. And Kirk's views come in contradiction to what Jesus himself announced so many times. You have to understand that this belief about eternal punishment or the lack thereof affects your view of Christ. I would like to ask Kirk, what did Jesus save us from? Burning guilt from within and divine opposition from without that would lay upon us forever? Or did Jesus save us from disappearing? And why didn't Jesus disappear on the cross in our stead? What did Jesus suffer on the cross? The conscious burden of the Father's wrath justly abiding upon him? Or did Jesus suffer annihilation on the cross? I would also ask him what evokes from you greater attitude. The concept that you have been delivered from eternal suffering or delivered from simply ceasing to be. I would moreover ask, how is the hedonist wrong who says, let us eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die? Tomorrow we disappear. That's our penalty. You change Christ himself when you abandon his teaching. Jesus bore the infinite wrath of God in our stead, not disappearance. And only the God-man could do such a thing. Third burden to your profession of faith will be self-righteousness. Many of you will find strange Ecclesiastes 7.16, which says, do not be excessively righteous and do not be overly wise. Why should you ruin yourself? This is not telling you to have a meager pursuit of righteousness in life. It is condemning a sort of excessive righteousness in which you look at your successes as overshadowing and even eradicating your sin, a sort of belief about yourself that I have overcome in the body in this life. That, that is the sort of self-righteousness he opposes, as well as falling prey to extra biblical codes of righteousness. Beware Trinitas Church of your successes. looking at your career and your excesses there, your academic successes, or the well work that you have done with your friendships, your success in exercising, parenting well, or even Christian things. Beware of those things if they consume you to the exclusion of your mourning for sin. One of the most remarkable chapters of any book I have ever read was called The Art of Mourning, written by Richard Sibbes. It's based on a passage where King Josiah mourns at the false religion that prevailed in Israel. And God says that he would extend his life so that he would see peace because he had a heart tender to the reality of sin. Friends, we mourn for many things. Very seldom is it our sin. We mourn for those opportunities we miss. We mourn for perhaps a physical ailment or illness that very seldom do we mourn for sin. And I'm gonna tell you something, if you become consumed with your successes and lose sight of the reality of your sin, your confession about Jesus Christ will begin to dwindle. See this in the New Testament when a rich young man came to Jesus successful by every outward measure. It says, what good teacher, even that address, you're a good teacher teaching people to be good, I'm here to learn. What can I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus eventually tells him, you need to lay down everything at my feet. And he went away sad. Friends, Successes are things that we can celebrate, but never to the exclusion of our mourning for being a sinner. That confession of sin we have in this church is vital to your faith. It's vital to your daily life. And there's an exercise we have to be involved in. I don't know what you think when you see homeless people on the streets. I see them a lot out where I live. And lest I become calloused, I have to mentally say to myself, I am not so far from that person on the street. You changed my life in the tiniest little ways, and you give to me certain decisions, slightly different decisions. I'm not far, and neither are you. When you mourn manipulative politicians, you need to have it in your mind that you are not far. And if people could just put a magnifying glass over the way that you've manipulated others in your small sphere of influence, what a tyrant we would all be if we had some power. This is an exercise we must be engaged in. The fourth enemy to your profession of faith is sensuality, love of pleasure. See, when you love pleasure, first and foremost, it obscures what your biggest problems are. Your pleasures not only distract from Christ as having your main attention, but it also allows you to say to yourself, my big problem is I'm not happier when your biggest problem is you're a sinner. And it's a danger, my friends, to confuse those two problems. In fact, it creates an appetite for false Christs who will come preaching the good news that you can have all your pleasure, as opposed to a Christ who sets you free from the consequences of your sin. In the fall itself, we see an appeal to human sensuality and human appetites. It says that the woman saw that the fruit was good for food. And we've been doing it ever since. When Moses ascends to Mount Sinai, it says that the people below make an idol. They want something they can see with their senses. And it says, then the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play, engage in false worship. The New Testament warnings go like this, but false prophets also arose among the people of Israel. It's an allusion to the golden calf incident and beyond. Just as there will also be false teachers among you, many will follow their sensuality. And these false teachers entice by fleshly desires, by sensuality, promising them freedom while they themselves are slaves of corruption. Today there's the false gospel of prosperity. That Jesus came to bring you in this life unimaginable wealth, success, material possession, recognition, and physical health. And if you don't have those things, it's because you don't exercise a bold and big enough faith. There is the gospel, and it's one of the biggest religions in America today, biggest cults of sexual liberation. It's in every mainline denomination of Christianity, and it says, ultimate happiness will come to you in embracing your sexual appetites, your gender identity. This is where salvation lies. They're new age Jesuses. And there are cults of all kinds that will help you dabble in the occult, in mind-altering drugs, and call it Christian. It happens that over this December, as I was going into Christmas week, and I had three sermons to write, I was in my cafe house, and I'll be honest with you guys. I tell a lot of stories about sharing the faith. I don't always feel like it. I really don't. And this particular Tuesday, I didn't feel like it. It was my birthday the next week, so I was gonna be out of town one night, and then had multiple sermons over Christmas week. So I was getting busy on my sermon. But it happens that they were sitting across from me in this sofa seat, a couple. And I hear the fellow begin to speak, and they were clearly together in some sort of dating relationship. And he says very confidently to the young lady, you know, a lot of people think that Satan and God are enemies, but Satan really just, he works for God. He's kind of like doing a sting operation. It's like you got the good angels who they're the good cop, and Satan's like the bad cop, and they're just, they're both working for God. It's God most high, and he's in charge. Okay, so I'm a bit agitated when I hear this. And I'm like, you know, broadly speaking, you know, there's some truth to the fact that the Lord governs everything and everyone. He's working through the bad players and the good players, but Satan really is his adversary. So I'm like, you know, these guys are on a date or something. I'm just, I'm gonna let this slide. So I just get back to work. And then he says this. You know, a lot of people believe that the Bible says you're not supposed to, you know, sleep together outside of marriage. No, no, no, no, no. The seventh commandment is just about adultery. So you're not supposed to do what David did where you know how he slept with Bathsheba and then killed the husband and everything. That's the thing that Jesus is against. Now I can tell what's going on here. Some sort of angle is getting worked and I had to embrace that I am here providentially to contradict this thing. I interject myself into the conversation fully expecting for there to be a bit of a bout here ahead. And I said, you know, actually, I mean, Seventh Commandment isn't all we got. You know, it says don't commit adultery. And they go into expounding the entire biblical doctrine of sexuality. And, you know, I probably, you know, went at it pretty hard pretty quick. And at that moment, the guy's like, whoa, this guy really knows his stuff. And so, then I address the whole Satan thing, and you know, I'm explaining it all. I can tell that the girl is very relieved, and I appreciated that, because it's just like, you know, she had her defenses up already. But you know what? At the end of that, they actually thanked me for talking with them. This isn't how it usually goes. Especially with topics like this one. But see, you see what the man was speaking and peddling. It was a Christianity that appeals to the flesh and says you can do whatever you feel like except the really bad sins. Happened to be around Christmas time and I was like, guy, the whole reason that it says that Joseph was a particularly righteous man is that it says that he put Mary aside when she was pregnant to protect her from shame. To protect her from shame, it was understood that to sleep with someone outside of marriage was an embarrassing thing at the time, much less to get pregnant. And the thought was, he was looking out for her. They both understood. Friends, I need you to know that you cannot worship Jesus second to your appetites and end up with the biblical Jesus. You end up with a false one. You end up with a false one. There's another way you can fall prey to this young men who love theology. I've seen it a hundred times. You don't think of this as sensuality. But there is this profile for a young man who discovers Calvinism, discovers post-millennialism, discovers presuppositionalism. If you don't even know what those words mean, it's okay. And they're always finding new ideas. And it's exciting to learn a new thing, but I'm gonna tell you something, there comes a point where you can't be learning a new, big, true theological idea every week, and if you just love learning new things, you're gonna learn yourself new things straight into heresy and outside of Christianity. You all know the picture of the person who's in love with being in love, excited about falling in love, and is never really in love with anybody. You can do that with your faith. There is a complacency to use the language of theologians that you have when you rest in Christ. It doesn't mean you don't pursue righteousness, it means that you have the truth and you know Him. The last thing I'm gonna tell you is this, your battle for your profession of faith in Christ, it will be beset by laziness. See, this actually comes from the gospel sometimes, when you know that your justification is whole and complete in Jesus Christ, and you have no appetite for the battle of sanctification and conforming our actions and character to that of Christ. Man, there's something so, so monstrous about learning but never doing. In fact, the wider the gap between your learning and your doing, the more monstrous and hypocritical all your learning is. James, the brother of Jesus, put it this way, for if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror, for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was. There's this danger. Trinitas Church, When the epistle of the Hebrews says to these Jewish Christians, so it would seem, who are lapsing back into Judaism and leaving Jesus behind, when he says, don't forsake meeting together, hold fast to your profession of faith, he's alerting us to a problem that Christians encounter again and again and again. To really believe in the gospel, it will increase rather than minimize the importance of this life Jesus says it is the gift he gives to all believers to take up your cross and follow him. And what this means is that no labor in this life when committed to him is meaningless or in vain. And you await on the last day to just see how meaningful and how important it all really was. Jesus says to the degree that you did any number of kind deeds to one of the least of the saints, you did it to me. This is what we're looking forward to. And it renders our life utterly important. I would just challenge you, brothers and sisters, as you go into the coming year, to not neglect the basic means of grace that Christ has lain upon you. To gather, to give, to sing, to put up with one another, to gently correct one another, to go to the Word expecting jewels to be set before you in it. Friends, when you pursue the sanctification that Christ is laying upon us to pursue, and you see your failures, your appreciation for the free gift of justification in Christ will grow. As you pursue sanctification and experience victories, and you will experience victories, you'll appreciate the gift of God the Holy Spirit living and acting in you the more. And so my imperative to you believers is to keep the faith. Trinitas Presbyterian, keep the faith. Keep the faith and tend to the things that Jesus Christ has set before you. And if you're with us and you're an unbeliever, we implore you to embrace Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Consider the reality that to not embrace him is to embrace yourself, embrace your own righteousness, and you have more evidence than anyone in reality as to what a terrible savior of yourself you are. Run to Christ. Run to Christ. Embrace the imperative to answer the question, who do you say that I am? Bow your heads with me. Lord Jesus Christ, I do pray that as we go in to the coming year, the coming decade, Lord, as we look ahead scores of years, I pray that the brothers and sisters in this room would keep the faith. I pray that their guard would be up against self-righteousness and sensuality, that it would be up against laziness, that their guard would be up against conforming Jesus to worldly wisdom, that their guard would be up against allowing the burdens of this life to present themselves as our biggest problems rather than the problem that our sin poses in our relationship to you. Lord, I pray that you would give us a hunger and a thirst for righteousness, a hunger and a thirst for your scriptures, that we would know we are not fed by bread alone, Lord, I pray that we would carry on holding fast our profession of faith, not neglecting the gathering of ourselves together. In Jesus' name, amen.