The theme of the school, as you well know now, is for freedom Christ has set us free, and from Sunday evening through to now we've looked at different aspects of what that freedom means to us. We've talked about the freedom of God himself, a freedom in which he goes out as he intends to serve us, but free in himself and he serves us freely. We've spent time talking about what we're freed from, We've described in various ways the different tyrants, or sometimes called our enemies, that which include the devil and the world system and the conscience, freedom from those things, as well as from our guilt and the condemnation of the law and wrath. We've also spoken of the way in which that freedom is made clear and known to us and applied to us, if that's the right word to say, but applied to us or brought to us, Through the free Holy Spirit, where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. We haven't tackled that verse, but that's the way it is. So there is an exuberance and an effected freedom that comes to us. It is objective, that is, the freedom that God gives to us is bigger than our experience of it. And God is bigger than us. It's something that God has done in history, in Christ, and through the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is done, actually, whether you believe it or not. But in believing it, that actually becomes true for you, and the Holy Spirit brings that to you. And dramatic changes take place in that, so that you convert, and you're born again, and you begin to live in the freedom. Usually when that happens to us, we are exuberant. It is a joyful thing and it is the passage that someone, I think it was Jeff, read on Wednesday, that our hearts sang for joy as we were set free. What I have to say today connects with that and seeks to pull some of it together. It links in with what Ian said the other evening, so well, about his trip to the former Soviet Union, where he met with and preached to Christians who had all kinds of boundaries around their lives for all sorts of reasons, which had become some form of oppression to them. But Ian ministered to them. So I'm linking up with that. And it also follows on from what Ian has just said, that our true freedom is freedom to serve. But this one is love, free to be unfree. Now that's a wordy, kind of tricky sort of statement. I'll make it more tricky. Jeff Bingham said, true freedom is being free not to do what you are free to do. Let me say it again, write it down. True freedom is being free not to do what you are free to do. That's really what the title of this study means. I suspect the authors flogged it from there. So, let me illustrate that. from the summer school, and something of the rapture of the rediscovery or the first discovery that you are not condemned in any way, that you're not bound now by the condemnation of the law or by the law in a wrong way, that there's a peace come to your conscience and a joy. I mean, after last night, who could remain joyless? Even if you didn't want to, you had to be. So with that kind of power behind us, there you are, and our spirits soar. And guess what? Next Sunday, it's your turn to lead the worship. And you're going to tell them that you're free. And they're going to cop it. Is that true freedom? No. You are free to share your experience and new discovered freedom with your friends and with the congregation. But true freedom does not impose it on them. Tricky. But love. That's what Paul's talking about here. It's Romans 14. which comes after chapters 1 to 13. And as Noel was saying earlier this morning, in chapter 12 you find a whole new way of worship which contrasts with the false way of worshipping in chapter 1. And what Paul is talking about here is the new freedom that we actually have through Jesus Christ and are being justified from all our enemies. This is our true worship as a community. Now the passage says something like this, say I take verses 7 to 9, I think is one of the key keys to understanding the passage or living it. We do not live to ourselves and we do not die to ourselves, that's as Christians, within the family of God, as free people. If we live, we live to the Lord and if we die, we die to the Lord, so then whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living." What she's saying there, very briefly, we'll come back to it. These words, in Romans 14 and those in particular, are a way in which God is crying out HALT to all those who think their freedom is to actually do and impose their freedom on everybody else. He is calling it a halt to an attitude that we often use in the name of freedom. I am so filled with the Spirit and I am so free, no one is going to interfere with my freedom. As a pastor, I have confronted that, dealt with it and done it many times. It's quite destructive. What he's saying here in these last couple of verses I read to you is that in life and in death, both the strong person, that is the person who's very secured of their freedom and who knows their freedom, but also the weak Christian, the person who still has scruples, which we have to look at, all belong to the one Lord. To put it simply, I'm anticipating something down the end. We've talked here about being set free in Christ, that is, through God's unconditional love to us, his sheer goodness, he's justified us forever, through the atoning death of Jesus Christ. Are we justified or set free by our theological understanding of that? Are we set free by God because we have worked all that out in our head? was one good nodder here out of a couple of hundred, and you are correct. We are not set free by our doctrine of justification, you are set free by the Christ who justifies you. Do you get it? Otherwise, not one of us has got a hope. We all belong to the one Lord. Can anyone with the understanding of the unparalleled mercy of God in Christ set at naught another brother or sister within your congregation who has scruples or who's practicing a form of freedom that you don't get? Does our congregation then exclude all the Pharisees? I've wished them out at times, but nonetheless that is the way it is. No, not so. Not so, and it's very hard to work out at times just who the Pharisees are in this passage. Now he talks about those who are weak in faith. In 1 Corinthians, in another context, Paul talks about those who have a weak conscience. Those two things are parallel, but that's for a different reason. I'm not going to tackle that one. The weak in faith. You just look back at the text. Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of asking them a heap of questions. What do you mean you don't understand what I know? Come over here and I'll sort you. I've got something I've got to tell you after church. You need to come over here." And then the Inquisition starts. Like, here's a person who is here at this meeting, but they won't recognise it. I don't think I'm talking about that they may, but I remember their conversion. And they were so freed and so full of joy, that they could not sort of contain it, and they did live consistently with that. And as they stepped out of church one morning, the person there, who's a really top-notch tongue speaker, said, I've got to get you right. And she spent a lot of time with him, trying to get him right. Really, if you're free, yeah, but that's not quite right. You've got to get really free. So she quizzed him. Who was free there? That's a good question. So the weak in faith of those, you pick it up in verse 5 again, some judge one day better than another, while others judge all days the same. So in the context, it is primarily about what people eat and how they actually observe certain, what you could call, holy days. Let's see if I can context it now. to the present, without going through all the historical data that Paul had to deal with in the church at Rome, and maybe this passage is why all the rest of the stuff was first written, because the conflict is there. However, those who are weak in faith, who are Christian people, are those who sometimes seal sections of their lives off in order that they may serve God more wholeheartedly. So the vegetable eater in this passage is saying, I will not eat meat, I'll only eat vegetables because I'm so dedicated to God and I want to serve Him, I do not want to be distracted or in any way seduced, I'm going to stick to that dietary rule. They do it in order to serve God wholeheartedly. Historically in the life of the church, the Christian church, it would go something like this. And there's big chunks I'm leaving out, but so we can context it as to where we are today. In the history of the Christian church, such dedicated Christians Such dedicated Christians, I mean, I've been one of them. I had scruples when I first became a Christian about what you ate and drank. I was a Methodist. The Methodists had numbers of scruples. You were to be plainly dressed. You did not dance. You did not drink stuff that I drink now, when I'm not allowed to name. So, there it is. Scruples. But I see someone here today could already be offended because I said that. How could he, oh he's United Church, yeah well they do everything. Anyway, how could you actually say that? So historically these people often proved to be extremely dedicated and used by God. I've now got to correct something and get it clear. The word that the early church used referring to these people after the Bible was written was the word mono, m-o-n-o, mono. That is, Christians who sought to be alone, and who isolated themselves, and so later on were called monarchists, and they had to do with living in monasteries. And men, particularly men, and particularly in the second and third centuries, thousands and thousands of Christians lived in the deserts of Egypt. Not just a few, thousands did, and sought to live a monastic life, a life of celibacy, a life in which they renounced wealth, and a life in which they kept their lives in trim so that they could pray to God and actually serve Him effectively. So you've got Syrian, the great, I think it was Syrian, one minute, let me think, it might have been him. Oregon was one of the first great ones, but in Egypt it was Anthony, and I've read the history of these things because some of the folk from my congregation worked in Egypt and gave me the literature. I mean, let's take a couple, certainly in Egypt, but in the 5th century, one of the outstanding ones, was Simon of Stylites who lived in northern Assyria. And we joke about him. If you get a chance to read easy to read church history books, this series, it's a summary, it's not productive history, it's popularising history but making it readable. But this series by Lee Churchill, you can probably pick him up at Curon. In this area, the one on the birth of Europe, I read a lot about the monastic orders and in the other places, but Simon of Stylites was an extremely ascetic man, had scruples about eating food and punished his body in order to, I'm trying to put the best construction on it, to serve God. So he joined a monastery, it was extremely strict, but eventually in order to pursue that and to live out his life in dedication to God and in order to pray, he built a tower. And eventually that tower was 60 feet high, on which he lived with nothing else but his cape and a hood. And they took food up to him in a bucket. And from all over the countryside, not only Christians, but pagans would come to actually see him. He could see with his arms up, stretched like this in prayer. And they came to him for advice, and hundreds and hundreds of people converted to his ministry. So do not belittle him. Do not pass judgement on him, and many others like him. If we want to modernise it, you may see a bit of it in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, escaping to get to the city they're in. It's a lot of escaping. We can judge whether that's good or bad, but we've all read him for good. But that tendency's there. In the present day we find Christians who have consciences about numbers of things. Many of us have dietary habits which are connected now with our faith. What we eat and what we don't drink, what we don't eat, what we drink and what we don't drink. It's linked with certain forms of behaviour. Sometimes it's very cultural. Sometimes it changes from one group to another. It's often seen in the ways in which we set up a particular form of worship, which we think enables us to actually really serve God. And then it becomes, this is the way, you have to do it to serve God. Then it collects a number of rules about it, and many of those people in that situation do serve God, and are very effective. Many people have become Christians of those sort of groups. They have some problems later on, but nonetheless, that's where it may take place. They have certain activities they won't engage in because they think it's worldly. And so, you're hearing what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to actually put all that in a better light than sometimes we're given it. So, the weak in faith then, often believe they are strong because of their asceticism. And they can think that because they do that, they actually move closer to God and please Him. But they are people of faith. Every congregation has people like that. Some of us here still like it, and I'm not criticising you at all. With a children you understand yourself. We have it with dietary rules, health regulations, and sometimes very orthodox doctrinal formulations. As evangelicals, we are in great danger of doing that. If you don't fit our doctrine. Did you go to the new creation school? No. We did. Do you understand what we know? No. Well then boy, you may not be right and truly properly in. You do it indirectly usually, but sometimes directly. You can rush home from a summer school with a bag of books, some good news songs, and charge into your minister's study or meet him after church on Sunday and say, have you read this? And then pound him for the next month because you think he doesn't understand grace. In the process, kill him. I've met a number of ministers who have been killed by evangelicals. My job at the moment is sometimes sad the moment we do that. And vice versa, I meet people come out of us who do the same things to us. So I'm not taking sides. It helps us understand the scriptures. So the question sometimes you say to them, are you part of us? Do you come to our new creation system? Or some such thing. Now the strong in faith can be those who are very critical of the weak. I said can because not all strong in faith are, but there's a tendency for those who are strong in faith to be critical of those who are weak, that is of those who have those scruples. I have been one of them, probably still innately am. I can't stand pharisaism, and the Lord is actually dealing with me about it. I hope all duplicity and religious game-playing But not all the weak are in actual fact playing games. Many of them are very sincere people. I was serving God. Do you get what I'm trying to say? So here you've got this other, it talks about some believe that in eating anything and some judge one day is no better than another. I slavish scruple as a Christian minister in clear, I do not mow my lawns on a Sunday afternoon. The reason could be I would not want my neighbours to misunderstand what I'm doing. But technically I think I'm free to do it. But I choose not to. My neighbours are Catholics. Both sides, they're working on me. So here they are. The strong in faith can be very critical of the weak, and that's what's happening here. They understand what is being said at the school about freedom and the freedom that Christ has given them. Nevertheless, you can feel you're being held back in your Christian life by those people who are your friends or in your group who seem to be weak. Christian sanctified frustration which is not in the Bible. Here, strange as it may be, one commentator said, this passage is Paul speaking against all the Paulites. This is Paul speaking against all the Paulites. I belong to Paul. He's got it right. He understands true doctrine. He's got a brilliant mind. Don't you know what Paul knows? So they maintain their strength and don't want to have their strength contaminated by the poor doctrines of the weak. They are very critical of the Pharisees in their congregation. Their scruples about what foods are impure and what days should be sacred or obligations, whether you should wear robes in worship or not wear them, they regard all that as a matter of indifference. That's their freedom. Now, brothers and sisters, we cannot play off our knowledge against one another. Weak, weak is the strong person that allows him or herself to be pushed into a position where he judges others. Weak is that strong person. Who has authority to judge, Paul says? Not you, your weaker brother or your stronger sister stands before the Lord and he is able to make him or her stand and he will hold them up. How about that? If we're not faithful enough in our freedom to descend from the high place that we sometimes put ourselves in, in our own minds at least, our knowledge that we've actually gathered together and we've clambered up to this high place, take heed because you will crash with a loud ecclesiastical noise. Let me change it, you're all participating well, but let me say, we're very critical in judging each other. Some of you may have heard me tell this story once before. You see, there was this married couple, and the woman died. But this story's not the Bible. And this woman went, turned up at the pearly gates, and St Peter was there, and she said to him, what are you doing here? And he said, I'm here to check people out before I let them in. She said, oh, OK, what do I have to do? And he said, I want you to listen to Ian's study, I want you to spell for me the word love. She said L-O-V-E. Said that's all that's required, you can come in. She quite enjoyed it in heaven. Until Sir Peter came to one day and said, look I've got some long service leave coming, can you actually look after the gate for me while I'm away? And she said, sure. He said, do you know what to do, how to test them? She said, yes. So she was there just performing the tests and along came her husband. And he says, what are you doing here? She says, I've been put here by St Peter to test people before I let them in. She says to him, what have you been doing? He says, oh, since you died, I had a wonderful time. I've remarried, we've built a new house, we've got a boat and we're having a holiday in Europe." She said, what do I have to do? She said, spell Czechoslovakia. I told Geoffrey Bingham that story and he said to me, it's like that all the time, you don't have to wait till you get to heaven. The determining factor in this issue of the week and the stroll, in this context, is the judgement of God. Let me re-read the passage I read earlier. We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. For to this end Christ died and lived again, so that he might be Lord of both the dead and the living. Now, I went through that and went through it and thought, why is that paragraph even in there? And then I had to sort it out. And what it's really saying is something like this. Whether you are a weaker Christian who has certain scruples about whether you should go dancing, about whether you should wear bathers on the beach, or whether in actual fact you drink wine or you only drink lemonade, or whether you've got certain dietary laws that you think are consistent with the book of Leviticus and you should in some way follow those in order to be dedicated to God, or whether you have nothing to do with all that because you say, no, I'm free to actually engage in the whole of the creation, and it doesn't take me the cynicism for me to actually indicate my freedom and love to God. What Paul is saying here, whether you're strong or weak, each live our lives no longer for ourselves or to ourselves, but to God. Your life is not your own, it came from God in the first place. And there's no such thing as the way in which you live your life to yourself, You live your life only in relationship to God. Neither the weak or the strong is put into God's delight by abstinence or by drinking and enjoying a food. For both, there is no such thing as life itself, but only like a relationship to God and we do not, as it were, creep up to God through a kind of pampering piety factory. Both vegetable eaters and those who have no scruples face the barrier of death. Makes no difference whether you're Simon of Stilites Or were they a Martin Luther? Both face the barrier of death. This is because there is no such thing as death by itself. There is only death in relation to God. How about that? Both have the promise of resurrection through our Justifier, Jesus Christ. Therefore, The weak need to shrug off the suspicion that it's only by their activities of reform. I mean, the scrupled people are the great reformers. The scrupled people are the great reformers in many ways, socially and morally. But they have to shrug off the suspicion that it's by doing that that they will survive death. will not pass through death because they have no conscience about drinking beer, or working on Sunday, neither is self-justified. The judgment seat of Christ is where our lives are determined and the judge has assigned all our guilt onto his son, whether you're weak or strong. Neither the weak or the strong are in a position to judge. So judge not your brother or your sister. I suppose I have regarded myself as someone who is strong. I have no quibbles about dieting really. except in regard to what Rosin says I can and cannot eat. And so summer school is a great freedom. So what I did say is that when, if I approach A person who has a weaker conscience about these things, and when a person thinks it's morally wrong to do something that they now have scruples about, I will not help that person by rubbishing them about their scruples, or by giving them a lot of questions. I may, if I'm personable enough and persuasive enough, get them to understand that yeah, they could drink a glass of wine, but if their conscience is not being freed, in actual fact I will confuse them, and they'll become muddled headed, and if their conscience is in fact wrong to drink wine, and they drink wine, their conscience will condemn them, and I'll cause my brother to stumble. Do you get it? So it's no good attacking the person who's not free. So I learnt this in many ways from watching Jeff Bingham at it, and then I tried to do it as a pastor in my previous congregation, where many people used to come to our congregation who, what we would call, were quite legalistic. They had all kinds of hang-ups. The way to help them is not to attack the kind of things they're doing, or to rubbish them. Occasionally I did, but not too much. So there's a place for good humour, but there's another place where you can seriously affect them and you put them, you engulf them in a precarious problem so the freedom of which the person stands before God can in fact, that person's freedom can be disturbed by your free behaviour. He also says that those who have got scruples should not judge those who don't have the scruples. So, let me start to draw it together. I need to say something before I do that, which is in addition to what I've prepared. I've thought now for the last few years that many of the problems we have in our congregations come because when we go to such and such a church or congregation, we go to that congregation with an image in our mind of what we think Christian communities should be. And we've picked up that image of what Christian communities should be, not from the church or from the Bible, but from a provost meeting or belonging to a service club. Now those service clubs and provosts are fine groups, so I'm not criticising them in any way. I would like to belong to one of them myself. And so the people who go to provosts often used to say to me, we don't have anywhere near as many fights and provosts as you have at church. And I said to them one day, that's because you don't have to deal with the God factor. Because when God speaks to his people, his people react in different ways. And the gospel not only brings the best out of us, it also has brought the worst out of you. And so there's biblical grounds for saying in some instances there is more sin in the church than there is in the world. So remove your image and understand that God's free people are made up of people like you, who have not got your act together, and all the other people who are on various forms of understanding that. And Paul is saying to both the strong and the feeble, people who have got a good understanding and a maturity about what that means, as well as others who are battling and struggling and don't understand that, or are very secure in actually holding on to their scruples. Don't do it that way. Don't have any images, Paul John says. So don't come to a congregation with images. Regard it, this is the community of God and it's made up of forgiven and justified and freed sinners, but are still having to do all the battles that we've talked about and other speakers have told us that we have to do with ourselves. And sometimes our stuff spills over. And it needs the brothers and sisters to bring us back into line and to encourage us and sometimes to tell us off. P. G. Forsyth, in his book on the power of positive preaching in the modern mind, has a very good paragraph on one spot. And that is, he says, that love and consideration for the weak does not give the weak the right to set up a claim which governs and controls the church. See, in this passage Paul himself says, In the midst of this discussion, I am persuaded in the law, Jesus, that there is nothing unclean in itself. But it is unclean for anyone who thinks it's unclean. It's a rather beautiful statement. But there is nothing unclean in itself, but some people think it's unclean, but you can't leave people in their weakness as if you're a pastor or ministering in a church. But you don't attack them. How would you put it? You do not help the weak or a congregation by letting the weak gain control of the congregation, or by overweening the weak. Forsyth says in effect, grace cannot be inverted into a right that makes demands as a right, that Paul says is a grace. So you cannot use your scruples as being a teetotaler to use that as a right which you throw on the whole church and the whole church itself has to become teetotaler because you have a conscience about it. You are right not to drink and free not to, so don't make up your conscience by drinking. But don't then by that basis say that's my right and I've got a moral authority to say the whole church will come to my point of view. No. Forsyth says we need to shift the focus in the congregation from poultry things. Dear, dear, poultry things. He says in his time, in his time, which was in the early part, the later part of the 1800s and the beginning of the 1900s, he said congregations had more arguments about whether their minister could smoke a cigar or not. Not much different today. Can you be a Christian and smoke? Think that out. Is it good for you? Right, well you're clear on that one, you've been listening to it on TV. See, all of us, weak and strong, are impure before God. We've seen that. And all notions about particular impurities, such as food or alcohol, See, in the New Testament Paul says, to the pure all things are pure, but to the impure nothing is pure. God has created everything created by God, everything, repeat, repeat and repeat, everything, without exception, everything created by God is good and nothing is to be rejected if it is received by prayer and thanksgiving. It is then sanctified. Luther says, As we sit here drinking this glass of ale, the word of God goes out throughout the land. Sanctified booze. I think I'd better stop this study. To go back to it, if we see ourselves as impure before God, then all notions of our particularised impurities stem from maintaining secret or even open illusions. What needs to happen is for the same determination to be used by the weak to maintain his or her disgust, which they use to maintain their particular disgust, at particular impurities, That disgust needs to be placed where it belongs, where Paul says, to the pure all things are pure, to the impure nothing is pure. That's where you need to focus it. The weak need to do that. And the teaching that we've had at a school like this is, in a way, to enable us to grow up in that. Now, love counts others better than ourselves. That's what Ian was saying because it ties in with what I'm saying. So to come back to what I said at the beginning, if you're leaving for service on a Sunday morning, do you pick all the songs that you're going to throw at the congregation because they are your favourites? Or do you count other people better than yourselves and you pick the songs that you believe will be most beneficial and helpful to them? That's the test. Is it me and mine and what I want today? I get my chance to tell the church what I'm about? Or is it your chance to leave the church with the gifts that Christ has given to you, and in love you serve the congregation and you count others better than yourself, so it's not an ego trip, so you introduce, yeah sure, new songs, and the one song might be one you love, but everything you pick and the way you do it is for the good and the well-being of all those who have not yet sung anything in which you clap your hands. You're not in the flesh, brothers and sisters. You are in the Spirit. If the sun has set you free, you are free indeed. Well if you want to be a true human being and not some wraith, then fear God and keep his commandments. You've been born again for that. And everything else is empty. How should we relate to each other? Well, love works itself out through serving one another. Read Galatians 5, verses 13 and 14. So what of the battle we're going through now? Are we not really free? We think, oh, if only I could be free of that. No, you're free in that. One man once said, we don't have rest from the wrestling, we have rest in the wrestling. That's where the true peace is known. The sufferings we experience now are real and they are painful, but I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. So right now I believe what Christ has done and move out into that, and I will walk at liberty, for I have sought your precepts. This is putting it very simply. Do you want to enjoy freedom in Christ? Then do what he tells you. I could have saved the whole study if I'd said that, couldn't I? Just do what he tells you. He's set you free. And we will walk at liberty when we seek his precepts. Because the whole of the just requirements of the law have been fulfilled in us. And we'll never know the joy of that until we move out in faith and obedience, we will walk at liberty. So let us learn how to stir one another up to love and good works. And all the more as we see the day drawing near. You read Hebrews chapter 10 verses 22, 23 and 24. Paul says, let us do this, let us do this, let us do this. We're moving on towards a great goal. So come on, let's do it together. I find it difficult because I'm in a battle, so I need you to stir me up to love and good works, and you need me to stir you up to love and good works. That's why God's put us in the family of God. But that's what it is to be free. His service is perfect freedom. In the battle, He fell out of the tree and he went home with Jesus. And when he repented, he took total responsibility for his sins. Repentance is such a wonderful gift that God gives and wants to give to you. A few weeks ago, I stood at the grave of St. Patrick in Northern Ireland. St. Patrick, all I knew about St. Patrick was green and getting drunk. I tried a pint of Guinness and I didn't like it. Oh sorry, I should have said that. And there was an exhibition, there's an exhibition in Northern Ireland about St. Patrick, it's a wonderful exhibition. a museum type, and you walk in, you stand on a spot, and they give you a video, or you hear something said. And the first thing that is being said in this exhibition is, you hear the voice of St. Patrick, well, sort of, and he said, I am a sinner. And then he tells the story of his conversion. Zacchaeus stood up and made a big announcement, half his goods to the poor, and he paid back four times the amount he had fraudulently obtained from people. This was far more than the law of Moses ordered. You give back the amount plus twenty percent. So he gave half away to the poor and four times. Guess what? How much did he have left? Do you think how much he had left? Nothing. He was rich. No longer. He got rid of what was closest to his heart, his riches. Jesus had set him free. I'm not telling you tonight to give away your riches, but I am telling you tonight to repent. He had become a true son of Abraham because of the son of man. A true son of Abraham is a blessed person. A true son of Abraham, or a daughter of Abraham, is a person of faith. He is a righteous man. His name, the righteous man, had become true. Jesus said, today salvation has come to this house. He is a true son of Abraham. Here is a blessed man. Here is a man of faith. Here is a man who is righteous. Here is a man who is clean. Here is a man who has been forgiven. Here is a man who repented and received from God all that God had to give to him. in God is trust in the God who seeks us. We are saved because He has sought us in our lostness. So today, call upon the name of the Lord. Today, Jesus says to you, if you do not know, and if you are not a son or daughter of Abraham, Jesus says right now to you, today, hurry! Say yes, let Him grab your heart. Zach came down from the tree. And Jesus went up the tree to die for Zacchaeus. It's so that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law, Gentiles, well, I became as one outside the law. Doesn't matter, because the law of God is over all of humanity. See, I'm not free from God's law, of course. He says, I'm under Christ's law, the law of the true humanity. So of course I'm going to serve him. And of course I'm going to love, because that's what it's all about. I want to see these people come to the same freedom that I know. So to the weak I become weak, that I might win the weak. I become all things to all people, that I might by all means save some. And I do it all for the sake of the gospel. so that I may share its blessings. Here is a man who knew the power of anger because of his failure, and because of the failure of others, to become a man who said, I now know what love is, because strong, strong love has conquered me. But the love that has conquered me is not something mystical, It's the law of Christ, the man. Who are you, Lord? I'm Jesus, whom you crucified. That's the love. There is love in the creation. There is law. And it's come to me and washed me clean. And it's no longer I who live. I'm in that man, and he's in me. I don't need to apply that, do I? No. God is faithful, and his mercy that came to Saul is the mercy that's come to us, and keeps coming. And the love of God which is shed abroad in our hearts wasn't just a once for all thing back then, But it still flows because Christ hasn't stopped loving and the Father hasn't stopped loving.