Freedom!

 Do you ever have the experience of reading a passage of scripture and you go, “Ok, that’s nice, but what does that have to do with me?”

Exodus 21:2-4 says, “If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything. If he comes alone, he is to go free alone, but if he has a wife when he comes, she is to go with him. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.”

Now, I am not a Hebrew servant and I don’t intent to buy any Hebrew servants. So, I didn’t see that this passage had any meaning to me.

Then I noticed one word in this passage and it changed my thinking about it having no meaning for me. The word is free.

John tells us two essential things about being free in John chapter eight.

Verses 31 and 32 says, “So Jesus said to the Jesus who had believed Him, ‘If you abide in My word, you are truly My disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.’”

Jesus says that it is His word that sets us free.

A disciple is someone who sits under the teaching and the authority of another. So, listen to what Jesus is saying. If we sit under Jesus’ teaching, listen to what He says and believe, we will know the truth and that truth will set us free.

Then in verse 36 Jesus says, that if the Son sets you free, you are free indeed.

We are told in culture that many things will set you free. The truth is none of those things will set you free. In fact, those very things that offer us freedom really makes slaves to them. Jesus promises that He will free us and He is always faithful to do what He says He will do.

Why did Jesus have to free us?

Because of what Paul shares with us in Romans 6:20-21. “For when you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. But what fruit were you getting at that time from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death.”

Why did Jesus have to free us? Because we were slaves to sin and that brought shame to us in our earthly life and death to us spiritually. Jesus loves us and does not want us to live in shame and to die spiritually.

The only way to be free is for Jesus to free us, so He did.

How did Jesus free us?

Colossians 2:13-15 says, “When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; He has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”

Jesus freed us by His death on the cross.

According to what Paul writes in Colossians, Jesus:

Forgave our sins – He freed us from the penalty

Canceled our legal indebtedness – He freed us from what we owed

because of our sin

Overcame our condemnation – He freed us from God’s wrath and turned it

          into God’s favor

Disarmed the powers and authorities – He freed us from the power of

          Satan        

We needed to be free and Jesus did it. He did it because above all else, God loves us.

Jesus wants us free to know Him.

Jesus wants us free to experience His love.

Jesus wants us free us to experience His blessings in our lives.

In Matthew 11:28-30 Jesus says, “Come to Me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and lean from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and My burden is light.”

Jesus intentionally invites us if we are weary and burdened to come to Him so that by being yoked or connected to Him we will find rest (be freed to rest in Jesus).

Freedom comes from:

Acknowledging that we are slaves

Turning to the one who can free us – Jesus

Believing that He has freed us

Living in that freedom

So, when a passage in Exodus about freeing Hebrews servants seems not to have anything to do with me or you, the truth is that it does. It does because the Christ has come and by His grace provides freedom for us and offers it to us.

In the Freedom of Jesus, Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls,

                                                   Joe

God Simplifies

There is a spiritual principle that I have known and believed for years. It is that God simplifies and man complicates. This spiritual principle is one that has kept me from trying to make things too complex or complicated. It has also freed me up to simplify my life and help others do the same.

A great example of this is the law that God gave the people of Israel through Moses.

In Exodus 20:1-17 God gives Moses the Ten Commandments. Many people think that was the whole law. The truth is that the law given to Moses by God had over six hundred separate commandments. God summarized those six hundred commandments into ten. Of those ten, four deal with our relationship to God and six deal with our relationship to other humans.

During the years of exile of God’s people in Babylon, the group known in the New Testament as the Pharisees developed. They took the six hundred commandments and decided to interpret them. In interpreting them, they actually expanded them to over three thousand commandments.

Now, I don’t know about you, but to try to remember let alone obey over three thousand commandments is not going to happen. I can’t do that with six hundred commandments. Now, ten commandments are much more doable, but still a stretch.

The law became the focus of God’s people. They began to see the law as an end in itself and not as a means to lead them to the Giver of the law – God.

For decades the people were taught the way to reach God was through obeying the law. The problem was that no one could obey the law perfectly. The fact that there were over three thousand commandments complicated the matter.

The law was given for three reasons:

To reveal to us the character of God

To reveal to us the standards that we are to live by

To reveal to us that we cannot by human effort obey the law

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is allowing God to use the law in our lives for the purpose for which He gave it.

Jesus comes into the world and proclaims a gospel based in grace, not the law.

One way that Jesus does this is by simplifying the three thousand commands. He doesn’t simplify to six hundred or even ten, but to two.

Mark 12:30-31

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.

When Matthew records this saying of Jesus, he adds at the end, “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

If we love God with all that we are and we love our neighbor as ourselves, we have fulfilled all the law.

Now, I can remember two commands: love God and love other people.

I can remember them but I still have the problem of not being able to do that all the time in my own human effort.

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is not depending on the law to deliver us and makes us right with God.

Paul expresses that same frustration in Romans 7 where he says that the things he wants to do he can’t and the things he does not want to do he finds himself doing.

In the last verse of Romans 7, verse 25, Paul says, “Thanks be to God, who delivered me through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

Jesus is who delivered Paul from the frustration of wanting to obey God but not having the ability to do it.

Jesus does this by dying for our sin on the cross and then sending His Sprit to indwell us with the resurrected life of Jesus.

Paul tells us in Galatians 2:20 that he had been crucified with Jesus and it was not him living but Jesus living in him and that the life he lived was lived by faith in Jesus.

The law inside is good and holy because it is from God.

The law was never intended to be what saves us and makes us righteous.

Grace through faith saves us and gives us the righteous of Jesus.

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is depending on grace to save us and make us righteous.

Jesus simplifies the law in two commandments and then sends the Holy Spirit to empower us to obey those two commandments.

Nothing could be simpler. It is not easy, but it is simple.

Simply Through Jesus, Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls,

                                                     Joe

Jesus is the Rock

Exodus 17:1-7

The whole Israelite community set out from the Desert of Sin, traveling from place to place as the Lord commanded. They camped at Rephidim, but there was no water for the people to drink. So, they quarreled with Moses and said, “Give us water to drink.” Moses replied, “Why do you quarrel with me? Why do you put the Lord to the test?” But the people were thirsty for water there, and they grumbled against Moses. They said, “Why did you bring us up out of Egypt to make us and our children and livestock die of thirst?” Then Moses cried out to the Lord, “What am I to do with these people? They are almost ready to stone me.” The Lord answered Moses, “Go out in front of the people. Take with you some the elders of Israel and take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will stand there before you by the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it for the people to drink.” So Moses did this in the sight of the elders of Israel. And he called the place Massah and Meribah because the Israelites quarreled and because they tested the Lord saying, “Is the Lord among us or not?”

Water is essential for life. In the desert, water is limited and if you are going to travel in the desert, you have to know where the water is.

The people of Israel are in the desert and they are out of water. They began to grumble against Moses and against God.

God tells Moses to take his staff and go and strike the rock at Horeb. God will make water come out of the rock when Moses strikes it.

Moses did as God commanded him and water came of the rock when Moses struck it.

In Matthew 16 Jesus takes His disciples to Caesarea Philippi. He asks them who the people say that He, Jesus, is. They tell Jesus what the people are saying about Him. Then Jesus asks them who they say He is. Peter says, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then says, “And I tell you that you are Peter and, on this rock, I will build My church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.”

Jesus is saying that the confession that Peter makes, that He, Jesus, is the Messiah, the Son of the Living God, is the rock on which He will build the church.

In Matthew 7 Jesus tells a parable about two men who build houses. One built his house on sand and the other built his house on a rock. When a storm came, the house build on sand was destroyed and the house built on the rock stood through the storm.

In Romans 9:33, Paul identities Jesus as the rock of offense; that if we believe in Him, we will not be put to shame.

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is experiencing Jesus as our Rock.

When we experience Jesus as our Rock, we will experience:

Protection and Deliverance and Salvation – Psalm 18:2

Redemption – Psalm 19:14

Guidance – Psalm 31:3

Security – Psalm 40:2

Stability – Psalm 62:6

God’s Glory and Might – Psalm 62:7

Righteousness – Psalm 92:15

The Equipping of the Lord – Psalm 144:1

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is letting Jesus as our Rock enable us to follow and be used by Him.

In John 4 Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at the well at Sychar. Jesus asked the woman for a drink of water. The woman was amazed that Jesus, a Jewish male, would ask her, a Samaritan woman, for a drink.

In John 4:10 Jesus says, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked Him and He would have given you living water.”

The woman is confused about where Jesus could possibly get any water, let alone living water.

In John 4:13-14 Jesus says, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks the water I give will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is receiving living water.

Not only will we receive living water but living water will well up inside us.

1 Corinthians 10:1-4

For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them, and that rock was Christ.

Jesus is the Rock.

The living water that comes from the Rock is our salvation.

God instructed Moses to strike the rock and out came water to save the Israelites.

Jesus was struck and out came blood and that blood brought salvation to all people.

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is experience Jesus as our Savior and receiving salvation from Him.

Just as the rock that Moses struck which produced water is through grace, so Jesus’ death for sin that produced our salvation is through grace.

With the Rock, Raising the Roof and Removing Walls,

Joe

Jesus is Our Bread

The reality in our relationship with God is that He always gives us more than what we deserve. In giving us more than we deserve, what He gives us is Himself.

Exodus 16:1-4

The whole Israelite community set out from Elim and came to the Desert of Sin, which is between Eli and Sinai on the fifteen day of the second month after they had come out of Egypt. In the desert the whole community grumbled against Moses and Aaron. The Israelites said to them, “If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat around pots of meat and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert to starve this entire assembly to death.” Then the Lord said to Moses, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you. The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day. In this way I will test them and see whether they will follow My instructions.”

When the Israelites grumbled against God and His anointed leadership, God did not destroy them or even punish them. He provided what they needed: bread.

God fed His people with bread from heaven. The act of grace was magnified by the fact that God’s people were filled with complaints against God and blaming the leadership that God had provided and He had appointed. They foolishly longed for the days of slavery in Egypt, where they remembered eating pots of meat and all the food they wanted. But they forgot that they lived in slavery.

Now they feared they would stave to death in the wilderness. They were only recently removed from God miraculously delivering them at the Red Sea. This same people who sang and danced to this great victory that God had won now blamed God and mourned their seemingly dire circumstances.

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is trusting God in the midst of confusing circumstances.

God now faithfully feeds His faithless children. God’s motive for providing this food is clear – He wanted His people to see His provision for them and to see His power and remember that He was working on their behalf. Each day, they awakened to fresh evidence of God’s gracious generosity.

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is looking to and trusting God for our daily provision.

This blessing was personal. It was not just to the nation as a whole but to each person and family in the nation.

Just as Jesus didn’t die for humanity as a whole but for each of us as individuals.

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is experiencing the gracious provision of God individually.

Jesus compared His mission on earth to the providing of the heavenly bread called manna. After demonstrating His miraculous power by feeding 5,000 on a hillside and walking on water, Jesus describes Himself as the Bread of Life in John 6:35.

Those who know Jesus discover a source of spiritual nourishment far greater than any physical food can provide. Jesus satisfies the cravings of all those longing for a source of satisfaction in life and hope in the life to come.

Like manna in the wilderness, Jesus provides food for the hungry soul. His provision is sufficient to meet the needs of all those who, by faith, feast on Him. In John 6:53-54 Jesus uses very shocking imagery to communicate the truth that whoever eats His flesh and drinks His blood will have eternal life. Many, upon hearing these words, turned back and no longer followed Jesus.

Raise the Roof and Removing the Walls is trusting in the life and death of Jesus to save us.

On the night Jesus was betrayed, Jesus would show the significance of His words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood. He would break a loaf of bread in the upper room with the Twelve. He would say that this broken loaf of bread represented His body that would soon be broken for our sin.

Jesus told His disciples that every time they ate this broken bread they were to remember His body given for their sin.

Raise the Roof and Remove the Walls is experiencing the grace of God through Jesus as our atoning sacrifice. 

In John 6:35 Jesus says, “I am the Bread of Life.”

Jesus is what brings real satisfaction into our lives.

Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls is finding our true satisfaction in feasting on Jesus and His Word.

The world is looking to many things to bring satisfaction and none of those things will be lasting satisfaction. The things other than Jesus that we look to bring satisfaction will disappoint us and leave us empty. Jesus will fill us and satisfy us and never leave us empty.

With Jesus as the Bread of Life, Raising the Roof and Removing the Walls,

                                                 Joe