Commitment & Choosing to Yield to our Heavenly Father

Christ's name. It's good to be with you this morning in worshiping together around Jesus, who is the reason we sing, the reason we have purpose in life, and all of that.

I guess we're going to have more of the same lesson that we've been already having, so we're going to be looking in Romans chapter 6. So I guess the Lord knew we needed it. I didn't know where you were studying, but some things that the Lord seemed to bring to me, some things that I needed to learn, and so hopefully it'll just be a little bit of a different dimension, fill in a little more, maybe another brick or two in the wall or something like that. So as I was thinking about this and being here with you all, just last week Kathy and I celebrated 24 years of marriage, and that happened right here. And if I remember correctly, I think our wedding was the first wedding in this building.

I think I'm right on that. Am I right on that, Marvin? I'm not sure. Well, '99. I think I'm right on that. I think our wedding was the first wedding in your new building here, so 24 years ago. 24 years goes quickly, and it doesn't take very long, and here we are. And I thanked Kathy the other day. I said, "Thank you for being a faithful wife." And she said, "Well," she said, "I chose my love, and I love my choice."

And I thanked her for that commitment in a relationship. We haven't always got things done completely right always, but we're glad for the Lord and He's leading us along, and as we surrender to Him, we just rejoice in what He has done for us, giving us a beautiful relationship and family.

So the last time I was here, I talked a little bit about from the verse, Psalms 16:11, it talks about in God's presence is fullness of joy and how we get into His presence and how we live in His house and some of the principles there. As we now, I kind of want to think about in light of Romans chapter 6, our part. God has done His part in preparing opportunity for us. We heard that all this morning, opening up the opportunity to be redeemed, to have power within, to live right, to have righteous relationships, and that I don't think needs more explanation necessarily. That was well explained this morning, but we'll mention it a little bit.

So my thoughts this morning is down the line of commitment and choosing to yield to our Heavenly Father. Yielding has the idea of surrender to a greater power, to a greater authority. When you're getting on the highway and you come up the on-ramp, there's a yielding that has to happen with the traffic that's on the main road.

I guess pretty hairy sometimes depending which ramp you're using. Some of them have nice long ramps, and you can merge real well, and some of them have real short, and boy, you got to be snappy with it. But there's a yielding that happens there, and commitment has the idea of a predetermined disposition of where I'm going.

It's not something that I just make up always at the spur of the moment. Commitment could be explained as a flywheel in like a baler or a machine has a flywheel on the crankshaft that takes the bumps, helps that engine run smooth. It keeps, instead of just jerking and yanking around, it helps keep that, it's a big weight on the crankshaft somewhere that just helps keep that machine running smooth and moving forward.

So those are some of the thoughts that I want to think about, and I really appreciated the message or the meditation that Dallas shared with us from Ephesians there about Christ and then our part. So I'm kind of more focusing on our part here this morning.

How do we respond to what God has done? What is our commitment? And Dallas shared with us, it says, "Put off the old conversation and be renewed." So there's a choice, and that was already mentioned this morning.

There's a story of Ernest Shackleton that did an exposition to the North Country in a ship looking for a passage through the North Country by ship, and they got stuck in the Sea of Weddell in the ice, and the ship was crushed, and they were not going to be saved other than if he went for help. And so he went on an 800-mile treacherous journey south to find the South Georgia Island using only a map and only a sextant, and 800 miles across rugged, treacherous land. And if his navigator would have been off one degree, they would have missed that island and been hopelessly lost at sea.

And I thought about that in our Christian life. Where's our center? Where are we taking our cues from? Where are we taking our positions from and where are we going to make decisions from? A sextant is one that a machine or a little tool where you use a star and then the horizon to get your positions, and you can, I believe it's called maybe dead reckoning, but they use known sources to find their position, and by doing that, they were able to find this island, and all of his men, if I remember right, were saved.

But it's because they trusted that instrument and they knew it was right that took them through a lot of treacherous journeys, rugged, cold situations. That was very, very barren situations.

So my passion this morning is to help us to know where we anchor our lives and where we go through because our bodies, like I was already said this morning, have a lot of passions. We experience a lot of hurts from sin in lots of ways. We have unfulfilled expectations in a lot of these things that just really pound in our hearts and our minds and want to take us away in this way and that way and take us away into sin.

I've been impressed as we relate one to another.

The passion of Jesus Christ was that we would have restored relationships.

Too many of us like honeymoon relationships where everything's all nice, but you ever think about it, God doesn't want that. He wants restored relationships. So let's take up the mantle and forgive when we need to forgive and love even when it hurts and all these different things. We'll look at them, but choosing to walk with the Lord in spite of what our flesh is feeling.

Another story that got me thinking down this road was from The World magazine, and it seems to be where our world is. This couple had a son, and they were Christian, evangelical, and they had a son that had homosexual feelings and leanings, and this distressed them greatly, and they prayed. It said they prayed for years that God would deliver their son, and at the end of these years, their son was not delivered. Their son's feelings did not change, and the parents then decided that they were the ones that were wrong, and because God did not deliver their son, he must be saying that homosexuality is okay.

And it may not be the best choice, but apparently they said God still was accepting their son for who he was, and they would still consider him a Christian, and so they embraced his idea and were soon shopping for a church that supports their ideas.

They changed their definition of Christianity to fit their situation, and I wonder how did that happen? Where was the commitment?

That's a huge flip.

And so I think about this. So a couple of things I think about before we go to Romans 6 is many people seem to be looking for God just simply to do something for them. They want God to really change their situation and do something big. Many people are blaming God for the failures in their lives, and when it doesn't happen the way they expect it should happen, then they say God must not be real.

They question His word, and they reinvent truth, and this loss of trust in the Father is often caused by these unfulfilled expectations. They said God should have reached down and just healed this boy, and it should have all been good, but it didn't happen that way, so their expectations were very twisted, were just jilted.

Another reason that we get off path on this thing is a power struggle between God and myself. I'm not okay to surrender to God, and we see that in the story of the parable, the parable of Jesus said about the talents where two men, he gave three men in the kingdom. They were His servants. Talents to work with and to do things and to prosper in His kingdom. Two of them were happy to be in His kingdom. Two of them were happy to be under His lordship, and the other one said, "No, I can't do that.

I don't want to work for Him because He's just living off of what other people do." He blamed God for being a hard man, and he wasn't willing to surrender and happy to work in God's house and yield to that.

So

a kind of person, this kind of person is an unfaithful person who says, "No, I can't trust you. I won't agree to your authority," who cannot be trusted in any responsibility. We have hurtful situations ruining trust as well in God where we're jilted. Maybe we're blamed for something, and we have hurts, and we also have situations where we ask the question, "Why?" and there's no answers for the question, "Why?"

And so a lot of people right there will become disappointed in God and turn away. And it also says in Matthew 24:10 to 12, it says that the love of many will grow cold because of iniquity. There's this lawless living. I want to be a law to myself. I want to love myself.

Men become laws to themselves, and I believe it was said already that they begin to live by what they feel, what they experience, and what seems right to them in the moment. So humanity is awash in relativity. We are living more and more in this Romans 1 scenario where people do not even appreciate that God is even there. In our scientific understanding, where we think we can explain everything by science, we don't even appreciate that God's even there in a general way, in a general society.

And so God says, a sad state of that situation is that God does give them over to their own thinking and to their reprobate mind, and they were not thankful to God that He is the creator of all this.

Many people are refusing to do their part to bring right perspective in in in their life. God has done everything needed for man to be redeemed and to have redeemed relationships, but many people are not going through with yielding to God, yielding to His ways, yielding to His plans for their lives, yielding to His goodness, and so therefore they believe and they make decisions out of the passions of their flesh, out of the emotions of their soul, and out of their circumstances that they that they interpret on their own doing.

All right, so let's turn to Romans 6 again, and we'll take some thoughts from there.

So I guess I'll just read it again. You've heard it already, but I'll read it again. So Romans 6:1, "What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin that grace may abound? God forbid! How shall we that are dead to sin live any longer therein? Know ye not that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into His death? Wherefore we are buried with Him by baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. For if we've been planted together in the likeness of His death, we shall be also in the likeness of His resurrection.

Knowing this that our old man is crucified with Him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For He that is dead is freed from sin.

Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more, death hath no more dominion over Him. For in that He died, He died unto sin once, but in that He liveth, He liveth unto God."

So those first 10 verses I see as as God's promise, powerful promises of victory over sin. Victory is absolute. There's an absolute victory in Christ, and it's just powerful, and I rejoice in that, and there's times when I was struggling deeply with addictions and passions, I looked at this and said, "That's what I want.

This is what I want. I don't want to have this sin having dominion over me." We'll read a little bit later, but identifying with Christ, and that's what I wanted, but there's something else to this that I see. If we don't learn how to deal with our flesh properly, we can go to our grave at times wanting to serve Christ and not winning like we should, and so hopefully we can learn a few of those lessons this morning.

As it says in Romans 8:1, "To be a person that can have no condemnation in our lives, that we can stand confident before the Lord and before our brethren in the Lord and have a confident hope."

So as we read on, we begin to, at least I'm seeing our part where God asks us to do our part, where we respond to Him and yield to Him.

So let's read on. Verse 11, "Likewise, reckon or add it up," and this is the total, this is the sum of it, "reckon ye all see yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that ye should obey it in the lust thereof.

Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness unto God. For sin shall not have dominion over you, for you are not under the law, but under grace. What then? Shall we sin because we are not under the law, but under grace? God forbid! Know ye not that to whom ye yield yourselves servants to obey, His servants ye are to whom ye obey, whether of sin unto death or of obedience unto righteousness? But God be thanked that ye were the servants of sin, but ye have obeyed from the heart the form of doctrine which was delivered you.

Being then made free from sin, ye became the servants of righteousness. I speak after the manner of men because of the infirmity of your flesh. For as ye have yielded your members servants to uncleanness and to iniquity unto iniquity, even so now yield your members as servants to righteousness unto holiness.

For when ye were the servants of sin, you were free from righteousness. Then fruit, what fruit had ye then in those things whereof ye are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death, but now being made free from sin, ye become servants unto God. Ye have your fruit unto holiness and the end of everlasting life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord."

One of the first things I want us to realize is here in 16 through 18 is this idea of servanthood, and in this scripture here it talks about, it's really the context of slavery. It's not just something that, you know, servanthood, it's just like it's a nice place to be always necessarily, but it's slavery where you are not in control of yourself, and this is the two realities of life. Either we're serving our flesh and the passions thereof, or we have been through the work of Jesus Christ, and as we call upon the Lord, and then we acknowledge Him and choose His way and reach out our hand to Him, He gives us new heart and new life, but we have this yielding unto the Lord that we must do in order to experience righteousness, right living, and God does His part in that.

As I reach out to Him, He does His part, but there's only two realities. Either you're a slave to sin, or you're a slave to righteousness, and that just kind of struck me, and then as I think about the lie that Satan puts on the table is option three, and he says, "No, you are in charge. You can be in charge. You don't have to be a slave to yourself. You're in charge," and he said, "You can be like God."

The reality of this is it only ends up being that your body and your flesh, and all of its emotions and feelings, get put right in the driver's seat, and you go along for the ride. And so I think about this yielding is reaching out to the Lord and agreeing with God in His ways, but are you okay with being a servant one way or the other?

Is that clear in our minds? It's either one or the other. I think we need to get that squared away. In verse 14, it says that sin shall not have dominion over you, and in verse, let's see here, in verse 12, I get the idea that let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body. It seems like, and I kind of struggle to explain this, but it seems like there's this, we have our bodies in our flesh, but we also have control over it, that we can choose what we're going to do with it.

Even though the passions are strong and the temptations are strong, we still have the choice what we're going to do with our bodies and with our passions. It says, "Let not sin reign in your mortal body," so it's almost like I'm like I am, and then it's my body, it's my tent that I live in that has all these sin problems.

They're connected, intertwined so well, but Paul's putting forward we have the, we can make a choice.

Donnie Brekbill was at our church here the other weekend and talked to us about discipleship, and he gave the illustration this way about yielding. As I yield, as I choose to yield, it's like turning the light switch on.

The light switch is not the power, but the light switch connects the power to the light, and it works, and so yielding to the Lord is like turning the light switch on. It's what God, when I yield to the Lord, He meets with His grace to strengthen my life, to bring me forward into new life. I really like that illustration.

Let's be willing to yield to God and His ways regardless of what my flesh is feeling.

You know, sometimes we're crying out, we cry out, and we say, "Lord, I have need. I need changed. I have sin in my life," and sometimes God does instantly change a person. We all see those instances where God just, "Wow, that was, that was redemption. Wow, there it is." We all like those. We all want those, and sometimes I do feel like, I mean, it's obvious that God does it, and I think God does that at times to encourage a person's faith. Maybe it's there, they need that extra encouragement to walk with God, and God shows them an extra measure of power and deliverance. We're all delivered, but even after those exciting times of deliverance, there comes the discipline of choosing, the discipline of yielding, and it's just, I think at times God does miracles.

I think the reason God puts miracles in our experiences is for faith strengtheners to prove that He is God to people, that He is real, and to those who need that extra affirmation in difficult situations. But even after times of greatness, great experiences, mountaintop experiences, is this continual need for choice to turn again to Christ in the next test, the next time when we're going to be tested.

Our world today, I guess that's what I see in our world today in a general way. Everyone's looking for God to do something big for them. Just simply deliver me. Just take it all away, and that's not how I'm seeing it working.

Change, it tends to change without commitment. It seems like it's the buzzword, without commitment of ongoing obedience, and that statement right there I think is an oxymoron. You can't have long-term change in the Lord's kingdom without ongoing obedience.

God does do these miracles of breaking the bondage of sin in our lives, but I'm looking at just this need for yielding to the Lord.

All right, so we have, for all of us though, as we think about going forward in life, we must walk faithfully with the Lord in order for our heart and our desires to align with the Father. In order to deal with the addictions of the flesh, the emotional upheavals and powerful feelings of the flesh that we face, there's just a need for commitment on walking with Him, learning of Him.

Another part that I want to look at is where Satan wants to take us down a road of false guilt is in another way, which I'm going to get to in a little bit, but the devil is a master of using all of our emotional feelings and bodily passions to condemn us and to cause us to circle in false guilt, which has been a concern of mine as I work with young men that are dealing with addictions, and even myself at times in the past. There's false guilt, there's true guilt, but there's also false guilt that Satan wants us to continue to run around in, so.

One of the first things that I find is dealing with our flesh, dealing with the passions of our flesh. How do I deal with it? How do I think about it? How do I think about what's coming out of my life?

One of the things that was a huge blessing to me was as I look, as I saw things in my life that were not righteous. You know, my responses or my thoughts were not righteous. We all have those times, we see things, and it's not righteous.

And confess your needs to the Lord. It's this confessing, and as I struggled deeply in the past with moral purity in mind, and I began to, as I read the New Testament and the people that came to Christ, they had brokenness as they had legs or arms were broken, they couldn't walk, or their spirits were emotional problems. There were physical problems, there were spiritual problems.

They couldn't see these things, and they came to Christ and they said, "We have this problem," and they just said, "We see that You're the one who's able to help us and to bring healing to our lives," and so they cried out to God, confessed, they confessed their need, and Romans 10:9 and 10, it says, "Confess with your mouth and you shall be saved." So there's this confession acknowledging the Lord. The people in the day when Christ walked with us here, they acknowledged their need and received the beginning of healing, but I noticed one thing, that this was not an overnight snap change. As I confessed my need before the Lord, God began to do a work in my life, and it came in time.

As I yielded and kept talking with the Lord, trusting with Him, the changes began to come, and so I praise God for that. In Psalms 55:22, it says, "Cast your burden on the Lord and He will sustain you. He shall never suffer the righteous to be moved." God does not despise the broken and the contrite heart, so when you're feeling heavy and you're feeling like life is just, and your own self is throwing you a lot of curves, you're dealing with addictions and passions and responses that are not righteous, just simply take them to the Lord and just tell Him exactly what is happening in your heart. Just say what it is.

Say, "I need healing in these areas." I heard a brother the other day, an older brother, said he just made a short confession. He said, "I just need, I confess that when I get cut off on the road," he said, "this spirit of anger just wants to rise up within me at that person that, you know, did me wrong on the road," and just those simple things. Acknowledging again our need before the Lord is the beginning of conquering sin in our lives.

Psalms 62:8 says, "Trust in Him at all times, ye people. Pour out your heart before Him. God is a refuge for us." David knew how to do that. As he wrestled with what God had for him, he poured out his heart, and you read it through the Psalms, all his struggles with how he was relating to his circumstances, what it all was.

He said, "Here it is, God. I don't know what to do with it," and yet he always would come back and say, "But I'm trusting you. I'm loving you. I'm loving your way and waiting for that."

So again, in verse 16 through 18, it says that you are to yield from the heart and let not sin reign in your mortal body, and you and your body are two in one. So I get this idea. I'm going to just draw this. I think we've all seen this already, and I don't know how, I'm not sure if I'm going to explain this 100% exactly right, but this is how I see it.

This circle, and we have.

Spirit, soul, and body, and down here I'm going to have.

And then.

Feelings, so. At conversion, so in and of ourselves, this is kind of how we tend to explain ourselves, what we're made of. Spirit is the center of who we are. Soul is where our emotions and our ideas are, and then body, we have feelings.

At conversion, God gives us a new spirit, and we become a new creature, the center here, but, and because this changes, then He gives us a new foundation for our emotions, and He gives us, and He begins to redeem the body.

So I want to read Philippians 3:20 to 21, and this verse was very, it's a profound verse and a beautiful verse.

20 to 21, "For our conversation is in heaven, from whence also we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself."

But it, so even my vile body has the option to be redeemed. The Gnostics in John's day said that the spirit was good and the body was evil, and these were separate, but here it's very clear that as the spirit is renewed, at conversion we call upon the name of the Lord, and it says, and we trust Him and we obey Him.

His spirit meets our spirit, and He ministers strength to us. It's a new spirit in here, and then this life begins to come out and keeps coming out and keeps coming out and being manifest in our body and subduing it to Himself.

But right here, we have a changed spirit. We still deal with emotions, and we still have feelings. So someone, you know, if I'm in a situation where I'm hurt, I have feelings and I have emotions, and I want to get, I want to get even again, or there's sometimes retaliation feelings that want to come, we want to have it justice served, and you can do that in many aspects. This is where Satan plays havoc in, in emotions and in feelings, is what I find.

We have a choice here that we can either listen to our flesh, its emotions, its reactions that we experience from temptation, from hurts, from lustful desires, covetousness, and all these things. We can choose either to listen to that, or we can listen to the voice of our Heavenly Father and go in His way in this situation.

The body will demand that it listens to it and to its feeling. Your emotions can be very loud and all over the place. The spirit can be hurt and at times will be hurt. We will experience hurts at times, and it will ask us to nurse those hurts and just keep remembering them, and that leads to bitterness.

And Satan will say, because you're experiencing these, these emotions, these temptations to do evil or to love your, to follow your flesh, he says, he will say, he will accuse you, you're not righteous. He will tend to say, oh, but you don't have it quite right yet. You're experiencing strong emotions. You're experiencing anger. You're experiencing a lust, desire, things like that, and feelings.

He will say, see, you're experiencing that, you're not winning, and that's not what God says.

Revelations 12:10 says, we have an accuser who accuses us day and night before the Father.

And Satan is attacking our confidence with God and with ourselves, and this may be one of our biggest battles we fight, is insecurity with God, and Satan wants us to doubt God's goodness in God's way.

The opportunity to yield to feelings and the passions of my flesh is called temptation, so you hit a situation that is wrong or is a temptation to yield to sin, to lust, to covetousness, or, you know, these things.

A choice needs to, on our part, needs to be made.

What are you going to do with them? What are you going to listen to? This, or are you going to listen to the Lord and the Spirit that He has given us to live by? When we yield to temptation, we know what that is. When we yield to our sinful fleshly passions, it always brings forth sin, and sin brings forth, just builds our own selfishness and lays another wall, a brick in the wall of our own just loving ourselves and pleasing ourselves.

So God calls us to look beyond our emotions and our feelings, set them aside many times, and move on.

Let's see here, get find my place in my notes again. Get ahead of myself.

So, all right. So he tends to say, Satan wants to say that as we experience the struggle of life, he wants to say that we're still guilty before the Lord and that the power of Christ is not working.

Satan desires us to focus on the feelings and passions and fight against them. If he can get a person to focus on the problem, he will have you in what is called a cycle of false guilt, is what I feel is just keeps going round and round.

So the call that I am giving to us this morning is to not let this dictate who we are, but who we are in Christ, and that will bring us out to a good place. Satan, through the flesh, will make you believe things that are not true.

We must realize that temptation is not sin, okay? Just because you're experiencing temptation in the flesh, emotions, feelings, even a hurt spirit, the temptation is there to yield to anger, to immorality, lustful thoughts, covetousness, these things. The temptation is there to yield, but that is not sin.

Sin is when you yield to it and you live in it and you nurse it and you go with it. That's sin. Just because we're in an emotional upheaval does not mean that we have sinned. We're experiencing passion. We're experiencing emotion.

What we do with it determines whether we yield to righteousness or to sin.

The saying is, the birds can fly over our head, and we might get dirty from a bird flying over our head sometimes, but when we can't control that, you know, if you're outside, flock of geese fly over, there they go, you know. You might get dirty sometimes.

But we can keep them from landing on our head. We can keep, we don't, if a bird or whatever wants to land on our head, we can keep them moving. We can keep them moving, and that's how we need to think about our emotions and our feelings, you know. They don't, God doesn't want us just to stay in them. God wants to redeem them. So the evil temptations, as the Spirit is redeemed, God gives us a foundation for our emotions, and our emotions become much more even-keeled when we find it difficult times, and guess what? The feelings of the body begin to follow as that gets settled in our minds. Who God is, where I'm going.

Paul said, he brings his body into subjection.

So you are able to control your mind and your body, and you control where your Spirit is connecting to. We have that choice. Proverbs 16:32 says, he that is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he that ruleth his Spirit than he that taketh the city.

As you learn to yield your Spirit and your life and your mind, and that's why I say it seems like there's a bit of a divide between my body and me. Paul says, you have the choice to dictate what your mind does, and you have the choice to dictate what your body's going to respond to, and your Spirit where it's going to connect.

You have that choice.

Proverbs 25:28 also says, he that hath no rule over his own Spirit is like a city that is broken down and without walls. Again, there's that, your choice, where you're going to connect to, who you're going to respond to. Sometimes I find in this struggle, I have to talk to myself. Did you ever do that?

When my emotions are strong or feelings of the passions of my flesh are just strong in an unrighteous way, I have to just say, body, I guess, you know, if you want to feel that way, if that's what's running through you right now, it'll just kind of happen to be that way, but I'm going God's way, okay?

Same way with your emotions. I might feel ever so strongly about something, but God is asking me to yield that to Him again, and I might just have to say, I'm feeling this way. I'm not sure what I'll do with it, but I'm going to embrace God's way in that thing.

And I find in addictions, in the mind is another one, you know. Addictions run deep, and especially lustful addictions, it kind of makes a groove in the mind, and the mind just loves running in it because it tickles the flesh, and it wants another lustful thought, and it's for men and women. I mean, I'm amazed at, you know, the addiction level in men is very high, but especially in lust and pornography and things like that, ladies aren't that far behind anymore in that whole thing, and so this is a real thing for us all where it says, gird up the loins of your mind and be renewed in your mind, and it's the, again, I see this, you have a choice of what you're going to think about, but because the addictions in our minds are so strong, it feels like it's controlling us.

We can't do anything with it. I've had different times just to say, you know, okay, mind, you want to go that way, but I'm going God's way, okay? And my mind, and I again set my mind on the Lord in His ways, and God, as I make those choices, God meets you, and He slowly and surely makes the change for righteousness.

Psalms 37 is a very familiar verse, but I just want to bring this to a close here this morning with that. Let's all turn to Psalms 37:3 and 4. We could say them by memory, I'm sure, and maybe we can read them together here at the end.

Psalms 37:3 to 4. Let's read them together. I have the New King James, not the King James, so that's what I'm going to read from, so I think we have either one here, so we'll do the best we can together, so.

Trust in the Lord and do good. So shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the Lord, and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart. That verse, as I was contemplating this subject, just kept running through my mind.

You're dealing with passions and addictions and things like that. One of the great keys is, instead of focusing on that issue, turn and delight in God. Just delight, simply delight in God's ways. As you continually do that, it says He's going to give you the desires that are right.

He's going to change your desires, and I think it needs to come in that order.

So delight yourself in the Lord, and He will give you the desires of your heart that are correct, that are right. Another way to help this, to help this delighting in God, is to rejoice in all things. When you're in a difficult spot, you don't know how to respond, or you're struggling with your flesh, or you're struggling with relationships, rejoice in God's ways and say, if God says to love my enemy, I'm going to love my enemy.

Just make that commitment. If it says to love my brother with agape love, and you don't have agape love in your heart, say, Lord, I don't have it, I need it. I'm going to go that way. God will begin to deal with those emotions that are between you guys or ladies, you know, between us.

And then give thanks for what the Lord has done for you. Learn to live a grateful life. Be a grateful person. I think about the ten lepers who Jesus met, the ten lepers that Jesus met, and they cried out for help and mercy, and they received it. They all went their way in obedience to Christ and what He said.

One of them came back and said, thank you, and the words that Jesus said to him was, go your way, you have been made whole. Now, I don't know if the other guys were, if He meant that for all of them or if this man had an extra dimension of his healing. I'm not, I think maybe, I'm not sure, but thankfulness, and I find that thankfulness is a huge key to setting your affection on things above, because Paul says other places he said, he lists all the sins of the body. He lists the sins that we deal with, but he said, instead of all that, rather giving of thanks, and so it's one of the powerful keys to overcoming emotion that is sinful emotion.

Now, I will say this yet at the end, that God wants to redeem our emotions, and emotions are a part that are given, given from Him, but He wants to redeem them so that they're His emotions. They're His joy, and they're His righteousness, and our feelings begin to come, but it's our commitment that begins to help that to be a reality in our lives.

And as this, this, and I really think as I go back to the beginning story that I started with of that young man that they dumped off in far out, we say, I believe if he would have yielded his life, and I don't know if he had any teaching on it or not, but if he would have yielded his life and says, God did not make it this way to be a homosexuality, but to be in righteousness with God and just say, I will delight in God's way, I really believe that his whole life would have been very different, and those feelings and emotions that he was experiencing would have been transformed, and he would have come out right, but that didn't happen, and I think that commitment was not there, so I'll let that with them.

I just, how that all works out with them, I don't know what they were taught or what they weren't taught, but for us, I think this is very important.

So in Romans 8 again, verse 1, it says, there is no condemnation to those who are in Christ. Don't let Satan use your flesh to condemn you that you're not winning, because we deal with emotions, we deal with hurts, we deal with feelings. Don't let them be your judge, don't let them be your God.

As we learn to think God's thoughts about ourselves and our relationship with God and with others, we will experience this place of no condemnation and be at peace with God in ourselves, so that's all I have for this morning. God bless you, it's been very good to be with you.

We want to walk in wholeness and beauty with God and walk confidently with Him and with each other. God bless you.