This transcript is provided to make the message easier to revisit. Minor transcription errors may remain.
I was told that tonight I don't need to speak more than 30 minutes past 10. So I'll try to keep it down to what I'm supposed to. If you were not born in Iowa, Kansas, or Missouri, sorry, that great state of misery between Illinois and Kansas, if you were not born in those three states, would you stand up, please? And they said the Iowa family camp wasn't diverse. Now, I see a lot of kids sitting down. Kids, can you, not your parents, because hopefully you know where your parents were born, but kids not connected with parents or others, can you look at the people around the room and tell me, from looking at them, which state they were born in?
You want to guess? You want to guess? Let's take Pastor Alan back there. What state, just looking at him, outward appearance, what state do you think he was born in? Where were you born, Joe? Alabama. We would have had to count his teeth to figure out that. You know, toothpaste was developed in Alabama. Did you know that? Because had it been developed anywhere else, it would have been teeth paste. But it was developed down there, so. Joe, you can sit down. You can sit down. Let's take, hmm, who else can we pick on? Pastor Baumgartner back here. He's nice and tall. Nice and tall. Maybe he was born somewhere without a lot of sun. He had to grow tall so he could Get some sunlight.
Where do you think Pastor Baumgardner was born? What state? Can you tell by looking at him what state he was born in? No, he can't be Iowa, Kansas, or Missouri. Minnesota? No. He's a Hoosier. Right? Mrs. Baumgardner, where were you born? Okay, well, let's oh, okay Water a glass of water So you were that's like, Michigan or Minnesota, Wisconsin. No, New Jersey East Massachusetts New York New York, all right All right, everybody sit down.
OK, so notice what Mrs. Baum, this was perfect. See, I didn't even have to coach her. She said, what did she say? She said, I've lost my accent. How can you tell sometimes where someone is born or where they're from? Their accent. But to them, they don't have an accent. You have an accent, right? Because you're from somewhere else. You know, the Midwest, where there is no accent.
The speech just is flat and goes on forever, just like the Midwest, right? But when you start to see how someone talks, hear how they talk, sometimes you can even guess by how someone walks, if they have a really laid back gait, you might say, man, they seem like kind of a coastal surfer type personality, you know, they're really laid back, or if they're really in a hurry all the time, everywhere they go, you think, they must be from New York City, or, or, you know, some big town where everybody's always in a hurry, right? Everybody's got somewhere to be, somewhere to go. Well, I want to ask you tonight, which state you are from? Which state were you born in? And I'm not talking about one of the 50 nifty United States. I'm talking about spiritual state. Which state are you from? Which state were you born in?
See, our first parents created immediately by God. That means nothing between. We all have in this room have mommies and daddies. I don't have to guess at that. If you exist at this point in human history, you came from two people. Got the bass turned up. But our first parents, Adam and Eve, were created in a state of perfect holiness and happiness. No sin.
Now we can have a good day, right? How many of you have had a good day in your life? Those of you not raising your hand, we need to talk because I think you have some perspectival issues, okay? But we can have good days, days where we feel like, hey, everything went right today, you know?
Usually, you know, young dads, we think, boy, if I ever lay my head on my pillow and think everything went right today, we're afraid to think that because The baby's projectile vomiting in the nursery. There's always something that seems to be working against us, seems to be not going right, not going well. Because we live in a fallen world now. We can't imagine what it was like to have no sin, no frustration, You know that fight your family won't admit that they got into on the way up here to family camp?
About how the car was parked, or who was supposed to put gas in the tank, or what to eat for lunch, or who let the cows out. Right, Ed? Yeah. Boy, you are getting shinier up there, aren't you? And a lot, what happened here? Grandchildren. I've met your kids too, so I know what really happened. Can we imagine a world with no sin? Can you imagine a world where everything is operating in your favor? That's not the state we live in, is it?
The state we're born into is described in Ephesians 2. The verses you have there for you on the handout. And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you once walked and followed the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind. We were born in a state of rebellion and hatred against God. That's the state that we are originally from, is the state of rebellion. And notice that our three mortal enemies are enumerated for us in this text. Our enemies are the world, what else? The flesh, and who else? The devil, right? Those are our enemies. And Paul touches on those three enemies in this text. But he starts by describing all of that as us being dead. Now, in the Greek, dead, as it is mostly in the English, which is interesting then why the Westminster Divines used it the way they did, dead is a word without degree.
Okay, so if you go down to the county morgue and you see the medical examiner or the coroner looking at bodies, you'll never hear them say, see this guy, he went to sleep and didn't wake up. Man, he's dead. But you know, this guy was walking across the highway when he shouldn't have and he got hit by a grain truck. He's really dead. You'll never hear them say that, will you? Why? Because dead is dead. So there's no degree of death, of deadness. We were dead to God in our sins. And what is Paul saying in this text?
He lists our three mortal enemies and basically says we were holding hands with them. We were working in concert with them. They were our buds, our bros. We loved them. And we operated with them. And how does he describe that? Well, he describes that by saying that we were carrying out all the desires of the body and the mind. This is a wholeness to the state in which we were born. Our body, our external, our physical person, and our mind, our internal, our spiritual person, every part of us was in absolute rebellion against God.
And so, my second question there for you as we begin talking tonight is, how do you live as a result? How do you live as a result of being from the state that you're from? Now, if you're from Rural Iowa, raise your hand if you're from rural Iowa, also known as the best part of the world, right? Except for the rural part of Kansas, right? That's, yeah, across the Arkansas River. To get into Kansas is that poor state that mispronounces that river all the time. I know, I know. You know how I know? I'm right. Just ask me. But if you're from rural Iowa, there's a certain way that you live. There's a certain way that you direct your schedule, your time, your trips into town. My grandpa, my grandpa Carl, was born and raised in rural Ohio in the same house. He lived past 90, and he died in the house that he was born in. And when he was born, the road out front was just two ruts. Muddy, nasty ruts. And when he died, there was two ruts. Tar and chip ruts outside of his house.
And Tuesday was the day that they went into town. Now, transportation changed drastically. an LTD For a crown Vic you know he had the farm truck old blue And then he had in the garage was the nice car for going into town with grandma and Tuesday was the day and they would do all their shopping that he'd at Ponderosa he'd get a steak and he'd get a Mountain Dew and They didn't even have to ask him. He they just knew what Carl wanted when he came in and to Ponderosa, and that was their day that they went into town. That was the schedule. There was a certain way that they lived, way past retirement, way past farming. Tuesday was go-to-town day, and they did it until the day that Grandpa died.
If you live in the city, your schedule and your time is directed another way. Where you live directs to a point how you live. And when we are born in the state of rebellion and hatred against God, that directs how we live. We live acting out that hatred and that rebellion. Even the good things that we do are done for wrong reasons, wrong motives, selfish ambition, vain glory. Throw in all the biblical phrases there that you want. Even the good things that are done. are done with hatred in our heart toward God, and even towards our fellow people. So the question we want to address this week, if we're born in this state of rebellion, and that determines how we live, and so we live in ways that are hateful and rebellious against God, we want to answer these next two questions.
How do you move to a different state? Well, everybody from Iowa and Missouri and Kansas says, I don't want to move to a different state. I live in the best state. But as people, we need to come to grips with the natural state that we're born into. How do we move to a different state? And then once we move to that state, how do we act like we live in that state?
Because many times we still act like we live in that old state. If you live in central Kansas and you move, I don't know, to Washington, D.C., and you try to live like you're still in central Kansas, you'll get run over. You'll probably get shot. You'll get your stuff taken out of your house.
You know, it took us a good, I don't know, 12 months to start locking our doors. on our house. Now, praise God, we lived in a great neighborhood with a lot of guilt-ridden Catholics, and so they weren't going to come take stuff out of our house, but we'd be way out somewhere and think, did you lock the house? No, I didn't lock the house. Did you lock the house?
No. Where do we live? What are we doing? If you try to live as if you're still in that old state, you're going to be frustrated, you're going to be defeated, you're not providing a good testimony for the Lord? And so we want to ask that question, how do I change?
I am going to guess that everyone, nearly everyone, if not everyone here tonight, has something that the Lord has been working on you about. It might be that same besetting sin that just keeps nagging at you and keeps creeping back in, sneaking in the back door. You should lock the doors. He comes sneaking in when you least expect it. It might be something new that has just been exposed to your heart and soul over the last few weeks that you realize, you know what? Like Paul, I didn't realize I had a coveting problem until God told me not to covet. And then that's all I can do is covet. And maybe there's something new. that you thought would never be an issue with you. You thought, oh those poor people who get suckered into that sin. Praise God, I'll never get suckered into that sin. And you found yourself sinning in that way.
How do you change? How do you live in a way that says, I've moved. I've moved from my old state to my new state. When we move, we have to get a new driver's license that has our picture and states, I have the right to operate and function in this state.
We have, in a sense, a new identity. And to do that, we have to take in bills and things like that that prove, hey, I am already functioning here. I live here. I am consuming the things here that I should be consuming. I'm participating in the things that I should be participating in. And we have the legal basis for where we live. We might buy a house. We might sign a contract to rent a house. It says, I have the right to be here.
But then our behavior still needs to change to follow that. To follow that new state that we live in. How do we do that? How do we change? I'm not going to ask for a show of hands because we're Presbyterians. We wouldn't do that anyway. Neither will you say amen, but feel free. I always try to go for it, but I still lack the power to provoke audible amens.
You know the difference between Pentecostals, Baptists, and Presbyterians, right? When a Pentecostal pastor says something, a congregation agrees with it. They say, hallelujah, and they wave their hands. Baptist church, they say, amen, and they might give a little hand clap. Presbyterian church, the pastor says something very passionate, The congregation agrees with it wholeheartedly, they write it down. And that stirs a pastor's soul. When he hears pens to paper, nothing encourages us, right Dan, to preach the word with more fervor than the sound of writing.
Closing Prayer
Thank you. And all God's people said, write it down. All right. Amen. How do you change? Because I can tell you this. You need to change. You know how I know? You're all here and none of you are dead. We will know when we're done changing. and needing to change. Because we will open our eyes and we will see Jesus. Until that moment, we need to change. And we must change. How do we change? That is what we'll be talking about this week. Let's pray. Father, thank You for being honest with us in Your Word. Not painting some picture of nice people with occasional problems, but declaring clearly in our ears that we are dead without You. Lord, I pray for any this week who have not been made alive by your Holy Spirit, that you would visit them in that way this week.
That you would grant them new life, a new heart, a new mind. That you would move their residence from a state of sin and rebellion to a state of redemption. Lord, for those who have been moved into your kingdom, and have struggled to act like heirs and citizens of heaven. We pray, Lord, that they would be given the basic tools, spelled out in Your Word, to walk on that path of change. Change to become more like our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who is an example to us, but so much more than an example. who is our substitute, who is our redeemer, who is the empower of the change that we so desperately need to acquire that holiness without which we will not see your face. So Lord, help us to enjoy our time in the word this week, but help us to be convicted and challenged by it. To enjoy our fellowship, but to be built up by it and drawn closer to your side that we might be changed. And Lord, that you would empower us by your Holy Spirit to do the things that we are commanded to do, to put off sin, to put off righteousness in Christ Jesus, in whose name we pray.
Amen. Amen. Thank you for listening to God's Word for You, a ministry of Sharon Arpey Church in Morning Sun, Iowa. We pray that you would be blessed as you grow in your love for God, your love for His Word, as well as your love for His people. Until next week, God bless you.