Under The Law

You are listening to a message from Thrive Community Church, a church located in Southwest Florida. For more info, visit us at thrive-fl.org. I kind of have always liked video teaching. As a matter of fact, Mark is part of a group that we meet on Saturdays over in Grand Iza. We call it Grand Iza Worship. We use different teachers to listen to their messages and let them take us through the Bible and to inspire us and to teach us and to grow us in the faith. Teachers like Andy Stanley and J.D. Greer and Tim Keller. We listen to these folks on a regular basis. In today's Internet age, it makes no sense for us not to log in and to plug in to some of these dynamic teachers. I was a second-career pastor. I went into vocational ministry about 18 years ago. For a period of about 13 years, I was in full-time vocational ministry. Every week, I had to come up with a new message. 52 weeks out of the year, you have to be inspired. I did it. During that time, the advent of online churches or churches doing satellite campuses came about. I thought this is very unique that a message would be piped in to a congregation that did live music and then you listen to a pastor. The pastor we're going to listen to today is Craig Groeschel. We're going to do that today. We're going to do a video message. The pastor we're going to listen to is Craig Groeschel. He preaches at one of his 25 campuses every week, just one. All the other campuses watch him on a video and hear his message. It's not a live video. It's actually taped, and they watch it. My son-in-law's church, he's a campus pastor in Stillwater for Life Church. They have six worship experiences. At each one of those six experiences, it's a video message that's presented. The church is a church of 2,500 people on a Sunday morning. Video message can work and does work. I hope today that you'll find value in what Craig Groeschel brings us in a message. Two weeks ago, we talked about works of the law. I spoke on works of the law versus the curse of the law, how we can get hung up on laws and rules, and we've got to live our life a certain way. This message came to mind for me that Craig's going to bring to us today about killjoy God, that a lot of Christians have this attitude that I want to be a Christian, I want to believe in God, but there's all these rules. I had a really close friend. I coached his sons in basketball along with my kids, traveled with them all over the state of Missouri when they were playing. He knew I was a pastor of a church, and I kept inviting him to come to our church, to come to our church, and come to our church. He visited one time when he knew I was preaching, and I told him I wanted him to come, and so he came. After that, his excuse was, I've got a lot of things in my life I've got to clean up before I can come back to church. You see, he was raised in an environment where he thought that church was that thing you had to be clean and follow all the rules and say, praise the Lord at the right time and in the right moment in order to be a part of a church. And so I hope today as we listen to Craig that we learn that there are a lot of things that we were raised in. Those of you that were raised in the church like me, you may have been raised in things, and you say, this is the way it's supposed to be. You have to do these things. And what Paul teaches all through Galatians is none of those things, those things are all rubbish compared to the gospel of Jesus Christ. It's that it's Christ and Christ alone that brings us our freedom. So we're going to watch this video. I'm queuing you up right now, Brett, and I want to believe, but there are just too many rules. And the scripture verse we're using today is Galatians four, beginning with the fourth verse. It says, but when the time when the set time had fully come, God sent his son born of a woman born under the law to redeem those under the law. Who's us? He came to redeem those under the law that we might receive adoption to sonship. So here is Craig Garcelle. We're actually in part two of a four part message series that's called I want to believe in God, but I want to believe in God. But there are so many people, I believe, that really would love to be God followers and want to believe. It seems like there's got to be some kind of a God, but there's a ceiling or a barrier or some reason why they can't fully believe. What I argue is that these people are not rejecting the true God, who he really is in his purest essence. But there are so many people that are actually rejecting what I call a distorted view of God. They're rejecting their wrong view of who God is. And that's what I want to talk about in this message series. In fact, if you were with us last week, we talked about on demand God. I want to believe in God, but he doesn't do exactly what I want him to do. And we looked at the reality that on demand God doesn't exist. Let me tell you where we're going, because this is important. Some of you...