Freedom!

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. Good morning. It's good to see you here today. It's great to have you here, especially anyone who's new or it's been a while between vacations, travel, whatever. It's great to have you back here. We've been in the middle of a sermon series, a series called Rest, and I didn't realize this. It was my mistake. We have one more week next week on this. It'll be our last one, but I think it's an important topic. I was talking with Phil and Sammy earlier this week, and we really struggle with this. Our culture, everything is set to say you shouldn't. You really shouldn't. You got to be productive. You got to fill your days. You got to have everything going on, and I'll tell you, that's a tyrant. The tyranny of the urgent, of the important, of the got-to-haves, we're going to let go of that and experience and savor our freedom today, okay? Pray with me. Lord God, thank you so much for this day, a chance to rest, to stop, to take time to be with you, with others, to reflect on your goodness, your mercy, the freedom that you've brought about for us. We pray, Lord, that you would teach us. We thank you, Lord, for so many faithful Christians in our community who are worshiping at many different churches today, and we thank you for the one Christian church we are together with them, and we pray, Lord, that your gospel really changes all of our lives, that it sinks in deep to our souls, Lord, and that it just permeates our lives in such a way that we are changed, and we make a difference in our community and world just by resting in you, trusting you, and living out of that rest. So bless, Lord, all the congregations, all the people who are gathering today around your word and around your work and around you, Lord Jesus. And be with us, that we might experience that rest and enter into it right now. In Jesus' name, amen. Today we're going to be looking at two different passages that I think relate together, and we'll get to those passages, how they relate later, but we're going to read them right now. First of all, Galatians chapter 5, verses 1 through 6. For freedom, Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. Look, I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. You are severed from Christ, you who would be justified by the law. You have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly await for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love. And then from the book of Hebrews. So then, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. For whoever has entered God's rest has also rested from his works as God did from his. Like I mentioned, we're in our fourth week of rest. And just to review where we've been and kind of where we are today, last week we talked about the importance of rest, how it is one of God's command, how he sets it up so it's a time to commune with God, a time to be with him, to just rest in him, that everything's been complete, everything has been done. And so, we rest also to discover God's bigness. Too often we supersize our problems and minimize our God, but instead we should be magnifying our God, making him as big as he is, realizing that, and then everything else comes into perspective. Now, the week before, we said that we need to rest to find our center. You know, people talk about being centered and trying to be. Look, you need a center, you need something that holds you together, let me tell you, because the world will tear you apart and we rest knowing that it is Christ who is our center who holds everything together by what he has done and can hold us even when we are falling apart. And we started this whole series off with understanding that, hey, so often we want everything else to change, but nothing really changes until we change, and we change by being transformed by the gospel in view of God's mercies. So we stop and rest to be transformed by reviewing God's mercies, the gospel, the good news, and through that, then everything else changes, even if our circumstances don't. Today, I am excited about this one because I think this kind of, well, they all fit together to an extent, but rest, we're going to stop to savor our freedom. It's already ours, it's time to savor it. Paul says right at the beginning, for freedom, Christ has set us free. Now, that's how Paul addressed the Galatian Christians, because he was the one who brought the gospel to them in the first place, and Galatia is in, kind of, if you think of Asia Minor, Turkey, is this kind of handish kind of thing sticking there. Galatia is in the middle of that, and he came ...